Timeline
Internet
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1895 Paul
Otlet (1868-1944), Belgian librarian, met future Nobel Prize winner
Henri La Fontaine, who joined him in planning to create the
Mundaneum, a master bibliography of all the world’s published
knowledge. Otlet and LaFontaine eventually persuaded the Belgian
government to support their project, proposing to build a “city of
knowledge” that would bolster the government’s bid to become host of
the League of Nations.
(www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/science/17mund.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&emc=eta1)
1934 Paul Otlet (1868-1944),
head of the Mundaneum in Belgium, sketched out plans for a global
network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them)
that would allow people to search and browse through millions of
interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. In his 1934
book “Monde” he laid out his vision of a “mechanical, collective
brain” that would house all the world’s information, made readily
accessible over a global telecommunications network.
(www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/science/17mund.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&emc=eta1)
1948 Richard Bolt and Leo
Beranek, professors at MIT, established a small acoustics consulting
firm and soon added a former student of Bolt’s, Robert Newman. In
1949 BBN won its first major consulting contract, designing the
acoustics for the UN General Assembly Hall.
(www.bbn.com/about/timeline/)
1962 Aug, The first recorded
description of the social interactions that could be enabled through
networking was a series of memos written by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT
discussing his "Galactic Network" concept. He envisioned a globally
interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly
access data and programs from any site. In spirit, the concept was
very much like the Internet of today. Licklider was the first head
of the computer research program at DARPA, 4 starting in October
1962. While at DARPA he convinced his successors at DARPA, Ivan
Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts, of
the importance of this networking concept.
(SFEC, 3/16/97, Z1
p.3)(www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml#Origins)
1968-1998 American Engineer Jon Postel (1943-1998)
coordinated the Internet’s protocols and addressing system over this
period.
(Econ, 11/19/05,
p.68)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel)
1969 Sep 2, The first Internet
message was a packet switch delivered to UCLA from BBN Corp. (Bolt
Beranek and Newman). The 1st 2 machines of ARPANET were connected at
Prof. Len Kleinrock's lab at UCLA. The US Dept. of Defense’s
Advanced Research and Projects Agency (ARPANET) launched a
self-healing computer network with TCP/IP (Transmission Control
Protocol / Internet Protocol). By the early 1980’s the military
component became a separate network and the true birth of today’s
Internet is marked. By 2007 some university researchers with the
federal government's blessing want to scrap the Internet and start
over.
(http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070414/ap_on_hi_te/rebuilding_the_internet_8)(SFEC,
3/16/97, z1 p.3)(SFC, 8/30/99, p.C10)(SFC, 9/3/99, p.C1)
1969 Oct 29, Researchers sent
the first inter-node message between two sites on ARPAnet. The first
e-mail message crossed the Arpanet as a team under Professor Leonard
Kleinrock of UCLA communicated with a team under Douglas Englebart
at Stanford. The US Dept. of Defense’s Advanced Research and
Projects Agency (ARPANET) launched a self-healing computer network
with TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol) [see
Sep 2].
(http://tinyurl.com/lpq766)(WSJ, 1/14/99,
p.A1)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET)
1971 Ray Tomlinson, an engineer
at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), invented an e-mail program that
allowed users to exchange messages across a distributed network. In
1972 Tomlinson modified the program to run on ARPANET where it
became a quick hit.
(http://tinyurl.com/6s97pv)
1972 Jul, Robert Metcalf
(b.1946) at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) combined packet
switching from the Arpanet and single wire broadcasting to lay the
foundations for computer networks. This system was called Ethernet
and marked the first Internet message. The IEEE committee 802.3
later defined the Ethernet standard. He later fixed May 22, 1973, as
the birthdate of Ethernet, a day on which he circulated a memo about
his ideas to PARC colleagues.
(WSJ,11/14/94, p.R26)(SFEC, 3/28/99, Z1
p.8)(Econ, 6/12/04, p.26)(Econ, 12/12/09, p.23)
1972 Vinton Cerf,
hearing-impaired since birth, developed e-mail-like text messaging
protocols for the Arpanet.
(SFC, 7/26/00, p.D3)
1973 May 22, Robert Metcalf
(b.1946), at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), circulated a
memo about his Ethernet ideas to PARC colleagues. He later fixed
this day as the birthdate of Ethernet. Metcalf had combined packet
switching from the Arpanet and single wire broadcasting to lay the
foundations for computer networks. Bob Metcalf described ethernet
for the 1st time in a patent memo.
(Econ, 12/12/09, TQ p.23)(SFC, 10/25/00, p.A16)
1974 May, Robert Kahn and
Vinton Cerf published a paper that outlined the protocols of the
Internet. Their Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol
(TCP/IP) was updated in 1978. In 2004 they received the A.M. Turing
Award for their work. By December full specifications for the new
proposal were published.
(SFC, 6/11/05, p.C1)(Econ, 6/10/06, Survey p.33)
1978 Feb 16, The 1st Computer
Bulletin Board System was Ward & Randy's CBBS in Chicago.
(www.historyoftheinternet.com/chap3.html)
1979 Jun, Robert Metcalf of
Xerox Corp. started 3Com Corp., consulting company, and soon began
producing Ethernet hardware. The company specialized in
connecting computers using the Ethernet system, which he helped
develop. The early Ethernet adapters sold for $5000. In 1994 they
sold for $100.
(WSJ,11/14/94, p.R26)(Econ, 12/12/09, TQ p.24)
1979 Roy Trubshow and Richard
Bartle, Univ. of Essex students, created the 1st text-only MUD
(Multi-User Dungeon).
(NW, 11/25/02, p.48)
1980 Jun 25, The Associated
Press chose 11 major newspapers to launch a cooperative experiment
to deliver news electronically to computer-equipped homes.
(SFC, 6/24/05, p.F2)
1982 Sep 19, Prof. Scott E.
Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon Univ. posted an emoticon, the first
online smiley face, in a message to an online electronic bulletin
board at 11:44 a.m., during a discussion about the limits of online
humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly.
(AP, 9/18/07)
1982 Sep, 3Com under Robert
Metcalf started shipping EtherLink adaptor cards for IBM’s new
personal computer.
(Econ, 12/12/09, TQ p.24)
1982 Symantec, a provider of
security technology, was founded. It went public in 1989 and was
acquired by Norton in 1990.
(SSFC, 1/4/04, p.I1)
1982 Rich Skrenta (b.1967), a
freshman in Pennsylvania, developed Elk Cloner as a practical joke.
It was the 1st virus to hit computers worldwide and later became
known as a "boot sector" virus. When it boots, or starts up, an
infected disk places a copy of the virus in the computer's memory.
Whenever someone inserts a clean disk into the machine and types the
command "catalog" for a list of files, a copy gets written onto that
disk as well. The newly infected disk is passed on to other people,
other machines and other locations.
(AP, 9/1/07)(SFC, 9/3/07, p.C3)
1982 France launched Minitel, a
national videotex communications network. It became outdated with
the rise of the Internet and was scheduled to close in 2011. During
the first half of 1982, the Division of l'lnformatique Parlementaire
studied the feasibility of an internal videotex system for the
Chamber of Deputies in France and in September 1982, M. Louis
Mexandeau, Minister of the PTT gave his support to the project. On
30 October 1982, the Bureau of the Assemblée Nationale
approved implementation in two phases; first of 100 terminals; and
secondly equipment to support all deputies with constituencies in
metropolitan France.
(Econ, 9/4/10,
p.18)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel)
1983 Jan 1, TCP/IP became the
standard for Internet protocol.
(SFC, 8/30/99, p.C10)
1983 Paul Mochapetris, an
Internet address system researcher, grouped computers into groups.
"Thus .edu signified a university, .gov indicated a government
agency. Corporations got .com."
(WSJ, 10/11/99, p.B1)
1984 Apr 1, Stewart Brand and
Larry Brilliant launched the Well (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) in
Sausalito. In La Jolla, Ca., Larry Brilliant, physician and head of
Network Technologies Int’l. in Michigan, pitched the idea for a
public computer conferencing system to Stewart Brand, publisher of
the Whole Earth Catalog. Their meeting led to the 1985 founding of
“The Well” online service that operated as a collection of
conferences. It used the PicoSpan conferencing software. In 2001
Katie Hafner authored “The Well: A Story of Love, Death and Real
Life in the Seminal Online Community.”
(Wired, 5/97, p.100)(SSFC, 5/27/01, DB p.69)
1984 Mike Lazaridis founded
Research In Motion (RIM) while a student at the Univ. of Waterloo in
Ontario. RIM went on to produce the hand-held Blackberry e-mail
device.
(Econ, 3/19/05, p.68)
1984 Tim Berners-Lee, a
researcher at CERN, envisioned a computer system for researchers to
share documents and databases. This grew to become the World Wide
Web. In 2004 Lee won the 1st Millennium Technology Prize.
(WSJ, 10/1/99, p.W6)(SFC, 4/16/04, p.C1)
1984 Ray Ozzie left Lotus
Development and founded Iris Associates, which created Lotus Notes,
a collaborative software program. Iris was acquired by Lotus in 1994
and Lotus was acquired by IBM in 1995. In 2006 Bill Gates named
Ozzie to succeed him as Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Ozzie)
1985 Mar 23, Joshua Silver,
Oxford physicist, began contemplating the development of self
adjusting eyeglasses. By 2009 some 30,000 of Silver's specs had been
distributed to the poor in 15 countries; his eventual target is 100
million pairs.
(SSFC, 1/11/09, p.A6)(http://tinyurl.com/96buv9)
1985 Mar, The Well online
conferencing service went live from Sausalito, Ca., with a VAX
computer, 6 modems and 6 phone lines.
(WSJ, 8/5/96, p.B5)(Wired, 5/97, p.106)
1986 Jan, The first PC virus,
called Brain, was discovered in the wild. Though it achieved fame
because it was the first of its type, the virus was not widespread
as it could only travel by hitching a ride on floppy disks swapped
between users. The first virus to hit computers running a Microsoft
Corp.'s operating system (DOS) came when two brothers in Pakistan
wrote a boot sector program now dubbed "Brain," purportedly to
punish people who spread pirated software.
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4630910.stm)(AP, 9/1/07)
1986 Aug, Dr. Clifford Stoll,
the computer systems manager at Lawrence Berkeley, discovered
computer break-ins. He monitored them for approximately 12 months
and realized that the had confused Lawrence Berkeley with
Lawrence Livermore.'' A West German citizen used global
communications networks to secretly gain access to more than 30
computers belonging to the US military and military contractors.
(http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/6.68.html)(Econ,
5/26/07, p.64)
1986 The US Computer Fraud and
Abuse Act was created. Under the act the release of a computer virus
was illegal, but the construction of such viruses was not.
(WSJ, 3/31/05, p.B1)
1988 Nov 2, A computer worm,
named Morris, unleashed by a Cornell University graduate student
began replicating, clogging thousands of computers around the
country, but causing no real damage. The virus infected an estimated
6,000 university and military computers over the Internet.
(AP, 11/2/98)(SFC, 9/3/07, p.C3)
1989 Mar, The first versions of
HTML that launched the Web appeared. Tim Berners-Lee invented the
World Wide Web. His document describing the initial project was
titled: “Information Management: A Proposal.”
(SFEC, 3/15/98, p.W26)(SFEC, 5/30/99, Z1
p.4)(Econ, 3/10/07, p.32)
1989 Brewster Kahle founded
WAIS, a company named after the Wide Area Information Server
protocol, to make software for online publishing. The protocol was
an early form of internet search engine, which had been developed by
Thinking Machines with Apple, Dow Jones and KPMG. In 1995 AOL bought
the firm.
(Econ, 3/7/09, TQ p.34)
1990 Astrophysicist Clifford
Stoll authored “The Cuckoo's Egg," a true account of the tracking of
a hacker who probed the US's most sensitive secrets, using keywords,
such as "thermonuclear war." Stoll's pursuit of a hacker trying to
access American computer networks led to the discovery of a West
German spy ring.
(www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Clifford-Stoll/dp/0671726889)
1990 The World Wide Web server
prototype was built. The Archie file transfer protocol was
developed. A semi-crawler search engine was built.
(SFC, 2/2/08, p.C1)
1990 Thomas Campana Jr.,
Chicago-area engineer, created a system to send e-mails between
computers and wireless devices. He founded a company called NTP that
filed suit in 2001 against Research In Motion (RIM), maker of the
BlackBerry wireless device.
(SFC, 12/1/05, p.C8)
1991 Aug, James Gossling
developed his new computer language called Oak. It was to be the
progenitor of the new Java software for the Internet by Sun
Microsystems.
(Wired, Dec. '95, p.238)
1991 Al Gore as US Senator held
hearings that led to the passage of the National High-Performance
Computer Technology Act. It boosted federal support of the Internet
by about $1 billion a year.
(Wired, Dec. '95, p.154)
1991 Cambridge Univ. scientists
set up a video to monitor their coffee pot in the Trojan Room and
spawned the Web cam revolution. In 2001 Spiegel Online paid $4,750
for the $70 coffee pot.
(SFC, 8/15/01, p.B3)
1991 Quantum Computer Services
changed its name to America Online.
(WSJ, 1/11/00, p.B1)
1992 Mar 6, Personal computer
users braced for a virus known as “Michelangelo,” set to trigger on
March 6, but only scattered cases of lost files were reported. The
Michelangelo computer virus threatened computer systems around the
world. It was designed to lodge itself into a corner of the system
and infect any floppies put into the system, and to eventually
mangle the hard drive.
(Sp., 5/96, p.68)(AP, 3/6/02)
1992 Internet domain
registrations began (DNS). Network Solutions Inc. of Science
Applications Int’l. was given the naming oversight in a contract
with the National Science Foundation. America’s Dept. of Commerce
created ICAAN, a non-profit corporation to run the DNS. Jon Postel
(1943-1998), an American engineer, was assigned to head ICAAN, but
he soon died.
(WSJ, 6/5/97, p.B5)(Econ, 12/4/10, p.73)
1992 Network Solutions won a
government contract to be the exclusive registrar of Internet
addresses.
(WSJ, 11/5/99, p.B5)
1992 Robert Kahn and Vinton
Cerf, creators of the TCP/IP Internet protocol, founded the Internet
Society.
(Econ, 6/10/06, Survey p.33)
1992 America Online, a popular
Internet company, went public.
(WSJ, 5/24/99, p.R8)
1993 Jun, Marc Andreeson and
Eric Bina at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at
the Univ. of Illinois released their first version of the Mosaic
Browser, a software tool that simplified searching for material on
the World Wide Web. Andreeson went on to found Netscape Corp. In
1998 Joshua Quittner and Michella Slatalla published “Speeding the
Net,” a history of Netscape Communications.
(Wired, Dec. '95, p.242)(WSJ, 6/25/98, p.A20)
1993 Aug 13, US Court of
Appeals ruled that congress must save all e-mails.
(MC, 8/13/02)
1993 Ward Cunningham (b.1949)
founded the 1st Wiki site, The Portland Repository.” The site was
developed so that multiple users could revise and update
information. He joined Microsoft in 2003.
(WSJ, 7/29/04, p.B1)(www.en.wikipedia.org)
1993 Arthur Hair received a
patent titled "Method for Transmitting a Desired Digital Video or
Audio Signal." He and Scott Sander then launched Sightsound.com to
build a market for transmitting music and video over the internet.
(WSJ, 5/7/99, p.B1)
1994 Apr 4, Jim Clark and Marc
Andreeson founded Mosaic Communications Corp., the predecessor of
Netscape Communications.
(WSJ, 11/25/98, p.B1)
1994 Apr, Charles H. Ferguson
started Vermeer Technologies. It developed Front Page, the first
software program to allow people to develop a Web site without
mastering a programming language. He sold the company to Microsoft
after 20 months for $133 million.
(WSJ, 12/15/99, p.A20)
1994 Spring, David Filo and
Jerry Yang, graduates students of Stanford Univ., started a guide to
their favorite sites on the Internet: Jerry and David’s Guide to the
World Wide Web.” They later named the site Yahoo: "Yet Another
Hierarchical Officious Oracle."
(WSJ, 3/6/00, p.B1)(SFC, 7/18/00, p.A8)
1994 Nov 28, Mosaic changed its
name to Netscape Communications.
(WSJ, 4/21/99, A1)
1994 The SF Chronicle newspaper
began its SFGate site on the Internet.
(SSFC, 6/7/09, p.W3)
1994 John McAfee, founder of
the anti-viral firm McAfee Associates, sold his stake for over $100
million. Network Associates after 7 years renamed itself to McAfee
Inc.
(WSJ, 4/21/07,
p.A1)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McAfee)
1994 Tribal Voice was founded
by the software millionaire John McAfee, founder of McAfee
Associates. On its website, the company described itself initially
as a 'Native American' company run by Native Americans. As the
company grew, the Native American references gradually disappeared.
In 1999 McAfee sold his stake for $17 million.
(WSJ, 4/21/07,
p.A10)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McAfee)
1994 Lou Montulli, computer
programmer at Netscape, invented "cookies" to help enable purchasing
products from a Web site.
(WSJ, 2/28/00, p.B1)
1994 Scientists at Carnegie
Mellon Univ. created a search engine. Rights were bought by CMGI
Inc., an Internet venture fund, and Lycos was formed in 1995.
(SFC, 3/29/00, p.D3)
1994 The first Internet stock
trade was completed by K. Aufhauser & Co., later part of
Ameritrade Holding Corp.
(WSJ, 6/2/99, p.C1)
1994 Sky Dayton founded
EarthLink, an Internet access provider.
(Econ, 3/10/07, TQ p.13)
1994 Jeff Taylor founded
Monster.com, an online job-search site.
(Econ, 3/27/04, p.66)
1994 Britannica posted a web
site for its reference work.
(WSJ, 4/22/99, A1)
1994 Brian Pinkerton of the
Univ. of Washington released WebCrawler. It was able to index entire
pages. It was later bought out by AOL. Lycos and InfoSeek soon
followed.
