Serendipitous Trigger To Relearn

Many new office buildings now have small personal working area and large common collaboration areas.  (https://hbr.org/2014/10/workspaces-that-move-people). One of the purported value proposition of smaller personal spaces is that it motivates you to rise from your chair, which can help you to think/create/perform better.  From the same article : "Chance encounters and interactions between knowledge workers improve performance".

This type of serendipitous energy can also happen without getting up from your small working space. An event triggered an unexpected on a laptop can also cause one to deviate from ones normal "virtual" path (as opposed to get-up-and-walk physical path) and think serendipitously.

A laptop reboot caused Microsoft security software (Windows Firewall) to block Firefox

The above unexpected warning from my laptop about security caused me to clicked on "port" to read more about it. That led me to write this little blurb on basic browser networking flow. I have been meaning to write a simple data flow on networking, but never had the inclination until this unplanned event.

Simple view of the 5 OSI networking layers on a web browser

Let’s examine how the network layers works from your browser to the internet. Pretend that you want to browse cnn.com on Firefox browser.  You are on a PC that we can call a client. The uses uses an (1) APPLICATION such as Mozilla Firefox to visit the Universal Resource Locator (URL) http://www.cnn.com. Firefox knows that you are using Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP), not other application protocol such as FTP, SMTP, …   Hypertext Transport Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is HTTP that uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) or the older  Secure Socket Layer (SSL) to encrypt transmission using session keys (keys expire after browsing is done)*. The encryption uses X.509 Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).  Either case, the  browser is a client and makes a request to a web server. (reuse stuff from example #1 / email)...

* Transport Layer Security TSL, aka SSL, allows the client (your browser) and the server (the web browswer at BankOfBits) to talk to each other securely. Using X.509 Public Key Infrastructure, the client connencts to the server first, and the server provides a certificate. The client checks that the server certification is authentic by checking on its own trusted roots (sources that can look at the server certificate and give the ok that it is BankOfBits). Once the client knows that the server is safe, the client creates a SESSION KEY (?), encrypt it using the server’s public key, then sends the encrypted session key to the server. The server will use its private key to decode the encrypted session key. The client will start sending encrypted data using the session key, which the server will decrypt with the same session key.

Perhaps in addition to small spaces, more random events triggered on the laptop can spur thinking?