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How does the Internet work?

Who Invented the Internet? Who Controls The Internet? Seven people control the system at the heart of the web: the domain name system, or DNS.


Keys to the Best Search Tools
for Unlocking the Internet.

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WHAT IS THE INTERNET

I've been on the net since 1990 and Clifford Stoll had already been on it for 20 years and declared in Newsweek 1995 that the Internet was total failure poised for imminent collapse. Stoll writes: “Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic." Hindsight is 20/20 "-)

“The difference between the Internet and Web is a little bit like the difference between train tracks and individual cars. The Internet is the tracks: a system that lots of different cars can use, as long as they conform to certain basic standards. The Web is an application that consists of pages that ride (like train cars) on top of the Internet to deliver a great variety of things. The Web is one of many applications that use the Internet; other common applications include email, video or audio conferencing tools like Skype, file sharing tools like Dropbox, or online gaming platforms like Xbox or PlayStation." ~ Andrew Russell arussell.org

The UN thinks internet access is a human right

July 2016 U.N. Declaration
The resolution indicates the importance of "applying a comprehensive human rights-based approach when providing and expanding access to the internet and for the internet to be open, accessible and nurtured".
In formal terms, the Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP.) This enables billions of devices to be connected worldwide. Through this network, the Internet delivers a range of services, including inter-linked hypertext documents; the World Wide Web; electronic mail; telephony; and file sharing networks. The origins of the Internet can be traced back to the 1960s , although its popularity as a social network arguably began with British scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, when the foundations of the web were laid down.

WHO CONTROLS THE INTERNET?

The whole internet is controlled by seven actual, physical keys. There is an actual key ceremony controlled by ICANN who assigns the internet addresses to websites. If someone got control of their database they could control the internet. So ICANN gave 7 people authority to hold the keys and 7 more people to hold backup keys - 14 people in all. These keys unlock safe deposit boxes around the world that contain smart key cards so that when 7 smartcards are put together you get a "master key" that is really a password that gets into the ICANN database. These people meet 4 times a year to generate a new master key password for security.

The very first key ceremony conducted in 2010. Skip to 1:58 to see the ceremony.

10/1/19 The transfer of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from the U.S. to an international entity representing 162 countries will proceed on Saturday as planned.

The Chinese invention of moveable type, is credited to Bi Sheng in the year 1045 AD way before Guttenberg ever printed a bible, and the internet which really started with TCP/IP in 1983 is far and away more impressive in changing the world than moveable type was for it's time.

The Net is a world
of ends.

You're at one end, and everybody and everything else are at the other ends. The Internet's value is founded in its technical architecture.

The Internet is a "network of networks" of computers. It was born on Oct. 29, 1969, when a UCLA student programmer sent a message from his computer to one at Stanford.

The Internet was not created by the US military. Sure, the military contributed to the Internet, but the majority of contributions came from corporations, universities, and researchers. The Internet was not “monitored from day one”, because until the 1990s, it wasn't even an important enough network to monitor. As late as 1993, the Internet was dwarfed in size and importance by numerous other computer networks - until the web took off that year, the Internet was considered a temporary research project. The competing networks of those years were XNS, AppleTalk, GOSIP, SNA, Novel, DECnet, Bitnet, Uunet, Fidonet, X.25, Telenet, and all the other things that were really important during those years. And, mass Internet surveillance started in 1998.

 

The World Wide Web is the system that allows documents and sites to connect via the Internet, and it was born March 12, 1989. That's when Timothy Berners-Lee, then a fellow at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), wrote "Information Management: A Proposal" (bit.ly/1eBedal), outlining "a universal linked information system." He described much of what the Web has come to be.

Take Back Your Privacy - Your Secrets Aren't Safe
First Library to Offer Anonymous Web Browsing Stops Under DHS Pressure

IF YOU THINK YOU HAVE nothing to hide. Yes you do! The Library Freedom Project shows libraries how to “protect patrons' rights to explore new ideas, no matter how controversial or subversive, unfettered by the pernicious effects of online surveillance.”

TOR

 

 

1st READ The Structure of the Internet explained.

KickassTorrents (KAT) is currently the most visited torrent site on the Internet. Tor, which stands for The Onion Router, is an encrypted anonymity network that can't be easily blocked by ISPs. you can always access KAT via this address lsuzvpko6w6hzpnn.onion on a TOR network.
KickassTorrents is pushing back against the increasing number of ISP blockades. To make it easier for its users to bypass local censorship efforts, KAT's operators have added a dark web address, hiding the site in the Tor network. While these blocks are somewhat effective, there are also plenty of ways to circumvent them. KAT itself is operating various proxy sites, for example, and today it steps up its unblocking efforts by joining the dark web. TorrentFreak spoke to KAT's Mr. White who informs us that an KAT is not the first torrent site to become active on the Tor network. The Pirate Bay has had an .onion address for several years already. In addition, there are also several smaller torrent and warez communities active on the dark web.

