About Internet
What is internet?
The
Internet is a global system of interconnected computer
networks that use the standard Internet
protocol suite (TCP
/IP) to
serve several billion users worldwide. It is a network
of networks
that consists of millions of private, public, academic,
business, and government networks, of local to
global scope,
that are linked by a broad array of
electronic, wireless and
optical networking technologies. The Internet
carries an
extensive range of information resources and
services, such as
the inter-linked hypertext documents of the
World Wide Web
(WWW), the infrastructure to support email,
and
peer-to-peer networks.
Most
traditional communications media including telephone,
music, film, and television are being reshaped
or redefined by the Internet, giving birth to new services such as voice over
Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Internet Protocol television (IPTV). Newspaper,
book and other print publishing are adapting to website technology, or are
reshaped into blogging and web feeds. The Internet has enabled and accelerated
new forms of human interactions through instant messaging, Internet forums, and
social networking. Online shopping has boomed both for major retail outlets and
small artisans and traders. Business-to-business and financial services on the
Internet affect supply chains across entire industries.
The origins
of the Internet reach back to research commissioned by the United States United Kingdom and France
The funding
of a new U.S.
The
Internet has no centralized governance in either technological implementation
or policies for access and usage; each constituent network sets its own
policies. Only the overreaching definitions of the two principal name spaces in
the Internet, the Internet Protocol address space and the Domain Name System,
are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The technical underpinning and
standardization of the core protocols (IPv4 and IPv6) is an activity of the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit organization of loosely
affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by
contributing technical expertise.
Contents [show]
Terminology:
The
Internet Messenger by Buky Schwartz in Holon
See also:
Internet capitalization conventions
The
Internet, referring to the specific global system of interconnected IP
networks, is a proper noun and written with an initial capital letter. In the
media and common use it is often not capitalized, viz. the internet. Some
guides specify that the word should be capitalized when used as a noun, but not
capitalized when used as a verb or an adjective.[3] The Internet is also often
referred to as the Net.
Historically
the word internet was used, uncapitalized, as early as 1883 as a verb and
adjective to refer to interconnected motions. Starting in the early 1970s the
term internet was used as a shorthand form of the technical term internetwork,
the result of interconnecting computer networks with special gateways or
routers. It was also used as a verb meaning to connect together, especially for
networks.[4][5]
The terms
Internet and World Wide Web are often used interchangeably in everyday speech;
it is common to speak of "going on the Internet" when invoking a web
browser to view web pages. However, the Internet is a particular global
computer network connecting millions of computing devices; the World Wide Web is
just one of many services running on the Internet. The Web is a collection of
interconnected documents (web pages) and other web resources, linked by
hyperlinks and URLs.[6] In addition to the Web, a multitude of other services
are implemented over the Internet, including e-mail, file transfer, remote
computer control, newsgroups, and online games. All of these services can be
implemented on any intranet, accessible to network users.
The term
Interweb is a portmanteau of Internet and World Wide Web typically used
sarcastically to parody a technically unsavvy user.[7]
History Of Internet:
Professor
Leonard Kleinrock with the first ARPANET Interface Message Processors at UCLA
Main
articles: History of the Internet and History of the World Wide Web
Research
into packet switching started in the early 1960s and packet switched networks
such as Mark I at NPL in the UK ,[8]
ARPANET, CYCLADES ,[9][10] Merit Network,[11]
Tymnet, and Telenet, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a
variety of protocols. The ARPANET in particular led to the development of
protocols for internetworking, where multiple separate networks could be joined
together into a network of networks.[citation needed]
The first
two nodes of what would become the ARPANET were interconnected between Leonard
Kleinrock's Network Measurement Center at the UCLA's School of Engineering and
Applied Science and Douglas Engelbart's NLS system at SRI International (SRI)
in Menlo Park, California, on 29 October 1969.[12] The third site on the
ARPANET was the Culler-Fried Interactive Mathematics center at the University
of California at Santa Barbara, and the fourth was the University of Utah
Graphics Department. In an early sign of future growth, there were already
fifteen sites connected to the young ARPANET by the end of 1971.[13][14] These
early years were documented in the 1972 film Computer Networks: The Heralds of
Resource Sharing.
Early
international collaborations on ARPANET were sparse. For various political
reasons, European developers were concerned with developing the X.25
networks.[15] Notable exceptions were the Norwegian Seismic Array (NORSAR) in
June 1973,[16] followed in 1973 by Sweden with satellite links to the Tanum
Earth Station and Peter T. Kirstein's research group in the UK, initially at
the Institute of Computer Science, University of London and later at University
College London.[citation needed]
In December 1974, RFC 675 – Specification of
Internet Transmission Control Program, by Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl
Sunshine, used the term internet as a shorthand for internetworking and later
RFCs repeat this use.[17] Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the
National Science Foundation (NSF) developed the Computer Science Network
(CSNET). In 1982, the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) was standardized and the
concept of a world-wide network of fully interconnected TCP/IP networks called
the Internet was introduced.
