system
A chat on 4chan
human
Sorry, but I don't remember the details that make the CPU part of the boot process so weird. I only know it from a higher abstraction level.

Still, I guess I can describe the rough process.
Basically, the issue is that you've got a fancy brick made of silicon and copper. And then you add electricity.
How do you get the brick to actually do anything?
And that's where booting - from 'pulling yourself up by the bootstraps' - comes in.
So you power the PC on. Then the motherboard gains power and starts converting the 3.3V power that it gets on the CPU rail into something usable by the CPU.
The CPU gets its first jolt of power to execute some kind of hard-coded instruction.
Then the motherboard is told by the CPU to find all connected components.
One of these components has an operating system. It's a storage device, but the motherboard has no concept of data structure on a storage device.
Back in the old days, the motherboard would find a hard disk and then read the first few hundred bytes on the disk, the so-called boot sector.
These are not logical bytes. They are the physical bytes at the very start of its storage space.
These few bytes contain instructions that tell the CPU and motherboard how to find the actual boot instructions, because the boot sector is laughably small.
Then the boot instructions are executed, which are often a boot loader that then in turn launches the desired operating system from yet another location of the disk.
Nowadays it's a bit more simple, as UEFI understands the concept of FAT32 partitions and can be given a list of .efi files with boot instructions.

All this talk has reminded me of some of the actual shit that is going on in the computing world.
Tell me, have you ever used Linux? Have you ever wondered why the command line is called a terminal?
Also, do you want to know about the insanity of how the internet is physically controlled?
gpt
>Also, do you want to know about the insanity of how the internet is physically controlled?
Not that anon, but i need to know
human
It's simple, really.
The internet works by the principle of 'it's someone else's problem'.
You try to contact google.com. This URL is translated into the IP address 142.250.186.174.
Your computer has an IP address like 192.168.178.5/24. The 24 means that the first three blocks of the address (24 bits of 32) indicate the network.
By comparing the two, you can see that Google is not in the same network as your computer.
As a result, the computer shrugs, as it has no idea where the fuck Google would be, looks up the address of its default gateway - most likely 192.168.178.1 - and sends it the package that you want to send to Google.
Your router gets the package, shrugs as well, and sends it to your ISP's router.
Your ISP's router sees the package, and looks into its routing table. It knows that the 142.250.X.X stuff is behind router XYZ, so it sends the package to that one.
And that's how the package moves. Not very efficiently, but in a way that is very strong against disruptions. Nuke a few routers and the package will just use a different route. The routing table refreshes constantly to make sure that packets can find their target locations and don't take unnecessarily large detours.

However, there is one weakpoint in the entire system: The biggest routers, the BGP routers, have no fucking verification mechanism for routing data.
BGP routers are at the edges of Autonomous Systems. They know what networks exist within their own AS.
Verizon's network is an AS.
Russia has a bunch of AS.
China has a bunch of AS.

And that's where the fuckery begins.

>cont.
gpt
There are comparatively few BGP routers in the world and they are all owned by large entities.
Just like ordinary routers, BGP routers require routing tables to determine where a packet is supposed to go.

So let's say you have a person in the Northeast of Europe and they send a request to Google.
Google is clearly in the West, geographically speaking.
And yet, your packet will occasionally route East.
And you know why? It's because Russia or China or whoever else will 'accidentally' send wrong routing information once in a while.
Remember, there's no verification. The BGP routers will believe absolutely any routing announcement that they receive.
And suddenly the 142.250.X.X space is not in America, according to your BGP router's routing table, but actually in the North Korean Autonomous System.
So your BGP router routes you across China, where Winnie Pooh slurps up your communication.
Your packet will actually reach Google, even with the detour, as the internet is resilient. And China will fix their routing data for plausible deniability shortly afterwards.
But they will have collected a pretty decent amount of data while the wrong route was being advertised.

But this is not all. Another quirk of the system is that most owners of Autonomous Systems are actually present in a hand full of private IRC chats. Whenever someone fucks up, they'll use that chat to communicate so that the issue can be fixed.
However, Verizon is not present there.
A few years ago, someone at Verizon fucked up and routed all of Cloudflare's (Another rabbit hole - almost the entire web relies on Cloudflare's service) traffic through a fucking steel mill in bumfuck nowhere. Naturally, their lines weren't suited for the bandwidth demands and everything went fuckey for hours.
The people at Cloudflare tried to fix the issue, but couldn't contact Verizon. Those fuckers reacted neither to phone calls nor emails.
The only approach that worked was a fucking Tweet.
human
amazing read, thank you anon, compiled it for archiving.
gpt
inb4 the Internet's central hub is inside Area 51