9/17/15 Dozen or more US libraries line up to run Tor exit nodes Publicity over relay takedown drives demand. Following a decision by the library's board of trustees earlier this week to put the exit node back online.

 

Cyber Space The 9th Wonder of the World

JOHN PERRY BARLOW

 

see Internet Computer History
Rancher and lyricist of the Grateful Dead
Cognitive Dissident, Eff Co-Founder
The John Perry Barlow Wellness Trust
http://www.johnperrybarlow-wellnesstrust.com/

"The Hidden Code in Barlow's Declaration of Cyberspace Independence"
The Cyber supremacy power struggle between the nation state and citizens (and between nation states). The power struggle reflects a tension inherent in the design of the Internet - avoiding the limitations/vulnerability of a top down hierarchy. The embrace or antipathy of centralization goes a long way to explain the differences between the "Internet" and the "telephone network". Re-imposing telephone network like top down control on the Internet wins only the restoration of limitations / vulnerabilities engineers sought to preclude. It requires a veto of a preference for Internet enabled services leading the communicating public to abandon the telephone network. It realizes the conflict Barlow anticipates in his 1996 Declaration between Internet (a physical infrastructure) and Cyberspace (as non-physical expression of mind). All the points government makes about the need for central control address anxiety about the trustworthiness of citizens. Barlow points out the same arguments arise more properly as a question about the trustworthiness of government which means the trustworthiness of the PEOPLE who are in government.

- The key issue with internet governance is always trust, which is ridiculous.

The internet's initial early years as a network for academics and researchers who were friends really, was transformed by the vulgar commercial activity that had been in effect, outlawed.
The US government's decision, in 1991, to throw the nascent network open to private enterprise amounted, as one leading (and now eye-wateringly wealthy) Californian venture capitalist has put it, to “the largest creation of legal wealth in the history of the planet”. It was your tax dollar that paid to invent the internet.

On 30 April 1993 CERN published a statement that made World Wide Web technology available on a royalty free basis, allowing the web to flourish.

Who Invented the Internet:
Here is Footnote 20 from Steve Lukasik's informative memo Why the Arpanet Was Built:

"Invention" is used here with some trepidation, given the plethora of those who would be pleased to accept such a mantle. In the case of any large and diverse enterprise, the essence of the creation is not the individual but the group.

1989 is the year Tim Berners-Lee invented the web and 7/6/15 The Internet is Sold Out -- New IP Addresses Not Available http://ow.ly/PhTNt

HACKERS AND HEROES: A TALE OF TWO COUNTRIES " Hackers' Place in Society by Elliot Williams <more on security>

Monopolistic Platforms

.

The digital economy is, by its nature, winner-takes-all.

Imagine it is 100 years ago, and the post office, the phone company, the public libraries, the printing houses, Ordanance Survey maps and the cinemas were all controlled by the same secretive and unaccountable organisation. Plus, he adds, almost as an afterthought: “Google doesn't just own the post office - it has the right to open everyone's letters.”

2013 The internet's inherent “1% model” is functioning perfectly: the top 1% of music artists received 77% of all artist-recorded music income
2012 Amazon, probably destroyed 27,000 US jobs. There is deep hostility to unions A massive impact on independent retail; in books, savage bullying of publishers.
2015 Google
, handles 3.5bn searches daily and controls more than 90% of the market in some countries, including Britain, was valued at $400bn last year - more than seven times General Motors, which employs nearly four times more people. Its two founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are worth $30bn apiece. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, head of the world's second biggest internet site - used by 19% of people in the world, half of whom access it six days a week or more - is sitting on a similar personal pile, while at $190bn in July last year, his company was worth more than Coca-Cola, Disney and AT&T.
2018 Google Now Snares One In Five Of Every Ad Dollars Spent (& It's One In 10 For Facebook)
2019 Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, starts with Google and talked about the growing business of collecting and selling consumer data.

Rule of the Mob

Rather than encouraging creativity, stimulating competition, creating jobs, distributing wealth and promoting equality, the internet is in fact doing the reverse. Socially and culturally, it's the same: The digital "sharing" economy destroys the world and it's citizens. Can the internet really replace healthcare, education, government? Can teachers and lawyers and doctors be replaced by a tiny group of online superstars?