T3 NSFNET
Backbone, c. 1992
TCP/IP
network access expanded again in 1986 when the National Science Foundation
Network (NSFNET) provided access to supercomputer sites in the United States
Since the
mid-1990s the Internet has had a tremendous impact on culture and commerce,
including the rise of near instant communication by email, instant messaging,
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) "phone calls", two-way
interactive video calls, and the World Wide Web[23] with its discussion forums,
blogs, social networking, and online shopping sites. Increasing amounts of data
are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks operating
at 1-Gbit/s, 10-Gbit/s, or more.
Worldwide
Internet users
2005
|
2010
|
2013a
| |
6.5 billion
|
6.9 billion
|
7.1 billion
| |
Not using the Internet
|
84%
|
70%
|
61%
|
Using the Internet
|
16%
|
30%
|
39%
|
Users in the developing world
|
8%
|
21%
|
31%
|
Users in the developed world
|
51%
|
67%
|
77%
|
The
Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online
information and knowledge, commerce, entertainment and social networking.[26]
During the late 1990s, it was estimated that traffic on the public Internet
grew by 100 percent per year, while the mean annual growth in the number of
Internet users was thought to be between 20% and 50%.[27] This growth is often
attributed to the lack of central administration, which allows organic growth
of the network, as well as the non-proprietary open nature of the Internet
protocols, which encourages vendor interoperability and prevents any one
company from exerting too much control over the network.[28] As of 31 March
2011, the estimated total number of Internet users was 2.095 billion (30.2% of
world population).[29] It is estimated that in 1993 the Internet carried only
1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunication, by 2000 this figure
had grown to 51%, and by 2007 more than 97% of all telecommunicated information
was carried over the Internet.[30]
Technology
Protocols
Main
article: Internet protocol suite
|
·
DHCP
·
DHCPv6
·
DNS
·
FTP
·
HTTP
·
IMAP
·
IRC
·
LDAP
·
MGCP
·
NNTP
·
BGP
·
NTP
·
POP
·
RPC
·
RTP
·
RTSP
·
RIP
·
SIP
·
SMTP
·
SNMP
·
SOCKS
·
SSH
·
Telnet
·
TLS/SSL
·
XMPP
·
more...
|
|
·
TCP
·
UDP
·
DCCP
·
SCTP
·
RSVP
·
more...
|
|
·
IP
·
IPv4
·
IPv6
·
ICMP
·
ICMPv6
·
ECN
·
IGMP
·
IPsec
·
more...
|
|
·
NDP
·
OSPF
·
Tunnels
·
L2TP
·
PTPP
·
Ethernet
·
DSL
·
ISDN
·
FDDI
·
DOCSIS
·
more...
|
As the user
data is processed down through the protocol stack, each layer adds an
encapsulation at the sending host. Data is transmitted "over the
wire" at the link level, left to right. The encapsulation stack procedure
is reversed by the receiving host. Intermediate relays remove and add a new
link encapsulation for retransmission, and inspect the IP layer for routing
purposes.
Internet
protocol suite
Application
layer
DHCP DHCPv6
DNS FTP HTTP IMAP IRC LDAP MGCP NNTP BGP NTP POP RPC RTP RTSP RIP SIP SMTP SNMP
SOCKS SSH Telnet TLS/SSL XMPP more...
Transport
layer
TCP UDP
DCCP SCTP RSVP more...
Internet
layer
IP IPv4
IPv6 ICMP ICMPv6 ECN IGMP IPsec more...
Link layer
ARP/InARP
NDP OSPF Tunnels L2TP PTPP Media access control Ethernet DSL ISDN FDDI DOCSIS
more...
v t e
The
communications infrastructure of the Internet consists of its hardware
components and a system of software layers that control various aspects of the
architecture. While the hardware can often be used to support other software
systems, it is the design and the rigorous standardization process of the software
architecture that characterizes the Internet and provides the foundation for
its scalability and success. The responsibility for the architectural design of
the Internet software systems has been delegated to the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF).[31] The IETF conducts standard-setting work groups, open to
any individual, about the various aspects of Internet architecture. Resulting
discussions and final standards are published in a series of publications, each
called a Request for Comments (RFC), freely available on the IETF web site.
The
principal methods of networking that enable the Internet are contained in
specially designated RFCs that constitute the Internet Standards. Other less
rigorous documents are simply informative, experimental, or historical, or
document the best current practices (BCP) when implementing Internet
technologies.
The
Internet standards describe a framework known as the Internet protocol suite.
This is a model architecture that divides methods into a layered system of protocols
(RFC 1122, RFC 1123). The layers correspond to the environment or scope in
which their services operate. At the top is the application layer, the space
for the application-specific networking methods used in software applications,
e.g., a web browser program uses the client-server application model and many
file-sharing systems use a peer-to-peer paradigm. Below this top layer, the
transport layer connects applications on different hosts via the network with
appropriate data exchange methods. Underlying these layers are the core
networking technologies, consisting of two layers.
The
internet layer enables computers to identify and locate each other via Internet
Protocol (IP) addresses, and allows them to connect to one another via
intermediate (transit) networks. Last, at the bottom of the architecture, is a
software layer, the link layer, that provides connectivity between hosts on the
same local network link, such as a local area network (LAN) or a dial-up
connection. The model, also known as TCP/IP, is designed to be independent of
the underlying hardware, which the model therefore does not concern itself with
in any detail. Other models have been developed, such as the Open Systems
Interconnection (OSI) model, but they are not compatible in the details of
description or implementation; many similarities exist and the TCP/IP protocols
are usually included in the discussion of OSI networking.
