The Internet PortalThe Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the interlinked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony, and file sharing. The origins of the Internet date back to research that enabled the time-sharing of computer resources, the development of packet switching in the 1960s and the design of computer networks for data communication. The set of rules (communication protocols) to enable internetworking on the Internet arose from research and development commissioned in the 1970s by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense in collaboration with universities and researchers across the United States and in the United Kingdom and France. The ARPANET initially served as a backbone for the interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the United States to enable resource sharing. The funding of the National Science Foundation Network as a new backbone in the 1980s, as well as private funding for other commercial extensions, encouraged worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies and the merger of many networks using DARPA's Internet protocol suite. The linking of commercial networks and enterprises by the early 1990s, as well as the advent of the World Wide Web, marked the beginning of the transition to the modern Internet, and generated sustained exponential growth as generations of institutional, personal, and mobile computers were connected to the network. Although the Internet was widely used by academia in the 1980s, the subsequent commercialization in the 1990s and beyond incorporated its services and technologies into virtually every aspect of modern life. (Full article...) Selected articleCyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age is a non-fiction book about cyberlaw, written by free speech lawyer Mike Godwin. It was first published in 1998 by Times Books. It was republished in 2003 as a revised edition by The MIT Press. Godwin graduated from the University of Texas School of Law in 1990 and was the first staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Written with a first-person perspective, Cyber Rights offers a background in the legal issues and history pertaining to free speech on the Internet. It documents the author's experiences in defending free speech online, and puts forth the thesis that "the remedy for the abuse of free speech is more speech". Godwin emphasizes that decisions made about the expression of ideas on the Internet affect freedom of speech in other media as well, as granted by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The book was received favorably by Library Journal, where it was "Recommended for anyone concerned about expression on the Internet and democratic society." Publishers Weekly noted Godwin's "unusually broad view of free speech", and criticized the author for viewing issues "filtered through rose-colored screens". The Philadelphia Inquirer highlighted Cyber Rights among "1998's Best Reading". (Full article...) Selected pictureIn studying and/or promoting web-technology, the phrase Web 2.0 can refer to a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis, and folksonomies — which aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing between users. The term gained currency following the first O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. News
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William Ford Gibson, born March 17, 1948 , in Conway, South Carolina is an American-Canadian writer who has been called the "noir prophet" of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction. Gibson coined the term cyberspace in 1982, and popularized the concept in his debut novel, Neuromancer (1984). In depicting a visualised worldwide communications network before the ubiquity of the Internet, Gibson is credited with anticipating important aspects, and establishing the conceptual foundations, of the Internet and the Web in particular. Although much of Gibson's reputation has remained rooted in Neuromancer, his work has continued to evolve conceptually and stylistically. After expanding on Neuromancer with two more novels to complete the dystopic Sprawl trilogy, Gibson became central to an entirely new science fiction subgenre—steampunk—with the publication in 1990 of the alternate history novel The Difference Engine, written in collaboration with Bruce Sterling. In the 1990s he composed the Bridge trilogy of novels, which focused on sociological observations of near future urban environments and late stage capitalism. His most recent novels—Pattern Recognition (2003), and Spook Country (2007)—are both set in a contemporary universe and have put Gibson's work onto mainstream bestseller lists for the first time.
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