The creation of a global computer network is sometimes put on a par with such achievements of civilization as the domestication of fire or the invention of the wheel. It is difficult to compare the scale of such different phenomena, especially since we seem to be observing the very beginning of the Internet's impact on human society in general and the individual in particular. Before our eyes, the net stretches its tentacles into the most diverse areas of our life.
At first, everything was limited to reading the news, downloading books and chatting. Then there were cats and music. The proliferation of high-speed Internet connections seemed like an avalanche, but it was only a harbinger. The mobile Internet has become an avalanche. Instead of the joy of human communication, the curse of communication on the Web appeared.
Of course, the positive aspects of the Internet have not gone anywhere. We still have quick and easy access to any information, and we get this information in any convenient form. The Internet provides millions of people with a piece of bread, and some with a good layer of butter. We can take virtual travels and admire works of art. Online shopping continues its strong assault on traditional commerce. Without a doubt, the Internet makes human life easier, more convenient and more interesting.
It's about balance, as always. How easy and interesting the citizens of Ancient Rome lived! More and more bread, more and more spectacles ... And hundreds of years of darkness later. Nobody wanted anything bad, everyone just enjoyed the benefits of civilization. And when in the world - and Ancient Rome was a world in itself - there were only users, everything collapsed.
The speed of the Internet spread in the sphere of human interests is also alarming. Several decades passed from the invention of the printing press to the widespread distribution of books. The Internet has become widespread in a matter of years. Where he will penetrate next is a mystery. However, it is worth leaving the near future to science fiction writers and turning to existing facts and phenomena.
1. The most popular national domain zone in the world is .tk. This domain zone belongs to Tokelau, a New Zealand dependent territory located on three islands in the South Pacific. Registration in this domain zone is completely free. However, ad revenues from nearly 24 million sites represent 20% of the budget for a territory with a population of 1,500. However, the real passive income on the Internet does not prevent Tokelau from occupying the last, 261st place in the world in terms of GDP. But in terms of the number of registered sites, the territory is far ahead of the zones .de (14.6 million), .cn (11.7 million), .uk (10.6 million), .nl (5.1 million) and. ru (4.9 million). The most popular domain zone is traditionally .com - 141.7 million sites are registered in it.
2. Accounts in social networks do not die with users. Moreover, not only laws, but even more or less general rules regarding what to do with the accounts of deceased or perished people, there are no. Facebook, for example, closes the user's page, but does not delete it, pathetically calling it a “memory page”. The Twitter administration seems to agree to delete such accounts, but only on condition of documentary confirmation of death. The problems here are not even in some ethical aspects, but in the prose of life. In personal correspondence, for example, photographs and videos are stored in which the deceased can be captured with other people. They can fall into anyone's hands. They can be used for a variety of purposes. And the solution to this question does not exist even in theory. It is clear that social networks without a twinge of conscience transmit information to special services and corporations. But it is just as clear that access to even a remote account on a social network is quickly restored if there is verification information in the form of a password and a phone number.
3. The history of the Runet contains several very interesting paradoxes. For example, the first library in the Russian segment of the Web appeared earlier than the first Internet store. Maxim Moshkov launched his library in November 1994, and the first online CD store appeared only in September of the following year. And even then the site closed almost immediately due to the unprofitable algorithm of work. The first fully functioning store appeared in Runet on August 30, 1996. Now it is the Books.ru resource.
4. The first site of the mass media in Russia was the site of the very circulating, but semi-amateur "Uchitelskaya Gazeta" site. The highly professional edition went online in April 1995, and RosBusinessConsulting launched its website a month later.
5. As you know, in Russia the publication and processing of personal information is regulated by a fairly strict law. A person can publish his personal information himself, but no one has the right to publish someone else's data. This law is in the air - the Internet is full of a wide variety of databases with any information. Disk or access to a network database costs about $ 10. The United States has taken a completely different approach to personal information on the Internet. It is believed that if some information about a citizen is known to some of the state institutions, then it should be available to any other citizen. There is a special online resource where personal information about any US citizen can be obtained for a modest fee. Of course, some data is still not published, but when Barack Obama was President, hackers (of course, Russians) also opened a closed part of the national database, penetrating into it through the servers of a financial company. The network has leaked data on tens of thousands of Americans, including their social security numbers.
