How the Web Was Won

You wouldn't believe what all I find on the internets tubes I never post about. I use such as research, trivia accumulation, increasing my knowledge base which is why I'll occasionally state something as fact without accreditation. I often don't have any goddamn idea where I saw it. When I read about it, I evaluated it as authoritative, stuck the fucking info into my gray matter and moved on.

Which brings us to this post. The article linked to in the headline is as long as a novella which requires several mouse clicks to access, but its worth the effort.

It's an impressive chronicle of how the internets tubes came to be.

Ya ever hear of ARPA?

Fifty years ago, in response to the surprise Soviet launch of Sputnik, the U.S. military set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency. It would become the cradle of connectivity, spawning the era of Google and YouTube, of Amazon and Facebook, of the Drudge Report and the Obama campaign. Each breakthrough—network protocols, hypertext, the World Wide Web, the browser—inspired another as narrow-tied engineers, long-haired hackers, and other visionaries built the foundations for a world-changing technology. Keenan Mayo and Peter Newcomb let the people who made it happen tell the story.

All neo-geeks &ndash no thanks necessary.

I apologize for the graphic, but its the best I could find. Hey, ya wanna take a shot at diagramming the internets tubes as they are now, silly rabbit?

Note: Headline links to source.

The internets tubes

Goatsee comes immediately to mind.

Don't look for it.

Technically that should be "there're" and not "there's", but that just nit picking.

Note: Headline links to source.

The internets tubes

Which, of course, are not tubes at all.

Wanna "see" them?

Just follow the Wired link.

Via Wired.

Webmasters

Dontcha just love webmasters who fuck up? I know I do. Makes me feel superior!

Bloglines is back up and running, but it keeps telling me there are unread posts for various sites which is completely wrong. I click on them and nothing is there.

I'm sure they'll sort it all out in a few hours. Meanwhile I can gloat. Muahahaha.

Where's the fucking Bloglines plumber when they need him?

AT&T and Other I.S.P.'s Gearing Up for Friendly Censorship

Gawd, I love this meter.
Fortunately its calibrated so
it doesn't detect my bullshit.
So much for online research for term papers and such. Fuck. This really blows.

Jesus H Christ late to class, but one of the beautiful things about the internets tubes was the access to information you would have to obtain, at a much slower rate, at the local public library...if there is one.

Just what is the difference between going to the library, writing down information, with prober attribution, and cutting and pasting the same information off the internets tubes, again with proper attribution?

Answer: No fucking difference.

If you deal with any of these companies, contact them and tell them this is unacceptable.

For the last 15 years, Internet service providers have acted - to use an old cliche - as wide-open information super-highways, letting data flow uninterrupted and unimpeded between users and the Internet.

But I.S.P.'s may be about to embrace a new metaphor: traffic cop.

At a small panel discussion about digital piracy at NBC's booth on the Consumer Electronics Show floor, representatives from NBC, Microsoft, several digital filtering companies and the telecom giant AT&T said the time was right to start filtering for copyrighted content at the network level.

Via The Signs.

Japanese Government to Censor Internet

Waterproof cellular phones

Another sad state of affairs. This actually quite surprised me. Cell phones are ubiquitous and all forms of communication are very important to the Japanese. I doubt the public is going to look on this favorably.

With little fanfare from local or foreign media, the Japanese government made major moves this month toward legislating extensive regulation over online communication and information exchange within its national borders. In a series of little-publicized meetings attracting minimal mainstream coverage, two distinct government ministries, that of Internal Affairs and Communications (Somusho) and that of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (Monbukagakusho), pushed ahead with regulation in three major areas of online communication: web content, mobile phone access, and file sharing.

On December 6th, in a final report compiled by a study group under the Somusho following up on an interim report drafted earlier this year, the government set down plans to regulate online content through unification of existing laws such as the Broadcast Law and the Telecommunications Business Law [1,2]. The planned regulation targets all web content, including online variants of traditional media such as newspaper articles and television broadcasting, while additionally going as far as to cover user-generated content such as blogs and webpages under the vaguely-defined category of gopen communicationh [3,4,5,6].

I'm not liking this precedent.

NOTE: You must go to Gayaku for the footnotes which are,unfortunately, mostly in Japanese.

Via Black Listed News.

Survey finds people are in committed, destructive relationships with PCs

Wow, but I've found a mother lode at The Sign.

According to recent research, people spend more time with their computers than with their spouses/significant others (64%). 84% claim to be more dependent on their computers today than they were three years ago. 19% admitted to wanting to throw their computers out the nearest window when it gave them problems.

Guilty as charged.

Via The Sign.

OMG

I'm being slightly facetious here, but I had a referral from a Google™ search and there is only one result. Got that? Only one and its SPIIDERWEB™. Woot!!!1!

The search?

Check it out.

The internets tubes are so fun sometimes for us geeks.

Survey: over 70% Chinese netizens have health problems

OK, Americans, here's a challenge for ya. I'm sure you can beat the Chinese at this. Let's see ya raise these numbers. K?

Especially the 70% psychological problems. That one should be particularly easy.

About 73 percent of Chinese netizens are in sub-healthy state with 70 percent of them suffering from psychological problems, according to a survey conducted by 39.com.