Sharing Economy

If there's no exchange of cash for your article, your photograph, your movie, your book, your song, how else are you supposed to make money? It's been 25 years since the birth of the web. We've constantly been told: wait, don't worry, it's a young medium, something will emerge … But nothing has. For creatives, this has been a disaster. The illusion of social media is that we want to be social; the reality is we're selling ourselves. We're all working for Facebook and Google. http://ow.ly/J9BMb

CHANGE THE WORLD

"Nations have well established rules of the game on land, sea, air and in outer space," it said. "There is a significant lack of such rules in the fifth common domain -- cyberspace." ~ John Edwin Mroz EWI

"The Internet belongs to no man, or industry, or government!" he said, to applause. "No matter how many politicians you lobby, no matter how many SOPAs you put together in Congress, you will not succeed in efforts to take control of our Internet!" “Mega” offers end-to-end encryption of files allowing a diverse range of companies and individuals to set up servers and host users' files. Encrypted files stored with Mega will be duplicated and stored with multiple hosts for redundancy protection. ~ Kim Dotcom
Concerns over Mega's encryption regime. Frankly, I can't think of a single reason why anyone would want to entrust data to this particular service. It has an enormous target painted on it -- from both technical and legal standpoints. ~ KE

ICANN

The US Department of Commerce put ICANN in charge.
2/2/14 Meet the seven people who hold the keys to worldwide internet security seven keys, held by individuals from all over the world, that together control security at the core of the web. The reality is rather closer to The Office than The Matrix. Together, their keys create a master key, which in turn controls one of the central security measures at the core of the web. The keyholders have been meeting four times a year, twice on the east coast of the US and twice here on the west, since 2010. Each of the 14 primary keyholders owns a traditional metal key to a safety deposit box, which in turn contains a smartcard, which in turn activates a machine that creates a new master key. The backup keyholders have something a bit different: smartcards that contain a fragment of code needed to build a replacement key-generating machine.

WHO MANAGES THE INTERNET'S ADDRESS BOOK? BY VINT CERF

Vint Cerf summarizes the transition of ICANN.

 

 

2014 NSA Spying Fractures Internet US Loses Control of ICANN
Privacy, Technology, and Intelligence The U.S. government WILL relinquish control over the backbone of the Internet.

Aaron Swartz: The Internet's Own Boy by Brian Knappenberger. Encourages the American people to get up & do something about systemic problems.

 

2014 USA FREEDOM: How Many Hops?
The USA FREEDOM ACT limits the government to two “hops” from an initial “seed” number linked by “reasonable articulable suspicion” to a foreign terror group. Or does it? While the current incarnation of USA FREEDOM is clearly intended to impose the two-hop limit that President Obama has agreed is sufficient for intelligence needs, it does so rather differently than the original version—and is worded ambiguously enough that, it seems to me, a clever Justice Department lawyer might be able to construe it as permitting four hops, rather than the two Congress intends.

The United States of Secrets - Part 1 and 2 Collect it All.

11/26/13 The framing of an "IP Transition" fails to come to terms with the real impact of the Internet ~ Bob Frankston
I keep seeing so many articles about the Internet and related policy issues that it's hard to know how to respond. The term “IP Transition” may be a good starting point since the term is an attempt to treat the Internet as a smooth transition rather accepting the idea that we are in the midst of a disruptive change. It seems that the FCC's approach is to simply substitute IP for old protocols and to preserve policies tied to the accidental properties of a copper infrastructure. This shows a failure to come to terms with the new reality.
Perhaps we can learn from the history of the ICC (Interstate Commerce Commission). The Wikipedia entry tells how the FRC (Federal Radio Commission) was spun out of the ICC. What is more interesting is that the ICC itself was succeeded by the Department of Transportation whose focus is on the means of transportation rather than the business of carrying freight. I'd be interested in learning more about how we went from the ICC to the DoT from those versed in regulatory history.
If we are to come to terms with a disruptive change we need to take a zero-based approach and think in terms of a “Department of Connectivity” (DoC) that can focus on the future rather than on preserving the past. This is a thought experiment which is appropriate because the Internet is really about an idea - a way to use available resources.
The DoC could take a fresh look at the infrastructure and ask how to finance the wires and radios given that we can't charge for services like phone calls because such services are now apps. While we do need to be wary of analogies there is a similarity to the shift from charging for rides on railroads to paying for roads. The DoC can also think outside the telephone-framing of today's 9-1-1 to a resilient infrastructure. For example a Nest (or similar) fire detector should be able to send a rich message directly to a fire department using standard messaging.
The problem with calling for a DoC is that unlike roads, which coexisted with the railroads, today's connectivity has to be carved out of the existing telecommunications infrastructure as when IP was used to create wormholes between LANs. I can't make the case for a DoC in a few sentences here given that it took a carefully constructed column (in IEEE/CE Magazine) for me to explain the concepts. What I can do is ask those who take the “IP Transition” effort seriously to read that column (http://rmf.vc/IEEERefactoringCE) and to revisit the conventional understandings rather than trying to force the Internet into the confines of regulatory polices circa 1934.