The most
prominent component of the Internet model is the Internet Protocol (IP), which
provides addressing systems (IP addresses) for computers on the Internet. IP
enables internetworking and in essence establishes the Internet itself. IP
Version 4 (IPv4) is the initial version used on the first generation of today's
Internet and is still in dominant use. It was designed to address up to ~4.3
billion (109) Internet hosts. However, the explosive growth of the Internet has
led to IPv4 address exhaustion, which entered its final stage in 2011,[32] when
the global address allocation pool was exhausted. A new protocol version, IPv6,
was developed in the mid-1990s, which provides vastly larger addressing
capabilities and more efficient routing of Internet traffic. IPv6 is currently
in growing deployment around the world, since Internet address registries
(RIRs) began to urge all resource managers to plan rapid adoption and
conversion.[33]
IPv6 is not
interoperable with IPv4. In essence, it establishes a parallel version of the
Internet not directly accessible with IPv4 software. This means software
upgrades or translator facilities are necessary for networking devices that
need to communicate on both networks. Most modern computer operating systems
already support both versions of the Internet Protocol. Network
infrastructures, however, are still lagging in this development. Aside from the
complex array of physical connections that make up its infrastructure, the
Internet is facilitated by bi- or multi-lateral commercial contracts (e.g.,
peering agreements), and by technical specifications or protocols that describe
how to exchange data over the network. Indeed, the Internet is defined by its
interconnections and routing policies.
Routing
Internet
packet routing is accomplished among various tiers of Internet service
providers.
Internet
service providers connect customers, which represent the bottom of the routing
hierarchy, to customers of other ISPs via other higher or same-tier networks.
At the top of the routing hierarchy are the Tier 1 networks, large
telecommunication companies which exchange traffic directly with all other Tier
1 networks via peering agreements. Tier 2 networks buy Internet transit from
other providers to reach at least some parties on the global Internet, though
they may also engage in peering. An ISP may use a single upstream provider for
connectivity, or implement multihoming to achieve redundancy. Internet exchange
points are major traffic exchanges with physical connections to multiple ISPs.
Computers
and routers use routing tables to direct IP packets to the next-hop router or
destination. Routing tables are maintained by manual configuration or by
routing protocols. End-nodes typically use a default route that points toward
an ISP providing transit, while ISP routers use the Border Gateway Protocol to establish
the most efficient routing across the complex connections of the global
Internet.
Large
organizations, such as academic institutions, large enterprises, and
governments, may perform the same function as ISPs, engaging in peering and
purchasing transit on behalf of their internal networks. Research networks tend
to interconnect into large subnetworks such as GEANT, GLORIAD, Internet2, and
the UK
General
structure
The
Internet structure and its usage characteristics have been studied extensively.
It has been determined that both the Internet IP routing structure and
hypertext links of the World Wide Web are examples of scale-free networks.[34]
Many
computer scientists describe the Internet as a "prime example of a
large-scale, highly engineered, yet highly complex system".[35] The
Internet is heterogeneous; for instance, data transfer rates and physical
characteristics of connections vary widely. The Internet exhibits
"emergent phenomena" that depend on its large-scale organization. For
example, data transfer rates exhibit temporal self-similarity. The principles
of the routing and addressing methods for traffic in the Internet reach back to
their origins in the 1960s when the eventual scale and popularity of the
network could not be anticipated.[36] Thus, the possibility of developing
alternative structures is investigated.[37] The Internet structure was found to
be highly robust[38] to random failures and very vulnerable to high degree
attacks.[39]
Governance
Main article: Internet governance
ICANN
headquarters in Marina Del Rey , California , United States
The
Internet is a globally distributed network comprising many voluntarily
interconnected autonomous networks. It operates without a central governing
body.
The
technical underpinning and standardization of the Internet's core protocols
(IPv4 and IPv6) is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a
non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that
anyone may associate with by contributing technical expertise.
To maintain
interoperability, the principal name spaces of the Internet are administered by
the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), headquartered
in Marina del Rey, California
Allocation
of IP addresses is delegated to Regional Internet Registries (RIRs):
American
Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) for North America
Asia-Pacific
Network Information Centre (APNIC) for Asia
and the Pacific region
Latin
American and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry (LACNIC) for Latin America
and the Caribbean region
Réseaux IP
Européens - Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) for Europe, the Middle East,
and Central Asia
The
National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an agency of the
United States Department of Commerce, continues to have final approval over
changes to the DNS root zone.[41][42][43]
The
Internet Society (ISOC) was founded in 1992, with a mission to "assure the
open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of all
people throughout the world".[44] Its members include individuals (anyone
may join) as well as corporations, organizations, governments, and
universities. Among other activities ISOC provides an administrative home for a
number of less formally organized groups that are involved in developing and
managing the Internet, including: the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF),
Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG),
Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), and Internet Research Steering Group (IRSG).