(Econ, 9/18/04, TQ p.33)(SFC, 2/2/08, p.C1)
1995 Mar, David Filo and Jerry
Yang, graduates students of Stanford Univ., turned their hobby into
a business. In 1994 they had started a guide to their favorite sites
on the Internet: Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” The
site was soon renamed Yahoo: "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious
Oracle."
(WSJ, 3/6/00, p.B1)(SFC, 7/18/00, p.A8)(WSJ,
2/20/07, p.B5)
1995 Jul 16, Amazon.com went
live on the Internet. The 1st book sold on the site was “Fluid
Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental
Mechanisms of Thought.”
(SFC, 7/5/05, p.E2)
1995 Aug 9, Netscape
Communications went public and was valued at $2.2 billion. In 1999
Jim Clark and Owen Edwards authored "Netscape Time: The Making of
the Billion-Dollar Start-Up That Took on Microsoft."
(WSJ, 11/25/98, p.B1)(SFEC, 6/27/99, BR p.6)
1995 Aug 30, Cable News Network
joined the internet ("This is CNN").
(MC, 8/30/01)
1995 Sep 13, The FBI made at
least a dozen arrests, capping a nationwide two-year investigation
of pedophiles and pornographers using the America Online computer
network.
(AP, 9/13/00)
1995 Sep 23, Guillermo Gaede,
an Intel engineer, was arrested in Phoenix. He had used his computer
to tap into plans for the Pentium & 486 chip manufacturing
process and video taped the information in May 1993. He sent the
info to his former employer Advanced Micro Devices who notified
federal authorities. He claimed to have been double-crossed by the
FBI and also to have passed info from AMD to Cuba, China, North
Korea and Iran.
(SFC, 6/25/96, p.A23)
1995 Sep, The US government
came up with a new proposal security in computer communications,
dubbed by critics as Clipper II.
(Wired, 9/96, p.224)
1995 Nov 20, Salon produced its
1st online issue. Salon.com was founded in SF as an online publisher
by former staffers of the SF Examiner. The company purchased the
Sausalito online community Well in 1999 from Bruce Katz, the founder
of Rockport Shoes. In June 1999 it became a public corporation with
an IPO at $10/share.
(SFC, 4/8/99, p.B1)(SFEC, 6/27/99, p.B1)(SFC,
7/28/00, p.A19)
1995 Nov, Microsoft released
Internet Explorer 3.0 and gave it away for free in a challenge to
Netscape’s Navigator browser.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1995 Dec 7, Bill Gates
announced Microsoft’s Internet counterattack on Netscape and the
browser market.
(WSJ, 11/25/98, p.B1)
1995 Dec 15, Louis Monier of
Digital Equipment Corp. unveiled the Alta Vista search engine. It
used several hundred “spiders” in parallel to index the web. The
engine was co-invented by Paul Andrew Flaherty (1964-2006) of DEC.
(Econ, 9/18/04, TQ p.33)(SFC, 3/24/06, p.B5)
1995 World Chats, one of the
earliest 3-D online chat rooms, introduced the use of onscreen
“avatars” for Internet communication.
(NW, 11/25/02, p.47)
1995 A group of 7 Swiss artists
registered the domain name of Etoy.com with Network Solutions. In
1999 the toy company EToys.com sued the artists and forced them to
shut their web site down. In 2003 Adam Wishart and Regula Bochsler
authored: “Leaving Reality Behind: “Etoy vs. eToys.com & Other
Battles to Control Cyberspace.”
(SSFC, 2/2/03, p.AM3)
1995 Pierre Omidyar founded
eBay as a site for auctioning items. Originally called Auction Web
it also helped his fiancée trade her Pez dispensers. In 2002
Adam Cohen authored "The Perfect Store," a chronicle of the rise of
eBay.
(WSJ, 6/25/02, p.D9)(Econ, 6/11/05, p.66)
1995 Craig Newmark founded
Craigslist in San Francisco. It was an Internet forum for finding
jobs, housing, and goods for sale. In 2004 Ebay acquired a 25% stake
from a former employee’s equity sale.
(SFC, 8/14/04, p.C1)
1995 The first Internet
gambling casino opened, but games could only be played for fun. The
first real money Internet casino opened in 1996.
(SFC, 7/2/07, p.C1)
1995 Metacrawler search engine
technology was developed.
(SFC, 2/2/08, p.C1)
1995 VocalTec, an Israeli
company, was the first company to release commercial PC-to-PC
calling software, which it called Internet Phone. However, many
competitors soon followed. In 2010 VocalTec merged with YMax Corp,
maker of magicJack, an Internet phone gadget.
(AP, 8/14/10)
1996 Feb 8, John Peter Barlow,
Internet activist, issued the “Declaration of the Independence of
Cyberspace” from Davos, Switzerland.
(Econ, 12/8/07,
p.14)(http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html)
1996 Feb, Kevin Mitnick,
33-year-old computer wizard, was arrested in Raleigh, N.C. with the
help of computer security expert Tsutomu Shimomura. Mitnick was
accused of breaking into the systems of software companies and
attacking the computers of Internet service providers (ISPs). In
1999 he admitted breaking in to computer systems at Sun Microsystems
and Motorola where he stole software and installed programs that
caused millions of dollars in damage. He was ordered to pay token
restitution of $4,125 and was prohibited from any access to
computers and the Internet for 3 years following his release.
(SFC, 9/28/96, p.A3)(SFC, 8/10/99, p.A3)
1996 Spring, Yahoo went public
at $13 per share and quickly rose to $33 in its 1st day of trading.
(WSJ, 3/6/00, p.B1)
1996 Apr, The web site DJ.com
launched RealAudio’s technology to broadcast 24 channels of music
over the web. The site was later renamed Spinner.com.
(WSJ, 6/20/00, p.B1)
1996 Apr, Takafumi Horie (23),
a student at the Univ. of Tokyo, set up Livin’ on the Edge Inc., a
Web-site design company. In 2000 the company was listed on the Tokyo
Stock Exchange and in 2004 the name was changed to Livedoor, after
an Internet service provider that it took over in 2002.
(WSJ, 2/3/06, p.A1)
1996 May, The US government
released a draft proposal on computer security that was dubbed
Clipper III.
(Wired, 9/96, p.226)
1996 Jul 4, Hot Mail, a free
internet E-mail service began.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotmail)
1996 Aug 13, Microsoft released
Internet Explorer 3.0.
(http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/pr/release33.html)
1996 Aug 18, "Where Wizards
stay Up Late, The Origins of the Internet" by Katie Hafner and
Matthew Lyon was reviewed.
(SFEC, 8/18/96, BR p.3)
1996 The $1.6 billion FLAG
project (Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe) was completed for
transmission of data from Europe to the Far East. Neil Tagare pushed
the project with financial assistance from Nynex.
(SFC, 3/15/99, p.B7)
1996 UC Berkeley professor Eric
Brewer and graduate student Paul Gauthier founded Inktomi Corp. to
provide software for Internet Service Providers. Their software was
incorporated in the widely-used HotBot search engine, which
displaced AltaVista as the leading web-crawler-based search engine.
(SFC, 2/2/08,
p.C1)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inktomi)
1996 Brewster Kahle founded the
non-profit Internet Archive. With a former colleague he also
co-founded a firm called Alexa, to track and analyze the paths
people follow as they move around the Web. In 1999 Amazon bought
Alexa for an estimated $250 million.
(Econ, 3/7/09, TQ p.34)
1996 David Warthen and venture
capitalist Garrett Gruener (42) co-founded Ask Jeeves Inc., a
company devoted to scouring the Net for data based on simple
questions. www.ask.com. In 2004 the company moved operations from
Emeryville, Ca., to Oakland.
(WSJ, 4/8/99, p.B9)(SFC, 9/12/03, p.A10)(SFC,
7/19/04, p.F5)
1996 Michael Lynch, British
software entrepreneur, founded Autonomy as a kind of Google for
corporate data.
(Econ, 2/28/09, p.70)
1996 Following the success of
Doom, id Software released Quake, a first-person shooter that also
allowed users to create their own levels, which were called
modifications or mods.
(NW, 11/25/02, p.47)
1996 Instant messaging was
created by the Israeli company Mirabilis.
(SSFC, 7/6/03, p.E3)
1996 Microsoft launched
Expedia, an online travel assistance site. It was later sold to
Barry Diller, who spun it off from his InterActive Corp. (IAC) in
2005 as a separate company.
(Econ, 10/1/05, p.66)
1996 Eliezer Yudkowsky (16) set
up the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI). He
and a group of followers, dubbed transhumanists, believed that a
kind of artificial intelligence, a super intelligence, will emerge
over the next 25 years. "The Singularity is the technological
creation of smarter than human intelligence."
(SSFC, 1/11/04, p.A1)
1997 Mar 6, The first ever
Webby Awards ceremony was held in SF at Bimbo’s 365 Club in North
Beach.
(SFC, 3/7/96, p.A1)
1997 Mar 6, Britain's Queen
Elizabeth II launched the first official royal Web site.
(AP, 3/6/98)
1997 Mar 19, The US Supreme
Court heard arguments on Internet indecency.
(MC, 3/19/02)
1997 Apr 8, Microsoft Corp
released Internet Explorer 4.0.
(http://tinyurl.com/dax6p)
1997 May 1, An Int’l. committee
agreed to create 7 new (WWW) World Wide Web domains. The new
suffixes would be: .firm, .store, .web, .arts, .rec, .info and .nom
for individuals.
(SFC, 5/2/97, p.A1)
1997 May 27, The Cathedral and
the Bazaar, an essay by Eric S. Raymond on software engineering
methods, was first presented by the author at the Linux Kongress and
was published as part of a book of the same name in 1999. It was
based on his observations of the Linux kernel development process
and his experiences managing an open source project, fetchmail.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar)
1997 Jun 26, The Supreme Court
struck down a congressional attempt to keep pornography off the
Internet, saying it violated the First Amendment; the court also let
stand the president's line-item veto authority without addressing
its constitutionality.
(AP, 6/26/98)
1997 Sep 8, It was announced
the America Online Inc. (AOL) would take over Compuserve in a 3-way
deal that involved WorldCom.
(SFC, 9/8/97, p.A3)(AP, 9/8/98)
1997 Dec, Michael Robertson
launched a web site called MP3.com as a repository for music in the
MP3 format.
(WSJ, 6/20/00, p.B1)
1997 Don Tapscott authored
“Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation.”
(Econ, 11/15/08, p.98)
1997 The US Senate opened
hearings on the Internet browser battle.
(NW, 4/21/03, p.E12)
1997 AOL launched Instant
Messenger (AIM), an instant messaging and presence computer program.
It used the proprietary OSCAR instant messaging protocol and the TOC
protocol to allow registered users to communicate in real time.
(SFC, 2/11/10,
p.D3)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Instant_Messenger)
1997 Scott Kurnit founded
About.com, a web site for information originally known as the Mining
Company.
(WSJ, 7/7/99, p.A23)
1997 Electronic Arts launched
Richard Garriott’s Ultima Online, the 1st truly successful massively
multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).
(NW, 11/25/02, p.47)
1997 Phil Goldman (d.2003 at
39), Steve Perlman and Bruce Leak, the founders of WebTV, sold their
firm to Microsoft for $425 million.
(SFC, 12/30/03, p.A19)
1997 The website Sixdegrees was
launched as a means for social networking.
(SSFC, 10/23/05, p.A4)
1997 ING Direct, an online
banking service under Dutch parent ING Groep NV, was launched in
Canada. In 2000 it began operations in the US from Wilmington, Del.
By the end of 2007 it had over 7 million customers and $62 billion
in deposits. In 2008 Arkadi Kuhlman, ING’s US chief, and Bruce
Philp, chairman of ING Direct’s marketing partner, authored “The
Orange Code: How ING direct Succeeded by Being a Rebel with a
Cause.”
(WSJ, 12/10/08, p.A17)
1997 Alexander Pircher, a
student in Darmstadt, Germany, created a web site called
Anonymouse.org, which allowed users to type in a Web address in a
box and with a click the Anonymouse server fetches and displays the
page. This allowed anonymous Web searches.
(Econ, 12/2/06, TQ p.3)
1997 IslamOnline began as a
student project at the Univ. of Qatar with cash from Sheika Mozah, a
wife of Qatar’s emir, and with an endorsement from Egyptian-born
scholar, Yussuf al-Qaradawi.
(Econ, 4/10/10, p.51)
1998 Jan 17, Matt Drudge
reported over the Internet that Monica Lewinsky had paid numerous
service calls to the White House.
(WSJ, 10/24/00, p.A22)
1998 Jan 22, Microsoft under
court pressure signed an agreement giving PC makers the freedom to
install Windows 95 without an Internet Explorer icon.
(WSJ, 11/8/99, p.A30)
1998 Mar 3, Microsoft chairman
Bill Gates testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that his
company wasn't a monopoly out to crush rivals in the Internet
software market.
(AP, 3/3/99)
1998 Mar 19-1998 Mar 25, CeBIT,
the world’s largest exhibition for information and communications,
was held in Hanover, Germany. 600,000 visitors were expected.
(FT, 3/4/98, p.IT4)
1998 Mar 20, An Indiana man,
Chris Dean (35), was arrested for sending the pipe bomb that killed
Christopher Marquis of Vermont. Marquis had defrauded Dean in a $400
trade of Citizens Band radio equipment arranged on the Internet.
(SFC, 3/21/98, p.A3)
1998 May 18, The US Justice
Dept. filed an antitrust action against Microsoft Corp. for
embedding its own browser in its operating system, thus limiting
competition from others such as Netscape. The Justice Department and
Microsoft reached a settlement in 2001.
(SFC, 5/19/98, p.A1)(AP, 5/18/08)
1998 Jun 16, A woman (40) in
Florida gave birth to a baby boy, named Sean, live on the Internet.
(SFC, 6/17/98, p.A3)
1998 Jun, An appeals court
panel ruled in favor of Microsoft and considered Internet Explorer
and Windows and integrated product.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1998 Jul 26, AT&T and
British Telecommunications PLC announced they were forming a joint
venture to combine international operations and develop a new
Internet system. The joint venture, known as Concert, proved a
money-loser and was shut down.
(AP, 7/26/03)
1998 Aug, F. Thomson Leighton
and Daniel Lewin founded Akamai based on technology they had
developed at MIT in 1995. Their main product, FreeFlow - a system
that routed Internet traffic - began selling in April 1999. Lewin
(31) was aboard AA Flight 11 on Sep 11, 2001, and died when
hijackers crashed the plane into the WTC.
(WSJ, 12/8/99, p.C28)(SFC, 9/14/01, p.A29)
1998 Sep 16, House Judiciary
Committee Chairman Henry Hyde, responding to a report in an Internet
publication, Salon Magazine, admitted to "indiscretions" with a
woman in the 1960s at a time when both were married.
(AP, 9/16/99)
1998 Sep 18, A federal judge in
San Jose awarded the Church of Scientology a $3 million settlement
against Grady Ward for publishing secret scriptures on the Internet.
Grady would not have to pay the full fine if he refrains from
publishing church secrets and pays the church $200 per month for the
rest of his life.
(SFC, 9/19/98, p.A23)
1998 Sep, In Dubai, UAR, the
construction of a new multi-million prison was set to begin. Crown
Prince Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum conceived of the
facility as a prison for 2,000 "guests" of white-collar crimes. The
prison will have a gym, theater, conference center, and be equipped
with internet access.
(SFC, 7/31/98, p.D8)
1998 Oct 17, Jon Postel (55),
an influential Internet pioneer, died. Since 1968 he had directed
the network’s Internet assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) that
allowed computers to be matched with web addresses. Two weeks before
he died he submitted the framework for a new organization to succeed
the IANA, a non-profit entity (ICANN) with an internationally
diverse board of directors.
(WSJ, 10/19/98, p.A1)(WSJ, 10/22/98, p.A22)(Econ,
11/19/05, p.68)
1998 Oct, The US Congress
passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in an effort to
protect writers and artists from piracy in the free-for-all world of
Net music.
(WSJ, 6/20/00, p.B1)(SFC, 8/13/01, p.D1)
1998 Nov 13, The globe.com,
founded by Tod Krizelman and Stephen Paternot, went public and
leaped from $9 to $97 a share. In 2001 Paternot authored “A Very
Public Offering.”
(WSJ, 5/2/01, p.A17)(WSJ, 8/27/01, p.A13)
1998 Nov 23, It was reported
that American Online planned to purchase Netscape Communication for
about $4 billion in stock.
(SFC, 11/23/98, p.A1)
1998 Nov 24, America Online
confirmed it was buying Netscape Communications in a deal ultimately
worth $10 billion.
(AP, 11/24/99)
1998 Oct, The board of
directors for ICANN was seated. The Clinton administration created
ICANN, the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers. It had
been run by Jon Postel (d.1998), director of the Computer Networks
Division at Information Sciences Institute at the Univ. of Southern
Calif. ICANN was expected to become independent in 2006.
(WSJ, 11/5/99, p.B5)(SFEC, 7/30/00, p.B6)(Econ,
11/20/04, p.66)
1998 Dec 3, Digital MP3
file-squishing technology was reported as a threat to recording
industry. MPEG Layer 3 was a compression technology that allowed CD
quality music to be sent over the internet. The Rio portable player
by Diamond Multimedia was released to stores in the midst of piracy
concerns.
(SFC, 12/3/98, p.A1)(SFEC, 12/20/98, p.B1)
1998 Pres. Clinton signed the
Internet Tax Freedom Act. It mandated a moratorium on any state or
local taxes on Internet access.
(WSJ, 12/8/03, p.B1)
1998 Algis Ratnikas launched
Timelines of History on a web site provided by theGlobe.com.
Accumulation of data had begun in 1996.
(AR, 11/29/98)
1998 Amazon.com bought Junglee,
a comparison-shopping website, for $230 million. Junglee was
co-founded by Ashish Gupta. In 2006 Gupta helped found Helion
Venture Partners, an Indian venture capital firm.
(Econ, 12/23/06, p.102)
1998 Sergey Brin, a Russian
immigrant, and Larry Page of Stanford Univ. raised $1 million and
launched the Google search engine in Menlo Park, Ca. By 2003 over
200 million searches were logged daily. In 2004 Google filed for
IPO. Google's core search technology patent, owned by Stanford, was
set to expire in 2011.
