INTERNET - What It Is Now - Linus Torvalds

The 9th Wonder of the World

Cybersecurity as Realpolitik by Dan Geerdeciding to stay off the net as much as is possible presented at Black Hat USA 2014 - 54:34

2014 Here is an archive of email header list discussions from 1979. I don't know whether to be impressed or depressed by the degree to which it is the same people who are still discussing the same kind of issues now as was discussed 35 years ago !!!!!
The first file starts with complaining about a 64K [actually (2**19-1)/9 characters] limit on messages message imposed by Multics FTP.

2014 China bans use of Microsoft's Windows 8 on government computers and According to StatCounter , IE is used more than 25% of the time worldwide. Chrome is at about 40%, and Firefox is in third at about 20%. In the U.S. specifically, IE is about 30% and FF is about 15%. Source: http://gs.statcounter.com/

2014 EU Pushes to Globalize Internet Governance

Everybody demands their divine right for a monopoly whether its domestic FonHedz or Soluable States, er, "Soverign" States.
It's the "Tooltime School of Political Sociology".
The only thing Power wants is... "MORE POWER!" and to expect any other behavior is either irrational or delusional, depending on where you're standing.

CHANGE THE WORLD

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

2013 The Internet in general and " big data " is like a "planetary" or "global" nervous system. Can you believe the weakness in stupid password identity protocols? Can you believe they built up a whole digital society that rested on such a weak foundation? Can you believe the flow of power plants, electricity, water, weapons systems, healthcare services, money, and social interaction were built on top of protocols that were easily spoofed, stolen and replayed?

2014 On October 30-31, 2013, The New York Review of Books held a conference, “ Power, Privacy, and the Internet ,” at Scandinavia House in New York City, with generous support from The Fritt Ord Foundation of Oslo, PEN America, Sarah and Landon Rowland, The Europaeum of Oxford, The Lead Bank of Kansas City, and the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University.
Simon Head, director of programs for The New York Review of Books Foundation, addressed the theme of the conference:
The Internet is a transformative technology of our times and it is changing our lives as perhaps nothing else has done since the coming of the telephone, the telegraph, and the mass production automobile a century and more ago. Where the Internet surpasses these earlier technologies is in the speed with which its reach is expanding—in our contacts with one another through Twitter and Facebook, in what we read, hear, and buy; in our dealings with business, government, colleges and schools, and they in their dealings with us. Whether we like it or not we are caught up in these flows of technology and as we are carried along by the flows, some barely visible to us, it becomes increasingly difficult to stand back and distinguish between what is good about these innovations and what is not.

Power And The Internet by Bruce Schneier
All disruptive technologies upset traditional power balances, and the Internet is no exception. The standard story is that it empowers the powerless, but that's only half the story. The Internet empowers everyone. Powerful institutions might be slow to make use of that new power, but since they are powerful, they can use it more effectively. Governments and corporations have woken up to the fact that not only can they use the Internet, they can control it for their interests. Unless we start deliberately debating the future we want to live in, and information technology in enabling that world, we will end up with an Internet that benefits existing power structures and not society in general. <snip>

2012 Internet Society Board of Trustees Election Results 6/19/12
Subject: [ISOC] ANNOUNCEMENT: 2012 Internet Society Board of Trustees Election Results
To: isoc-members-announce@elists.isoc.org
isoc-members-announce@elists.isoc.org
Message from Jason Livingood, Chair of Internet Society Election Committee:

On behalf of the Internet Society's Election Committee, I wish to extend our appreciation and thanks to all of the nominees and final candidates for the Board of Trustees. We are quite honoured to have such well-qualified people so interested in serving the Internet Society!
The election results were certified on 24 May 2012 and the challenge period concluded 10 June 2012. The process ran smoothly and the Election Committee does not have any issues or concerns to report. The new Trustees will be seated at the Internet Society Board Meeting in Vancouver, Canada, on 4 August 2012.

CHAPTERS
In the Chapter membership election, we had three candidates:
1. Gihan Dias
2. Sala Tamanikaiwaimaro
3. Rudi Vansnick

55 out of the 86 Chapters voted, which is a vote participation rate of 63.95%. In the previous election, the vote participation was 79.49%.
Rudy Vansnick received the highest number of the votes and has been elected for a three-year term.

ORGANISATIONS
In the Organisation membership election, we had six candidates:
1. Keith Davidson
2. Marshall Eubanks
3. David Farber
4. Demi Getschko
5. Byron Holland
6. Bevil Wooding

52 of the 109 Organisation Members, or 47.71%, voted. They had the opportunity to vote for up to two candidates, with votes weighted by the class of membership. In the previous election the vote participation was 50.47%, on a group size of 107 organizations.
Keith Davidson and David Farber , receiving the largest weighted vote counts, have been elected for three-year terms.

INTERNET ENGINEERING TASK FORCE (IETF)
Using the process documented in RFC 3677, the IAB has re-appointed Eric Burger as the IETF appointee to the ISOC Board.