The survey said 73 percent of the 150,000 respondents have dizzy, insomnia and arthralgic problems and half of them suffer from stomachache from time to time.

More than 70 percent netizens have suffered amnesia, anxiety and scatterbrained problems, however, 90 percent of them never resort to psychological doctors, the survey showed.

Surfing on the Internet kills netizens' time for physical exercise. 51.4 percent of the respondents said they spent less than 3 hours every week in taking exercise and 12.5 of them didn't do any exercise in the last half year.

The Internet also sharply reduces users' time for sleeping. The survey said that 84 percent of them sleep for less than eight hours a day.

Via Xinhua.

Drown Union Reps In Paperwork

Very interesting story. Especially the last paragraph which should really discourage union participation.

One thing I find extremely interesting is I have worked for companies who, purportedly in an effort to avoid envy among employees, demanded workers keep their income/pay secret from other employees. How secret is your info if its posted on the internets tubes?

By Isaiah J. Poole on August 16, 2007 - 1:00pm.

A federally-imposed reporting requirement goes into effect today that is a transparent attempt by the Bush administration to intimidate union activists and hamper union activity. The tactic is to do to unions what conservatives complain liberals do to businesses: Bog them down in needless paperwork.

The rule would require thousands of shop stewards and others union volunteers to file a detailed financial disclosure form to the Department of Labor, which would then post the form on the Internet. The form in question is known as the "LM-30," formally the Labor Organization Officer and Employee Report. The final ruling was published in the Federal Register on July 2.

The nine-page form, which is so long the Office of Management and Budget estimates it would take at least two hours to fill out, is ostensibly intended to help union members ascertain if their representatives have financial conflicts of interest that would affect their ability to represent their members.

But the form is already required of union leaders. The problem is that the new reporting requirement reaches far beyond people who are even in a position to be "corrupt union bosses" - the straw men and women the conservatives behind this rule are trying to knock down - in an effort to make rank-and-file people think twice before helping their fellow workers file grievances or do other union-related activity. And, bear in mind, the rule is not a response to union members demanding more information; in fact, as the department concedes in the Federal Register, 300 comments about the reporting rule were received from unions or union members, "most of whom were critical of all or parts of the proposal."

Union members who do union work while on company time would have to report the amount of their salary they received while doing union business.

Just another low for the Bush administration. What weasels.

(read more)

H/T Rick Perlstein

The wonder of the internets tubes

Within seconds of my last post came a hit from a Google search for "Official" Pamela Martin & Associates Telephone Records.

Its alive! Perhaps we should be afraid?

Too kewl

It is so kewl to know someone in Istanbul is reading SPIIDERWEB™.

I love the internets tubes!

I'm number one

No one tops me for "Popcorn Chicken Recipe" on a Google™ search for "popcorn chicken recipe stuffing".

Sometimes the internets tubes make me laugh. Make me laugh very hard.

My problems are, for now, solved

Its taken a long time and almost endless searching for solutions, but I'm back online.

I'm no guru and to try to solve connection problems which seem to be at my end is really a PITA (pain in the ass).

Locked out of the internets tubes

You may have noticed, if you're a regular, I'm reactionary and a sometime encourager. I don't come up with the "big ideas" without some source to get me thinking. I don't write essays out of whole cloth.

Currently all my attempts to access sites are timing out. Without the online dictionary and access to other blogs and online news sources, this guy can't really blog.

I have no idea what's going on. Perhaps this post won't work. If it does, I promise I'll return as soon as the internets tubes allow.

The internet tubes are international

Ya doubt it? Take a look at the visitors to SPIIDERWEB™. I'm amazed. Even though some visit only once, many return and spend some time here.

Argentina
Aruba
Austria
Australia
Bangladesh
Bahamas
Bahrain
Belgium
Bhutan
Bosina Herzevogina
Botswana
Brazil
Brunei Darussalam
Bulgaria
Cayman Islands
Canada
Chile
China
Columbia
Costa Rica
Cote D'Ivoire
Croatia
Czech Republic
Denmark
Dominican Republic
Egypt
El Salvador
Estonia
Europe
Finland
France
Germany
Ghana
Greece
Grenada
Guam
Guyana
Hong Kong
Hungary
Iceland
India
Indonesia
Iran
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Jamaica
Japan
Jordan
Kenya
Kuwait
Lithuania
Macedonia
Malaysia
Maldives
Malta
Mexico
Morocco
Netherlands
Netherlands Antilles
New Zealand
Nigeria
Northern Mariana Islands
Norway
Latvia
Libyan Arab Jamahiriya
Oman
Pakistan
Palestinian Territory, Occupied
Papua New Guinea
Peru
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Puerto Rico
Qatar
Republic of Korea
Romania
Russia
Russian Federation
Satellite provider
Saudi Arabia
Serbia and Montenegro
Singapore
Slovenia
South Africa
Spain
Sri Lanka
Sweden
Switzerland
Taiwan
Thailand
Togo
Tunisia
Turkey
UK
UAE
Ukraine
Unknown country
Uraguay
USA
Uzbekistan
Venezuela
Vietnam

Don't get stuck in traffic