INTERNET - What It Is Now

The 9th Wonder of the World

CHANGE THE WORLD

We are all sitting on the cusp between the old physical and new virtual worlds of information.

"The Internet is a way for all the things that call themselves networks to coexist and work together. It's an inter-network. Literally. What makes the Net inter is the fact that it's just a protocol — the Internet Protocol, to be exact. A protocol is an agreement about how things work together." [SOURCE]

Despite all of our high-tech stuff, some basic truths remain unchanged.

Control over the access to information, whether on scrolls, in books, or flashing onto computer screens, is power. And those persons and organizations who would restrict such access are always the first to realize and manipulate this fact -- to the detriment of society at large. This has been true all throughout human history, and our fancy machines and networks have not made us immune to the same dark traps. ~ Lauren Weinstein

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THE FIRST ARCHIVE OF K-12 SCHOOL SITES

In1991 when I started out on the net.

Before there were websites, before it went commercial, before you could buy anything on it, and way before regular people ever heard of it, I was there. We are known as "netizens", a citizen of the net. The internet is the biggest playground in the history of the world because there are no walls, where there should be no boundaries of any kind.

Meet some of the other K - 12 Teachers who were internet pioneers here on the Educational CyberPlayGround responsible for getting schools wired.

SCHOOL DIRECTORY ©1993 K-12 SCHOOLS GO ONLINE
Educational CyberPlayGround hosts the School Directory

Look up Arbor Heights Elementary in Seattle, Washington. One of the first 9 or 10 elementary schools in the US with a web site. Until the summer of 1995, all pages were all written and maintained on a 386-33, 4mb RAM, 110mb HD computer using a 14,400 bps modem for file uploads to the server. The browsers used to check this page were NCSA Mosaic, Cello, and Lynx - Netscape and Internet Explorer weren't around yet.

TEACHERS
How do you
want to teach?

We learn by imitation. We want to integrate technology into the classroom, so Teachers Must Model what we want future teachers to be able to do in their classrooms. This is a perfect example of ideas and concepts put into present day action. Watch an Old style Talk and Chalk video lesson now distributed on the net. Then discuss the changes in the medium, storage and delivery differences from 1972 compared to 2007 and how the ideas and concepts discussed in the film came true or not.

WHAT DO YOU NEED TO KNOW RIGHT NOW

HOW TO FIND

HOW WE THINK ABOUT THE INTERNET TODAY

Shaping the Web: Why the politics of search engines matters PDF
This article argues that search engines raise not merely technical issues but also political ones. Our
study of search engines suggests that they systematically exclude (in some cases by design and in
some accidentally) certain sites, and certain types of sites, in favor of others, systematically give
prominence to some at the expense of others.

GFS: Evolution on Fast-forward by Marshall Kirk McKusick, Sean Quinlan | August 7, 2009 PDF
A discussion between Kirk McKusick and Sean Quinlan about the origin and evolution of the Google File System. During the early stages of development at Google, the initial thinking did not include plans for building a new file system. While work was still being done on one of the earliest versions of the company's crawl and indexing system, however, it became quite clear to the core engineers that they really had no other choice, and GFS (Google File System) was born.

