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The 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, internet 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 internetwork. Although the Internet was widely used by academia in the 1980s, the subsequent commercialization of the Internet in the 1990s and beyond incorporated its services and technologies into virtually every aspect of modern life. (Full article...)

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"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" is an adage which began as the caption of a famous cartoon published by The New Yorker on 5 July 1993, and authored by Peter Steiner. The cartoon shows two dogs: One sitting on a chair in front of a computer, speaking the caption to a second dog sitting on the floor. As of 2000, the panel was the most reproduced cartoon from The New Yorker, and Steiner had earned over $50,000 (USD) from the reprinting of the cartoon.

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ICE 3 high-speed train with Hotspot advertisements
ICE 3 high-speed train with Hotspot advertisements
Credit: S. Terfloth

A hotspot is a venue that offers Wi-Fi access. The public can use a laptop, WiFi phone, or other suitable portable device to access the Internet. Of the estimated 150 million laptops, 14 million PDAs, and other emerging Wi-Fi devices sold per year for the last few years, most include the Wi-Fi feature.

In 2013 and 2014, the American web services company Yahoo was subjected to two of the largest data breaches on record. Although Yahoo was aware, neither breach was revealed publicly until September 2016.

The 2013 data breach occurred on Yahoo servers in August 2013 and affected all three billion user accounts. The 2014 breach affected over 500 million user accounts. Both breaches are considered the largest ever discovered and included names, email addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, and security questions—both encrypted and unencrypted. When Yahoo made the breaches public in 2016, they acknowledged being aware of the second intrusion since 2014.

These incidents led to the indictment of four individuals linked to the latter breach, including the Canadian hacker Karim Baratov who received a five-year prison sentence and also prompted widespread criticism of Yahoo for their delayed response. The fallout included a U.S. $117.5 million class-action lawsuit settlement, a $35 million fine from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, scrutiny by the United States Congress, and complications for Verizon Communication's 2017 acquisition of Yahoo. (Full article...)

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Danah Boyd at the Web 2.0 Conference, 2005
Danah Michele Boyd (or danah boyd, born Danah Michele Mattas in 1977), is an American academic, researcher, and blogger best known for media appearances where she speaks about social networking sites such as Friendster and MySpace. Since 2003, she and her research have been quoted on the subject of social networking in dozens of different articles in media sources such as NPR, Wired, MSNBC, USA Today, Newsweek and The O'Reilly Factor. She was also the subject of a major profile in The New York Times in 2003 and the Financial Times in 2006. She initially studied computer science at Brown University where she worked with Andy van Dam, and then pursued her Master's Degree in sociable media with Judith Donath at the MIT Media Lab. She advanced to Ph.D. candidacy in the UC Berkeley School of Information in 2006, and will be a non-resident fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society for the 2007-2008 academic year.

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The following are images from various internet-related articles on Wikipedia.

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Tim Berners-Lee
You affect the world by what you browse.

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