Before the winter break we started a new unit called disruption, the driving question for the unit is: How has technology disrupted. Before we left for winter break we were given two books to read, one book called Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. And the other book we had a choice on, I decided to read “Tubes” by Andrew Blum

The book is about a group of teens that are very technology savvy living in San Francisco. the bay bridge is blown up by terrorists, after the Department of Homeland Security puts in new security measures using technology which is heavily monitored. Marcus, the main character fights the envasion of privacy with the help of his online  friends by going anonymous on a hard to reach internet hub designed by himself called the Xnet.

The assignment that was assigned to us was to research a specific part from the book that was chosen by our teacher. We were to connect it to the overall unit and integrate it into the work we had been doing. We were assigned one of many different options, unfortunately by the time I got to choose my topic most of the ones I was interested in had already been chosen. I decided to choose SMTP

SMTP or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is an internet standard for electronic mail transmission, it’s basically how your computer or device retrieves your messages. Various forms of one-to-One messaging were used in the 1960’s, people communicated with one another using systems developed for specific mainframe computers. As more computers were interconnected, especially in the US Government, standards were developed to allow users of different systems to email one another. SMTP grew out of these standards developed during the 1970s. SMTP can relate to Little Brother as the whole story revolves around technology and the Department of Homeland Security monitoring everyone’s technology. With SMTP being the way you receive your messages the Homeland Security System would hack into the mainframe and could read all your messages.