Anthology of Youtube

It's Silicon Valley vs. Telcos in Battle for Wireless Spectrum ~ Bob Frankston bobf.frankston.com May 16, 2007
If you want to carry a television signal over a long distance then use that darn Internet. The problem is that we have layers upon layers of simplifying assumptions and we pile them on instead of rethinking. This is a key point in Robert Laughlin's "A Different Universe".
We tend to solve problems as if they exist in isolation. We do need to decompose problems in order to deal with them but there isn't a unique decomposition and we have to be open to rethinking the decomposition.
In the early 1900's the first decomposition was to assume that "communications" is a unit. We then decomposed that into voice and video. We also had wired vs wireless. The accidental properties of wires led us to use them for one-to-one communications because they were point to point connections. Wireless signals couldn't be contained hence they were broadcast to all. It doesn't help that "radio" and "telephony" are now used to describe business rather than technologies thus making it hard to talk about the basic assumptions separate from the market assumptions.
This is why TV over wires is not treated as a point to point medium -- it was originally implemented as shared antenna system and our policies continue to make that implicit assumption.
Today this decomposition is extremely dysfunctional. We now understand the concept of bits as a common representation for information and that is a very effective point of decoupling as we've seen with the Internet.
We can then use packets to organize the bit transports.
This decoupling of the communications from the bit transport (as in TCP/UDP vs IP) is very hard for people to accept because we base our understanding on the nave assumption that we are simply relaying sound waves through electronic tubes. There is assumption that you must preserve the relationships between the bits as in isochronous and QoS models. This was a defining assumption for analog telephony and the solution, eventually, was digital telephony and then packet telephony. We treated the answer as way to make analog telephony work better without using the new understanding to question whether we were asking the right question in light of our understanding. Digital technology freed us from the constraint of isochronicity and thus allowed us to get many orders of magnitude in improvement (by various measures). But it was an answer the put a lie to the decomposition that defined the industry that asked the question in the first place and thus they had a stake in failing to understand the answer they got.
Once you decouple the bits from the interpretation you can view wired and wireless bits indifferently and can dispense with the complexity and expense of slicing and dicing the transports and the use of special kinds of wires and gear for each particular message.
Yet we continue to argue as if it is still 1934 and every bit is special - sort of like the $100 Japanese Honeydew Melons but far pricier.
These concepts extend far beyond "telecom" into our basic understanding of how systems work. The isochronous assumption has a parallel in the assumption that we have to solve problems as stated and that if any component fails the system fails. Thus the Y2K scare and the presumption that we must govern systems lest people do things the "wrong" way -- alas wrong often means finding that we've solved far more interesting problems -- we may have wanted a guidance system for airplanes but we got digital computers instead. We presume music comes from record companies and not musicians and thus we preserve a particular industry structure rather than allowing for musicians to be heard.
Telecom is useful case study because it's a simple problem and the price of continuing to live in 1900 is higher than we should have to bear.
Too bad this fight over slivers of spectrum is treated as if it were any more real than the rest of professional wrestling. The entertainment value doesn't make up for the collateral damage.

New Academic Ideas ~ Noel Chiappa MIT
All this neat packet networking stuff only exists now (2007) because for many years (during Baran's first RAND work ca. 1960-64, then during the ARPANet development in the late 60's-early-70's, and then the early internet work in the 1975-1982 time-frame) this stuff was all funded by "bureaucrats in DC".
There was *no* commercial market for any of this stuff back then, so there was no other way to make it happen. (A fact of which I am well aware, because I was one of the first people - maybe the first, actually - to make money selling IP routers commercially - and that was in 1984 or so, almost 10 years after the bureacrats starting putting money into TCP/IP.)
In fact, to add a nice topping of irony, many commercial communications people of the day (circa 1980) said much the same things about TCP/IP that they are now saying about other efforts: I distinctly recall the TCP/IP people being told to "roll up our toy academic network" (and yes, they explicitly and definitely used the work "academic") and go home.

THE COMMERCIAL INTERNET

The Commercial Internet Exchange and the Board Members

Protecting your IP, your website content: How do you keep it from being copied - NO STORE: Cache Control, the Cache busting Option.

Google is Big Brother:

- Spent about 1 billion dollars on infrastructure (think disk storage)
- A monopoly with a vast trove of world wide search data..
- Knows everything about you and can PREDICT behavior, that is the real value.
- Can sell that information to any business, or government.
- Laws restrict government from collecting it themselves.
- Won't tell anyone about their own "secrets".
- Worldview: content is individually valueless.
- Corporate philosophy: organizing and giving away other people's content, creating space for advertisements in the process, but won't discuss specifically how it detects bad clicks or what percent it deems fraudulent.
- Google's Gmail spook heaven?
- Security Tools you need to know about and use.

When the Net became commercial Cash became more important than cooperation. Unrestricted information flow soon stopped. The culture of the Net was the culture of science, like science, information was shared; the technology was more important than the credentials of who invented it; rewards came mostly through the recognition of your peers and money was the last thing on anyone's mind.

THE EARLY DAYS OF THE COMMERCIAL INTERneT

WHAT DID
THEY LOOK LIKE?

Read the December 1993 article John Markoff wrote about the Web and Mosaic in "The New York Times" (US) business section; "The Guardian" (UK) publishes a page on the Web; "The Economist" (UK) analyses both the Internet and the Web.