On 16
November 2005, the United Nations-sponsored World Summit on the Information
Society, held in Tunis
Modern uses:
The
Internet allows greater flexibility in working hours and location, especially
with the spread of unmetered high-speed connections. The Internet can be
accessed almost anywhere by numerous means, including through mobile Internet
devices. Mobile phones, datacards, handheld game consoles and cellular routers
allow users to connect to the Internet wirelessly. Within the limitations
imposed by small screens and other limited facilities of such pocket-sized
devices, the services of the Internet, including email and the web, may be
available. Service providers may restrict the services offered and mobile data
charges may be significantly higher than other access methods.
Educational
material at all levels from pre-school to post-doctoral is available from
websites. Examples range from CBeebies, through school and high-school revision
guides and virtual universities, to access to top-end scholarly literature
through the likes of Google Scholar. For distance education, help with homework
and other assignments, self-guided learning, whiling away spare time, or just
looking up more detail on an interesting fact, it has never been easier for
people to access educational information at any level from anywhere. The
Internet in general and the World Wide Web in particular are important enablers
of both formal and informal education.
The low
cost and nearly instantaneous sharing of ideas, knowledge, and skills has made
collaborative work dramatically easier, with the help of collaborative
software. Not only can a group cheaply communicate and share ideas but the wide
reach of the Internet allows such groups more easily to form. An example of
this is the free software movement, which has produced, among other things,
Linux, Mozilla Firefox, and OpenOffice.org. Internet chat, whether using an IRC
chat room, an instant messaging system, or a social networking website, allows
colleagues to stay in touch in a very convenient way while working at their
computers during the day. Messages can be exchanged even more quickly and
conveniently than via email. These systems may allow files to be exchanged,
drawings and images to be shared, or voice and video contact between team
members.
Content
management systems allow collaborating teams to work on shared sets of
documents simultaneously without accidentally destroying each other's work.
Business and project teams can share calendars as well as documents and other
information. Such collaboration occurs in a wide variety of areas including
scientific research, software development, conference planning, political
activism and creative writing. Social and political collaboration is also
becoming more widespread as both Internet access and computer literacy spread.
The
Internet allows computer users to remotely access other computers and
information stores easily, wherever they may be. They may do this with or
without computer security, i.e. authentication and encryption technologies,
depending on the requirements. This is encouraging new ways of working from
home, collaboration and information sharing in many industries. An accountant
sitting at home can audit the books of a company based in another country, on a
server situated in a third country that is remotely maintained by IT
specialists in a fourth. These accounts could have been created by home-working
bookkeepers, in other remote locations, based on information emailed to them
from offices all over the world. Some of these things were possible before the
widespread use of the Internet, but the cost of private leased lines would have
made many of them infeasible in practice. An office worker away from their
desk, perhaps on the other side of the world on a business trip or a holiday,
can access their emails, access their data using cloud computing, or open a
remote desktop session into their office PC using a secure Virtual Private Network
(VPN) connection on the Internet. This can give the worker complete access to
all of their normal files and data, including email and other applications,
while away from the office. It has been referred to among system administrators
as the Virtual Private Nightmare,[45] because it extends the secure perimeter
of a corporate network into remote locations and its employees' homes.
Services
World
Wide Web:
This NeXT
Computer was used by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN and became the world's first Web
server.
Many people
use the terms Internet and World Wide Web, or just the Web, interchangeably,
but the two terms are not synonymous. The World Wide Web is only one of
hundreds of services used on the Internet. The Web is a global set of
documents, images and other resources, logically interrelated by hyperlinks and
referenced with Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). URIs symbolically identify
services, servers, and other databases, and the documents and resources that
they can provide. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the main access
protocol of the World Wide Web. Web services also use HTTP to allow software
systems to communicate in order to share and exchange business logic and data.
World Wide
Web browser software, such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox,
Opera, Apple's Safari, and Google Chrome, lets users navigate from one web page
to another via hyperlinks embedded in the documents. These documents may also
contain any combination of computer data, including graphics, sounds, text,
video, multimedia and interactive content that runs while the user is
interacting with the page. Client-side software can include animations, games,
office applications and scientific demonstrations. Through keyword-driven
Internet research using search engines like Yahoo! and Google, users worldwide
have easy, instant access to a vast and diverse amount of online information.
Compared to printed media, books, encyclopedias and traditional libraries, the
World Wide Web has enabled the decentralization of information on a large
scale.
The Web has
also enabled individuals and organizations to publish ideas and information to
a potentially large audience online at greatly reduced expense and time delay.
Publishing a web page, a blog, or building a website involves little initial
cost and many cost-free services are available. Publishing and maintaining
large, professional web sites with attractive, diverse and up-to-date
information is still a difficult and expensive proposition, however. Many
individuals and some companies and groups use web logs or blogs, which are
largely used as easily updatable online diaries. Some commercial organizations
encourage staff to communicate advice in their areas of specialization in the
hope that visitors will be impressed by the expert knowledge and free
information, and be attracted to the corporation as a result.
One example
of this practice is Microsoft, whose product developers publish their personal
blogs in order to pique the public's interest in their work. Collections of
personal web pages published by large service providers remain popular, and
have become increasingly sophisticated. Whereas operations such as Angelfire
and GeoCities have existed since the early days of the Web, newer offerings
from, for example, Facebook and Twitter currently have large followings. These
operations often brand themselves as social network services rather than simply
as web page hosts.