(SSFC, 11/9/03, p.I1)(WSJ, 4/30/04, p.A1)
1998 InnoCentive was conceived
by 3 scientists working for Eli Lilly as a way to solve problems by
using the Internet. In 2001 it was spun off as an independent
start-up.
(Econ, 9/19/09, p.75)
1998 Netscape released its
browser code to allow the general community to produce Mozilla, an
open-source browser, later named Firefox.
(NW, 4/21/03, p.E12)(Econ, 12/17/05, p.64)
1998 The BBC under John Birt
launched Internet online operations.
(Econ, 6/18/05, Survey p.52)
1998 Bill Gross pioneered the
pay-per-click Internet advertising model. In 2003 Yahoo acquired his
Overture Services.
(Econ, 7/8/06, p.62)(Econ, 11/25/06,
p.66)
1998 Samih Toukan founded
Maktoob in Amman, Jordan, a software firm dedicated to replacing
English with Arabic in e-mail systems. Maktoob.com was the world’s
1st Arab language Web site. In 2000 the firm received a $2.5 million
cash injection from an Egyptian investment bank.
(SFC, 9/9/00, p.A14)(SSFC, 5/15/05, p.C1)
1998 Microsoft invented the key
technology for web-based software: Asynchronous Javascript and XML
(AJAX), but failed to exploit it.
(Econ, 11/19/05, p.69)
1998 PayPal was founded as a
way of moving money between Palm Pilots.
(Econ, 5/5/07, p.87)
1998 Disney purchased Infoseek
and turned it into Go.com.
(SFC, 2/2/08, p.C1)
1998 Yossi Vardi (b.1942),
Israeli entrepreneur, sold Mirabilis Ltd., the creator of the ICQ
instant messaging service, to American Online for over $400 million.
(Econ, 1/5/08,
p.56)(www.enewsbuilder.net/viab/e_article000077316.cfm)
1998 Tuvalu leased the .tv
suffix of its internet address to a Toronto firm, Information CA,
and prime Minister Bikenibeu expected royalties of at least $60
million a year.
(SFC, 8/19/98, p.A12)
1998 Yahoo! with 637 employees
matched the market capitalization of Boeing with 230,000 employees.
(Econ, 8/29/09, p.9)
1998-1999 America traced a series of computer
break-ins at the Pentagon, NASA and elsewhere to a computer in
Russia, which denied involvement.
(Econ, 5/26/07, p.64)
1999 Jan, Shawn Fanning (18), a
computer science student at Boston's Northeastern Univ., wrote
Napster, a software program to share music files over the Internet.
He and Sean Parker founded the Napster file-sharing service.
(SFC, 3/3/00, p.A7)(WSJ, 9/9/03, p.B1)
1999 Feb 25, The FCC ruled that
connecting to the internet constitutes a long-distance call.
(WSJ, 2/26/99, p.B3)
1999 Mar 18, The 3rd annual
Webbies was held at the Herbst Theater under the direction of
Tiffany Schlain (28).
(SFC, 3/13/99, p.A17)
1999 Mar 29, The Melissa
computer virus, first reported Mar 26, was spreading and infecting
E-mail in tens of thousands of computers. In Dec. David L. Smith, a
New Jersey programmer, pleaded guilty to creating the virus and
spreading it through a sex Web site. It was reported to have caused
$80 million in damage.
(SFC, 3/29/99, p.A3)(SFC, 12/10/99, p.B1)
1999 Mar, Jack Ma (b.1964), a
former English teacher, launched Alibaba.com to support small
business people in China. In 2005 Yahoo agreed to pay $1 billion in
cash and turn over its Chinese operations to Alibaba in return for a
40% stake in the Chinese e-commerce company. On Nov 6, 2007, Alibaba
became listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange. In 2009 Liu Shiying
and Martha Avery authored “Alibaba: The Inside Story Behind Jack Ma
and the Creation of the world’s Biggest Online marketplace.”
(WSJ, 8/12/05, p.A1,B1)(SFC, 11/5/07, p.A15)(WSJ,
3/4/09, p.A13)
1999 May 6, A US appeals court
ruled that government restrictions on the export of encryption
software violated free speech.
(WSJ, 5/7/99, p.A1)
1999 May, Chinese hackers broke
in and vandalized American government websites in retaliation for
the May 7 American aircraft bombing of the Chinese embassy in
Belgrade. The White House website closed for three days.
(Econ, 5/26/07, p.64)
1999 Jun 6, The
Worm.Explore.Zip virus was first detected in Israel. The virus was
disguised a an e-mail attachment and destroyed files when opened.
(SFEC, 6/13/99, p.A6)
1999 Jun 11, The FBI was
seeking the creator of Worm.Explore.Zip, a file-destroying computer
virus which had hit some of the nation’s biggest corporations.
(AP, 6/11/00)
1999 Jun 23, House Republicans
unveiled their "e-Contract," a pitch to the high-tech community that
included a promise to keep the Internet free.
(SFC, 6/24/99, p.A1)
1999 Jun, In South Korea NHN
Corp. launched Naver, the first portal in South Korea that used its
own proprietary search engine.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naver)(Econ,
2/28/09, p.71)
1999 Aug 18, Ramos Horta of
Indonesia, 1996 Nobel Prize winner, warned the government that
computer hackers would wreak electronic mayhem on the country if
voting in the East Timor referendum is hampered.
(SFC, 8/18/99, p.D10)
1999 Aug 31, In Argentina the
online-auction site DeRemate was launched. In 2002 daily visits
averaged 160,000 as Internet users climbed to 2.7 million.
(WSJ, 9/4/02, p.B5A)
1999 Sep 16, The White House
said it would allow US firms to export computer encryption
technology.
(SFC, 9/17/99, p.A1)
1999 Sep, Yodlee.com, trusted
leader in providing compelling financial solutions, put the Internet
to work for individuals by bringing together all personal
information, from hundreds of sources, in one convenient, secure
site.
(http://tinyurl.com/ru3g5)(WSJ, 6/24/06, p.B1)
1999 Nov 11, The computer virus
dubbed Bubbleboy was reported to spread through electronic mail
without attachments.
(WSJ, 11/11/99, p.A1)
1999 Oct 21, Organizers called
for a "Jam Echelon Day," an effort to overload US National Security
Agency (NSA) supercomputers with e-mail containing words such as
"bomb." Echelon was a worldwide surveillance network run by the NSA
and partners in Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
(SFEC, 11/14/99, p.A7)
1999 Nov 30, It was reported
that the EU passed the Electronic Signature Directive, a law that
gave legal status to digital signatures.
(WSJ, 12/1/99, p.A24B15)
1999 Dec 6, AT&T agreed in
principle to give competing Internet providers access to its
high-speed cable lines.
(SFC, 12/6/99, p.A3)
1999 Dec 7, The Recording
Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed suit against Napster
for being a haven for music piracy.
(WSJ, 9/9/03, p.B1)
1999 Dec 13, Mayfield Fund and
@Ventures, the affiliated venture capital arm of CMGI, announced
that they have completed the initial $7.50 million round of venture
capital funding for a photography Internet startup. Snapfish.com,
formerly code-named 'Project SkyTalk,' will offer a revolutionary
new business model in the photography market. In 2005 the company
was acquired by Hewlett-Packard.
(www.snapfish.com/release12132000)(SFC, 4/10/10,
p.D1)
1999 Tim Berners-Lee, inventor
of the World Wide Web, authored "Weaving the Web."
(WSJ, 10/1/99, p. W6)
1999 Barry M. Leiner (d.2003 at
57) authored a technical history of the Internet. In the 1980s he
worked as a manager at DARPA and helped establish the Internet
Activities Board (IAB), which set technical standards for the
Internet.
(SFC, 4/19/03, p.A17)
1999 Anthony B. and Michael C.
Perkins authored "The Internet Bubble." The founding editors of Red
Herring and Red Herring Online believed that Internet stocks were
overvalued.
(WSJ, 11/1/99, p.A52)
1999 Netflix was founded in Los
Gatos, Ca., as an Internet based company for DVD rentals sent via
mail.
(WSJ, 10/17/05, p.A1)
1999 Pyra software company
released Blogger for free. It allowed users to set up a Weblog, a
simple personal web site program. By 2002 some 500,000 weblogs were
on the Internet.
(NW, 8/26/02, p.42)
1999 Over 1000 World Wide Web
search engines were in operation.
(SFC, 2/2/08, p.C1)
1999 In China Ji Qi founded
Ctrip, a new Internet firm, catering to the Chinese traveler. He
later followed up with Home Inns, a chain of basic hotels.
(Econ, 1/26/08, p.64)
1999 NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s top
mobile phone operator, pioneered internet access through its i-mode
service. In 2001 it pioneered 3G technology and in 2005 embedded a
credit card into a wireless chip enabling consumer financial
payments.
(Econ, 7/23/05, p.71)
1999 Malaysiakini, an
independent online newspaper in Malaysia, was founded as a free
site. In 2002 it was forced to start charging for use.
(Econ, 3/15/08, p.52)
1999 In Russia legislation was
passed that created SORM-2, a Russian acronym for the system of
Operative and Investigative procedures. It required every Internet
service provider to install monitoring equipment that allowed access
by Russian security agencies.
(SFC, 3/11/00, p.A1)
1999 Mark Shuttleworth of South
Africa sold Thawte, a company that made digital certificates and
security software to support internet commerce, to VeriSign for over
$500 million.
(Econ, 6/9/07, TQ p.33)
1999 South Korea initiated OPEN
(Online Procedures Enhancement for Civil Applications), an
Internet-based anti-graft program.
(SFC, 11/23/01, p.D6)
2000 Jan 1, In California the
Uniform Electronic Transactions Act became law. It validated all
transactions formed, transmitted and recorded electronically, with
certain exemptions.
(SFEC, 1/2/00, p.B1)
2000 Jan 7, Pres. Clinton
announced a $91 million program to protect computer security as part
of the 2001 fiscal budget.
(SFC, 1/800, p.A1)
2000 Jan 19, Transmeta Corp.
leaders unveiled a pair of new microprocessors named Crusoe designed
for hand-held Internet-access devices.
(SFC, 1/20/00, p.B2)
2000 Jan 20, It was reported
that the number of Internet users in China had more than doubled
over the last 6 months from 4 to 8.9 million, most of them young
single men.
(SFC, 1/20/00, p.C16)
2000 Jan 24, A torrent of data
to the US National Security Agency brought the system to a crashing
halt that lasted 3½ days.
(Econ, 2/27/10,
p.18)(http://intellit.muskingum.edu/nsa_folder/nsa00.html)
2000 Jan 26, In China the State
Bureau of Secrecy issued a 20-article circular that banned
discussion of state secrets on the Internet, in e-mail, and in chat
rooms or bulletin boards. Content and service providers were also
required to undergo a "security certification" prior to operation.
(SFC, 1/27/00, p.A1)
2000 Feb 3, The Ford Motor Co.
said it would provide new PCs and a printer with Internet access to
its 300,000 employees at $5 per month over 3 years.
(SFC, 2/5/00, p.A1)
2000 Feb 4, Delta Air Lines
said it would provide new PCs and Internet access to its 72,000
employees at $12 per month over 3 years.
(SFC, 2/5/00, p.A1)
2000 Feb 7, An apparent team of
computer hackers shut the Yahoo web site down with a
"denial-of-service" attack that mimicked millions of phantom users.
(SFC, 2/8/00, p.A1)
2000 Feb 8, Net hackers shut
down at least 4 popular Web sites including Amazon.com, eBay,
CNN.com and buy.com with "denial of service attacks."
(SFC, 2/9/00, p.A1)(AP, 2/8/01)
2000 Mar 3, It was reported
that student use of Napster software to download music files from
the Internet was clogging up university networks and causing
officials to block or limit access to the site.
(SFC, 3/3/00, p.A1)
2000 Apr 3, It was reported
that 6 prestigious int’l. universities and cultural institutions
planned to sell knowledge and education over the Internet via the
Fathom Web site.
(SFC, 4/3/00, p.A5)
2000 Apr 5, The Netscape 6
browser was introduced.
(WSJ, 4/5/00, p.B1)
2000 Apr 13, The heavy metal
rock group Metallica filed suit against Napster for copyright
infringement and racketeering.
(WSJ, 9/9/03, p.B1)
2000 May 4, The e-mail virus “I
Love You” bug hit millions of computers around the world. It was
considered the most virulent, most damaging ($2.6 bil), most costly
and most rapidly spread virus to date.
(SFC, 5/5/00, p.A1)(SFC, 5/6/00, p.A1)
2000 May 18, Another computer
virus, described as a complex polymorph, began to spread around the
world.
(SFC, 5/19/00, p.A1)
2000 May 26, The “Killer
Resume” computer virus began to circulate.
(SFC, 5/27/00, p.A1)
2000 May 28, Donald W. Davies,
who helped pioneer packet switching, died in London at age 75.
(WSJ, 6/1/00, p.A1)
2000 Jun 9, The FBI began
discussions on the “Serbian Badman Trojan: computer virus disguised
as a movie clip and embedded in some 2000 commercial and home
computers.
(SFC, 6/9/00, p.A7)
2000 Jun 16, The US Senate
passed a bill to allow e-signatures for online contracts. Pres.
Clinton said he would sign the bill.
(SFC, 6/17/00, p.A3)
2000 Jun 30, Pres. Clinton
signed legislation for “digital signatures.”
(WSJ, 7/3/00, p.A1)
2000 Jul 26, Napster Inc. was
hit with a preliminary injunction to halt all illegal song swapping
over the Internet.
(SFC, 7/27/00, p.A1)
2000 Dec 8, Richard Clarke, top
cyberspace official of the US National Security Council, warned that
several nations had already created information-warfare units for
disrupting computer networks.
(SFC, 12/9/00, p.A3)
2000 Luis von Ahn, computer
scientist at Carnegie Mellon, together with Manuel Blum, Nicholas J.
Hopper and John Langford coined the term CAPTCHA (completely
automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart) in
a joint paper. This led to the use of mangled text to verify human
users of computer software over the Internet. The Recaptcha system
was launched in 2007 and used words that machines could not read.
(Econ, 9/5/09, TQ p.16)
2000 Orbitz, an online travel
assistance site, was put together by a group of airlines for direct
sales to consumers. In 2004 it was sold to Cendant for $1.25
billion.
(Econ, 10/1/05, p.66)
2000 Gurbaksh Chahal (18),
India-born entrepreneur in San Jose, Ca.,, sold his company Click
Agent for $40 million to competitor Value Click in an all stock
merger. In 2007 he sold his 2nd company, Blue Lithium, to Yahoo for
$300 million.
(SSFC, 10/26/08, p.F1)
2000 The Alta Vista search
engine began allowing multi media searching.
(SFC, 2/2/08, p.C1)
2000 Google and Yahoo partnered
to provide search on yahoo.com. Google indexed over 1 billion pages,
making it the largest index on the Web.
(SFC, 2/2/08, p.C1)
2000 Data centers consumed .6%
of the world’s electricity. By 2005 this reached 1%.
(Econ, 5/24/08, p.19)
2000 Baidu.com, a Chinese
search engine, was founded. It went public in 2005.
(SFC, 2/2/08, p.C1)
2000 Japan recorded the 1st
known case of two or more people using the Internet to form a
suicide pact. Hundreds of suicides, if not more, from various
countries copied that pattern in the following years.
(Econ, 6/23/07, p.66)
2000-2001 Israeli and Arab hackers
vandalized and crashed each others’ websites over a 4-month period.
Attacks also occurred against telecom films supplying internet
connections.
(Econ, 5/26/07, p.64)
2001 Jan 15, Jimmy Wales (35),
a retired futures and options trader, founded Wikipedia, an Internet
encyclopedia. It started as an offshoot of Nupedia, a free, online
encyclopedia written by experts. Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales came
up with the idea of allowing anybody to edit entries. In 2009 Andrew
Lih authored “The Wikipedia Revolution: How as Bunch of Nobodies
Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia.”
(SFC, 12/6/05, p.A10)(WSJ, 3/18/09, p.A13)(SFC,
1/15/11, p.D1)(Econ, 1/15/11, p.14)
2001 Mar 6, US District Judge
Marilyn Patel ordered Napster to block access to its files of
Millions of downloadable songs protected by copyrights.
(SFC, 12/30/01, p.D3)
2001 Jul 19, The Code Red
computer worm began hitting Internet-connected computers, exploiting
a flaw in Microsoft software. This was among the first network worms
to spread rapidly because it required only a network connection, not
a human opening an attachment.
(SFC, 7/30/01, p.D1)(SFC, 9/3/07, p.C3)
2001 Jul 23, The US Pentagon
shut down public access to its web sites due to a computer worm
called the Code Red worm. It defaced web sites with the words
“Hacked by Chinese.”
(SFC, 7/24/01, p.A2)
2001 Aug 2, Houston launched
SimHouston, a program to provide each of its 1.8 million residents
with free e-mail accounts and access to word processing software.
(SFC, 8/21/01, p.C1)
2001 Aug 8, US Federal
authorities announced the arrests of 100 people nationwide in an
Internet child pornography operation, Landslide Productions Inc.,
based in Fort Worth, Tx.
(SFC, 8/9/01, p.A3)
2001 Aug 27, Michael Dertouzos,
MIT computer scientist, died at age 64. His books included “”The
Unfinished Revolution: Human Centered Computers and What They Can Do
For Us.” He also helped drive the creation of the WWW Consortium to
ensure uniformity on the Web.
(SFC, 8/31/01, p.A24)
2001 Sep 18, The new computer
worm, W32.Nimda, struck the Internet.
(SFC, 9/19/01, p.D1)
2001 Sep 30, ExciteAtHome, a
firm that connected cable companies to the Internet, declared
bankruptcy. A month later some 764,000 AT&T customers found
their Internet access shut down.
(SSFC, 12/2/01, p.A16)
2001 Oct 8, Mena and Ben Trott
released Movable Type, a weblogging tool. Operations quickly
expanded and in 2002 they named their company Six Apart.