Telephone On The Net nobody knows you're a dog.

Do you have imaginary friends?
At least one of my FB friends is a fake, I know this because the person who created the identity told me. In this case it was created as an ongoing performance art joke. In my high school, we developed a hoax personality - "Omar Beckins", complete with bogus autobiography. We then named the local academic tournament after him. A couple of years ago, a friend points me to the wikipedia page for Omar Beckins - some later student had set it up, and the hoax page lasted for about a year before being taken down. Because spammers copy wikipedia content and sometimes wholly duplicate it, the bogus biography of Omar has now been absorbed into the guts of the web in various locations. Since it's not as well known a hoax as George P. Burdell, I occasionally find sites where the biography is cited seriously, usually based on the old wikipedia entry. ~Michael Collins

Vint Cerf appointed to National Science Board by President Obama
On January 16, 2013 President Obama announced his intention to appoint Vint Cerf - Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google - to the National Science Board. The 25-member National Science Board is the governance body for the National Science Foundation, and additionally serves as an independent body of advisors to both the President and [...] entire post at: http://www.cccblog.org

 

The Internet is more than just a technology. It is a domain similar to the domains of land, air, sea and space, but with its own distinct challenges. The cyber domain has national and international dimensions that include industry, trade, intellectual property, security, technology, culture, policy, and diplomacy. It includes all parts of the converged network, from computer networks to satellite communications, and is not bound by international borders.
The President's / White House "kill switch" for the Internet giving emergency powers in the event of a catastrophic attack exits in a little known provision in Communications Act passed a month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Some people said the original design goal of the ARPAnet/internet had absolutely nothing to do with, withstanding an extensive nuclear attack and that it was designed to enable people with interactive computing and common interests to communicate via email, programs, and data across local and distant geographies. However, the packet switching work that Paul Baran did at RAND had attack resiliency as a design goal, and Internet is built on a packet switching foundation. So both statements are correct, depending on how broadly or narrowly one wants to look at the history; Internet inherited whatever resiliency it has from packet switching.
Some folks say that Arpanet absolutely had Defense relevance, just not resilience against nuclear holocaust. And it had to with passage of the Mansfield Amendment.
The change of name from "ARPA" to "DARPA" came when ARPA was moved out of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) to become a separate Defense agency. The moved was soured by a criticism that OSD was too large, around 2,000 people. Moving ARPA to its own agency reduced the head count by 150 ;)
The change went into effect July 1, 1972, ie the beginning of FY 73. In the Clinton administration the name was briefly changed back to ARPA to signal warmth toward the fruits of the research having dual use. Defense relevance was always required.

Q: Could someone really destroy the whole Internet?

Could someone really destroy the whole Internet?

YES in 1998
L0pht testified before the U.S. Senate, famously claiming that the group could, with its combined expertise and capabilities, “bring down the Internet in about 30 minutes.”

NO in 2012 ~ Dr. Herbert Lin is chief scientist at the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council of the National Academies
A: Taking down the Internet is a lot easier said than done, according to IT expert Dewayne Hendricks, active member of the (FCC/TAC) Federal Communications Commission Technological Advisory Council ) and the Internet is very much here to stay. Known as the "Broadband Cowboy," Hendricks has worked with AT&T, Cisco, WorldCom, and Lucent, and is currently CEO of Tetherless Access Inc. "The first thing you need to know about the Internet,is that there is no such thing as 'the' Internet."
Simple, independent, and distributed
The Internet, says Hendricks, is "merely a series of highly distributed packet switchers." Most people get this wrong, he argues. "People tend to think it's this one thing - and it's not - it's important to get this idea across that it's thousands of independently owned and operated networks - networks that are tied together by physical connections that use a common protocol."
It's this very quality that has endowed the Internet with the capacity to not just remain live and active under extreme circumstances, but to repair itself and adapt when necessary. Taking the Internet down, therefore, is very much like trying to herd cats. It's essentially a network of networks.
And indeed, there has been some speculation about what it would take to bring down the entire Internet. Earlier this year, Gizmodo's Sam Biddle made a heroic effort at trying to figure out how to destroy the Internet, suggesting that it could be done (however unlikely) by cutting all the cables that bind the Internet together, ruining the root servers, and destroying all the data centers. Assuming this could be done, all the world's digital data would be left frozen on local machines. "Nothing can get anywhere, because all the roads, bridges, and traffic lights are in ruin," Biddle writes, "All that's left of the Internet is your office intranet, or the file-swapping in your dorm. The tiny shreds. There are nets, but none of them are inter."