Advertising
on popular web pages can be lucrative, and e-commerce or the sale of products
and services directly via the Web continues to grow.
When the
Web began in the 1990s, a typical web page was stored in completed form on a
web server, formatted in HTML, ready to be sent to a user's browser in response
to a request. Over time, the process of creating and serving web pages has
become more automated and more dynamic. Websites are often created using
content management or wiki software with, initially, very little content.
Contributors to these systems, who may be paid staff, members of a club or
other organization or members of the public, fill underlying databases with
content using editing pages designed for that purpose, while casual visitors
view and read this content in its final HTML form. There may or may not be
editorial, approval and security systems built into the process of taking newly
entered content and making it available to the target visitors.
Communication
Email is an
important communications service available on the Internet. The concept of
sending electronic text messages between parties in a way analogous to mailing
letters or memos predates the creation of the Internet. Pictures, documents and
other files are sent as email attachments. Emails can be cc-ed to multiple
email addresses.
Internet
telephony is another common communications service made possible by the
creation of the Internet. VoIP stands for Voice-over-Internet Protocol,
referring to the protocol that underlies all Internet communication. The idea
began in the early 1990s with walkie-talkie-like voice applications for
personal computers. In recent years many VoIP systems have become as easy to
use and as convenient as a normal telephone. The benefit is that, as the
Internet carries the voice traffic, VoIP can be free or cost much less than a
traditional telephone call, especially over long distances and especially for those
with always-on Internet connections such as cable or ADSL. VoIP is maturing
into a competitive alternative to traditional telephone service.
Interoperability between different providers has improved and the ability to
call or receive a call from a traditional telephone is available. Simple,
inexpensive VoIP network adapters are available that eliminate the need for a
personal computer.
Voice
quality can still vary from call to call, but is often equal to and can even
exceed that of traditional calls. Remaining problems for VoIP include emergency
telephone number dialing and reliability. Currently, a few VoIP providers
provide an emergency service, but it is not universally available. Older
traditional phones with no "extra features" may be line-powered only
and operate during a power failure; VoIP can never do so without a backup power
source for the phone equipment and the Internet access devices. VoIP has also
become increasingly popular for gaming applications, as a form of communication
between players. Popular VoIP clients for gaming include Ventrilo and
Teamspeak. Modern video game consoles also offer VoIP chat features.
Data
transfer
File
sharing is an example of transferring large amounts of data across the
Internet. A computer file can be emailed to customers, colleagues and friends
as an attachment. It can be uploaded to a website or FTP server for easy
download by others. It can be put into a "shared location" or onto a
file server for instant use by colleagues. The load of bulk downloads to many
users can be eased by the use of "mirror" servers or peer-to-peer
networks. In any of these cases, access to the file may be controlled by user
authentication, the transit of the file over the Internet may be obscured by
encryption, and money may change hands for access to the file. The price can be
paid by the remote charging of funds from, for example, a credit card whose
details are also passed – usually fully encrypted – across the Internet. The
origin and authenticity of the file received may be checked by digital
signatures or by MD5 or other message digests. These simple features of the
Internet, over a worldwide basis, are changing the production, sale, and
distribution of anything that can be reduced to a computer file for
transmission. This includes all manner of print publications, software
products, news, music, film, video, photography, graphics and the other arts.
This in turn has caused seismic shifts in each of the existing industries that
previously controlled the production and distribution of these products.
Streaming
media is the real-time delivery of digital media for the immediate consumption
or enjoyment by end users. Many radio and television broadcasters provide
Internet feeds of their live audio and video productions. They may also allow
time-shift viewing or listening such as Preview, Classic Clips and Listen Again
features. These providers have been joined by a range of pure Internet
"broadcasters" who never had on-air licenses. This means that an
Internet-connected device, such as a computer or something more specific, can
be used to access on-line media in much the same way as was previously possible
only with a television or radio receiver. The range of available types of
content is much wider, from specialized technical webcasts to on-demand popular
multimedia services. Podcasting is a variation on this theme, where – usually
audio – material is downloaded and played back on a computer or shifted to a
portable media player to be listened to on the move. These techniques using simple
equipment allow anybody, with little censorship or licensing control, to
broadcast audio-visual material worldwide.
Digital
media streaming increases the demand for network bandwidth. For example,
standard image quality needs 1 Mbit/s link speed for SD 480p, HD 720p quality
requires 2.5 Mbit/s, and the top-of-the-line HDX quality needs 4.5 Mbit/s for
1080p.[46]
Webcams are
a low-cost extension of this phenomenon. While some webcams can give
full-frame-rate video, the picture either is usually small or updates slowly.
Internet users can watch animals around an African waterhole, ships in the Panama Canal , traffic at a local roundabout or monitor
their own premises, live and in real time. Video chat rooms and video
conferencing are also popular with many uses being found for personal webcams,
with and without two-way sound. YouTube was founded on 15 February 2005 and is
now the leading website for free streaming video with a vast number of users.
