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Courtesy of Ingrid Burrington A Surreal Trip to a Domain-Names Conference
… where misspelled URLs are auctioned off for tens of thousands of dollars.
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Ingrid Burrington Why Amazon's Data Centers Are Hidden in Spy Country
The company powers much of the Internet, but its cloud facilities are difficult to find.
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Shannon Stapleton / Reuters How Mobile Carriers Skirt Net-Neutrality Rules
“There’s something stomach-twisting about a company offering free video streaming but charging for the data used when filling out an online job application.”
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Yves Herman / Reuters The Environmental Toll of a Netflix Binge
The data centers that support the Internet use a huge amount of energy.
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Ingrid Burrington The Secrets of an Abandoned Microwave Tower in Kansas
A mysterious AT&T relic reveals connections between telecommunications infrastructure and the Cold War.
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Ingrid Burrington A Network of Fragments
There’s a poetry in the bits and pieces of Internet infrastructure that hide in plain sight all around us.
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Sam Kronick A Journey Into the Heart of Facebook
How the “sharing” company’s data centers reveal its values
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Jim Young / Reuters Why Are There So Many Data Centers in Iowa?
“Networks, land, power, and taxes.”
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Ingrid Burrington Finding Dark Fiber in a Desert Ghost Town
In the American West, there are ruins everywhere.
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British Library / Wikimedia How Railroad History Shaped Internet History
It’s no accident that Iowa, where the first transcontinental railroad began, is now home to a huge data-center industry.
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Wikimedia A Visit to the NSA's Data Center in Utah
Why would the intelligence agency put its largest surveillance storehouse in the middle of a desert?
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Bob Riha Jr / Reuters The Strange Geopolitics of the International Cloud
How cold weather, taxes, and sovereignty dictate the placement of data centers overseas.
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Jan Butchofsky / Corbis Where the Cloud Rises From the Sea
The cable that connects the U.S. to the global Internet runs right next to a small coastal town in California. Why do so few of its residents have broadband?
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Mike Segar / Reuters What's Important About Underwater Internet Cables
Hint: It has nothing to do with Vladimir Putin or terrorism.
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KFOR-TV / AP What People Mean When They Talk About ‘The Cloud’
When your data-center road trip is waylaid by rain, why not use the time to define your terms?
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Sam Kronick The Room Where the Internet Was Born
An epic American road trip—to see “The Cloud” in all its strange manifestations—begins in an old lab at UCLA.
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Ingrid Burrington How to See Invisible Infrastructure
I spent a weekend at the International Utility Locate Rodeo, where people compete to find hidden cables, water mains, and gas lines.
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NASA/Flickr The Failed Attempt to Destroy GPS
An axe attack in the early 1990s damaged the same network of satellites that helps you map directions today.