We congratulate all of the new and returning trustees and look forward to working with them soon on the Board of Trustees. We also thank all nominees and final candidates for their participation, as well as ISOC staff for their support of this critical process.

Respectfully submitted,

Jason Livingood, Chair
Alain Aina and Theresa Swinehart, Election Committee Members

--

What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else By Doc Searls and David Weinberger March 10, 2003 http://worldofends.com

There are mistakes and there are mistakes. Some mistakes we learn from. For example: Thinking that selling toys for pets on the Web is a great way to get rich. We're not going to do that again. Other mistakes we insist on making over and over.

For example, thinking that:

the Web, like television, is a way to hold eyeballs still while advertisers spray them with messages....the Net is something that telcos and cable companies should filter, control and otherwise "improve."

it's a bad thing for users to communicate between different kinds of instant messaging systems on the Net.

the Net suffers from a lack of regulation to protect industries that feel threatened by it.

When it comes to the Net, a lot of us suffer from Repetitive Mistake Syndrome. This is especially true for magazine and newspaper publishing, broadcasting, cable television, the record industry, the movie industry, and the telephone industry, to name just six.

Thanks to the enormous influence of those industries in Washington, Repetitive Mistake Syndrome also afflicts lawmakers, regulators and even the courts. Last year Internet radio, a promising new industry that threatened to give listeners choices far exceeding anything on the increasingly variety-less (and technologically stone-age) AM and FM bands, was shot in its cradle. Guns, ammo and the occasional "Yee-Haw!" were provided by the recording industry and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which embodies all the fears felt by Hollywood's alpha dinosaurs when they lobbied the Act through Congress in 1998.

"The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it," John Gilmore famously said. And it's true. In the long run, Internet radio will succeed. Instant messaging systems will interoperate. Dumb companies will get smart or die. Stupid laws will be killed or replaced. But then, as John Maynard Keynes also famously said, "In the long run, we're all dead.

"All we need to do is pay attention to what the Internet really is. It's not hard. The Net isn't rocket science. It isn't even 6th grade science fair, when you get right down to it. We can end the tragedy of Repetitive Mistake Syndrome in our lifetimes — and save a few trillion dollars' worth of dumb decisions — if we can just remember one simple fact: the Net is a world of ends. You're at one end, and everybody and everything else are at the other ends.

Sure, that's a feel-good statement about everyone having value on the Net, etc. But it's also the basic rock-solid fact about the Net's technical architecture. And the Internet's value is founded in its technical architecture. Fortunately, the true nature of the Internet isn't hard to understand. In fact, just a fistful of statements stands between Repetitive Mistake Syndrome and Enlightenment...

--

HOW DOES THE INTERNET WORK?

"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 .

PEERING TECHNOLOGY

Peering economics is an interesting discipline with a wide variety of literature backing it.
This 1999 paper by Geoff Huston, now chief scientist at APNIC, is the most cogent explanation your readers will ever get about the issue.
http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac123/ac147/archived_issues/ipj_2-1/peering_and_settlements.html

and
http://www.cisco.com/
The paper is summarized in this presentation http://www.potaroo.net/presentations/1999-07-05-peering.pdf

the 3 pillars of privacy (consent, notice, and de-identification)

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

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

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 PROTECT THE KIDS INTERNET SAFETY RULES
• ABOUT DISTANCE LEARNING
• ABOUT DOMAINS AND DOMAIN NAMES
• ABOUT EMAIL, MAILING LISTS, SPAM
• ABOUT INTERNET2
• Glossary of Distance Learning Acronyms and definitions

HOW TO FIND

• MUST SEE SEARCH ENGINE FOR DIFFERENT LEARNING STYLES
• ENGINES FOR TEACHERS AND CHILDREN
• SPECIALIZED SEARCH ENGINES
• SEARCH ENGINE SYNTAX, TIPS, RESOURCES
• META GLOSSARY
• Glossary of Distance Learning Acronyms and definitions
• PERMISSION FORM

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.

Epic Linux Community Song Featuring Linus Torvalds

OSI Open Source Indicators Program
The all seeing surveillance state
Primary Point of Contact:
Jason Matheny
Program Manager
dni-iarpa-baa-11-11@ugov.gov

LARPA defines public data as “lawfully obtained data available to any member of the general public, to include by purchase, subscription or registration.” The intelligence community can and does register a fake profile on Facebook, in order to “friend” people and obtain more information.
Intelligence Community Wants to Monitor Social Media. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or Iarpa, a relatively new part of the spy community that's supposed to help investigate breakthrough technologies and wants to sweep up public data to predict the future. The idea is to use automated analysis to sift through publicly available data such as web search queries, blogs, micro-blogs, internet traffic, financial markets, traffic webcams, Wikipedia edits, andto help predict significant societal events, like a popular revolution, early detection of events such as disease outbreaks, political crises, and macroeconomic trends.

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 Internet

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.