It uses a flash-based web player to stream and show video files. Registered
users may upload an unlimited amount of video and build their own personal
profile. YouTube claims that its users watch hundreds of millions, and upload
hundreds of thousands of videos daily.[47]
Access
Main
article: Internet access
Common methods
of Internet access in homes include dial-up, landline broadband (over coaxial
cable, fiber optic or copper wires), Wi-Fi, satellite and 3G/4G technology cell
phones. Public places to use the Internet include libraries and Internet cafes,
where computers with Internet connections are available. There are also
Internet access points in many public places such as airport halls and coffee
shops, in some cases just for brief use while standing. Various terms are used,
such as "public Internet kiosk", "public access terminal",
and "Web payphone". Many hotels now also have public terminals,
though these are usually fee-based. These terminals are widely accessed for
various usage like ticket booking, bank deposit, online payment etc. Wi-Fi provides
wireless access to computer networks, and therefore can do so to the Internet
itself. Hotspots providing such access include Wi-Fi cafes, where would-be
users need to bring their own wireless-enabled devices such as a laptop or PDA.
These services may be free to all, free to customers only, or fee-based. A
hotspot need not be limited to a confined location. A whole campus or park, or
even an entire city can be enabled.
Grassroots
efforts have led to wireless community networks. Commercial Wi-Fi services
covering large city areas are in place in London ,
Vienna , Toronto , San Francisco , Philadelphia ,
Chicago and Pittsburgh
An Internet
blackout or outage can be caused by local signaling interruptions. Disruptions
of submarine communications cables may cause blackouts or slowdowns to large
areas, such as in the 2008 submarine cable disruption. Less-developed countries
are more vulnerable due to a small number of high-capacity links. Land cables
are also vulnerable, as in 2011 when a woman digging for scrap metal severed
most connectivity for the nation of Armenia.[50] Internet blackouts affecting almost
entire countries can be achieved by governments as a form of Internet
censorship, as in the blockage of the Internet in Egypt, whereby approximately
93%[51] of networks were without access in 2011 in an attempt to stop
mobilization for anti-government protests.[52]
Users
See also:
Global Internet usage, English on the Internet, and Unicode
Internet
users per 100 inhabitants
See also:
Global Internet usage, English on the Internet, and Unicode
Internet
users per 100 inhabitants
Source:
International Telecommunications Union.[53][54] Internet users by language[55]
Website
content languages[56]
Overall
Internet usage has seen tremendous growth. From 2000 to 2009, the number of
Internet users globally rose from 394 million to 1.858 billion.[57] By 2010, 22
percent of the world's population had access to computers with 1 billion Google
searches every day, 300 million Internet users reading blogs, and 2 billion
videos viewed daily on YouTube.[58]
The
prevalent language for communication on the Internet has been English. This may
be a result of the origin of the Internet, as well as the language's role as a
lingua franca. Early computer systems were limited to the characters in the
American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), a subset of the
Latin alphabet.
After
English (27%), the most requested languages on the World Wide Web are Chinese
(23%), Spanish (8%), Japanese (5%), Portuguese and German (4% each), Arabic,
French and Russian (3% each), and Korean (2%).[59] By region, 42% of the
world's Internet users are based in Asia, 24% in Europe, 14% in North America,
10% in Latin America and the Caribbean taken together, 6% in Africa, 3% in the
Middle East and 1% in Australia/Oceania.[60] The Internet's technologies have
developed enough in recent years, especially in the use of Unicode, that good
facilities are available for development and communication in the world's
widely used languages. However, some glitches such as mojibake (incorrect
display of some languages' characters) still remain.
In an
American study in 2005, the percentage of men using the Internet was very
slightly ahead of the percentage of women, although this difference reversed in
those under 30. Men logged on more often, spent more time online, and were more
likely to be broadband users, whereas women tended to make more use of
opportunities to communicate (such as email). Men were more likely to use the
Internet to pay bills, participate in auctions, and for recreation such as
downloading music and videos. Men and women were equally likely to use the
Internet for shopping and banking.[61] More recent studies indicate that in
2008, women significantly outnumbered men on most social networking sites, such
as Facebook and Myspace, although the ratios varied with age.[62] In addition,
women watched more streaming content, whereas men downloaded more.[63] In terms
of blogs, men were more likely to blog in the first place; among those who
blog, men were more likely to have a professional blog, whereas women were more
likely to have a personal blog.[64]
According
to Euromonitor, by 2020 43.7% of the world's population will be users of the
Internet. Splitting by country, in 2011 Iceland ,
Norway and the Netherlands
Social
impact
Main
article: Sociology of the Internet
The
Internet has enabled entirely new forms of social interaction, activities, and
organizing, thanks to its basic features such as widespread usability and
access. In the first decade of the 21st century, the first generation is raised
with widespread availability of Internet connectivity, bringing consequences
and concerns in areas such as personal privacy and identity, and distribution
of copyrighted materials. These "digital natives" face a variety of
challenges that were not present for prior generations.
Social
networking and entertainment
See also:
Social networking service#Social impact
Many people
use the World Wide Web to access news, weather and sports reports, to plan and
book vacations and to find out more about their interests. People use chat,
messaging and email to make and stay in touch with friends worldwide, sometimes
in the same way as some previously had pen pals. The Internet has seen a
growing number of Web desktops, where users can access their files and settings
via the Internet.
