INTERNET : “Things” you need to know about INTERNET

“Things” you need to know about INTERNET

The internet went from being something exotic to being boring utility, like mains electricity or running water – and we never really noticed. Imagine what it would be like if, one day, you suddenly found yourself unable to book flights, transfer funds from your bank account, check bus timetables, send email, search Google, call your family using Skype, buy music from Apple or books from Amazon, buy or sell stuff on eBay, watch clips on YouTube or BBC programmes on the iPlayer – or do the 1,001 other things that have become as natural as breathing. The internet has quietly infiltrated our lives, and yet we seem to be remarkably unreflective about it. That's not because we're short of information about the network; on the contrary, we're awash with the stuff. It's just that we don't know what it all means. So we wound up being totally dependent on a system about which we are terminally incurious. In spite of all the answers the internet has given us, its full potential to transform our lives remains the great unknown. Here are the few things you need to understand about the most powerful tool of our age.

• THE WEB ISN'T THE NET

The most common misconception is that the internet and the web are the same thing. They're not. A good way to understand this is via a railway analogy. Think of the internet as the tracks and signalling, the infrastructure on which everything runs. In a railway network, different kinds of traffic run on the infrastructure — high-speed express trains, slow stopping trains, commuter trains, freight trains and (sometimes) specialist maintenance and repair trains. And there will undoubtedly be other kinds of traffic, stuff we can't possibly have dreamed of yet, running on the internet in 10 years' time.

So the thing to remember is this: the web is huge and very important, but it's just one of the many things that run on the internet. The net is much bigger and far more important than anything that travels on it.

• THE NETWORK IS NOW THE COMPUTER

For starter, a computer was a standalone PC running Microsoft software. Eventually, these devices were networked locally (via Local Area Network) and then globally (via the internet). But as broadband connections to the net became common place, something strange happened: if you had a fast enough connection to the network, you became less concerned about the precise location of either your stored data or the processor that was performing computational tasks for you. And these tasks became easier to do.

First, the companies (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft) who provided search also began to offer "webmail" – email provided via programs that ran not on your PC but on servers in the internet "cloud". Then Google offered word-processing, spreadsheets, slide-making and other "office"-type services over the network. And so on.

Here was a transition from a world in which the PC really was the computer, to one in which the network is effectively the computer. It has led to the emergence of "cloud computing" – a technology in which we use simple devices (mobile phones, low-power laptops or tablets) to access computing services that are provided by powerful servers somewhere on the net. This switch to computing as a utility rather than a service that you provide with your own equipment has profound implications for privacy, security and economic development – and public perceptions are lagging way behind the pace of development. Everywhere one looks, the transition to cloud computing has profound implications, because it makes us more and more dependent on the net. And yet we're sleepwalking into this brave new world.

• THE WEB IS CHANGING

Once upon a time, the web was merely a publication medium, in which publishers (professional or amateur) uploaded passive web pages to servers. For many people in the media business, that's still their mental model of the web. 

But in fact, the web has gone through at least three phases of evolution – from the original web 1.0, to the web 2.0 of "small pieces, loosely joined" (social networking, mashups, webmail, and so on) and is now heading towards some kind of web 3.0 – a global platform based on Tim Berners-Lee's idea of the 'semantic web' in which web pages will contain enough metadata about their content to enable software to make informed judgement about their relevance and function. If we are to understand the web as it is, rather than as it once was, we need more realistic mental models of it. Above all, we need to remember that it's no longer just a publication medium.

• OUR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY REGIME IS NO LONGER FIT FOR PURPOSE

In the analogue world, copying was difficult and degenerative. In the digital world, copying is effortless and perfect. In fact, copying is to computers as breathing is to living organisms, in as much as all computational operations involve it. When you view a web page, for example, a copy of the page is loaded into the video memory of your computer before the device can display it on the screen. So you can't even look at something on the web without unknowingly, making a copy of it.

Since our current intellectual property regime was conceived in an era when copying was difficult and imperfect, it's not surprising that it seems increasingly out of sync with the networked world. To make matters worse, digital technology has provided internet users with software tools which make it trivially easy to copy, edit, remix and publish anything that is available in digital form – which means nearly everything, nowadays. As a result, millions of people have become "publishers" in the sense that their creations are globally published on platforms such as Blogger, Flickr and YouTube. So everywhere one looks, one finds things that infringe copyright in one way or another.

This is a disagreeable but inescapable fact – as inescapable in its way as the fact that young adults tend to drink too much alcohol. The only way to stop copying is to shut down the net. There's nothing wrong with intellectual property, but our copyright laws are now so laughably out of touch with reality that they are falling into disrepute. They urgently need reforming to make them relevant to digital circumstances. The problem is that none of our legislators seems to understand this, so it won't happen any time soon.

Reference :-

Beal, V. (2011). The Difference Between the Internet and World Wide Web. Webopedia : Everything you need to know is right here. Retrieved February 21, 2013, from http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Internet/2002/Web_vs_Internet.asp

Dembo, S. (2005). Would you want a computer without internet? Teach42 : Education and Technology. Retrieved February 21, 2013, from http://www.teach42.com/2005/09/02/would-you-want-a-computer-without-internet

Knorr, E. (n.d.). What cloud computing really means : The next big trend sounds nebulous, but it's not so fuzzy when you view the value proposition from the perspective of IT professionals. InfoWorld. Retrieved February 21, 2013, from http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/what-cloud-computing-really-means

Agarwal, A. (2009). Web 3.0 Concepts Explained in Plain English. Digital Inspiration : Tech A La Carte. Retrieved February 21, 2013, from http://www.labnol.org/internet/web-3-concepts-explained

DeGroote , M. (2012). Digital piracy wrong but not 'theft' professor says.  Deseret News. Retrieved February 21, 2013, from http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865553832/Illegal-copying-wrong-but-not-theft-professor-says.html

By : Mohd Nurhadi Bin Mohd Kifli (2010913601)