A: One nuclear EMP burst could do a lot to destroy a large portion of the Internet. Several could destroy nearly all of the electronics in the world. But short of that, I suspect you're right. ~Herb Lin

2019 Hoover Institution fellows Amy Zegart and Herb Lin talked about their book, Bytes, Bombs and Spies, on the use by the U.S. military of offensive cyber weapons.

HURRICANE SANDY

 

Hurricane Sandy Hurts the Cloud Internet Infrastructure it's all underwater and Verizon Customers Manhattan, NY Still Don't Have Service After Sandy — 186 Days and Counting

Disaster Recovery: How Hurricane Sandy took down a lot NYC data centers.

Protecting the Internet

What's the ITU?

 

Protecting The Open Internet

What's the ITU? The ITU was founded in 1865 as the International Telegraph Union, an organization that coordinated European telegraph standards. Over time it added telephone and radio standards to its remit, and in 1947 it became a specialized agency of the newly formed United Nations.

If all the ITU did was try to regulate the Internet, the United States would have pulled out of the organization a long time ago. But the ITU engages in other activities as well, most importantly in its radiocommunication or "R sector." The ITU's R sector is in charge of internationally coordinating the allocation of orbital slots for satellites. Geostationary satellites must orbit Earth over the equator, and at a particular altitude, and therefore the number of high-quality orbital positions is limited. Furthermore, satellites must communicate with the ground using high-powered radio waves. Without some form of international coordination, satellite communications would interfere with each other.

"For years, governments unhappy with their limited influence over the governance of the Internet have gone to the ITU to air their grievances and seek relief. They have proposed to make the ITU the preeminent standards-setting and governance body for the Internet, pushing aside the non-governmental Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for standards and Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) for governing the Internet's domain name system. These changes would enable governments to have greater control over content on their "national Internet segments," as well as the ability to charge high rates for international Internet traffic, just as they do for telephone traffic. For its part, the ITU Secretariat would love an expansion of authority because it would bring back some of the relevance the ITU lost in the rise of the Internet. The vast majority even of today's international telephone traffic is routed and billed according to a special loophole in the treaty that governs telecommunications, and 100 percent of Internet traffic is exempt from the treaty's provisions. These issues came to a head last year at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai. Governments came together for the first time in 24 years to renegotiate the telecommunications treaty. A number of countries, including Russia, China, UAE and Saudi Arabia, proposed sweeping changes that would have created significant obligations for member states with respect to the Internet. While the liberal democracies were able to keep the worst provisions out of the final treaty, it still contained objectionable provisions, and it was bundled with a resolution giving the ITU all the excuse it needed to start working on Internet policy. The United States and 54 other countries refused tosign."

The primary reason countries push for ITU control of the Internet is specifically to facilitate fragmentation and censorship of the Net on a massive scale. It's all about politicians who don't want their populations to have access to open information. Don't be fooled by their dissembling along other lines -- it's a smokescreen, nothing more.

Remember one other simple fact:

"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."

 

2013 I'm overwhelmed with input.
I've got AM, FM, XM, iPod, iPhone, Internet . . . and we're all closer together, just an e-mail or a text away, but we've all retreated into our niches, we've lost our cohesiveness. We're no longer all in it together, we're doing our own thing. And when you take a break and look up and realize no one's around you wonder . . . are we better off?

3/2012 'Non-Humans' Account for 51% of All Internet Traffic. "Hackers, spambots, botnets, scrapers and spies of sorts collecting proprietary business information and customer data from unsuspecting websites."

Fabulous Internet Tutorial For Beginners where you will how to click and scroll to rock'n roll around the net, please share this with your local librarian.

How to Teach Non Fear Based Internet Curriculum.

Net Generation, was born in the 1980s, the iGeneration, was born in the '90s. Each group of children has been uniquely influenced by the tech tools available in their formative stages of development. The iGeneration - spends considerably more time texting than talking on the phone, pays less attention to television than the older group and tends to communicate more over instant-messenger networks. The newest generations, unlike their older peers, will expect an instant response from everyone they communicate with, and won't have the patience for anything less. Can kids focus on anything anymore? Neither generation understands the cloud mirror and privacy.

INTERNET
WHAT IT WAS

The Internet was developed in the 1960s by DARPA, actually, with 4 nodes and 4 computers by 1971, used by academic researchers in the USA. Dial up speed was only Kilobits. In 1998 there were about 50 million users supported by 25 million servers and ICANN was created. In 1979 10 MB of disk storage cost $1,000.oo.


11/5/09 Marcus Ranum @TEDxMidAtlantic explains how security evolved from simple to correct programming and that old software needs to die to be replaced by good programming.

 

INTERNET
WHAT IT IS

Cyberspace is being shaped. The tectonic plates of cyberspace are shifting.