6. Contrary to popular beliefs, computer games in general and online games in particular are not exclusive to teenagers. Their share is really quite large, but on average it is about a quarter of all players. Gamers are distributed fairly evenly by age group. The clear exception is the 40+ generation. In 2018, gamers spent $ 138 billion on their hobbies. This amount is 3 billion more than the annual GDP of a country like Kazakhstan. Russians spent 30 billion rubles on online games.
7. The online gaming world is cruel, it's no secret. Players spend a lot of money on upgrading their characters, buying weapons, equipment or artifacts, etc. But the money taken from the personal or family budget and wasted time do not exhaust the list of problems created by online games. A player in Legends of the World 3, who lived in China, showed the game to his friend in real life. After a while, a friend, who was also interested in the game, asked me to lend him a very good and expensive sword. When the owner of the sword realized that the treasure would not be returned to him, he began to look for a friend. He has already sold the sword for $ 1,500. The enraged master of the sword killed the thief in all guises: in the real world, he beat him to death, and in the virtual world, he gained control over the victim's account and jumped off the mountain as his character. Of course, not forgetting to first transfer all the artifacts of a friend to your account.
8. The Internet, which is used by the majority of its 4 billion users, is the tip of the iceberg. Search robots see only those Internet pages that are in the public domain, and they have at least one external link. If there are no links to the site from other resources, the robot will not go there, and the user needs to know the exact address of the site. The piece of Internet content that is not indexed by search engines is called the "Deep Net" or "Deep Web". Even deeper, if we consider the Internet as a three-tier structure, is the Darknet - a network that is completely hidden from most browsers. If you can get to the "Deep Net" using a regular browser (although most of the pages will still require a login and password or an invite), then the "Darknet" can only be accessed from a special browser "Tor" or other similar programs. Accordingly, the Darknet is widely used by drug dealers, arms dealers, pornography dealers and financial fraud specialists.
9. As we know 95% of Internet users, the United States is at the forefront of human progress in high technology, as evidenced by Silicon Valley, Google, Twitter and Facebook. Moreover, all these achievements happened in a country in which still a huge part of the population is connected to the Internet not via fiber-optic networks, but using the antediluvian modem ADSL technology. It cannot be said that the authorities are not concerned with this. The Bill Clinton administration also offered the largest providers to cover the country with fiber-optic networks. Companies were not opposed to doing it for budget money. The administration of the most market-oriented country in the world persuaded them to get by with $ 400 billion in tax breaks. The providers agreed, but they didn't lay the networks - it's expensive. As a result, in the homeland of the Internet, there are tariff options such as $ 120 per month for slow (5-15 Mbps, this is the declared speed) Internet with cable TV. The cheapest mobile Internet costs $ 45 for a starter pack and $ 50 per month for 5 GB of traffic. On average, Internet in New York is 7 times more expensive than in Moscow at a much lower speed. Plus, the US needs to pay extra for literally everything, up to additional appliances in the apartment.
10. October 26, 2009 can be considered the day of the genocide of Internet sites. On this day, the corporation “Yahoo! Shut down free hosting GeoCities, destroying nearly 7 million sites in one fell swoop. “GeoCities” was the first massive free hosting. It worked since 1994 and was incredibly popular all over the world due to its cheapness and simplicity. Bosses of "Yahoo!" bought it on the wave of popularity in 1999 for almost $ 3 billion, but were never able to benefit from their purchase, although even at the time of closing the sites on the site were visited by more than 11 million unique users per day.
11. The Facebook audience continues to grow, although it seems to have nowhere to grow. In 2018, this social network counted 2.32 billion active accounts (with more than 4 billion inactive), which is 200 million more than a year earlier. One and a half billion people visit the web pages every day - more than the population of China. Despite all the criticism, advertisers are heavily investing in Facebook. The company's revenue from advertising for the year amounted to almost $ 17 billion, which is 4 billion more than in 2017.
