Internet

"The Internet has created a seismic disruption to the balance of power in the media. It is getting easier and easier to post your thoughts, photos, or videos. Yet the Wild West of the Web is being tamed. Small Internet service providers are being driven out of business, with corporations like Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon, and AT&T dominating the market. Privacy, security, and the freedom to publish without fear of censorship are dwindling with each merger, with each effort by corporate lobbyists to further restrict the open Internet in favor of a narrow profit advantage."

"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system."

"In the next century, planet earth will don an electronic skin. It will use the Internet as a scaffold to support and transmit its sensations. This skin is already being stitched together. It consists of millions of embedded electronic measuring devices: thermostats, pressure gauges, pollution detectors, cameras, microphones, glucose sensors, EKGs, electroencephalographs. These will probe and monitor cities and endangered species, the atmosphere, our ships, highways and fleets of trucks, our conversations, our bodies — even our dreams."

"When sputnik and Apollo 11 fired the imagination of the world, everyone began predicting that by the end of the century, people would be living in space colonies on Mars and Pluto. Few of these forecasts came true. On the other hand, nobody foresaw the Internet."

"When education, banking and healthcare are online, and huge groups can't leverage these tools, the people who struggle most are struggling harder."

"She was crying to her mother about not being able to finish her homework because she didn't have internet access at home, and the library was closed. I'll never forget the mother's face, she was distraught and it was heartbreaking."

"People say, why don't you create a food platform, or something else tech-driven. But if you can't connect to the internet, it doesn't matter what else you can do"

"That's the beauty of the Web: You can roll around in a stranger's obsession without having to smell his or her house. You can amscray whenever you want without being rude. The site gets its "hit" and you know more about our species' diversity."

"The origin of the Internet dates back to when, in the shadow of the former Soviet Union's program the United States established the (DARPA) within the Department of Defense. Four years later a Ph.D. student at , Leonard Kleinrock, published the first paper on theory. With packet switching a message that is sent from one computer to another is broken down into small packets of digital data."

"In Paul Baran of the published, "On Distributed Communication Networks" in which he formulated the concept of packet-switching networks having no single outage point. With these theoretical concepts in place, others could develop workable concepts. Two additional key elements, re-routing around outages and access by other networks, helped lay the necessary groundwork to create the theoretical basis for the inception of an Internet. The underlying motive for developing this technology was to streamline communication between military command centers, remote missile bases and other installations in the event of a preemptive nuclear attack. DARPA funds for developing packet switching in the late accounted for 60% of the computer research done in the United States at that time. Much of the concern during this period of the cold war was based upon a study done by the RAND Corporation that cited the lines of communication as the most vulnerable portion of U.S. military command."

"In late , civilian contractors developed the network technology that grew into the Internet. The first network to use the packet switching technology was not actually built until , however, and it contained only four nodes. This network was used by the Department of Defense and was known as . The first ARPANET transmission occurred when Kleinrock logged on from a computer connected to a Stanford computer and typed the word "login." Although the system crashed as he typed in the "g" of "login," the Internet revolution was born. By 1973, a total of 37 nodes were in operation."

"In , the adopted the use of TCP/IP protocols on ARAPANET, which by this time, consisted of more than 100 nodes. The military felt that separate resources were needed for research and military uses. Thus, MILNET was established for the exclusive use of the military while ARAPANET continued to be a tool dedicated to government related research. ARAPANET and MILNET became separate networks when the term "Internet" was expanded to include the academic and research computer networks that were emerging. The proliferation of the IBM compatible personal computer, which sold over 75 million machines in the early , provided an increasing number of researchers and scholars access to computer networks. Groups of universities within various regions of the country began to form networks, some with , to exchange and other ."

", and were used primarily by people in universities or in technical industries, and along with other Internet applications were terminal based and not easy to use. During the early there were a few attempts to go beyond the basic protocols and allow for a more user-friendly interaction with the Internet."

"By , an estimated 50 million users were connected to the Internet worldwide. With the , the program came into existence with the goal of connecting millions of schools. was founded in 1999 to set standards for , which was already blossoming. The business and media worlds were rocked in 2000 when and announced their merger, making the marriage of the media industry and a reality. In , during a strong period of innovation, the first cyber-age robbery occurred in Russia. The theft of millions of dollars from showed the world the ramifications of the misuse of this new technology."

"The commercial exploitation of the web has become a growing facet of the world economy, particularly in the last several years. In June 1999 NUA Internet Surveys estimated that 179 million people are connected to the Internet worldwide. A recent study by the sponsored by estimated that the "Internet Economy" generated $300 billion in revenue in the United States alone."

"When we sent that first message, there weren't any reporters, cameras, tape recorders or scribes to document that major event. ... We knew we were creating an important new technology that we expected would be of use to a segment of the population, but we had no idea how truly momentous an event it was."