INTERNET
WHAT IT WILL BE

The beauty of what used to be the net rested on what you did not know or cared about but were surprised to find. Pages that used to open slowly while hearing the funky buzz of the modem isn't around now. Transcending its original playful identity, the web is no longer a place for strolling it's a place for getting things done.
We are now moving slowly from open data to a closed online world of Facebook and apps. Use of the Domain Name System (the address bar) will likely diminish, owing not only to apps, but also to a tragedy of the commons in which new Top-Level Domain names (.whatevers and .brands) confuse users and lead them to rely on the search box or links within apps instead.
Hardly anyone “surfs” the Web anymore. The popularity of the “app paradigm,” whereby dedicated mobile and tablet applications help us accomplish what we want without ever opening the browser or visiting the rest of the Internet. In 2000 a concept like the “real-time Web,” in which our every tweet and status update is instantaneously indexed, updated and responded to, was unthinkable. What used to be a quirky adventure has now become a data driven economy with all data collected and sold. That's the tyranny of the social net business model that it has evolved into.

 

How we use and
live with EMAIL

 

DON'T CHECK EMAIL

Email any day of the year you'll get an instant auto reply:

“Last month I reduced my email traffic by 70%. It made me more productive, happier, and more responsive to things that were urgent. I will only check this email address occasionally in an attempt to maintain focus and improve productivity. Please excuse the delayed/lack of response.”

Internet Security

 

 

Loving the Cyber Bomb?
Pentagon's unquenchable thirst for ever-deadlier weapons systems--cyber, or otherwise. The United States is already engaged in hostile cyber operations against their geopolitical rivals--and allies--and have been doing so since the 1990s, Pentagon's propaganda blitz On May 31, 2011 The Wall Street Journal disclosed that the Pentagon now asserts "that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force." Also on May 31, The Washington Post reported that America's shadow warriors have "developed a list of cyber-weapons and tools, including viruses that can sabotage an adversary's critical networks, to streamline how the United States engages in computer warfare." That "classified list of capabilities has been in use for several months," with the approval of "other agencies, including the CIA." This "sensitive program ... forms part of the Pentagon's set of approved weapons or 'fires' that can be employed against an enemy." The "UK is developing a cyber-weapons programme that will give ministers an attacking capability to help counter growing threats to national security from cyberspace." Armed Forces Minister Nick Harvey told The Guardian that "action in cyberspace will form part of the future battlefield" and will become "an integral part of the country's armoury." Bloomberg News reported back in 2008, both Lockheed Martin and Boeing "are deploying forces and resources to a new battlefield: cyberspace." Bloomberg averred that military contractors and the wider defense industry are "eager to capture a share of a market that may reach $11 billion in 2013," and "have formed new business units to tap increased spending to protect U.S. government computers from attack." The military needs "presidential authorization to penetrate a foreign computer network and leave a cyber-virus that can be activated later." When it comes to espionage or other activities loudly denounced as illegal intrusions into the sacrosanct world of government and corporate crime and corruption, the "military does not need such approval." Learn about NSA's Echelon program in a 1997. "Military cyber-warriors can also, without presidential authorization, leave beacons to mark spots for later targeting by viruses," an "unnamed military official".

The 100% Scared Doctrine The Ever-Expanding National Security Complex

OpenNet Initiative documents emerging trends and technologies as governments around the world seek to shape, limit, and control the Internet.
As the global Internet expands in reach and ability to influence, governments are pursuing strategies to establish controls and policing over this domain consistent with national laws and values. These tendencies are evident in democratic as well as authoritarian states.
Government intervention has become more pronounced and pervasive and censorship and surveillance practices are on the rise. First-generation controls, typified by Chinas Great Firewall, are being replaced by more sophisticated techniques that go beyond mere denial of information and aim to normalize (or even legalize) a climate of control. These next-generation techniques include strategically timed distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, targeted malware, surveillance at key points of the Internets infrastructure, take-down notices, and stringent terms-of-usage policies.

STATS: Today there are an estimated 542 million servers and about 1.3 billion users. Around 3 billion mobile phones, 15% are internet enabled adding 450 million devices to the net, and 1 billion personal computers, Voice over IP, video conferencing, audio, and video content, scientific databases. In 2008 2 TB of disk storage cost $600.oo. (in 1979 2 TB cost $200 million)

The danger of allowing an advertising company to control the index of human knowledge is too obvious to ignore. Google's universal index is the shared heritage of humanity. There is no system for organising knowledge that does not carry with it social, political and cultural consequences. Nor is an entirely unbiased organising principle possible. The juxtaposition of advertisements with wisdom neutralises the latter. The prevalence of commercial messages traps us in the marketplace. No wonder it has become nearly impossible to imagine a world without consumerism. Advertising has become the distorting frame through which we view the world.