Feb. 4 1994 "Newsday" (US), a Long Island, NY, newspaper, publishes this sentence: "Following the lead of their sister in the motion-picture business, "content providers" like Paramount Publishing are aggressively seeking to buy up electronic rights and submarkets." Guy Jackson, Editor of "The Cambridge International Dictionary of English," finds this the earliest U.S. citation for "content provider" in the Cambridge International corpus, noting "the use of quotation marks, which indicates that the term was not yet widely known."

March 1994 Marc Andreessen and colleagues leave NCSA to form "Mosaic Communications Corp" (now Netscape).

Founded in 1994, World Wide Web Consortium http://www.w3.org/ has been primarily concerned with developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web. To do so, they draw on a set of international professionals and experts throughout the field of computer science and related fields. The W3C is led by Tim Berners-Lee, who directs the project and who was also responsible for inventing the World Wide Web. Carbon-dating the Internet

This anti-authoritarian impulse is a Hippie trait.

Richard Stallman is the father of "copyleft", which he called "a mirror image" of copyright. Stallman points out how Net culture has strayed far from its early days of open software to closed, proprietary systems like Microsoft Windows and suggests the Linux operating system as a free alternative. "What Stallman means by free: you can charge money to cover your distribution costs, but the software itself carries no charge, and the recipient is free to pass it on. Because the software comes with its source code, the user can make any modifications he pleases. If and when he passes on the software and its modifications, he must also pass along the source code. Free does not mean that no money changes hands at all, but it does mean free from the external control of the software police, or of the government. Hippie sentiments." [1]

1994 Revolution and Craigslist Culture of Trust one of the few people who remains true to some of the earliest ideals of the Internet. "It's good to make a good living. It's good to do well for your staff. I feel that one of the best things a person can do for another is to create a job. So you do OK commercially, and then you try to make a difference of some sort. We're still looking for new and other ways of doing that." Nerd values are simple. Doing Well by Doing Good, we don't think of ourselves as being owned. We're like a commons in the sense that we're providing a public service.

Yahoo started in 1994

August 9, 1995 -- Netscape IPO'd, and ushered in the Dot Com Boom that has brought us to where we are today.

Mar. 1 1995 "The Daily Telegraph" (UK) quotes a Mr. Connell that "People want better control over their lives, they want to see things when it's convenient for them, and we will give time and attention to linking up with existing content providers." Guy Jackson finds this the earliest British citation for "content provider" in the Cambridge International corpus.

The Ulitmate Band List 1996
Summer of 1994 at Caltech U., UBL, originally known as the Web Wide World of Music, or WWWOM

Amazon in 1996

National Center for Supercomputer Applications aka NCSA 1997

The Well 1997

1998 The Beginning of the Erate -
Schools and libraries have requested $2.02 billion in the discounted hookups to the Internet that are becoming available under a new government program. Educational CyberPlayGround Ringleader responsible for the E-rate

WHO IS ONLINE - STATISTICS FROM 2002
A nation online - How Americans are expanding their use of the internet.
2005 INTERNET STATS
Google has the largest share of U.S. Web searches with 46 percent, according to November 2005 figures from Nielsen//NetRatings. Yahoo is second with 23 percent, and MSN third with 11 percent. [Please note that each reduction is by just about eactly half!]
46% Google -- 23% Yahoo -- 11% MSN = 80% Top 3
From "Estimating the number of Internet users:"
Using this technique, the author computes a total of 471 million internet users. This is the average who are online in a particular day, and represents 7.2% of the world population.
Using different methods, http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/ estimates a total of 880+ million users, or 13.6% of the world population.

Top 12 Languages Used on the Interent

11/9/06 In 10 years, the U.S. share of the world's online population reportedly has fallen from 64 percent to less than 25 percent, although U.S. Web surfers evidently visit more pages each. More than three-fourths of Web visitors to large U.S. Web sites such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo come from overseas. The three companies are among 14 of the top 25 U.S. Web sites that draw more foreign traffic than U.S.-based traffic, according to market research company ComScore Networks.

