Some people celebrate, some are on duty.
Most are still in shopping malls, buying pigs in blankets (this year’s absolute hit in the UK) and sprouts (25% of sprouts in 2018 were bought before Christmas [1]). Logistics, relying on IT infrastructure, keeps running, delivering fresh products across the country.
Some of us will travel during the winter season, hoping flights and trains will be on time and the infrastructure withholds the peak time.
But most likely we will all send our wishes to loved ones, friends and colleagues.
Every message goes through dozens of routers and devices, making sure they will be delivered wherever that person might be. It’s a true miracle – and not only at Christmas – that we have this luxury of reaching almost everyone directly.
Messages – sent through IT infrastructure – rely on HOPS, a number of predefined connections one message can travel. If defined HOPS are too low, the information might be lost (eradicated). It might be a good thing – if you don’t want your data to leave a company’s servers, or bad if you are sending it to someone across the globe.
If you are curious how many hops it takes to reach servers, you can use this website that counts and traces routes: https://lnkd.in/epUkKrgQ
For example:
1. to reach servers of maps.google.com from the place I’m writing this article, you need only nine hops,
2. Server’s provider OVH ohv.co.uk is 13 hops away while
3. czech real estate website (sreality.cz) 16 hops away.
Each hop is a router or a device that can hijack or spy on your traffic (and some do). That’s why it’s so important for Santa to send you presents directly.
We can’t send you wishes directly but we are HOPing you will have a great time and you’ll find no malwares under the Christmas tree. Merry Christmas!
Sources:
[1] https://lnkd.in/eBV4CTb
[2] https://lnkd.in/eF4jgPix
[3] https://lnkd.in/epUkKrgQ