Big Data - You are the Product

Internet Association lobbying group will push for policies that protect their financial interests.
Michael Beckerman CEO stepped down as a top aide to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.), argues that companies that are primarily focused on providing online services do not always have the same interests as the rest of the technology sector. Facebook, Google, Amazon and eBay are joined forces to protect their interests in Washington.The other founding members of the association are AOL, Expedia, IAC, LinkedIn, Monster, Rackspace, salesforce.com, TripAdvisor, Yahoo and Zynga.

Where is the Market for Online Privacy?

The internet was never designed with security in mind or to protect your privacy. That's because the overriding economic force that created the free and open commercial Internet - the predominant Silicon Valley venture capital/IPO value creation model - was and remains largely antithetical to protecting online privacy. It's basic economics.
What is the essential critical element of achieving audience/user scale fastest? Free. No direct cost to the user fuels fastest, frictionless, viral adoption. This free economic model presupposes online advertising as an eventual monetization mechanism and shuns products and services directly paid for by the user because their inherent time-to-market is too slow and their upfront sunk cost of sales and customer service is too high for this predominant value creation model.
Security, Privacy and Trust
Information Wants To Be Free Model which existed when only the academics who made the net and ruled the net called it home ... before the commercial interests were allowed online who then took it and used it for one thing only... to make them rich.
According to the commercial tyrants this means that in order to make the web profitable, it has to be based on an advertising model rather than a subscription model.
YOU and your User leverage/consumer power in the market equation. What did you say? You don't want to be that loser sitting alone in your own world without friends? You are the problem. You can't keep your privacy on the web because YOU are addicted to all the free stuff it has to offer, So Get off Facebook Now. An online business is designed to preclude or limit the viability of a significant competitive alternative. This model claims users have privacy choices, when they know users have no where else to go so they don't have to protect your privacy.
Just because something is free doesn't mean it doesn't have a cost.

"The very specific market failure here is twofold. First, extremely lax enforcement of the FTC Section 5 law against deceptive business practices, created market failure here because users were systematically denied fair representation in the marketplace, which is the first and most important line of defense against consumer fraud. Without effective fair-representation law enforcement, the consumer incorrectly assumes the online businesses in question are being forthright. Second, dysfunctional Federal privacy law — that only protects privacy expectations offline and not online — creates market failure as well, because users have minimal market control over the market for their online personal data. What is needed is new privacy legislation that is a consumer-driven, technology/competition-neutral privacy framework that works online and offline.
Simply, what is needed here to correct this specific market failure, is for law enforcement to ensure online businesses fairly represent their privacy and financial conflicts of interest to consumers/users so they can better protect themselves, and for Congress to harmonize Federal privacy law to close the huge Internet loophole in privacy law so that users enjoy the same expected privacy protections online that they do offline." ~ Scott Cleland

Do You Like Online Privacy? You May Be a Terrorist
A flyer designed by the FBI and the Department of Justice to promote suspicious activity reporting in internet cafes lists basic tools used for online privacy as potential signs of terrorist activity. The document, part of a program called “Communities Against Terrorism”, lists the use of “anonymizers, portals, or other means to shield IP address” as a sign that a person could be engaged in or supporting terrorist activity. The use of encryption is also listed as a suspicious activity along with steganography, the practice of using “software to hide encrypted data in digital photos” or other media. In fact, the flyer recommends that anyone “overly concerned about privacy” or attempting to “shield the screen from view of others” should be considered suspicious and potentially engaged in terrorist activities.
Logging into an account associated with a residential internet service provider (such as Comcast or AOL), an activity that could simply indicate that you are on a trip, is also considered a suspicious activity. Viewing any content related to “military tactics” including manuals or “revolutionary literature” is also considered a potential indicator of terrorist activity. This would mean that viewing a number of websites, including the one you are on right now, could be construed by a hapless employee as an highly suspicious activity potentially linking you to terrorism.
The “Potential Indicators of Terrorist Activities” contained in the flyer are not to be construed alone as a sign of terrorist activity and the document notes that “just because someone's speech, actions, beliefs, appearance, or way of life is different; it does not mean that he or she is suspicious.” However, many of the activities described in the document are basic practices of any individual concerned with security or privacy online. The use of PGP, VPNs, Tor or any of the many other technologies for anonymity and privacy online are directly targeted by the flyer, which is distributed to businesses in an effort to promote the reporting of these activities. < - >



The Culture Wars:
HOLLYWOOD - RIAA, MPAA vs. WE THE PEOPLE

Misuse of intellectual property enforcement tools are everywhere, and they threaten everyone. The content industry has made itself into the villain. They are an occupying power, obeyed at gunpoint, despised for its ham-handed excesses and resisted from every dark corner. Hollywood, refused to respect technology and its customers by trying to keep a dead business model. The MPAA remind Congress of their source of funding for Democratic candidates, and that it would not tolerate defections. Game Over - Citizens Win.