Social
networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace have created new
ways to socialize and interact. Users of these sites are able to add a wide
variety of information to pages, to pursue common interests, and to connect with
others. It is also possible to find existing acquaintances, to allow
communication among existing groups of people. Sites like LinkedIn foster
commercial and business connections. YouTube and Flickr specialize in users'
videos and photographs.
The Internet
has been a major outlet for leisure activity since its inception, with
entertaining social experiments such as MUDs and MOOs being conducted on
university servers, and humor-related Usenet groups receiving much traffic.
Today, many Internet forums have sections devoted to games and funny videos;
short cartoons in the form of Flash movies are also popular. Over 6 million
people use blogs or message boards as a means of communication and for the
sharing of ideas. The Internet pornography and online gambling industries have
taken advantage of the World Wide Web, and often provide a significant source
of advertising revenue for other websites.[65] Although many governments have
attempted to restrict both industries' use of the Internet, in general this has
failed to stop their widespread popularity.[66]
Another
area of leisure activity on the Internet is multiplayer gaming.[67] This form
of recreation creates communities, where people of all ages and origins enjoy
the fast-paced world of multiplayer games. These range from MMORPG to
first-person shooters, from role-playing video games to online gambling. While
online gaming has been around since the 1970s, modern modes of online gaming
began with subscription services such as GameSpy and MPlayer.[68] Non-subscribers
were limited to certain types of game play or certain games. Many people use
the Internet to access and download music, movies and other works for their
enjoyment and relaxation. Free and fee-based services exist for all of these
activities, using centralized servers and distributed peer-to-peer
technologies. Some of these sources exercise more care with respect to the
original artists' copyrights than others.
Internet
usage has been correlated to users' loneliness.[69] Lonely people tend to use
the Internet as an outlet for their feelings and to share their stories with
others, such as in the "I am lonely will anyone speak to me" thread.
Cybersectarianism
is a new organizational form which involves: "highly dispersed small
groups of practitioners that may remain largely anonymous within the larger
social context and operate in relative secrecy, while still linked remotely to
a larger network of believers who share a set of practices and texts, and often
a common devotion to a particular leader. Overseas supporters provide funding
and support; domestic practitioners distribute tracts, participate in acts of
resistance, and share information on the internal situation with outsiders.
Collectively, members and practitioners of such sects construct viable virtual
communities of faith, exchanging personal testimonies and engaging in
collective study via email, on-line chat rooms and web-based message
boards."[70]
Cyberslacking
can become a drain on corporate resources; the average UK
Electronic
business
Main
article: Electronic business
Electronic
business (E-business) involves business processes spanning the entire value
chain: electronic purchasing and supply chain management, processing orders
electronically, handling customer service, and cooperating with business
partners. E-commerce seeks to add revenue streams using the Internet to build
and enhance relationships with clients and partners.
According
to research firm IDC, the size of total worldwide e-commerce, when global
business-to-business and -consumer transactions are added together, will equate
to $16 trillion in 2013. IDate, another research firm, estimates the global
market for digital products and services at $4.4 trillion in 2013. A report by
Oxford Economics adds those two together to estimate the total size of the
digital economy at $20.4 trillion, equivalent to roughly 13.8% of global
sales.[73]
While much
has been written of the economic advantages of Internet-enabled commerce, there
is also evidence that some aspects of the Internet such as maps and
location-aware services may serve to reinforce economic inequality and the
digital divide.[74] Electronic commerce may be responsible for consolidation
and the decline of mom-and-pop, brick and mortar businesses resulting in
increases in income inequality.[75][76][77]
Telecommuting
Main
article: Telecommuting
Remote work
is facilitated by tools such as groupware, virtual private networks, conference
calling, videoconferencing, and Voice over IP (VOIP). It can be efficient and
useful for companies as it allows workers to communicate over long distances,
saving significant amounts of travel time and cost. As broadband Internet
connections become more commonplace, more and more workers have adequate
bandwidth at home to use these tools to link their home to their corporate
intranet and internal phone networks.
Crowdsourcing
Main
article: Crowdsourcing
Internet
provides a particularly good venue for crowdsourcing (outsourcing tasks to a
distributed group of people) since individuals tend to be more open in
web-based projects where they are not being physically judged or scrutinized
and thus can feel more comfortable sharing.
Crowdsourcing
systems are used to accomplish a variety of tasks. For example, the crowd may
be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task, refine or
carry out the steps of an algorithm (see human-based computation), or help
capture, systematize, or analyze large amounts of data (see also citizen
science).