(www.sixapart.com/about/history)(Econ, 11/25/06,
p.68)
2001 Oct 9, Pres. Bush
appointed Richard Clarke as special adviser for cyberspace security.
(SFC, 10/10/01, p.A4)
2001 Dec 11, US Federal agents
carried out dozens of raids and seized computers in some 27 cities
and 21 states suspected of pirating software over the Internet. The
“Warez” network of software pirates was targeted.
(SFC, 12/12/01, p.A3)
2001 KaZaA, an internet
file-sharing program, was founded in Amsterdam by Niklas Zennstrom
of Sweden and Janus Friis of Denmark.
(Econ, 7/3/04, p.54)
2001 Keyhole released the first
commercial geobrowser. Google bought Keyhole in 2004 and launched
Google Earth in 2005.
(Econ, 9/8/07, TQ p.18)
2001 Infospace bought
Webcrawler.
(SFC, 2/2/08, p.C1)
2001 Ben and Mena Trott of SF
created “Movable Type,” a software blogging tool to operate web
logs, i.e. blogs on the Internet.
(Econ, 4/22/06, Survey p.3)
2001 In India Ramesh Ramanathan
and Swati Ramanathan, founded the Janaagraha Center for Citizenship
and Democracy. It started as a movement to enable citizen
participation in public governance and evolved into a robust
institution for Citizenship and Democracy. In 2010 the center
introduced the website http://ipaidabribe.com.
(www.ipaidabribe.com/node/77)
2002 Jan 19, It was reported
that China had imposed new Internet controls and required service
providers to screen all e-mail messages for political content.
(SFC, 1/19/02, p.A4)
2002 Nov 9, Allan Chu (17) of
Saratoga, Ca., won top honors in a Siemens Westinghouse competition
for his work on a new algorithm to compress Internet data.
(SFC, 11/12/02, p.A17)
2002 Richard Hunter authored
“World without Secrets: Business, Crime and Privacy in the Age of
Ubiquitous Computing.”
(http://tinyurl.com/4c9c2lo)(Econ, 2/26/11, p.77)
2002 David Sheff authored
“China Dawn,” a close-up look at the young men building Internet
infrastructure in China.
(WSJ, 3/12/02, p.A24)
2002 Bram Cohen created
BitTorrent, an online file sharing program. It increased the
download time for large files by breaking them into pieces and
reassembling them on arrival.
(SSFC, 8/6/06, p.F3)
2002 eBay bought PayPal,
founded by Elon Musk, for $1.5 billion in shares.
(Econ, 5/22/04, p.71)(Econ, 3/24/07, p.78)
2002 Yahoo acquired Inktomi.
(SFC, 2/2/08, p.C1)
2002 The website www.meetup.com
became a forum for clubs of all kinds.
(Econ, 7/16/05, Survey p.16)
2002 Friendster pioneered
social networking via Web sites. It was funded by entrepreneur
Jonathan Abrams. In 2006 Friendster was granted a patent covering “a
method and apparatus for calculating, displaying and acting upon
relationships in a social network.”
(WSJ, 7/27/06, p.B1)
2002 Google’s index surpassed 3
billion Web pages.
(SFC, 2/2/08, p.C1)
2002 LinkedIn, a Silicon Valley
startup, was founded by Reid Hoffman to manage his own network of
business contacts.
(Econ, 9/27/08, p.76)
2002 Gary McKinnon was caught
in London and after breaking into 97 US military and NASA computers,
while allegedly searching for UFO’s. His hacking from 2001-2002
caused an estimated $700,000 of damage. In 2008 McKinnon (42) was
diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. He also lost an appeal against
being extradited to the US to face charges. In 2009 he offered to
plead guilty to a criminal charge in Britain to avoid extradition to
the United States.
(SFC, 7/31/08, p.A14)(AP, 1/12/09)(Econ, 8/8/09,
p.51)
2002 The Transglobal Secure
Collaboration Program (TSCP) was founded as concerns of data
leakage, intellectual property protection, and export control
compliance began to rise. It was a cooperative effort by the leading
defense and aerospace firms, supported by the US Department of
Defense (DoD) and the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) to develop a
framework of policies and mechanisms to enable secure collaboration
across multiple jurisdictions.
(http://tinyurl.com/3sfx69x)
2003 Jan 10, Iraq blocked all
e-mail services following a batch of messages from disguised US
agencies urging dissent and military defections. Some service was
restored the next day.
(SSFC, 1/12/03, p.A14)
2003 Jan 15, Lufthansa
introduced Internet access to passengers on a flight from Germany to
Washington DC.
(SFC, 1/15/03, p.B1)
2003 Jan 25, A computer worm
slowed Internet traffic. The “slammer” virus sought vulnerable
Microsoft “SQL Server 2000” software.
(SSFC, 1/26/03, p.A3)(WSJ, 1/28/03, p.A1)
2003 Apr 29, The governor of
Virginia signed a tough antispam law that called for prison and
asset seizures.
(WSJ, 4/30/03, A1)
2003 May 9, The Fizzer computer
virus began circulating aided by its ability to propagate through
the Kazaa file sharing network.
(WSJ, 5/13/03, p.D3)
2003 May 19, It was reported
that a loose affiliation of people worked to coordinate Internet
attacks on span generators. E-mail marketer Optinrealbig.com was one
of those targeted.
(WSJ, 5/19/03, p.A1)
2003 Jul, Yahoo paid $1.6
billion for Overture Services, a pioneer in the paid-search
advertising business. Overture was called GoTo.com and came out of a
factory of companies called Idealab, developed by Bill Gross in
1996. Yahoo started its own search engine this year and stopped
using Google.
(Econ, 5/15/04, e-com p.17)(Econ, 7/8/06,
p.62)(SFC, 2/2/08, p.C1)
2003 Aug 12, An Internet worm
targeting Microsoft Corp Windows users was spreading rapidly around
the world, triggering computer crashes and slowing Web connections.
Dubbed Blaster but also known as LoveSan or MSBlaster, carried a
message for the Microsoft chairman: "Billy Gates why do you make
this possible? Stop making money and fix your software!!"
(AP, 8/12/03)
2003 Aug 29, Jeffrey Lee
Parson (18), suspected of writing a variant of the "Blaster," a
virus-like computer worm, was arrested in his hometown, the
Minneapolis suburb of Hopkins. He was charged with one count of
intentionally causing or attempting to cause damage to a computer
and faced a maximum of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine if
convicted. Parson pleaded guilty in August 2004 and was subsequently
sentenced on January 28, 2005 to 18 months in prison followed by a
three-year supervised release program, and was required to do 225
hours of community service. He was ordered to pay restitution of
$497,546.55 to Microsoft Corporation and $1,056 to specific
individuals to have their computer hard drives cleaned.
(SFC, 8/29/03, p.A1)(SFC, 8/30/03,
p.A2)(www.rbs2.com/parson2.html)
2003 Aug, Skype, founded in
Amsterdam as Kazaa in 2001, released the 1st version of its software
which allowed people to make free voice and video calls over the
internet.
(Econ, 9/16/06, p.79)
2003 Sep 18, Anti-virus
companies warned of a new computer worm circulating through e-mail
that purports to be security software from Microsoft Corp.
(Reuters, 9/18/03)
2003 Oct 31, A new e-mail
virus, "Mimail.C.," started spreading to corporate computers and is
headed for home computers, but computer security experts said they
expect the outbreak to wind down over the weekend.
(AP, 11/1/03)
2003 Nov, In China Jiang Lijun
(39) was sentenced to four years in prison for posting Internet
articles calling for the overthrow of the Communist Party. In 2006
it was reported that Yahoo's Hong Kong unit gave authorities a draft
e-mail that had been saved on Jiang's account. Yahoo also provided
information in the cases of Li Zhi and Shi Tao.
(AP, 4/19/06)
2003 Dec 5, Yahoo Inc. said it
is working on technology to combat e-mail spam by changing the way
the Internet works to require authentication of a message's sender.
(AP, 12/6/03)
2003 Dec 16, Pres. Bush signed
legislation to curb unsolicited commercial e-mails.
(WSJ, 12/17/03, p.A1)
2003 Dec 31, The JenniCam
website, begun by Jennifer Ringley in 1996, shut down. 7 years
earlier she installed a Web camera in her Pennsylvania college dorm
room and kept it on for 24 hours a day recording every detail of her
life.
(SFC, 12/12/03, p.B4)
2003 Apple released its
Internet browser, Safari.
(NW, 4/21/03, p.E12)
2003 Google bought Blogger, a
web service created by Evan Williams, that allowed anybody to create
a blog with a few clicks. Williams went on to create Twitter, a
service that allows users to send short messages in response to the
question: What are you doing.”
(Econ, 12/22/07, p.110)
2003 Microsoft introduced its
own web spider to index web pages.
(Econ, 5/15/04, e-com p.16)
2003 AOL spun off Mozilla.org
with a $2 million cash cushion. Ms. Mitchell Baker, former Netscape
attorney, turned Mozilla, creator of the Firefox web browser, into a
non-profit foundation.
(Econ, 12/17/05, p.64)(SFC, 1/28/08, p.E2)
2003 MySpace.com, an Internet
social networking website, was founded. By 2006 it was the 4th
biggest site on the Web. In 2009 Julia Angwin authored “Stealing
Myspace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America.”
(SFC, 3/10/06, p.A16)(SSFC, 3/29/09, Books p.J1)
2003 Oh Yeon Ho turned his
South Korean Ohmy News website into a for profit firm. In 2006 his
website averaged 700,000 visitors and 2 million page view per day.
(Econ, 4/22/06, Survey p.9)
2003 Philip Rosedale of Linden
Lab (f.1999) created SecondLife, a metaphysical universe, on the
Internet. The company sold virtual property and made money when
residents leased property by charging an average of $20 per virtual
“acre” per month. In 2008 Wagner James Au authored ”The making of
Second Life.”
(Econ, 4/22/06, Survey
p.16)(http://lindenlab.com/)(Econ, 9/30/06, p.78)(WSJ, 3/12/08,
p.D8)
2003 Xing, a professional
social network website, was founded by Lars Hinrichs of Hamburg,
Germany. It went public in 2006.
(Econ, 9/27/08, p.76)
2004 Jan 1, The 1st US
anti-span law, the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, went into effect. It made
it illegal for advertisers to falsify their identity and required an
effective way for recipients to get themselves removed from
advertiser lists.
(SFC, 1/2/04, p.B1)
2004 Jan 9, A new Swen-style
Trojan horse, dubbed Trojan.Xombe and posing as a critical update
from Microsoft, was detected on the Internet.
(AP, 1/9/04)
2004 Jan 27, A new Windows
computer virus, a self-propagating worm known as Mydoom or Novarg,
continued to spread over the Internet.
(SFC, 1/28/04, p.B1)
2004 Jan 28, A new strain of
the Mydoom virus emerged. Mydoom.B was programmed to launch an
attack against Microsoft's web site the following week.
(SFC, 1/29/04, p.B1)
2004 Feb 13, The FCC began
writing rules to enable users to access the Internet through
electric power lines.
(SFC, 2/13/04, p.B1)
2004 Feb 28, It was reported
that 70% South Koreans had high-speed Internet connections.
(Econ, 2/28/04, p.61)
2004 Feb, The Palo Alto-based
Facebook.com, an Internet social networking website, was founded by
Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg. He put Harvard’s yearbook on the
internet and the creation spread to Yale and beyond. He soon faced a
lawsuit from 3 other Harvard students, who alleged he stole their
idea. In 2009 Ben Mezrich authored “The Accidental Billionaires: The
Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal.”
(SSFC, 10/23/05, p.A1)(Econ, 9/16/06, p.69)(Econ,
7/21/07, p.66)(Econ, 8/8/09, p.72)
2004 Mar 10, Four major US
Internet service providers filed a series of lawsuits meant to
shutdown a number of leading spammers.
(SFC, 3/11/04, p.C1)
2004 Mar 12, An FBI proposal
was made public to require all broadband Internet providers to
support easy wiretapping.
(SFC, 3/13/04, p.C2)
2004 Mar 15, A new computer
worm, named "Phatbot," began appearing in the Asia-Pacific region.
Most call it a variation of the longstanding Gaobot or Agobot
family, and sometimes as Polybot. When the worm is run, it sets the
system to autostart the worm at boot time; attempts to terminate
security software running on the computer; and probes network shares
in an attempt to spread itself.
(AP, 3/17/04)
2004 Mar 20, A quickly
spreading Internet worm destroyed or damaged tens of thousands of
personal computers worldwide morning by exploiting a security flaw
in a firewall program designed to protect PCs from online threats.
The "Witty" worm wrote random data onto the hard drives of computers
equipped with the Black Ice and Real Secure Internet firewall
products. It spread automatically to vulnerable computers without
any action on the part of the user.
(WaP, 3/20/04)
2004 Mar 30, AT&T
officially began to offer phone calls via the Internet (VOIP) in 2
state, New Jersey and Texas.
(WSJ, 3/30/04, p.B1)
2004 Apr 1, Google introduce
Gmail, a Web based e-mail service with one gigabyte of free storage
per user. In 2007 the storage was expanded to “free unlimited.”
Google’s index passed 8 billion pages this year.
(WSJ, 6/13/07, p.B1)(SFC, 2/2/08, p.C1)
2004 Apr 15, Tim Berners-Lee,
inventor of the world wide web, became the 1st recipient of
Finland’s Millennium Technology Prize.
(Econ, 5/14/05,
p.84)(www.infoworld.com/article/04/04/16/HNbernerslee_1.html)
2004 Apr 29, Google unveiled an
IPO that could raise as much as $2.7 billion.
(SFC, 4/30/04, p.A1)
2004 Apr, The Anti-Phishing
Working Group counted some 1,125 phishing attacks this month. The
scam of duping computer users into revealing private data developed
into a serious threat in the 2nd half of 2003 when banks in
Australia and New Zealand came under attack. Each attack sends an
estimated 50k to 10 million phishing e-mails.
(WSJ, 5/27/04, p.B1)
2004 Apr, Some 64% of all
Internet e-mail was identified as spam. Up from 60% in Jan.
(WSJ, 5/28/04, p.B1)
2004 May 3, The fast-spreading
"Sasser" computer worm has infected hundreds of thousands of PCs
globally and the number could soon rise sharply. When a machine is
infected, error messages may appear and the computer may reboot
repeatedly.
(Reuters, 5/3/04)
2004 May 7, German authorities
arrested Sven Jaschen, an 18-year-old high school student, for
creating the "Sasser" network computer worm. Jaschan also
confessed to writing the Netsky virus and was suspected to be
responsible for 70% of the 2004 virus infections. In 2005 Jaschan
was found guilty of computer sabotage and illegally altering data.
He was given a suspended sentence of one year and nine months.
(AP, 5/8/04)(USAT, 5/11/04, p.4B)(SFC, 7/29/04,
p.C3)(AP, 7/8/05)
2004 May, Factiva, a web-based
news and information service, launched a new reputation-management
service. Factiva, a joint venture between Dow Jones and Reuters, was
run by Clare Hart.
(Econ, 5/15/04, e-con p.18)
2004 Jun 16, A new computer
worm targeting mobile phones was reported. It was dubbed “Cabir” and
reportedly written by a virus-writing group in Spain known as 29A.
(WSJ, 6/16/04, p.B9)
2004 Jul 26, A new variation of
the Mydoom computer virus spread across the Internet.
(SFC, 7/27/04, p.D1)
2004 Aug 7, AP reported that a
beheading was broadcast on 2 Arab TV stations. The video of the
beheading was fake and had been initially made and posted on the
Internet in May by 3 people from the SF Bay Area. Benjamin
Vanderford of SF said he made the video to show how easy it is to
spread lies over the Internet.
(SSFC, 8/8/04, p.A12)
2004 Aug 18, Google said it now
expects its stock to trade between $85 and $95 per share, down from
its old forecast of between $108 and $135. It also said the total
number of shares to be sold will be cut to 19.6 million, down from
25.7 million.
(AP, 8/18/04)
2004 Aug 19, Google, the
Internet search engine, began trading shares at $85 per share. 14.1
million shares were recently sold in a Dutch Auction at $85 per
share. Google shares closed up 18% at $100.33.
(SFC, 8/19/04, p.A1)(SFC, 8/20/04, p.A1)
2004 Sep 14, Firefox, developed
by Mozilla, released a new Web browser.
(Econ, 9/25/04, p.76)
2004 Sep 15, Amazon unveiled a
new search engine called A9.com.
(Econ, 9/25/04, p.76)
2004 Sep, SF Mayor Newsom
announced the launch of free wireless Internet service at Union
Square. He soon planned to extend free service to Civic Center
Plaza, Portsmounth Square and Ferry Plaza.
(SFC, 10/29/04, p.F1)
2004 Oct 5, The first Web 2.0
Conference opened for a 3-day session at the Hotel Nikko in San
Francisco.
(Econ, 3/21/09,
p.71)(http://conferences.oreillynet.com/web2con/)
2004 Oct 10, It was officially
“Craigslist day” in SF. Craig Newmark started the classified ad
Internet service in 1995 and in 2004 it was in 57 cities and 5
countries.
(Econ, 10/16/04, p.59)
2004 Oct 14, Google Inc.
introduced a program that quickly scours hard drives for documents,
e-mails, instant messages and past Web searches.
(AP, 10/14/04)
2004 Oct 28, AMD released its
new $185 personal Internet Communicator for consumers in developing
countries.
(SFC, 10/28/04, p.C3)
2004 Nov 3, Jeremy Jaynes of
North Carolina became the first person in the US to be convicted of
a felony for sending unsolicited bulk email. He was charged in
Virginia because his emails went through an AOL server there. In
2008 the Virginia Supreme Court declared the state’s antispam law
unconstitutional and reversed Jaynes’ conviction.
(WSJ, 9/13/08,
p.A2)(www.phonebusters.com/english/legal_2004_nov3.html)
2004 Nov 10, Microsoft unveiled
a preview of its new Internet search engine.
