Adventure 2 - Maps, Cables, and Pills
Map of Undersea Cables
How do Internet packets traverse continents? One way to do it is to send traffic under the ocean via fiber optic cables. submarinecablemap.com tracks the location, length, throughput, and other facts about these transmission lines.
https://www.submarinecablemap.com/
Information on the cables themselves can be found at the awesome FAQ page that is linked from the map.
https://www2.telegeography.com/submarine-cable-faqs-frequently-asked-questions
It seems slightly unbelievable that this actually works, so let's find an example of a connection that utilizes these cables.
Seychelles is a tiny island country off of the East coast of Africa. Its government's homepage will serve as an ideal candidate because the entire nation is connected to the African continent by only two undersea cables (one to Tanzania, the other to Somalia).
One thing to be careful of when attempting to reach a foreign website is to make sure you are actually talking with a foreign website. For example, if I wanted to reach out to a website located in Europe, and I chose the BBC homepage, it is highly likely that the webserver "on the other end of the wire" will not be located in Great Britain, but in America. So I assumed that Seychelles was obscure enough and that their government was not going to take the effort to employ a CDN to serve their website in other countries.
To begin, I run a traceroute on the domain egov.sc. This tool will attempt to trace the route that a packet takes through the Internet.
$ traceroute egov.sc
traceroute: Warning: egov.sc has multiple addresses; using 196.13.208.14
traceroute to egov.sc (196.13.208.14), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 10.0.0.1 (10.0.0.1) 5.401 ms 3.615 ms 3.925 ms
2 96.120.90.53 (96.120.90.53) 14.851 ms 13.338 ms 12.947 ms
3 be-10051-rur01.santaclara.ca.sfba.comcast.net (68.85.101.57) 14.147 ms 14.368 ms 14.772 ms
4 be-232-rar01.santaclara.ca.sfba.comcast.net (162.151.78.253) 14.374 ms 21.897 ms 13.080 ms
5 be-3651-cr02.sunnyvale.ca.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.91.73) 15.987 ms 14.337 ms 21.939 ms
6 be-11083-pe02.529bryant.ca.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.84.14) 14.067 ms 16.871 ms 14.742 ms
7 50.248.118.238 (50.248.118.238) 14.029 ms 15.165 ms 16.107 ms
8 multi-use.cogentco.com (154.54.42.157) 15.012 ms
be2430.ccr22.sfo01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.88.185) 21.485 ms
multi-use.cogentco.com (154.54.42.157) 56.053 ms
9 be3110.ccr32.slc01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.44.142) 30.622 ms
be3109.ccr21.slc01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.44.138) 29.261 ms
be3110.ccr32.slc01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.44.142) 31.155 ms
10 be3037.ccr21.den01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.41.146) 64.449 ms
be3038.ccr22.den01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.42.98) 69.341 ms
be3037.ccr21.den01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.41.146) 70.365 ms
11 be3036.ccr22.mci01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.31.90) 62.589 ms
be3035.ccr21.mci01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.5.90) 62.576 ms
be3036.ccr22.mci01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.31.90) 62.029 ms
12 be2832.ccr42.ord01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.44.170) 61.497 ms 62.347 ms
be2831.ccr41.ord01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.42.166) 63.143 ms
13 be2718.ccr22.cle04.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.7.130) 69.319 ms 70.360 ms
be2717.ccr21.cle04.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.6.222) 68.252 ms
14 be2879.ccr22.alb02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.29.174) 91.440 ms
be2878.ccr21.alb02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.26.130) 86.468 ms
be2879.ccr22.alb02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.29.174) 85.374 ms
15 be3600.ccr32.bos01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.0.222) 85.291 ms 85.722 ms
be3599.ccr31.bos01.atlas.cogentco.com (66.28.4.238) 85.794 ms
16 be2101.ccr42.lon13.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.82.37) 147.571 ms
be2099.ccr41.lon13.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.82.33) 146.679 ms
be2101.ccr42.lon13.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.82.37) 147.194 ms
17 be2869.ccr22.lon01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.57.162) 158.235 ms 147.831 ms
be2870.ccr22.lon01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.58.174) 148.114 ms
18 149.14.248.2 (149.14.248.2) 147.464 ms 149.251 ms 147.329 ms
19 cable-41-203-255-209.intelvision.net (41.203.255.209) 318.891 ms
cable-41-203-255-237.intelvision.net (41.203.255.237) 394.297 ms
cable-41-203-255-209.intelvision.net (41.203.255.209) 306.755 ms
20 cable-41-203-255-221.intelvision.net (41.203.255.221) 306.922 ms 306.763 ms 307.319 ms
21 cable-41-203-255-233.intelvision.net (41.203.255.233) 409.481 ms
cable-41-203-255-253.intelvision.net (41.203.255.253) 409.985 ms
cable-41-203-255-233.intelvision.net (41.203.255.233) 408.459 ms
22 cable-41-203-255-197.intelvision.net (41.203.255.197) 408.922 ms 400.629 ms 409.765 ms
23 196.46.148.180 (196.46.148.180) 409.634 ms 409.499 ms 409.579 ms
24 cable-41-203-255-242.intelvision.net (41.203.255.242) 355.239 ms 409.545 ms 409.848 ms
25 * * *
26 * * *We can see that the packet roughly moves from Palo Alto -> San Francisco -> Colorado -> Michigan -> Boston -> London -> Africa -> Seychelles.
The last few hops before the trace goes cold are of the form cable-41-203-255-233.intelvision.net. Note the cable and intelvision.net.
A google search tells me that Intelvision is one of three internet providers based out of Seychelles and that in 2012, the Seychelles to East Africa System undersea cable was laid, connecting the country to Tanzania.
In addition, a reverse geo-IP lookup tells me that the final router we hit is in fact located in the city of Victoria, Seychelles.
Wild.
Pill Identifier
It recently came to my attention that the markings and numberings on pills are not batch identification numbers, but unique identifiers for both the compound and amount held within them. Some pills have up to 5 alphanumerics on them, yielding roughly 60 million possible unique IDs (36^5 = 60,466,176).
[Code of Federal Regulations]
[Title 21, Volume 4]
[Revised as of April 1, 2019]
[CITE: 21CFR206]
TITLE 21--FOOD AND DRUGS
CHAPTER I--FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION
DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES
SUBCHAPTER C--DRUGS: GENERAL
PART 206 IMPRINTING OF SOLID ORAL DOSAGE FORM DRUG PRODUCTS FOR HUMAN USE
Sec. 206.10 Code imprint required.
(a) Unless exempted under 206.7, no drug product in solid oral dosage form may
be introduced or delivered for introduction into interstate commerce unless it
is clearly marked or imprinted with a code imprint that, in conjunction with
the product's size, shape, and color, permits the unique identification of the
drug product and the manufacturer or distributor of the product.
Identification of the drug product requires identification of its active
ingredients and its dosage strengthIf you want to determine the contents of a pill from its markings, you can perform a lookup in the database provided by drugs.com