"What I wrote was that the internet and dreams share the same quality of giving rise to the repressed subconscious. I think in countries like Japan and America and other countries where internet is prevalent, people can anonymously seek or release things they can't speak of offline, as if there's a part of the subconscious that's uncontrollable and comes out on the internet. That is very much like dreams. This may be a very visualistic analogy, but I've always thought we drop down into dreams, and when you're sitting in front of your computer and connect to the internet, you're also going down into some kind of underworld. I've always thought those two images had something in common. I'm not trying to say that dreams and the internet are good or bad, I'm trying to saying that there's good and bad that cannot be judged in both worlds. Some people say that in the virtual world, different rules exist or try to say that a lot of vicious things happen there, but I don't think there's a reason to differentiate the virtual world from reality because reality includes that virtual world."

"Being a netizen in China is an interesting experience. You can learn a lot from what is posted—and even more from what [the] censors delete."

"Most of us employ the Internet not to seek the best information, but rather to select information that confirms our prejudices."

"The real definition of Internet is: "lots of blogs and fat people trying to have sex with you.""

"The internet is like a big circus tent full of scary, boring creatures and pornography."

"You should view Internet arguments as a really crummy fighting game: only the utter idiots bother pressing the "block / defend" button. While your enemy cowers in a corner with their arms raised above their face to futilely protect them, real men pull off complex 408-move combos that involve transforming into a fiery phoenix of doom and releasing unrelenting waves of liquid napalm Satan clown death upon them."

"The is a global system of interconnected computer networks that is used by billions of people worldwide. In the 1960s, a team of computer scientists working for the U.S. Defense Department's (Advanced Research Projects Agency) built a communications network to connect the computers in the agency, called , the predecessor of the internet. It used a method of data transmission called "", developed by computer scientist and team member , based on prior work of other computer scientists. This technology was progressed in the 1970s by scientists and , who developed the crucial communication protocols for the internet, the (TCP) and the (IP), according to computer scientist in his book “Ideas That Created the Future: Classic Papers of Computer Science” (, 2021). For this, Kahn and Cerf are often credited as "inventors of the internet”."

"For hundreds of millions of years, Sex was the most efficient method for propagating information of dubious provenance: the origins of all those snippets of junk DNA are lost in the sands of reproductive history. Move aside, Sex: the world-wide Web has usurped your role."

"I'll probably be the last to know, because I don't get on the internet no more."

"In my 2008 article, I highlighted the word for ‘broadband’ in Germanic: we have breiðband in Icelandic, breëband in Afrikaans, breedband in Dutch, breitband in German and bredbånd in Danish, etc., all showing regular sound shifts from Proto-Germanic, which is reconstructible as proto-Germanic *braiđazbanđan, albeit without this implying that proto-Germanic tribes had the Internet... As such, they are intended to show that calque formation can generate an extraordinary diversity of expressions for an item of technology invented on a single occasion within a very restricted time frame and hence that such expressions do not allow any inferences to be drawn as to whether there was a single invention of an item of technology or multiple inventions (e.g. the French mania for coining their own neologisms, in this case ‘high flow rate’, by no means entails an independent invention). Nor do they tell us anything about the point of origin of this item. They also violate the rule of thumb according to which, the degree of lexical differentiation is a function of the age of the item. All that is required for this process to occur is a network and if anything, it shows that the more extensive the network linking speakers, the more diversity it generates, since the number of routes for dissemination is multiplied. Apply [the] logic on wheel etymologies to the above and you would have [Indo-Europeanist David Anthony] arguing that proto-Germanic couldn’t have broken up before broadband appeared in 2000 and the French and the Slavs each invented their own versions of broadband."

"When you picture the tech industry, you probably think of things that don’t exist in physical space, such as the apps and internet browser on your phone. But the infrastructure required to store all this information – the physical datacentres housed in business parks and city outskirts – consume massive amounts of energy. Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually. This is a hugely environmentally destructive side to the tech industry. While it has played a big role in reaching net zero, giving us smart meters and efficient solar, it’s critical that we turn the spotlight on its environmental footprint. Large language models such as ChatGPT are some of the most energy-guzzling technologies of all. Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities. It is hardly news that the tech bubble’s self-glorification has obscured the uglier sides of this industry, from its proclivity for tax avoidance to its invasion of privacy and exploitation of our attention span. The industry’s environmental impact is a key issue, yet the companies that produce such models have stayed remarkably quiet about the amount of energy they consume – probably because they don’t want to spark our concern."

"The Internet has given atheists, agnostics, skeptics, the people who like to destroy everything that you and I believe, the almost equal access to your kids as your youth pastor and you have... whether you like it or not."

"A year ago I was the original Internet Dummy. [...] Then while I was on vacation, a colleague ran some telephone wire into the back of my computer, loaded a communications package, and left me a note about how to launch the operation. Readers, that note is now framed in my office. Eventually that telephone wire led to the Internet and the single most amazing, entertaining and educational experience of my career. Quite simply, the Internet has revolutionized the way I interact with the outside world, altered my work habits, and burst the bubble around my PC. It has also challenged my thinking about the future of personal communications technology. And I believe that sooner — rather than later — these changes will be mapped onto society as a whole."