(SFC, 11/11/04, p.C1)
2004 Nov 23, The UN Working
Group on Internet Governance (40 delegates) met in Geneva.
(Econ, 11/20/04, p.65)
2004 Dec 13, Google announced
plans to digitally scan the book collections of 5 major libraries,
including the Univ. Michigan, Stanford, Harvard, NY Public Library
and Oxford, which agreed to books published before 1900.
(SFC, 12/14/04, p.A1)
2004 Nov, Digg, an
Internet-based provider of content submitted by users, went live.
Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson founded Digg.com, a web-based news site
using collaborative editing to focus on news in technology.
(SFC, 6/23/06, p.D5)(WSJ, 2/10/07, p.P4)
2004 Eric Jackson authored “The
PayPal Wars.” It describes how PayPal launched its online payment
service and set out to revolutionize the world's currency markets.
It describes how Max Levchin and David Gausebeck developed the
Gausebeck-Levchin test to tell if a machine or a person was signing
up accounts over the Internet.
(www.worldaheadpublishing.com/titles/ppw.php)(SSFC, 2/26/06, p.D3)
2004 FiXs was founded and based
in Fairfax, Virginia, to pilot a federated identity transaction
model and was incorporated as a not-for-profit corporation. A
long-standing affiliation with the DoD credentialing program has
enabled participating government organizations and industry members
to establish secure and interoperable identity verification and
authentication for secure facility and system access.
{USA, Virginia, Internet}
(http://www.fixs.org/)
2004 Joe Kraus co-founded
JotSpot as the first company to provide an application wiki. JotSpot
has since launched several other products.
(http://www.jot.com/)(Econ, 4/22/06, Survey p.14)
2004 WiMax technology, a
long-range wireless standard, provided high-speed Internet access
from a maximum range of 30 miles.
(Econ, 3/13/04, p.64)
2004 GetJar, an independent app
sales portal, was founded in 2004 by Lithuanian-born serial
entrepreneur Ilja Laurs. By 2010 with roughly 57,000 applications
contributed by about 350,000 registered developers, the GetJar
catalog yielded about 60 million downloads per month, up from 15
million monthly a year ago and second in volume only to the App
Store.
(www.entrepreneur.com/magazine/entrepreneur/2010/february/204586.html)
2004 Mark Shuttleworth of South
Africa began funding the Ubuntu project, which made a user-friendly
version of Linux, an open source operating system.
(Econ, 6/9/07, TQ p.33)
2004 Google’s index surpassed 8
billion web pages.
(SFC, 2/2/08, p.C1)
2004 In China Jack Ma, founder
of Alibaba, set up an online payments system called Alipay.
(Econ, 1/1/11, p.55)
2005 Mar 3, AOL launched a new
beta version of its web browser Netscape 8.0.
(WSJ, 3/3/05, p.B1)
2005 Mar 10, It was reported
that a Texas ranch has implemented a computer-assisted remote
hunting website allowing paying hunters to bag big game from their
home computers.
(SFC, 3/10/05, p.A1)
2005 Mar 12, It was reported
that Bernardo Huberman, researcher at Hewlett-Packard, had described
software called Tycoon for directing computons on computing grids.
He used the term “computon” to describe a packet of electromagnetic
energy.
(Econ, 3/12/05, TQ p.6)
2005 Mar 21, Barry Diller's
electronic commerce company IAC/InterActiveCorp announced that it is
buying online search engine Ask Jeeves Inc. for $1.9 billion and
taking aim at the Internet's advertising market leaders.
(http://news.tradingcharts.com/futures/3/3/64797233.html)
2005 Mar 22, IBM unveiled new
anti-span technology called FairUCE. It used a giant database to
identify computers sending spam and returned e-mails from those
listed back to the sending machine.
(WSJ, 3/22/05, p.B1)
2005 Mar 31, A US Commerce
Dept. study on Internet traffic, ordered in 1998, was published
under the title “Signposts in Cyberspace.”
(SFC, 4/1/05, p.C3)
2005 Apr 11, Officials said UC
Berkeley will lead a 5-year, $19 million project, funded by the NSF,
to prevent a hacker threat from decimating US computer networks.
(SFC, 4/12/05, p.B1)(WSJ, 4/12/05, p.B3)
2005 Apr, ICANN authorized the
.jobs and .travel domain names.
(Econ, 4/16/05, p.57)
2005 Jun 1, The Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved the web
suffix .xxx for porn oriented web sites.
(Econ, 6/11/05, p.59)
2005 Jun 27, The US Supreme
Court also ruled that cable-TV companies are not required to share
their high-speed Internet connections with rivals.
(WSJ, 6/28/05, p.B1)
2005 Jun 28, Google unveiled a
free 3-D satellite mapping technology.
(SFC, 6/29/05, p.A1)
2005 Jun 30, A 2-year,
11-nation investigation, called Operation Site Down, culminated with
arrests and the shut down of 8 major pirated film and software
distribution servers. Over 120 cyberpirates were identified.
(SFC, 7/1/05, p.B1)
2005 Aug 5, Baidu.com, a
Chinese search engine, went public on NASDAQ and closed up 354% at
$122.54.
(SFC, 8/6/05, p.C1)
2005 Aug 14, The FBI and
antivirus software companies began to notice that a computer virus
called Zotob had started to spread [see Aug 16].
(WSJ, 11/21/06, p.A13)
2005 Aug 16, Several new
computer worms hit systems running MS Windows 2000. On Aug 25
authorities in Morocco arrested Farid Essebar (18) for writing the
Zotob worm. Atilla Ekici (21) was arrested in Turkey for paying
Essebar to write the worm. In 2006 Morocco sentenced Farid Essebar
(19) to 2 years in prison and Achraf Bahlouo (21) to one year for
their role in unleashing the Zotob worm. Ekici’s trial continued in
Turkey.
(SFC, 8/27/05, p.A2)(WSJ, 9/14/06, p.B3)(WSJ,
11/21/06, p.A1)
2005 Aug 29, A Connecticut man
known on the Internet as "illwill" pleaded guilty in Manhattan
federal court to charges relating to the theft of the source code to
Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating software, considered among the
company's crown jewels. William Genovese, Jr. (28) admitted selling
the source code for Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4.0. On January 27,
2006, he was sentenced to 2 years in jail.
(AP,
8/29/05)(www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/genovesePlea.htm)
2005 Sep 6, The Wikipedia,
which surged this year to become the most popular reference site on
the Web, was fast overtaking several major news sites as the place
where people swarm for context on breaking events. The online
encyclopedia, based in St. Petersburg, Fla., was written entirely by
volunteers.
(Reuters, 9/6/05)(SFC, 12/6/05, p.A1)
2005 Sep, Rupert Murdoch’s News
Corp acquired MySpace.com, an Internet social networking website,
for $580 million. In 2011 Murdoch sold MySpace for $35 million.
(SSFC, 10/23/05, p.A1)(Econ, 7/16/11, p.26)
2005 Sep, Telebid, a German
online auction, was launched. It used purchased-credits, instead of
symbolic offers, for bidding. Over the next few years it expanded
into Austria, Canada, Spain, Britain and America. In 2008 it changed
its name to Swoopo.
(Econ, 8/15/09,
p.58)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swoopo)
2005 Oct 19, Police in Bosnia
arrested a cyber-jihadist who called himself Maximus. Mirsad
Bektasevic, a Swedish teenager of Bosnian extraction, was sentenced
to jail along with 3 others for plotting attacks to take place in
Bosnia or other European countries. On his computer police found
contacts with other jihadists in Europe including Younis Tsouli
(Irhabi007), whom British police arrested 2 days later.
(Econ, 7/14/07,
p.28)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irhabi_007)
2005 Nov 16, A UN technology
summit opened in Tunisia after an 11th-hour agreement that leaves
the United States with ultimate oversight of the main computers that
direct the Internet's flow of information, commerce and dissent.
(AP, 11/16/05)
2005 Nov 29, The Firefox web
browser was upgraded to version 1.5.
(Econ, 12/17/05, p.64)
1998 Nov, Tencent, a Chinese
internet company, was founded in Shenzhen.
(Econ, 7/10/10,
p.61)(www.tencent.com/en-us/at/abouttencent.shtml)
2005 Dec, Steve Chen, Chad
Hurley and Jawed Karim officially launched YouTube, an Internet
based site for sharing video clips. The three founders knew each
other from working together at another Internet start up, PayPal.
The domain name YouTube.com was registered on Valentine's Day in
2005. The first YouTube video was uploaded on April 23, 2005.
(Econ, 4/29/06, p.68)(WSJ, 10/13/06,
p.A12)(http://tinyurl.com/6chl58j)
2005 Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a
single mother from Minnesota, was accused of sharing 24 songs using
KaZaA, an Internet file sharing program. In 2007 a jury ruled
against her and awarded record companies almost $10,000 per song in
statutory damages. She was found guilty again in a 2nd trial in 2009
in which the jury awarded damages of $80,000 per song.
(Econ, 9/5/09, TQ p.4)
2005 Disney launched a free
online game called Virtual Magic Kingdom in conjunction with its
50th anniversary. It became very popular and in 2008 fans protested
plans to shut the site down.
(WSJ, 5/20/08, p.B1)
2005 Global Voices Online was
launched by former CNN Beijing and Tokyo Bureau Chief, Rebecca
MacKinnon and technologist and Africa expert, Ethan Zuckerman while
they were both fellows at the Berkman Center for Internet and
Society at Harvard University to create links between bloggers in
different countries.
(Econ, 9/4/10,
p.62)(http://globalvoicesonline.org/about/)
2005 Krishnan Ganesh founded
TutorVista, an Internet service using Indian tutors for Western
students.
(Econ, 6/23/07, p.76)
2005 The Internet news hub
Huffington Post was founded by Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer and
a group of other investors. In 2011 the site, which attracted some
25 million monthly visitors, was sold to AOL.
(AP, 2/7/11)(Econ, 2/12/11, p.71)
2005 Microsoft released MSN
Search, powered by its own internally developed search engine. MSN
had previously relied on Yahoo for its search function.
(SFC, 2/2/08, p.C1)
2005 Russian internet investors
Yuri Milner and Gregory Finger pooled their interests in mail.ru, a
Russian web portal, and created Digital Sky Technologies (DST).
(Econ, 7/10/10, p.61)
2006 Jan 19, Global News Blog,
a weblog of Global Geopolitics Net, began breaking news and analysis
on global security and intelligence issues. The site is sponsored by
the Eurasia Research Center. Alan Fogelquist, the site editor, is a
historian and geopolitical analyst.
(http://globalnewsblog.com/blog/?m=200601)
2006 Jan, The US National
Science Foundation launched 2 initiatives improve the Internet. The
Global Environment for Networking Innovations (GENI) planned an
advance test bed network for piloting new protocols and
applications. The Future Internet Design (FIND) planned to examine
how best to equip the internet for the needs of the future.
(Econ, 3/11/06, Survey p.32)
2006 Feb 23, A New Zealand
teenager hacked into the University of Pennsylvania computer system.
Owen Thor Walker (18), known by his online name "AKILL," also was
linked to a network accused of infiltrating 1.3 million computers
and skimming millions of dollars from victims' bank accounts. In
2008 Walker was ordered to pay more than $11,000 in fines but
avoided a conviction so that he can help police solve computer
crimes.
(AP, 7/15/08)
2006 Mar 1, China moved ahead
with 3 new internet address suffixes in the Chinese language, as
national variants to .cn, .com and .net.
(Econ, 3/4/06, p.61)
2006 Mar 9, Google announced
that it has bought Upstartle LLC, whose Writely.com service allows
users to create, edit and share documents online.
(WSJ, 3/10/06, p.A16)
2006 Apr, As of this month
Google held 43% of the US search engine market share. This reached
50% counting AOL, which used Google’s search engine technology;
Yahoo had 28%, MSN had 13% and Ask, owned by IAC/Interactive Corp,
had 6%.
(Econ, 6/17/06, p.65)
2006 Jun 26, Foundem, a small
British shopping comparison site, discovered that all of its obvious
comparison shopping keywords no longer applied for the company due
to changes made by Google.
(www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/19/google_hand_of_god/)
2006 Jul 19, Alain Rappaport
premiered the web site www.medstory.com, a consumer search product
for information on health and medicine.
(SFC, 7/19/06, p.C1)
2006 Jul 27, Pres. Bush signed
the Adam Walsh Act of 2006. It required convicted child molesters to
be listed on a national Internet database and face a felony charge
for failing to update their whereabouts.
(SFC, 7/28/06,
p.A1)(www.fd.org/odstb_AdamWalsh.htm)(Econ, 8/8/09, p.9)
2006 Aug 2, AOL shifted to an
advertising strategy as customers cancelled their dial-up service
and jumped to high-speed Internet connections.
(SFC, 8/3/06, p.C1)
2006 Sep 1, Brazil pressured
Google to turn over data from Web sites that the government said
were used by criminals. Authorities gave Google 15 days to comply or
face a daily fine of $23,000.
(SFC, 9/2/06, p.C1)
2006 Sep 18, A court in Belgium
ordered Google to remove all links to French and German language
newspaper reports published in Belgium due to copyright laws.
(SFC, 9/19/06, p.D7)
2006 Sep, The ChaCha phone
service (800-224-2242) began providing answers using a combination
of automation and people-powered search.
(www.chacha.com/)(WSJ, 4/24/08, p.D1)
2006 Oct 9, Google Inc. agreed
to acquire YouTube Inc., a leading video-sharing Web site, for $1.65
billion in stock.
(SFC, 10/10/06, p.E1)(WSJ, 10/14/06, p.B14)
2006 Oct 17, Megan Meier
(b.1992) of Missouri committed suicide following a series of cruel
messages on the MySpace online social network. In 2008 Lori drew
(49) of Missouri was indicted for perpetrating an online hoax, which
led to Meier’s suicide. Drew was convicted on Nov 26 of only three
minor offenses for her role in the Internet hoax. The federal jury
could not reach a verdict on the main charge against 49-year-old
Lori Drew, conspiracy, and rejected three other felony counts of
accessing computers without authorization to inflict emotional harm.
A final decision on the verdicts was still pending in 2009.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan_Meier_suicide_controversy)(SFC,
5/16/08, p.A4)(AP, 11/27/08)(Econ, 7/11/09, p.232)
2006 Dec 8, McAfee, an Internet
security firm, reported that organized gangs have adopted
"KGB-style" tactics to hire high-flying computer students to commit
Internet crime.
(AP, 12/8/06)
2006 Lawrence Lessig authored
“Code: Version 2.0,” in which he noted that online communities were
transcending the limits of conventional states. He predicted that
members of these communities would find it “difficult to stand
neutral in this int’l. space.”
(Econ, 7/24/10, p.59)
2006 Tim Berners Lee, creator
of the world wide web, helped establish the Web Science Research
Initiative (WSRI), a collaboration between MIT and the Univ. of
Southampton on web science, a field that blends sociology with
computer science.
(Econ, 3/10/07, TQ p.32)
2006 Niklas Zennström and
Janus Friis (founders of Skype and Kazaa) began developing Joost, a
system for distributing TV shows and other forms of video over the
Web using peer-to-peer TV technology (www.joost.com/).
(Econ, 6/9/07, TQ
p.9)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joost)
2006 Microsoft retired MSN
Search in favor of the Live Search brand.
(SFC, 2/2/08, p.C1)
2006 Twitter, an Internet
service that allows users to send short messages in response to the
question: “What are you doing,” was co-founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz
Stone, and Evan Williams.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter)
2007 Jan, Avaaz, a web-based
political movement, was launched with a simple democratic mission:
organize citizens everywhere to help close the gap between the world
we have and the world most people want.
(Econ, 9/4/10, p.62)(www.avaaz.org/en/about.php)
2007 Feb 22, Abdel Kareem Nabil
(22), an Egyptian blogger arrested in 2006, was convicted of
insulting Islam and President Hosni Mubarak and sentenced to four
years in prison in Egypt's first prosecution of a blogger. Nabil was
convicted for calling Islam a brutal religion in a piece he wrote in
2005 after Muslim worshippers attacked a Coptic Christian church in
Alexandria. In 2009 an Appeals court upheld his 4-year sentence.
Nabil, aka Kareem Amer, was released on Nov 5, 2010, and then
re-arrested, held for 11 days and beaten.
(AP, 2/22/07)(AP, 12/22/09)(AP,
11/17/10)(Reuters, 11/24/10)
2007 Mar, The Website
DoMyStuff.com, founded by Darren Berkovitz, went live as a hiring
hall for personal assistants.
(SSFC, 8/19/07, p.D1)
2007 Apr, The web site
mediapredict.com began operations. The NYC-based start-up used
editorial feedback from a large number of volunteers in a game
format to help executives decide which manuscripts should become
books.
(Econ, 6/2/07, p.73)(http://mediapredict.com/)
2007 May 8, Comcast Corp. Chief
Executive Brian Roberts dazzled a cable industry audience, showing
off for the first time in public new technology that enabled a data
download speed of 150 megabits per second, roughly 25 times faster
than today's standard cable modems. The technology, called DOCSIS
3.0, was developed by the cable industry's research arm, Cable
Television Laboratories.
(AP, 5/9/07)
2007 May 9, In the early hours
Internet traffic in Estonia spiked to thousands of times the normal
flow. May 10 was heavier still, forcing Estonia’s biggest bank to
shut down its online service for more than an hour. Hansabank
continued under assault and worked to block access to 300 suspect
Internet addresses. On March 12, 2009, Konstantin Goloskokov, an
activist with Russia's Nashi youth group and aide to a pro-Kremlin
member of parliament, said he had organized a network of
sympathizers who bombarded Estonian Internet sites with electronic
requests, causing them to crash.
(www.lunchoverip.com/2007/05/estonia_under_c.html)(Reuters, 3/12/09)
2007 May, Mahalo.com, a web
directory (or human search engine), was launched in alpha test by
Jason Calacanis.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahalo.com)
2007 May, Twitter, an Internet
service that allows users to send short messages in response to the
question: “What are you doing,” was incorporated. Since its creation
in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained notability and popularity
worldwide.