Wikis have
also been used in the academic community for sharing and dissemination of
information across institutional and international boundaries.[78] In those
settings, they have been found useful for collaboration on grant writing,
strategic planning, departmental documentation, and committee work.[79] The
United States Patent and Trademark Office uses a wiki to allow the public to
collaborate on finding prior art relevant to examination of pending patent
applications. Queens , New York
The English
Wikipedia has the largest user base among wikis on the World Wide Web[81] and
ranks in the top 10 among all Web sites in terms of traffic.[82]
Politics
and political revolutions
The
Internet has achieved new relevance as a political tool. The presidential
campaign of Howard Dean in 2004 in the United States
The New
York Times suggested that social media websites, such as Facebook and Twitter,
helped people organize the political revolutions in Egypt where it helped
certain classes of protesters organize protests, communicate grievances, and disseminate
information.[85]
The
potential of the Internet as a civic tool of communicative power was thoroughly
explored by Simon R. B. Berdal in his thesis of 2004:
As the
globally evolving Internet provides ever new access points to virtual discourse
forums, it also promotes new civic relations and associations within which
communicative power may flow and accumulate. Thus, traditionally ...
national-embedded peripheries get entangled into greater, international
peripheries, with stronger combined powers... The Internet, as a consequence,
changes the topology of the "centre-periphery" model, by stimulating
conventional peripheries to interlink into "super-periphery"
structures, which enclose and "besiege" several centres at once.[86]
Berdal,
therefore, extends the Habermasian notion of the Public sphere to the Internet,
and underlines the inherent global and civic nature that intervowen Internet
technologies provide. To limit the growing civic potential of the Internet,
Berdal also notes how "self-protective measures" are put in place by
those threatened by it:
If we
consider China 1989 Tiananmen Square
Philanthropy
The spread
of low-cost Internet access in developing countries has opened up new
possibilities for peer-to-peer charities, which allow individuals to contribute
small amounts to charitable projects for other individuals. Websites, such as
DonorsChoose and GlobalGiving, allow small-scale donors to direct funds to
individual projects of their choice.
A popular
twist on Internet-based philanthropy is the use of peer-to-peer lending for
charitable purposes. Kiva pioneered this concept in 2005, offering the first
web-based service to publish individual loan profiles for funding. Kiva raises
funds for local intermediary microfinance organizations which post stories and
updates on behalf of the borrowers. Lenders can contribute as little as $25 to
loans of their choice, and receive their money back as borrowers repay. Kiva
falls short of being a pure peer-to-peer charity, in that loans are disbursed
before being funded by lenders and borrowers do not communicate with lenders themselves.[87][88]
However,
the recent spread of low cost Internet access in developing countries has made
genuine international person-to-person philanthropy increasingly feasible. In
2009 the US-based nonprofit Zidisha tapped into this trend to offer the first
person-to-person microfinance platform to link lenders and borrowers across
international borders without intermediaries. Members can fund loans for as
little as a dollar, which the borrowers then use to develop business activities
that improve their families' incomes while repaying loans to the members with
interest. Borrowers access the Internet via public cybercafes, donated laptops
in village schools, and even smart phones, then create their own profile pages
through which they share photos and information about themselves and their
businesses. As they repay their loans, borrowers continue to share updates and
dialogue with lenders via their profile pages. This direct web-based connection
allows members themselves to take on many of the communication and recording
tasks traditionally performed by local organizations, bypassing geographic
barriers and dramatically reducing the cost of microfinance services to the
entrepreneurs.[89]
Surveillance
Main
article: Computer and network surveillance
See also: Signals
intelligence
The vast
majority of computer surveillance involves the monitoring of data and traffic
on the Internet.[90] In the United States for example, under the Communications
Assistance For Law Enforcement Act, all phone calls and broadband internet
traffic (emails, web traffic, instant messaging, etc.) are required to be
available for unimpeded real-time monitoring by Federal law enforcement
agencies.[91][92][93]
Packet
capture (also sometimes referred to as “packet sniffing”) is the monitoring of
data traffic on a computer network. Computers communicate over the Internet by
breaking up messages (emails, images, videos, web pages, files, etc.) into
small chunks called "packets", which are routed through a network of
computers, until they reach their destination, where they are assembled back
into a complete "message" again. Packet Capture Appliance intercepts
these packets as they are travelling through the network, in order to examine
their contents using other programs. A packet capture is an information
gathering tool, but not an analysis tool. That is it gathers
"messages" but it does not analyze them and figure out what they
mean. Other programs are needed to perform traffic analysis and sift through
intercepted data looking for important/useful information. Under the
Communications Assistance For Law Enforcement Act all U.S.
There is
far too much data gathered by these packet sniffers for human investigators to
manually search through all of it. So automated Internet surveillance computers
sift through the vast amount of intercepted Internet traffic, and filter out
and report to human investigators those bits of information which are
"interesting"—such as the use of certain words or phrases, visiting
certain types of web sites, or communicating via email or chat with a certain
individual or group.[95] Billions of dollars per year are spent, by agencies
such as the Information Awareness Office, NSA, and the FBI, to develop,
purchase, implement, and operate systems which intercept and analyze all of this
data, and extract only the information which is useful to law enforcement and
intelligence agencies.[96]
Similar
systems are now operated by Iranian secret police to identify and suppress
dissidents. All required hardware and software has been allegedly installed by
German Siemens AG and Finnish Nokia.[97]
Censorship
Internet
censorship by country[98][99][100]
Pervasive censorship
Substantial censorship
Selective censorship
Changing situation
Little or no censorship
Not classified / no data
Main
articles: Internet censorship and Internet freedom
Some
governments, such as those of Burma ,
Iran , North Korea , the Mainland China, Saudi Arabia , and the United Arab Emirates
In Norway , Denmark ,
Finland , and Sweden
More on ITSHIBCHAR next,
Thank You!
almas
Comments
Post a Comment