"This is a little known fact technological about the Internet, but the Internet is actually made of words and enthusiasm."

"It's strange — you know, the Net is denounced as austere, the product of the engineering mentality, so forth and so on. It's the most feminine influence that Western civilization has ever allowed itself to fall under the spell of. The troubadors of the fourteenth century were as nothing compared to the boundary-dissolving, feminizing, permitting, nurturing nature of the Net. Maybe that's why there is an overwhelming male preference for it, in its early form, because that's where that was needed. But it is Sophia, it is wisdom, it is the penetrating archetypal female logos of the world-soul, leading us away from what was very sharp-edged and uncomfortable and repressive to our creativity and our sexuality and our relationships to each other and to the Earth."

"It's very sad how in the information age you cannot get information into people's heads — as long as you write something on the internet and do not add LOL — it is true : "I'm not sure he's a Christian." — I'm not sure he's a mammal, Jay. He could be a werewolf."

"I have a theory that the Internet makes people stupider — and also FOX News makes people stupider. You know the Pew group did a study recently and they found out that 10 years ago, Democrats, Republicans and independents basically got their news from the same sources, probably more from CNN, for example. Then we had this polarity. ... We do have two Americas. We have the America that's living in reality. The people who understand that Obama is a centrist liberal from Hawaii who is trying to dig us out of the hole we're in. And then we have this other FOX/Matt Drudge/Rush Limbaugh reality where he is a Muslim sleeper cell, Manchurian candidate who was sent over by his Kenyan father..."

"Surrogates and also a pretty fascinating aspect the internet. Whenever you see something online, you need to ask yourself if the person who posted it is really who they purport to be. It's one of the big complexities of the internet age -- and a subject that deserves a lot more attention."

"I think that the online world has actually brought books back. People are reading because they're reading the damn screen. That's more reading than people used to do."

"When you go to the remote areas, that's where you have issues - network operators don't reach most of the communities."

"Even if you do go into a coma, you can still keep posting to Usenet — everyone else does."

"For the record if someone did that to me I'd hitch a ride to the International Space Station straight away; of course who am I kidding, they would never let me in, I've got spiders for hands! Internet is mean!"

"All the free stuff that you take for granted online is only free because you are the product."

"The Internet has come to resemble an enormous used book store with volumes stacked on shelves and tables and overflowing onto the floor, and a continuous stream of new books being added helter-skelter to the piles."

"There is nothing that is truly free nor democratic enough. Make no mistake, the internet did not come to save the world."

"I’m an open and vocal feminist on the internet, so I’m no stranger to some level of sexist backlash."

"I was attacked via nearly every facet of my online life by a loosely coordinated cyber mob. All of my social networks were flooded with a torrent of misogynist and racist slurs as well as threats of rape, violence and death. The wikipedia article about me was vandalized with similar sentiments. When I publicly shared what was happening to me, the perpetrators responded by escalating their harassment campaign and attempting to DDoS my website and hack into my online accounts. They also tried to collect and distribute my personal info including my home address and phone number. They made pornographic images in my likeness being raped by video games characters which they distributed and sent to me over and over again. Attempts were made to discredit me and my project by creating and posting false quotes or fake tweets attributed to me. There was also a flash game developed where players were invited to “beat the bitch up”. Unfortunately I still receive threats and explicit images on a semi-regular basis. In December 2012, I gave a TEDxWomen talk where I discuss in more detail what happened, and how these large scale loosely organized Cyber Mob attacks operate."

"There's a boys'-locker-room feel to the internet, where men feel they can show off for one another. A lot of the harassment is tied to this toxic masculine culture of ‘Look how cool I can be.’"

"We must filter the Internet to win over online file sharing. But politicians don’t understand that file sharing is bad, and this is a problem for us. Therefore, we must associate file sharing with child pornography. Because that’s something the politicians understand, and something they want to filter off the Internet."

"They can't ignore us, and they can't put us down. Thank God for the Internet, or we wouldn't know anything, and we would already be a fascist state."

"I yearned for that future. I wanted to live in the illusion that persuades us that true-life experience can be obtained on the Internet."

"The net has provided a level playing field for criticism and comment – anyone and everyone is entitled to their opinion – and that is one of its greatest strengths."

"The members of the did not live to see the full flowering of the scientific method, and we will not live to see what use humanity makes of a medium for sharing that is cheap, instant, and global (both in the sense of 'comes from everyone' and 'goes everywhere.') We are, however, the people who are setting the earliest patterns for this medium. Our fate won't matter much, but the norms we set will. Given what we have today, the Internet could easily become Invisible High School, with a modicum of educational material in an ocean of narcissism and social obsessions. We could, however, also use it as an Invisible College, the communicative backbone of real intellectual and civic change."

"Das Internet ist für uns alle Neuland"