(http://twitter.com/)(SFC, 10/5/09,
p.D3)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter)
2007 Jun 4, China promised to
better control emissions of greenhouse gases, unveiling a national
program to combat global warming, but rejected mandatory caps on
emissions as unfair to countries still trying to catch up with the
developed West. The government also said it will license no new
Internet cafes this year while regulators carry out an industry-wide
inspection, amid official concern that online material is harming
young people.
(AP, 6/4/07)
2007 Jun, Wenda, a
question-and-answer “knowledge community” product,
developed by Google in China, was launched in Russia.
(Econ, 10/13/07, SR p.7)
2007 Jul 5, British media
reported that a Scottish house had been used as a makeshift bomb
factory to carry out the terror attacks in London and Scotland.
Three "cyber-jihadis" who used the Internet to urge Muslims to wage
holy war on non-believers were jailed for between six-and-a-half and
10 years in the first case of its kind in Britain. Morocco-born
Younis Tsouli (23), an al-Qaida-inspired computer expert who dubbed
himself "the jihadist James Bond," was sentenced to 10 years in
prison for running a network of extremist Web sites. Accomplices
Tariq al-Daour and Waseem Mughal also got prison terms.
(AP, 7/5/07)(AFP, 7/5/07)(Econ, 7/14/07, p.29)
2007 Jul 18, Thailand’s
Computer Crime Act, intended to prevent cybercrimes, came into
force. Most prosecutions that followed under the act were for online
content that supposedly endangered national security.
(Econ, 2/5/11,
p.54)(www.prachatai.com/english/node/117)
2007 Jul 23, Hewlett-Packard
acquired Opsware, a software company founded by Marc Andreessen, for
$1.6 billion. He formed Opsware, a Web service company, in 1999
under the name Loudcloud Inc., which was renamed to Opsware in 2002.
(SFC, 7/24/07, p.B1)
2007 Jul 24, Intel Corp. said
it has fabricated the first modulator made from silicon that can
encode data onto a beam of light at a rate of 40 billion bits per
second (gigabits). Such speeds represented a rate 40 times faster
than most corporate data networks.
(WSJ, 1/25/07, p.B4)
2007 Aug 28, EarthLink, the
Atlanta-based Internet provider, announced that it no longer
believed the providing citywide Wi-Fi for San Francisco was viable
for the company.
(SFC, 8/30/07, p.A1)
2007 Aug 28, Chicago abandoned
plans for a city-wide Wi-Fi network to access the Internet as
EarthLink underwent restructuring.
(www.fool.com/investing/general/2007/08/30/too-windy-for-wi-fi.aspx)
2007 Sep 21, Google filed with
the EU competition regulator for permission to buy rival DoubleClick
for $3.1 billion.
(Reuters, 9/21/07)
2007 Oct 5, Europe's .eu
Internet domain registrar EURid said the Internet address
www.sex.asia is likely to be the domain name most in demand next
week when dot Asia Web sites are launched.
(AP, 10/5/07)
2007 Oct 10, Jimmy Wales,
founder of the Wikimedia Foundation (2003), said he plans to move
the small operation from St. Petersburg, Florida, to SF.
(SFC, 10/11/07, p.C1)
2007 Oct 12, Two men were
sentenced to prison in the first successful criminal prosecution
under the CAN-SPAM Act. James R. Schaffer, 41, of Paradise Valley,
Arizona, and Jeffrey A. Kilbride, 41, of Venice, California, were
convicted in June of fraud, conspiracy, money laundering, and
obscenity. Last week, the judge in the case sentenced Schaffer to 63
months and Kilbride to 72 months in federal prison.
(www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=1000096UTGDC)
2007 Oct 15, Internet addresses
began in 11 languages that do not use the Roman alphabet.
(WSJ, 10/11/07, p.B1)
2007 Oct 24,
Microsoft secured a deal to buy 1.6% of Facebook, a social
networking site, for $240 million.
(SFC, 10/25/07, p.A1)
2007 Oct 29, African leaders
and technology experts met in Rwanda to discuss plans to boost the
continent's development by securing universal Internet access by
2012.
(AP, 10/29/07)
2007 Nov 1, An alliance
including Google announced a plan to make social networks as open as
Netscape’s browser made the web.
(Econ, 11/3/07, p.78)
2007 Nov 5, Google introduced
Android, a new operating system for cell phones. It was expected to
appear in phones in the second half of 2008.
(SFC, 11/6/07, p.A1)
2007 Nov 6, Chinese e-commerce
portal Alibaba.com soared in its debut on the Hong Kong stock
market. It opened at $3.86 and closed at $5.09.
(AP, 11/6/07)(SFC, 11/7/07, p.C1)
2007 Nov 24, Beginning today
and continuing for less than a week, bad guys loaded up more than
40,000 Web pages with malicious software and thousands of common
search terms. The culprits' use of botnets to push a dark form of
SEO (search-engine optimization), called a "Google bomb," to boost
their sites' Google rankings.
(www.pcworld.com/article/id,141796/article.html)(PCWorld, 1/28/08)
2007 Nov 27, Google said it
will spend millions of dollars to develop renewable energy as part
of a plan to clean the environment and reduce the company’s own
power bill.
(SFC, 11/28/07, p.A1)
2007 Nov 30, New Zealand
officials said police have questioned the suspected teenage kingpin
of an international cyber crime network accused of infiltrating 1.3
million computers and skimming millions of dollars from victims'
bank accounts. Earlier this month, Ryan Goldstein, 21, of Ambler,
Pa., was indicted in the case. Authorities allege that the New
Zealand suspect and Goldstein were involved in crashing a University
of Pennsylvania engineering school server Feb. 23, 2006. On Feb 29
Owen Thor Walker (18) was charged with two counts of accessing a
computer for dishonest purpose, damaging or interfering with a
computer system and possessing software for committing crime, and
two counts of accessing a computer system without authorization. In
2008 Walker pleaded guilty to 6 charges of computer hacking.
(AP, 11/30/07)(AP, 2/29/08)(SFC, 4/2/08, p.C2)
2007 Dec 15, It was reported
that Google is testing a new service called Knol, that enlists
selected users to write about the breadth of human knowledge in
competition with Wikipedia.
(SFC, 12/15/07, p.C1)
2007 Dec 17, US trade officials
said the US has reached a deal with the EU, Japan and Canada to keep
its Internet gambling market closed to foreign companies, but is
continuing talks with India, Antigua and Barbuda, Macau and Costa
Rica.
(AP, 12/17/07)
2007 Julian Assange, a former
Australian hacker, founded Wikileaks, an international publishing
service for whistle-blowers.
(Econ, 6/12/10, p.67)
2007 Dell Computer created
IdeaStorm, “a way of building an online community that brings all of
us closer to the creative side of technology by allowing you to
share ideas and collaborate with one another.”
(www.dellideastorm.com/about)
2007 Google garnered 56% of the
US Internet search market. Yahoo’s share sank to 20% and Microsoft’s
grew to 14%.
(SFC, 2/2/08, p.C1)
2007 Tom Costello and his wife
Anna Patterson of Menlo Park, Ca., founded Cuil, an Internet search
engine. By mid 2008 they claimed to have an index of 120 billion Web
pages. They launched www.cuil.com on July 28, 2008.
(SFC, 7/28/08, p.D1)(WSJ, 7/28/08, p.B5)
2007 Mark Pincus founded Zynga
Game Network. The company had a smash hit with the social online
game FarmVille in 2009. By the end of 2010 the San Francisco-based
company was valued at $5.4 billion.
(SFC, 11/19/10, p.D8)
2008 Jan 16, CIA analyst Tom
Donahue disclosed that criminals have been able to hack into
computer systems via the Internet and cut power to several cities
outside the US. He offered few specifics on what actually went
wrong.
(www.pcworld.com/article/id,141564-c,hackers/article.html)
2008 Jan 31, The Mideast and
India suffered a 2nd day of telecom woes after two undersea Internet
cables in the Mediterranean sustained damage.
(WSJ, 2/1/08, p.A1)
2008 Feb 15, It was reported
that a new computer virus called Mocmex, identified as a Trojan
Horse from China, had been discovered in digital photo frames. It
recognized and blocked antivirus software from over 100 security
vendors and collected passwords for online games.
(SFC, 2/15/08, p.C1)
2008 Feb 21, Google Inc. said
will begin storing the medical records of a few thousand people as
it tests a long-awaited health service that's likely to raise more
concerns about the volume of sensitive information entrusted to the
Internet search leader.
(AP, 2/21/08)
2008 Mar 11, EU regulators
cleared Google's $3.1 billion bid for online ad tracker DoubleClick,
saying the acquisition won't curb competition for online ads.
(AP, 3/11/08)
2008 Mar 12, Hulu.com, a free
video Web site, was launched as a online joint video venture between
NBC and News Corp. In 2010 it announced that it would begin selling
subscriptions.
(Econ, 7/3/10,
p.63)(www.hulu.com/about/company_timeline)
2008 Mar 13, AOL said it will
acquire Bebo, a social Web site, for $850 million.
(SFC, 3/14/08, p.C1)
2008 Mar 14, It was reported
that China had likely surpassed the US last month in its number of
Internet users.
(WSJ, 3/14/08, p.B3)
2008 Mar 17, Hannaford Bros., a
grocery store chain in the Northeast US and Florida owned by
Belgium’s Delhaize Group SA, disclosed that as many as 4.2 million
customer account numbers had been stolen between Dec 7 and Mar 10.
The intrusion was not discovered until Feb 27 and occurred over a
network system that experts had believed to be secure.
(WSJ, 3/31/08, p.B4)
2008 Mar 23, Network Solutions,
an American network provider, said it had suspended a website that
Dutch MP Geert Wilders had reserved to post his anti-Islamic film,
which has sparked wide condemnation and fears of a backlash.
(AP, 3/23/08)
2008 Mar 25, Officials said
Indonesia plans to restrict access to pornographic and violent sites
on the Internet after the country's parliament passed a new
information bill.
(Reuters, 3/25/08)
2008 Mar 25, It was reported
that Syria is cracking down more on Internet use, imposing tighter
monitoring of citizens who link to the Web, as well as jailing
bloggers who criticize the government and blocking YouTube and other
Web sites deemed harmful to state security.
(AP, 3/25/08)
2008 Mar 26, TimeRime BV was
founded by Marijn Bom, Jaap Joziasse, Gerard Pastwa and Pico
Wilbrenninck, as a spin-off of the Dutch webdevelopment company
Hoppinger.com.
(www.timerime.com/)
2008 Mar 27, Adobe systems, the
maker of the popular photo-editing software Photoshop, launched a
basic version available for free online.
(AP, 3/27/08)
2008 Apr 8, Indonesian Internet
companies blocked access to YouTube and MySpace, heeding a
government order aimed at stopping people from watching an
anti-Islam film by a Dutch lawmaker.
(AP, 4/8/08)
2008 Apr 8, The UN refugee
agency unveiled a new partnership with Internet giant Google to help
track refugees from Iraq to Darfur and raise public awareness of its
work.
(AP, 4/8/08)
2008 Apr 16, Computer
consultant John Schiefer (26) pleaded guilty in Los Angeles to
raiding hundreds of thousands of computers with spyware to steal
users' identities and commit fraud.
(AFP, 4/17/08)
2008 Apr 23, German publisher
Bertelsmann said it planned to publish the world's first reference
book based on entries from Wikipedia, the popular online
encyclopedia. The single volume, 992-page tome would contain about
50,000 condensed entries and sell for about $31.80.
(AP, 4/23/08)(SFC, 4/24/08, p.C1)
2008 May 12, The Arab Network
for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) said that an Egyptian
government-owned Internet service provider on May 4 blocked the
Egyptian Movement for Change - Kefaya website, in the latest
crackdown on the country's cyber dissidents.
(AFP, 5/12/08)
2008 May 12, Powerset, a
SF-based Internet company founded in 2005, announced a limited
release of its search engine. Executives said it fielded queries in
natural language with attempts to deduce intent.
(SFC, 5/12/08, p.D1)(www.powerset.com/)
2008 May 13, EarthLink said it
is pulling out of its high-speed Internet network in Philadelphia,
and that it would shut down the operation on June 12.
(SFC, 5/14/08, p.C3)
2008 May 13, Microsoft Corp.
introduced its WorldWide Telescope, bringing the free Web-based
program for zooming around the universe to a broad audience.
(AP, 5/13/08)(SFC, 5/13/08, p.A1)
2008 May 14, Plaxo, an online
address book and social networking service, reported it had signed
an agreement to be acquired by Comcast. It was founded by Napster
co-founder Sean Parker, Minh Nguyen and two Stanford engineering
students, Todd Masonis and Cameron Ring and was based in Mountain
View, Ca.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaxo)
2008 May 15, CBS Corp.
announced it was buying SF-based Cnet Networks, an Internet
technology news provider, for $1.8 billion in cash.
(SFC, 5/16/08, p.C1)
2008 May 17, Spanish police
announced the arrest of five people this week suspected of hacking
into or outright disabling thousands of Internet pages, some of them
run by government agencies in the US, Latin America and Asia. Two of
the suspects were 16 years old. The others were 19 or 20.
(AP, 5/17/08)
2008 May 19, Google made
available a free service allowing customers to manage their medical
records online at www.google.com/health.
(SFC, 5/20/08, p.D1)
2008 Jun 18, Sweden's
Parliament narrowly approved a contentious law that gives
authorities sweeping powers to eavesdrop on all e-mail and telephone
traffic that crosses the Nordic nation's borders. Outrage over the
statute soon led to 2 million protests, filed by e-mail. In
September the government approved 15 changes following the
widespread protests.
(AP, 6/18/08)(AP, 7/2/08)(SFC, 9/26/08, p.A4)
2008 Jun 25, Dozens of
Belarusian news Web sites filled their pages with grim black banners
to protest a new media law that will severely restrict the last
source of independent information in the repressive ex-Soviet state.
(AP, 6/26/08)
2008 Jun, Evri, a Semantic Web
company, was launched in beta test. Evri’s first CEO, Neil Roseman,
conducted a demo of Evri.com at the All Things Digital conference in
May 2008. On March 11, 2010, Evri announced it's acquisition of
Radar Networks and its key property Twine.com.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evri)
2008 Jul 13, Terry Childs (43),
a San Francisco computer engineer, was arrested on felony charges
for allegedly plotting to hijack the city’s computer system. Childs,
who continue to draw his $127,735 annual salary, refused to provide
passwords to the network system and was held in lieu of a $5 million
bail. Mayor Newsom met with Childs on July 21, who provided system
code. Cisco engineers had the system back under control by July 22.
On April 27, 2010, Childs was convicted of felony computer
tampering. On April 27, 2010, a Superior Court jury concluded that
his crime cost the city over $200,000, making him eligible for a
maximum state sentence of 5 years.
(SFC, 7/16/08, p.B1)(SFC, 7/23/08, p.B1)(SFC,
4/28/10, p.C1)
2008 Jul 23, Google unveiled a
new service dubbed “Knol,” an Internet encyclopedia, in which
contributing authors would share in ad revenue.
(SFC, 7/24/08, p.C4)
2008 Jul 31, Booz Allen
Hamilton, a consulting firm on cybersecurity, split from Booz &
Co., in order to focus on the public sector. Booz & Co.
continued focused on the private sector. Their non-compete agreement
expired in August, 2011.
(Econ, 7/16/11,
p.69)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booz_Allen_Hamilton)
2008 Aug 7, Heavy shelling
overnight in the Georgian breakaway province of South Ossetia
wounded at least 21 people. Cyber attacks from Russia began to
target Georgian government Web sites. An organization known as the
Russian Business Network was the leading suspect in the attacks.
Georgia’s Pres. Saakashvili ordered the shelling of Tskhinvali, the
capital of South Ossetia.
(AP, 8/7/08)(WSJ, 8/12/08, p.A9)(Econ, 8/30/08,
p.49)
2008 Sep 2, Google’s new Web
browser, named Chrome, became available for download.
(WSJ, 9/2/08, p.A1)
2008 Sep 4, German ministers
agreed to update data protection laws for the digital age in the
wake of scandals showing how easily personal details can be bought
on the Internet.
(AFP, 9/4/08)
2008 Sep 6, Yahoo! Japan
announced support for victimized users whose Yahoo IDs were used
illegally. The company admitted that its online auction site
suffered a huge security breach and agreed to reimburse users who
had been charged fees relating to fraudulent transactions.
(http://blog.trendmicro.com/caution-needed-jp-yahoo-auctions-site-phished/)(Econ,
10/18/08, p.76)
2008 Sep 9, O3B Networks Ltd.,
founded by Greg Wyler (38), announced plans to launch as many as 16
satellites that could provide Internet service to Africa, the Middle
East and parts of Latin America by 2010 at a cost of some $650
million.
(WSJ, 9/9/08, p.B1)(www.o3bnetworks.com/)
2008 Sep 23, Google and
T-Mobile unveiled the T-Mobile G1, the first phone to use the
Google’s Android operating system.
(SFC, 9/24/08, p.C1)
2008 Sep 24, Google introduced
a $10 million project to reward 5 winners in an Internet competition
for an idea making the world a better place.
(SFC, 9/25/08, p.C1)
2008 Sep 24, Oracle unveiled a
joint project with Hewlett Packard for a storage server for data
warehousing: the HP Oracle Database Machine.
(SFC, 9/25/08, p.C1)
2008 Oct 1, Spanish police said
they have staged their biggest ever operation against Internet child
pornography, arresting 121 people suspected of involvement in a
network that reached 75 countries. Some 800 police took part in
Operation Carousel, an investigation that began last year in
cooperation with Brazilian police.
(AFP, 10/1/08)
2008 Oct 28, Google along with
the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild
announced a settlement regarding the use of copyrighted book
material. Google agreed to pay $125 million to start the Books
Rights Registry, resolve legal fees and deal with other issues
relating to authors and online book use.
(SFC, 10/29/08, p.C1)
2008 Nov 4, The Federal
Communications Commission ruled that a valuable chunk of wireless
spectrum will be open to whatever mobile devices Americans want to
use, amounting to a political setback for traditional telephone
companies and a partial win for Google.
