#internet
"The internet isn't in the cloud. It lives at an address.
We went looking for where each URL lives IRL. Turns out it's not one address but many. r00ts traces your browsing to the data centers behind it, the real buildings where your internet actually lives.
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Every video you stream, feed you scroll, website you visit comes from a place, a building, a data center. It has an address. It sits on someone's land, draws power from a specific grid, and pulls water from local reservoirs, with real people living right next to it. This isn't a secret. Researchers and journalists are documenting it medium-well. But that documentation sits conceptually far from how we use the internet every day. r00ts brings those investigations closer, rooting your everyday browsing to the data center that powers it.
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r00ts is a free, open-source extension for Chrome and Firefox that traces the page you're on to the data centers likely serving it. Open any site, click the r00ts icon, and it follows that page's requests to their IP addresses, then to the networks and facilities behind them. For each one, we show our work, the clues we followed to land on that specific building, so you can run the same kind of investigation yourself. Some sit near(ish) you; some are a world away. It collects nothing about you: no accounts, no cookies, no logs. It's not in the Chrome or Firefox stores yet, so for now it's a manual install."
https://aixdesign.co/projects/r00ts
#r00ts #Internet #DataCenter #Tracking #Location #Browser #BrowserExtension #Firefox #Chrome
Excerpt from:
»How are we preparing for the long web?«
„The digital dark ages has been circulating among archivists and information scientists since the late 1990s. In 2018, a data preservation director at Google noted that we may end up knowing less about the early 21st century than we do about the early 20th, as early 20th century records were made on paper, while so much of what we create now is born digital and dies digital, without ever becoming physical.
All of this writing. All of these photographs. All of these communities. Less legible to a historian in 2125 than a handwritten letter from 1925.“