BROADBAND

Since 2009 the situation has totally reversed. As the Internet has evolved — in particular, as dial-up has given way to broadband connections using DSL, cable and other high-speed links — it's the United States that has fallen behind.
The numbers are startling. As recently as 2001, the percentage of the population with high-speed access in Japan and Germany was only half that in the United States. In France it was less than a quarter. By the end of 2006, however, all three countries had more broadband subscribers per 100 people than we did.
Even more striking is the fact that our “high speed” connections are painfully slow by other countries' standards. According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, French broadband connections are, on average, more than three times as fast as ours. Japanese connections are a dozen times faster. Oh, and access is much cheaper in both countries than it is here.

Shift Happens Did You Know 4.0

 

There Is Going To Be An i-9/11 And An i-Patriot Act.
From Dial up to Deep Space
DTN: Delay and Disruption Tolerant Networking
The Interplanetary Internet: networking technology for space that allows interoperable networking between spacecraft of earth origin and devices on the internet. This will be standardized for usy by any of the world's space agencies. Spacecraft from any country will be interoperable each other.

Future Trends in Computing civilization as we've known it is over.

Loss of Information

Application software does not last 1000 years. Unless it is preserved we loose our ability to interpret digital content. You won't be able to open, format, or interpret digital content. We need to preserve the software and operating systems even when the company goes out of business.
Access to the Internet is a well-defined term, and is what cable and fiber based companies offer today for a monthly subscription fee. The Internet itself an all-encompassing term, which means best efforts delivery of packets to every reachable destination on the Internet.
Merely being able to access part of the World Wide Web is not access to the Internet. It is simply access to part of the World Wide Web. See: http://www.dpsproject.org for a very clear and simple definition of this important issue in a legal context.

CARBON FOOTPRINT

Emails especially those with attachments still use energy and create greenhouse gas emissions, even if you don't print them. Last month, Yeager told the BBC that sending an email attachment of 4.7 megabytes—the equivalent of about 4 photos taken on a point-and-shoot digital camera—creates as much greenhouse gas as boiling your tea kettle 17.5 times. Avoid sending giant attachments if you can. "In the last five or ten years a lot of people have added these 'think before you print' signatures to their emails," says Yeager. "Well we should all have 'think before you attach.'" Share your data without attachments: Instead of sending photos directly to all your friends and family members, upload them to central locations like Flickr or Facebook. "It's much more efficient to send a link to a place where everything is stored," says Yeager. For audio and video files, I often use hosting sites like Sendspace or MediaFire.

Always remember:

The power of online search engines and social networks to control exactly how we get information. Be aware of the politics of personalization and methods used to ensure that you won't end up in a search engine ghetto.

The Filter Bubble:Deleting Web History from your Google Account will erase all items from your Web History and stop your Web History from being recorded in the future. BUT If you've disabled search customizations, you'll need to disable it again after clearing your browser cookies; clearing your Google cookie turns on history-based customizations.

A search engine reflects the values and priorities of the engineers who design the algorithms. But not all Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) are equal. How Google Works graphic.

FIND SEARCH TOOLS
that are focused in a subject discipline as well as the general ones is a major need of researchers in every major subject discipline.

September 19, 2008 When Academia Puts Profit Ahead of Wonder
University Inc. Campus Commercialization and The CEO Salary. Campus Commercialization University Small Business Patent Procedures Act.

Message Overload Taking Toll on Workers 5/20/98

Author: Kirstin Downey Grimsley Issue: Lifestyle
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-05/20/064l-052098-idx.html
Description: With so many time- and labor-saving devices (such as the fax, voice-mail, email, corporate intranet, standard, cell and car phone, the beeper and pager) available for our convenience it is no wonder that we are beginning to feel a bit overwhelmed. A workplace study conducted by the Gallup Organization and Calif.-based Institute for the Future found that workers are being "bombarded by an avalanche of information" and are starting to "cry for a respite from the intrusions." The study, released yesterday, found that the 1,035 employees that were surveyed and observed at work received an average of 190 messages a day, most requiring some form of response. Employees said that they were starting their work day earlier and staying later in an effort to keep up. While many experts believe that the growth of information is causing people to work smarter and faster -- several academic studies have reached different conclusions when it comes to the effect on productivity "People are treated like they are machines that are on all the time," said economist Paula Rayman, director of the Radcliffe Public Policy Institute that also has interviewed workers on this subject. "All these workers wanted 'sacred time' -- time during the day with no interruptions...You absolutely need uninterrupted time to get your work done. If you are constantly bombarded with messages, you never get your real work done."