(http://tinyurl.com/5uyqzj)(SFC, 11/7/08, p.C1)
2008 Nov 6, A Romanian computer
programmer who hacked into computers used by the U.S. Navy, the
Department of Energy and NASA was convicted on Romanian charges and
ordered to pay thousands in damages. Victor Faur (28) was also given
a 16-month suspended prison sentence. In 2006 Faur was indicted in
the United States on nine federal counts of computer intrusion and
one of conspiracy.
(AP, 11/10/08)
2008 Nov 12, The Department of
the Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board announced the release of
a joint final rule to implement the Unlawful Internet Gambling
Enforcement Act of 2006. The act made it illegal for financial
institutions to transfer funds between punters and online gambling
sites. Compliance was required by Dec 1, 2009.
(www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/bcreg/20081112b.htm)(WSJ,
11/13/08, p.A1)
2008 Nov 17, Yahoo said
co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang will resign his post as CEO, but
continue his previous role as “Chief Yahoo” and remain on the
company’s board.
(SFC, 11/18/08, p.A1)
2008 Nov 19, In Miami, Florida,
police arrived to find Abraham Biggs (19) dead in his father's bed
12 hours after the Broward College student first declared on a Web
site that he hated himself and planned to die. It was only then that
the Web feed stopped. Some users told investigators they did not
take him seriously because he had threatened suicide on the site
before.
(AP, 11/22/08)
2008 Nov 26, Qatar based Al
Jazeera launched Sharek, a website where photos and videos can be
submitted for use, once verified, in Al Jazeera’s television and
online reports.
(Econ, 7/9/11, SR
p.10)(http://tinyurl.com/5hsj2k)
2008 Dec 12, A court in
Australia approved the use of Facebook, a popular social networking
Web site, to notify a couple that they lost their home after
defaulting on a loan.
(AP, 12/16/08)
2008 Dec 17, Microsoft said
will release an emergency patch today to fix a perilous software
flaw allowing hackers to hijack Internet Explorer browsers and take
over computers.
(AFP, 12/17/08)
2008 Dec 19, Egypt's
communications ministry says Internet cables in the Mediterranean
Sea have been cut, causing massive Internet outages.
(AP, 12/19/08)
2008 Dec 20, The NY Times said
China has blocked access to its Web site, days after the central
government defended its right to censor online content it deems
illegal.
(AP, 12/20/08)
2008 Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard
professor, authored “The Future of the Internet – And How To Stop
It,” in which he explains how the promise of the Internet might not
be realized, and points the way toward reducing the current risks.
(Econ, 9/4/10, p.76)
2008 NATO set up a research
center in cyberdefence in Tallinn, Estonia. It was scheduled to be
formally inaugurated in 2009.
(Econ, 12/6/08, TQ p.21)
2008 Randall Stross authored
“Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything
We Know.”
(WSJ, 9/17/08, p.A25)
2008 Foreign intelligence
inserted a flash drive into a US military laptop on a post in the
Middle East. In 2010 it was disclosed that the malicious code placed
on the drive uploaded itself onto a network run by the US military’s
Central Command and resulted in the most significant breach of US
military computers.
(SFC, 8/26/10, p.A7)
2008 Nathan Eagle founded a
service called txteagle, a Boston-based service, to distribute small
jobs via text messaging in return for small payments.
(Econ, 10/30/10,
p.73)(http://smlxtralarge.com/2010/01/19/the-future-of-worktxteagle/)
2008 The Chronicle of Life
Foundation was established by Kai Pommerenke, a UC Santa Cruz
economist, as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Its mission was
to save personal memories and any photos or other files, thus
creating a chronicle of one’s life. The service was launched for
public use on Dec 20, 2010.
(SFC, 1/10/11,
p.D4)(www.chronicleoflife.com/index)
2008 Syrian authorities blocked
225 internet sites this year, up from 159 in 2007.
(Econ, 7/25/09, SR p.13)
2009 Jan 5, China launched a
major crackdown on Internet pornography targeting popular online
portals and major search engines such as Google.
(AP, 1/5/09)
2009 Jan 12, State media said
China has shut down 91 websites for pornographic and other "vulgar"
content, as well as a political blog portal, since announcing its
latest bid to ensure Internet morality.
(Reuters, 1/12/09)
2009 Jan 12, Kazakh PM Karim
Masimov told his ministers to start personal blogs to get them
closer to the people of the former Soviet state.
(AP, 1/12/09)
2009 Jan 15, Police in New
Zealand said they had nabbed a man who was trying to crack a bar's
safe after posting security camera footage of the act on the
Internet networking site Facebook.
(AP, 1/15/09)
2009 Jan 18, Kyrgyzstan began
to come under a massive cyber attack attributed to Russian
“cyber-militia.” Less than 20% of the country’s 5.3 million
population had online access. Proposed reasons for the attacks
included the US use of an air base for operations in Afghanistan or
a hit on the fledgling Kyrgyz opposition, which has used the
Internet to express its discontent.
(WSJ, 1/28/08, p.A10)
2009 Jan 27, The
social-networking site Facebook removed a group whose title
advocated raising money so a gunman could be hired to "liquidate"
Bolivia's leftist president, Evo Morales. The Spanish-language
group, created in August, had 8,069 members and had drawn the
attention of at least one outraged blogger, when The Associated
Press alerted Facebook. Creator Hony Pierola (20) denied any malice.
(AP, 1/27/09)
2009 Jan 29, Swiss police said
they stumbled across a large marijuana plantation last year while
using Google Earth, the search engine company's satellite mapping
software. They arrested 16 people and seized 1.1 tons (1.2 US tons)
of marijuana as well as cash and valuables worth 900,000 Swiss
francs ($780,000).
(AP, 1/29/09)
2009 Feb 10, The European Union
announced that it has signed a pact with 17 social networking
providers including Facebook, MySpace and Google to improve
safeguards against the bullying of teenagers online.
(AP, 2/10/09)
2009 Feb 26, British
prosecutors said they would not bring charges against Gary McKinnon,
a computer expert accused by a US attorney of the "biggest military
hack of all time," dealing a blow to his bid to avoid extradition.
(AP, 2/26/09)
2009 Mar 4, The Finnish
Parliament approved controversial legislation that allows employers
to track workers' e-mails.
(AP, 3/4/09)
2009 Mar 6, In Thailand
Chiranuch Premchaiporn was arrested for violating the country’s
Computer Crime Act. She faced 10 charges for not preventing comments
on bulletin boards that might have offended the royal family.
(http://tinyurl.com/4j6w77d)(Econ, 2/5/11, p.54)
2009 Mar 16, The Vatican said
it will launch a Chinese version of its website on March 19 in an
effort to bring more of Pope Benedict's message to China, whose
communist government does not allow Catholics to recognize his
authority.
(Reuters, 3/16/09)
2009 Mar 17, The Seattle Post
Intelligencer, owned by the Hearst Corp., printed its last newspaper
edition. It will become exclusively Web-based as Seattlepi.com,
making it the nation’s largest daily newspaper to move to online
only.
(SFC, 3/17/09, p.A8)
2009 Mar 23, Advance
Publications Inc., owner of the Ann Arbor News and 7 other Michigan
newspaper, announced that the 174-year-old Ann Arbor News will
publish its last print edition in July and then become a community
oriented Web site.
(WSJ, 3/24/09, p.B5)
2009 Mar 29, Canadian
researchers said a shadowy cyber-espionage network based mostly in
China has infiltrated secret government and private computers around
the world, including those of the Dalai Lama. They said the network,
known as GhostNet, had infected 1,295 computers in 103 countries and
penetrated systems containing sensitive information in top
political, economic and media offices.
(AP, 3/29/09)
2009 Mar 30, An “Open Cloud”
manifesto was published. IBM and other tech companies issued a
statement of principles that called for keeping cloud computing
services as open as possible.
(www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2009/tc20090329_463505.htm)
2009 Apr 1, In Sweden a new law
cracking down on online copyright violation went into force leading
to a sharp drop in internet traffic.
(AP, 4/3/09)(http://tinyurl.com/c96saw)
2009 Apr 7, US military leaders
said the Pentagon has spent over $100 million in the past 6 months
responding to and repairing damage from cyber attacks and other
computer network problems.
(SFC, 4/8/09, p.C3)
2009 Apr 7, Australia announced
plans to build a 30 billion US dollar broadband network, its biggest
infrastructure project ever, opting to retain government control
rather than contract out the deal.
(AFP, 4/7/09)
2009 Apr 8, The Wall Street
Journal reported that cyberspies have penetrated the US electrical
grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt
the system.
(AP, 4/8/09)
2009 Apr 9, Vandals in the San
Jose, and San Carlos, Ca., chopped fiber optic cables disrupting
service for hundreds of thousands of people in Santa Clara, Santa
Cruz and San Benito counties.
(SFC, 4/10/09, p.A1)
2009 Apr 9, French lawmakers
rejected a tough new Internet piracy bill that would cut off illegal
downloaders, in a surprise setback for President Nicolas Sarkozy's
government.
(AP, 4/9/09)
2009 Apr 14, The EU started
legal action against Britain for not applying EU data privacy rules
that would restrict an Internet advertising tracker called Phorm
from watching how users surf the Web.
(AP, 4/14/09)
2009 Apr 17, Five of Germany's
leading Internet providers agreed to block access to sites
identified by national criminal investigators as hosting child
pornography, as authorities reported the breakup of an international
ring.
(AP, 4/17/09)
2009 Apr 17, A Swedish court
found four men guilty of promoting copyright infringement by running
The Pirate Bay, one of the world's top illegal file-sharing
websites, sentencing them to a year in prison in a landmark ruling.
(AP, 4/17/09)
2009 Apr 22, In Germany
Chancellor Angela Merkel's Cabinet approved a new law to require the
vast majority of the country's Internet service providers to block
child pornography sites.
(AP, 4/22/09)
2009 May 4, South Korean news
reported that North Korea runs a cyber warfare unit that tries to
hack into US and South Korean military networks to gather
confidential information and disrupt service.
(AP, 5/5/09)
2009 May 5, The British
International news portal One News Page was launched. One News Page
(http://www.onenewspage.us/) was founded by Dr Marc Pinter-Krainer
(38) a successful internet entrepreneur who has been working in the
commercial online arena since 1999.
(www.onenewspage.co.uk/press.php)
2009 May 15, The Wolfram Alpha
Internet search engine was officially launched. Stephen Wolfram,
British physicist, described it as a “computational knowledge
engine.” It was created to compute answers from its own source of
materials.
(Econ, 5/16/09,
p.86)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Alpha)(Econ, 6/4/11, TQ
p.30)
2009 May 20, SF-based
Craigslist sued South Carolina’s Attorney Gen’l. Henry McMaster to
block him from filing criminal charges against the online classified
site for abetting prostitution.
(SFC, 5/21/09, p.C1)
2009 May 20, Nebraska Gov. Dave
Heinemen signed a bill to prevent registered sex offenders from
using social networking sites such as Facebook.
(SFC, 5/21/09, p.A4)
2009 May 24, Iran blocked
access to Facebook, prompting government critics to condemn the move
as an attempt to muzzle the opposition ahead of next month's
presidential election.
(AP, 5/24/09)
2009 May 26, Iran restored
access to Facebook, after a block on the social networking Web site
last week generated accusations that the government was trying to
muzzle one of the main presidential campaign tools of the reformist
opposition.
(AP, 5/26/09)
2009 May 28, Time Warner, which
acquired America Online (AOL) in 2001, said it will spin out the
company and its 7,000 employees as a separate company under CEO Tim
Armstrong (38).
(SFC, 5/29/09, p.C2)
2009 May 29, President Barack
Obama said the nation for too long has failed to adequately protect
the security of its computer networks. He will name a new cyber czar
to take on the job.
(AP, 5/29/09)
2009 May 29, Cuba criticized
Microsoft for blocking its Messenger instant messaging service on
the island and in other countries under US sanctions, calling it yet
another example of Washington's "harsh" treatment of Havana.
(AP, 5/29/09)
2009 Jun 8, The Wall Street
Journal reported that China will require all personal computers sold
in the country from July 1 to come with software that blocks access
to certain websites. The program aimed to prevent the spread of
pornography and other "unhealthy" content. On June 16 the government
backed away from the order required use of installation of the Green
Dam Youth Escort software, but the software would come pre-installed
or included with all PCs sold on the mainland as of July 1.
(AFP, 6/8/09)(AP, 6/9/09)(SFC, 6/17/09, p.C3)
2009 Jun 15, Virgin Media, the
cable TV operator owned by entrepreneur Richard Branson, launched a
new kind of music download subscription service with Universal, the
world's largest music company.
(AP, 6/15/09)
2009 Jun 15, Georgia’s Supreme
Court ordered Expedia Inc. and its Hotwire.com subsidiary to collect
and pay hotel occupancy taxes to the west Georgia city of Columbus
in a possible precedent for cities across the country.
(SFC, 6/18/09, p.C1)
2009 Jun 16, The British
government declared a goal for Britain become the world's "digital
capital" by building cutting-edge broadband, telecoms and media
infrastructure to cement its role as a "global economic powerhouse."
(AFP, 6/16/09)
2009 Jun 16, The Norwegian firm
Opera Software unveiled new technology that allows it Opera 10 Web
browser to also function as a file server. A feature called Opera
Unite enables users to push content and establish communications
without the need for a 3rd party.
(SFC, 6/17/09, p.C1)
2009 Jun 17, It was reported
that security researchers at Finjan, a venture–funded security
company in San Jose, have identified a sophisticated online network,
called GoldenCashworld, that was used for buying and selling access
to infected PCs. The network included tools for creating malicious
code and stolen credentials for about 100,000 Web sites.
(SFC, 6/17/09, p.C1)
2009 Jun 18, China's Internet
watchdog condemned the Chinese-language version of Google for
"disseminating pornographic and vulgar information."
(AP, 6/18/09)
2009 Jun 19, Google Inc. said
that it was working to block pornography reaching users of its
Chinese service after a mainland watchdog found the search engine
turned up large numbers of links to obscene and vulgar sites.
(AP, 6/19/09)
2009 Jun 18, In a replay of the
nation's only file-sharing case to go to trial a federal jury ruled
that Jammie Thomas-Rasset (32) of Minnesota willfully violated the
copyrights on 24 songs, and awarded recording companies $1.92
million, or $80,000 per song. The new trial was ordered after the
judge in the case decided he had erred in giving jury instructions.
Thomas-Rasset's second trial actually turned out worse for her. When
a different federal jury heard her case in 2007, it hit
Thomas-Rasset with a $222,000 judgment.
(AP, 6/19/09)
2009 Jun 20, Italian police in
Sicily said they have arrested 14 people and placed more than 250
under investigation in the country's biggest sweep against Internet
child pornography.
(AP, 6/20/09)
2009 Jun 26, In Texas security
guard Jesse William McGraw (25), head of the Elecktronik Tribulation
Army, was arrested for hacking into computers at a Dallas medical
clinic in hopes of launching a massive computer attack around July
4.
(SFC, 7/1/09, p.A4)
2009 Jun 28, Swiss police said
they have uncovered a child pornography ring involving more than
2,000 people in 78 countries.
(AP, 6/28/09)
2009 Jun 29, The European Union
Chamber of Commerce in China urged Beijing to reconsider
implementing a controversial Internet filter, saying it raised
serious concerns about security, privacy and user choice.
(AP, 6/29/09)
2009 Jun 30, China postponed a
plan to require personal computer makers to supply
Internet-filtering software, retreating in the face of protests by
Washington and Web surfers hours before it was due to take effect.
(AP, 6/30/09)
2009 Jul 4, Attacks began on
more than two dozen Internet sites in the United States and South
Korea and some were disabled by hackers. South Korea's spy agency
later said the attacks were possibly linked to North Korea. Some of
the affected US government Web sites, such as the Treasury
Department, Federal Trade Commission and Secret Service, were still
reporting problems days after it started during the July 4 holiday.
(Reuters, 7/8/09)(AP, 7/8/09)
2009 Jul 7, Google announced
its new operating system, Google Chrome OS, which would initially
target low cost netbooks.
(SFC, 7/9/09, p.C1)
2009 Jul 9, South Korean Web
sites were attacked again after a wave of Web site outages in the US
and South Korea that several officials suspect North Korea was
behind.
(AP, 7/9/09)
2009 Jul 10, South Korea’s spy
agency told lawmakers that a research institute affiliated with the
North's Ministry of People's Armed Forces received an order on June
7 to "destroy the South Korean puppet communications networks in an
instant." The Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported that the North has
between 500-1,000 hacking specialists.
(AP, 7/11/09)
2009 Jul 13, China's Health
Ministry ordered a hospital to stop using electric shock therapy to
cure youths of Internet addiction, saying there was no scientific
evidence it worked.
(AP, 7/14/09)
2009 Jul 14, South Korean
police said hackers extracted files from computers they contaminated
with the virus that triggered cyberattacks last week in the United
States and South Korea, a sign that they tried to steal information
from the victims.
(AP, 7/14/09)
2009 Jul 21, Several Chinese
Internet sites and parts of popular Web portals went offline amid
tightening controls that have already left mainland Web users
without access to Facebook, Twitter and other well-known social
networking sites.
(AP, 7/21/09)
2009 Jul 29, Microsoft Corp.
and Yahoo Inc. agreed to a 10-year Internet search partnership,
capping a convoluted pursuit that dragged on for years and finally
setting the stage for the rivals to make an all-out assault against
the dominance of Google Inc. The extended reach will allow Microsoft
to introduce its recently upgraded search engine, called Bing, to
more people.
(AP, 7/29/09)
2009 Jul 31, A jury ordered
Joel Tenenbaum (b.1983), a student at Boston Univ., to pay damages
of $675,000 for sharing 30 songs over the Internet. He was later
ordered to destroy his illegal music files — but a judge declined to
force him to stop promoting the activity.
(Econ, 9/5/09, TQ
p.4)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Tenenbaum)(AP, 12/7/09)
2009 Aug 13, Australian police
said a 20-year-old Australian man has been charged with infecting
more than 3,000 computers around the world with a virus designed to
capture banking and credit card data.