Daily Internet and demographics Dump A collection of Web sites that track statistical data about the Internet. Internet Traffic statistics include reports on the current speed of the Internet. Specialty Internet Statistics contains links to data-based surveys of servers, domains and search engines on the Internet. Statistics Portals link to other extensive lists of Internet statistics and Market Research connects to e-commerce research firms which make some of their data publicly available.

SOCIAL NETWORKING
2009 Corporate’s bastardization of social media and marketing’s poor use of what could be a great conversational media form. "Social BS" corporate marketing has beaten us into submission as the social media sphere simply moves on and finds more interesting content rather than voicing distrust.

SECURITY
WE ALL NEED TO KNOW HOW TO PROTECT OUR COMPUTERS

INTERNET SECURITY TOOLS

Security by Obscurity
People have turnedfrom consumers of the Internet into participants in it—whether they’re publishing websites, or teenagers sharing their cell phone numbers in MySpace. The problem with the super-connected, Web-centered world we live in is that we have made it easier to share information than to share it right. We’ve made it easier to post information on websites than to take it down. We’ve made it easier to open online accounts than to close them. We’ve made it easier to reveal our mother’s maiden names, our elementary schools, our first pets, our favorite color or our childhood street than to keep track of who knows what information and how long it will stay on servers located who knows where. We’ve made it easier to be fast than good and we've lost control of our privacy.

The goal of an attacker is to install a Trojan on your machine that will allow them to control your machine. They turn it into what is called a a Zombie machine - a machine not under your control NOW YOUR COMPUTER is under their control.
Hundreds of thousands if not millions of machines are "owned" by someone other that the user sitting in front of the keyboard and monitor. These bad people control your PC, grab your passwords, and get lots of machines together to organize DDOS attacks and jump from machine to machine to machine in order to hide their tracks. Trojans are also used to mess with you. You MIGHT actually be using a zombie machine, a vicious cracker be able to surreptitiously turn on your Webcam on your computer if you have one in order to watch you work, or watch what you type on your computer screen and then send you popup messages insulting you.

These Are The Rules ~ From Internet Rules
"The rules are subject to change, but you are always advised to follow the current set of rules. They are not all of the rules. They are some of the rules. The absence in this list of a particular rule does not mean you don't have to follow it, if indeed it is a rule. These are intended to be a simple set of general rules for dealing with the kinds of interactions that are prevalent on the internet (web/email). Some of them also apply to the telephone. Use of the rules is at your own risk (as is use of the internet).
But you do have to follow these, even if you've lost your rulebook under the stack of AOL CDs. Remember, there are lots of people out there trying to scam you. Don't make it easier for them. These rules derive from the core principles of "don't execute untrusted code" and "verify your contacts"."
Watch the Chain of Trust
Do not ever give out any information to anyone who contacts you first, no matter how inconspicuous it seems. Find an alternate way to find out their contact information (or use contact information you already have, which has been verified), and contact them yourself. For example, if you get a voicemail from your credit card company telling you to contact them about some suspected fraud, don't use the number they leave. Call the number on the back of your card instead.
You don't control the links
If you're going to give out any information - financial info, username / password, etc..., even if it seems like inconspicuous information - do not click on links that are emailed to you. Always type in URLs by hand (or use bookmarks that you saved from typing URLs in by hand).
You don't control attachments
Do not open attachments unless you are expecting the specific attachment and you know what it is. Even then, this is risky. If you're not expecting that specific attachment, it's probably an email worm or something else bad. Even if you are expecting the attachment, rather than clicking on it directly to run it, you're much better off saving it to disk, opening the program you think it should be run with, and then opening it manually. This takes a bit more time, but think of the time you save by not having your data randomly deleted by malicious attachments.
HTML can be used to hide things from you
If you can, use a plaintext mailreader. HTML mail is fraught with all sorts of security problems.
Do not use Microsoft products to browse random websites or read random emails. In a controlled environment, these products do have advantages. When used with untrusted content, they behave badly and will run code without your permission or knowledge. This includes all versions of Internet Explorer, Outlook, and Outlook Express.
Instead, use Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird, Opera, http://www.scroogle.org/
http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/scraper.htm
And source: http://www.scroogle.org/changes.html
products that are better about executing (or not) untrusted system code - If you absolutely must use Microsoft products, make sure they are up to date with the latest patches.

Internet Area