12. On the video hosting YouTube, 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute. The first video, “Me at the Zoo,” by one of the founders of the company, was uploaded to YouTube on April 23, 2005. The first comment appeared under this video. As early as November 2006, three video hosting founders sold it to Google for $ 1.65 billion. The longest video posted on YouTube lasts over 596 hours - almost 25 days.
13. The Internet in North Korea both exists and does not. Actually, the Internet as a worldwide network is available for a very narrow circle of users who have the right to access the World Wide Web. These are top government officials and some higher educational institutions (of course, not every student is granted access there either). The DPRK has its own Gwangmyon network. Its users cannot simply physically access the Internet - the networks are not connected. Gwangmyeong has information sites, music, films, culinary resources, educational information, books. In principle, what is needed on the Internet for business. Of course, there is no porn, tanks, dating sites, blogs, video blogs and other achievements in the field of free exchange of information in "Gwangmyeong". Stories that information is spreading across the country by smuggling flash drives are nonsense. All computers in the DPRK are equipped with the operating system "Pulgyn Pöl", created on the basis of "Linux". One of its main features is the inability to open a file that is not provided with a special signature provided by the authorities. However, in the DPRK there is a special government body that constantly posts new content in Gwangmyeong if it is in line with ideological guidelines.
14. Disputes about when the first online sale was made has been going on for years. If you approach the criteria for such transactions from the standpoint of our time, Dan Cohen should be considered the debutant of online commerce. In 1994, a 21-year-old inventor, as part of a test of his NetMarket system, sold Sting's Ten Summoners Tales CD to a friend. The main thing was not sales, but payment. Cohen's friend paid $ 12.48 with a credit card over secure internet protocol. By the end of 2019, global Internet trade is projected to surpass $ 2 trillion.
15. Two years ago, the data that Norway is the world's leader in Internet coverage are hopelessly outdated. Of course, this is just a coincidence, but the leaders of coverage are now the United Arab Emirates, which do not admit a single person to their territory in refugee status, as well as so far too attractive for refugees Iceland and the Falkland Islands. By continent, the leaders are North America (81% of coverage), Europe (80%) and Australia with Oceania (70%). 40% of the world's population has Internet coverage at the place of residence, and 51% in terms of population. A symbol of the development of digital technologies, perhaps, should be considered the vicinity of the summit of Everest. Since the 1950s, about 200 corpses have accumulated along the main trail to the summit, which, as they say, with the current state of technology, cannot be evacuated. But the mobile Internet works steadily right at the top.
16. Two thirds of the world's Internet is viewed using the “Google Chrome” browser. All other browsers have completely lost the competition. Safari, with a share of just over 15%, is firmly in second place only due to its exclusive installation on Apple devices. The indicators of all other browsers are generally within the statistical error, not exceeding 5%, as in “Mozilla Firefox”.
17. Despite the fact that Twitter and Facebook are competitors, and Facebook is significantly ahead of the "tweet" in terms of both the number of users and financial results, Twitter wins the opponent's field so far. The official Twitter page on Facebook has over 15 million “likes”, while the Facebook account on Twitter has only 13.5 million followers. The official Instagram account on Twitter is followed by 36.6 million people, while VKontakte has just over a million followers.
18. At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, twin brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss competed for the US Olympic team. However, the fame of the twins was not brought by the Olympic success - they took the eighth place - but the lawsuit against the founder of the Facebook network Mark Zuckerberg. In 2003, they hired Zuckerberg to develop a social network, providing him with the existing piece of software code. Zuckerberg worked for the Winklevoss for two months, and then launched his own social network, then it was called "thefacebook". After five years of litigation, Zuckerberg bought off the brothers by handing over 1.2 million shares of Facebook to them. Cameron and Tyler later became the first investors to make a billion dollars from Bitcoin transactions.