(AP, 8/13/09)
2009 Aug 13, Chinese officials
retreated from a plan to install anti-pornography software on every
computer sold, but said Internet cafes, schools and other public
places must use the program.
(SFC, 8/14/09, p.A2)
2009 Aug 14, A Taiwanese
telephone company said Seabed movements believed caused by Typhoon
Morakat damaged seven undersea cables linking Asian nations,
disrupting Internet and telephone services.
(AP, 8/14/09)
2009 Aug 17, Albert Gonzalez
(28) of Miami, a former informant for the US Secret Service who
helped the agency hunt hackers, was indicted in New Jersey and
charged with conspiring with two other unnamed suspects to steal the
private information. He allegedly stole information from 130 million
credit and debit card accounts in what federal prosecutors called
the largest case of identity theft yet. He was already in jail
awaiting trial in a hacking case. On Aug 28 Gonzalez agreed to plead
guilty and serve up to 25 years in federal prison.
(AP, 8/18/09)(SFC, 8/29/09, p.A4)
2009 Aug 24, The Stockholm
District Court threatened to fine Internet provider Black Internet
500,000 Swedish kronor (about $70,000) unless it stopped serving
Pirate Bay. Court documents showed the company has to comply with
the order until the ongoing case between Pirate Bay and the
entertainment industry is over.
(AP, 8/25/09)
2009 Aug, In China a new
micro-blogging service (Sina Weibo), similar to Twitter, began
operating.
(Econ, 10/30/10, p.42)
2009 Sep 2, Vietnamese
authorities arrested blogger Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh (30), who writes
under the pen name Me Nam, at her home in Nha Trang. Quynh's arrest
was the latest in a series of police moves against writers who
criticized government policies toward China. The government
tightened its rules for bloggers earlier this year, saying they must
restrict their writings to personal matters. Quynh was released on
Sep 12.
(AP, 9/4/09)(AP, 9/12/09)
2009 Sep 8, The EU said that a
member states could be allowed to ban gambling websites if its
intention was to stop crime.
(Reuters, 9/8/09)
2009 Sep 14, Google rolled out
Fast Flip, which lets users scroll through the contents of online
newspapers in much the same way as they leaf through pages in print.
(www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/technology/internet/15google.html)(Econ,
9/19/09, p.74)
2009 Sep 15, The Obama
administration embraced cloud computing to help reduce government
waste and ease environmental impact.
(SFC, 9/16/09, p.C1)
2009 Sep 25, An Australian
court sentenced Belal Khazaal (39), a former Qantas Airways baggage
handler, to 12 years in prison for publishing a do-it-yourself jihad
book on the Internet. The book was titled "Provisions of the Rules
of Jihad: Short Judicial Rulings and Organizational Instructions for
Fighters and Mujahideen Against Infidels." Khazaal had also been
convicted in absentia by Lebanese military courts in 2003 and 2005
on terrorism-related charges.
(AP, 9/25/09)
2009 Sep 30, The US government
and ICANN, the body in charge of assigning Internet addresses,
signed an agreement that allows for greater global participation in
the Internet domain name process. The agreement, which allows ICANN
to become a "private sector led organization," subjects ICANN to
periodic reviews by a panel that includes a US representative and
independent experts, essentially allowing the organization to no
longer report solely to the United States.
(Reuters, 9/30/09)
2009 Sep 30, Google rolled out
Google Wave for a test involving some 100,000 people. The product
was billed as a revolutionary way to collaborate online.
(Econ, 9/19/09, p.74)
2009 Sep, Turkey banned
MySpace, an Internet-based social networking site.
(Econ, 10/3/09, p.67)
2009 Oct 15, Google Inc. said
it is launching a new online service for booksellers next year
called Google Editions, which will let readers buy books and read
them on gadgets ranging from cell phones to possibly e-book devices.
(AP, 10/15/09)
2009 Oct 15, It was reported
that the Taj network, funded by the National Science Foundation, now
connects India, Singapore, Vietnam and Egypt to the larger Global
Ring Network for Advanced Application Development (GLORIAD) global
infrastructure, and "dramatically improves existing US network links
with China and the Nordic region," according to an NSF statement.
(www.livescience.com/technology/091015-global-gloraid-taj-cyber-net.html)
2009 Oct 18, Amazon Chief Almir
Surui (35), unveiled a project in partnership with Google, to make
public the encroachment of illegal mining and logging on his
people’s 600,000 acre reserve in Brazil. Almir was evacuated for his
safety to the US in 2006. Eleven chief of the Surui and neighboring
tribes have been shot and killed this decade.
(SSFC, 10/18/09, p.A1)
2009 Oct 29, A US District
judge in San Jose awarded Facebook $711 million in damages in an
anti-spam case filed against online marketer Sanford Wallace, known
as the “Spam King.” Wallace filed for bankruptcy in June.
(SFC, 10/31/09, p.D1)
2009 Nov 10, An Australian
student sparked fears of a new era of computer viruses after
creating a worm which infects Apple's iconic iPhone with pictures of
1980s pop star Rick Astley.
(AFP, 11/10/09)
2009 Nov 14, In Iran local
newspapers reported that the government has formed a special unit to
monitor Web sites and fight Internet crimes, in a clear attack on an
opposition that relies almost exclusively on online means to
broadcast its message.
(AP, 11/14/09)
2009 Nov 15, Egypt’s
information technology minister said Egypt will apply for the first
Internet domain written in Arabic. The announcement was made at a
conference grouping Yahoo's co-founder and others to discuss
boosting online access in emerging nations.
(AP, 11/15/09)
2009 Nov 16, In Shanghai
President Barack Obama pointedly nudged China to stop censoring
Internet access, offering an animated defense of the tool that
helped him win the White House and suggesting Beijing need not fear
a little criticism.
(AP, 11/16/09)
2009 Nov 19, Google unveiled
its new Chrome operating system for an always-connected netbook.
(SFC, 11/20/09, p.D1)
2009 Dec 1, In India newspaper
executives and editors gathered from around the world heard calls to
seek more payment for their content on the Internet as they decried
their industry's sharply falling advertising revenues.
(AP, 12/1/09)
2009 Dec 4, In China the
file-sharing site BTCHINA, a major source of overseas movies,
television shows and games in the country, was closed. Another site,
VeryCD.com, was down on Dec 9 and a report in the Southern
Metropolis Daily said other file sharing sites would be closed in
the coming days. The closures were said to be a fight against
copyright infringement, but could be seen as another measure aimed
at controlling what content the country's Web users can find online.
(AP, 12/9/09)
2009 Dec 5, The Defense Advance
Research projects Agency (DARPA) conducted an experiment challenging
teams around the country to locate the submit the correct geographic
coordinates of 10 weather balloons in return for a $40,000 cash
prize. Over 4,000 teams participated and the winning answer came
after 8 hours and 56 minutes. Social networking sites played a major
role in the game theory simulation. Riley Crane, a post doc research
fellow at MIT’s media lab, led the winning team using an elaborate
information gathering pyramid.
(SFC, 12/7/09, p.A9)
2009 Dec 6, Iranian authorities
slowed Internet connections to a crawl or choked them off completely
before expected student protests on Dec 7, to deny the opposition a
vital means of communication. Authorities also ordered journalists
working for foreign media organizations not to leave their offices
to cover the demonstrations.
(AP, 12/6/09)
2009 Dec 9, Time Warner, which
acquired America Online (AOL) in 2001, span off AOL and its 7,000
employees as a separate company under CEO Tim Armstrong (38).
(SFC, 5/29/09, p.C2)(Econ, 12/12/09, p.73)
2009 Dec 10, A consortium
including Google and KDDI Corp signed a deal to build and operate an
international undersea cable system, estimated to cost $400 million.
Globe Telecom, part owned by Singapore Telecommunications Ltd, and
units of Bharti Airtel and Reliance Communications were also part of
the consortium.
(Reuters, 12/10/09)
2009 Dec 15, Australia said it
would push ahead with a mandatory China-style plan to filter the
Internet, despite widespread criticism that it will strangle free
speech and is doomed to fail. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy
said new laws would be introduced to ban access to "refused
classification" (RC) sites featuring criminal content such as child
sex abuse, bestiality, rape and detailed drug use.
(AFP, 12/15/09)
2009 Dec 16, In Belarus the
Nasha Niva independent newspaper said President Alexander Lukashenko
has issued a decree to tighten state control over the Internet.
(AFP, 12/16/09)
2009 Dec 17, The Obama
administration handed out the first $182 million of a $7.2 billion
pot of stimulus money that will go toward building high-speed
Internet networks and encouraging more Americans to use them.
(AP, 12/17/09)
2009 Dec 18, A Paris court
ruled that Google Inc. is breaking French law with its policy of
digitizing books, handing the US Internet giant a euro10,000
($14,300)-a-day fine until it rids its database of the literary
extracts.
(AP, 12/18/09)
2009 Dec 18, South Korea's
military said it was investigating a hacking attack that netted
secret defense plans with the US and may have been carried out by
North Korea.
(AP, 12/18/09)
2009 Dec 22, The Obama
administration announced that Howard Schmidt is the president's
choice to be his cyber security coordinator.
(http://tinyurl.com/yfhswrz)
2009 Dec 27, Syrian security
agents detained Tal al-Mallohi (19), a high school student blogger,
after summoning her for questioning. Authorities have not allowed
al-Mallohi's family to communicate with her since she was picked up.
On Sep 20, 2010, The New York-based Human Rights Watch called for
her immediate release. On Feb 14, 2011, she was sentenced to 5 years
in prison on charges of spying for a foreign country.
(AP, 9/20/10)(SFC, 2/15/11, p.A2)
2009 Ken Auletta authored
“Googled: the End of the World As We Know It.”
(SSFC, 11/15/09, p.E1)
2009 John Freeman authored “The
Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four-Thousand Year Journey to Your Inbox.”
(SSFC, 11/22/09, Books p.F7)
2009 Joel Simkhai created
Grindr, a dating app for the iPhone that allowed gay men to find one
another. The application used GPS technology to allow gay men to
find one another within walking distance.
(SFC, 3/19/10, p.F1)
2010 Jan 6, It was reported
that Santa Barbara-based Cybersitter has filed a $2.2 billion
lawsuit against China, accusing Beijing of stealing its technology
to bar Internet access to political and religious sites in China.
The suit alleges that the Chinese makers of Green Dam illegally
copied more than 3,000 lines of code from its filtering software,
and conspired with China's rulers and computer manufacturers to
distribute more than 56 million copies of the pirated software
throughout China.
(AFP, 1/6/10)
2010 Jan 12, Google's announced
that it was considering a withdrawal from China, after what it said
were attacks from China on human rights activists using its Gmail
service and on dozens of companies.
(Reuters, 1/13/10)
2010 Jan 13, Britain’s
Huddersfield University launched an investigation after its students
allegedly started an Internet craze for a Hitler drinking game. The
original page on the social networking site had nearly 12,000
members but has now been shut down, although another similar page
has since been set up.
(AFP, 1/13/10)
2010 Jan 14, Los Angeles-based
Gipson Hoffman & Pancione, the law firm representing a Santa
Barbara company that sued China for allegedly pirating its Internet
content filtering software, said its attorneys on Jan 11 started
received emails containing Trojans, which can allow outside access
to the target's computer.
(AP, 1/14/10)
2010 Jan 14, Hundreds of
Bulgarians protested against planned legal amendments allowing mass
monitoring of emails, electronic messages and phone calls to fight
crime and corruption.
(AP, 1/14/10)
2010 Jan 15, The US State
Department said it will soon give China a formal diplomatic message
expressing its concern about cyber attacks that prompted Google Inc
to threaten to pull out of China.
(Reuters, 1/15/10)
2010 Jan 15, Iran's police
chief warned opposition supporters not to use cell phones and e-mail
messages to organize protest rallies against the government, saying
those who do so will be prosecuted and punished.
(AP, 1/15/10)
2010 Jan 15, Malaysian student
Mohamad Tasyrif Tajudin (25) was charged after allegedly posting
comments on Facebook about throwing a gasoline bomb amid a recent
spate of attacks on churches, most of which were hit by Molotov
Cocktails. He was charged under Malaysia’s Communications and
Multimedia Act for improper use of the Internet, which carries a
penalty of up to a year in jail and a fine if found guilty.
(AP, 1/15/10)
2010 Jan 18, It was reported
that Alaska corporations and a multinational firm are planning to
build the first fiber optic cable between Asia and Europe through
the Arctic. The project estimated at $1 billion, involved laying
10,000 miles of undersea fiber optic cable from Tokyo, along the
Alaska coast, through the Northwest Passage, past Greenland to
London.
(SFC, 1/18/10, p.D3)
2010 Jan 18, The OSCE, Europe's
main security and human rights watchdog, said that Turkey was
blocking some 3,700 Internet sites for "arbitrary and political
reasons" and urged reforms to show its commitment to freedom of
expression.
(Reuters, 1/18/10)
2010 Jan 19, China’s Foreign
Ministry said Google Inc will not be treated as an exception to
China's demand foreign companies obey its laws, a week after the
world's largest search engine warned it could pull out of China.
Google said it had postponed the launch of two mobile handsets in
China, in the latest fallout from its threat last week to withdraw
from the Asian giant over cyberattacks and censorship.
(Reuters, 1/19/10)(AFP, 1/19/10)
2010 Jan 22, Beijing issued a
stinging response to US criticism that it is jamming the free flow
of words and ideas on the Internet, accusing the United States of
damaging relations between the two countries by hoisting its
"information imperialism" on China. An attorney for a US free speech
group said US trade officials have asked for more information as
they consider whether to pursue a possible World Trade Organization
case against Chinese Internet barriers.
(AP, 1/22/10)(Reuters, 1/22/10)
2010 Jan 25, China sharply
rebuked the United States, denying involvement in any Internet
attacks and defending its online restrictions as lawful after
Washington urged Beijing to investigate an attack against Google.
(AP, 1/25/10)
2010 Jan 26, Iran's supreme
leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei accused the US of trying to use the
Internet as a tool to confront the Islamic Republic, declaring that
such a policy only showed Washington's frustration. The US Senate
voted in July to adopt the Victims of Iranian Censorship Act which
authorizes up to $50 million for expanding Farsi language
broadcasts, supporting Iranian Internet and countering government
efforts to block it.
(Reuters, 1/26/10)
2010 Feb 1, President Barack
Obama unveiled a multitrillion-dollar spending plan, pledging an
intensified effort to combat high unemployment and asking Congress
to quickly approve new job-creation efforts that would boost the
deficit to a record-breaking $1.56 trillion. Obama also made his
first YouTube interview and spent about 40 minutes answering about a
dozen of over 11,000 questions submitted by YouTube users following
his State of the Union address.
(AP, 2/1/10)(SFC, 2/2/10, p.A9)
2010 Feb 6, China’s state media
said a man who operated a porn website has been sentenced to 13
years in jail and fined 100,000 yuan (15,000 dollars), amid an
ongoing campaign to crack down on online sexual content.
(AFP, 2/7/10)
2010 Feb 8, China's Ministry of
Industry and Information Technology issued new guidelines to local
authorities and lifted a ban imposed in December on individuals
acquiring .cn domain names. Individuals wanting to set up a website
will have to submit identity cards and photos of themselves, as well
as meet regulators, before their domain name can be registered.
(AFP, 2/23/10)
2010 Feb 11, In Australia a
shadowy group of cyber-activists succeeded in jamming key Australian
government websites for a second consecutive day and warned they
could shut down the sites for months in protest over controversial
plans to filter the Internet. Codenamed "Operation: Titstorm", the
hacking campaign involved hundreds of people from around the world
and used a technique called Distributed Denial of Service to jam web
traffic.
(AFP, 2/11/10)
2010 Feb 18, It was reported
that a new type of computer virus is known to have breached almost
75,000 computers in 2,500 organizations around the world. The virus,
known as "Kneber botnet," gathers login credentials to online
financial systems, social networking sites and email systems from
infested computers and reports the information back to hackers.
(Reuters, 2/18/10)
2010 Feb 18, Microsoft won
unconditional European Union approval for its planned search deal
with Yahoo Inc to challenge market leader Google.
(Reuters, 2/18/10)
2010 Feb 24, An Italian court
convicted three Google executives of privacy violations because they
did not act quickly enough to remove an online video that showed
sadistic teen bullies pummeling and mocking an autistic boy. Judge
Oscar Magi sentenced the three in absentia to a six-month suspended
sentence and absolved them of defamation charges. A fourth
defendant, charged only with defamation, was acquitted. In the US,
the Communications Decency Act of 1996 generally gives Internet
service providers immunity in cases like this, but no such
protections exist in Europe.
(AP, 2/24/10)
2010 Mar 2, It was reported
that Spanish investigators, working with private computer-security
firms, have arrested the three alleged ringleaders of the so-called
Mariposa botnet, which appeared in December 2008 and grew into one
of the biggest weapons of cybercrime. The Mariposa botnet infected
almost 13 million computers across 190 countries. More arrests were
expected soon in other countries.
(AP, 3/2/10)(SSFC, 3/14/10, p.D1)
2010 Mar 9, In Switzerland a
senior Google executive welcomed a US decision to relax restrictions
on exporting Internet communications services to Iran, Sudan and
Cuba.
(AP, 3/9/10)
2010 Mar 13, Iran’s Fars the
news agency said Iran has busted what it says was a US-funded cyber
network group linked to an exiled opposition movement that collected
data on its nuclear scientists. 30 members of the network with links
to the outlawed People's Mujahedeen and monarchists were said to
have been arrested.
(AFP, 3/14/10)
2010 Mar 13, Venezuela’s
President Hugo Chavez called for regulation of the Internet while
demanding authorities crack down on a critical news Web site that he
accused of spreading false information. A Venezuelan police official
said security forces have seized two tons of cocaine hidden in two
bulldozers at a port in the central state of Carabobo. The cocaine
was intended to be smuggled to the Netherlands.
(AP, 3/14/10)
2010 Mar 17, McAfee Inc.
reported that hackers have flooded the Internet with virus-tainted
spam that targets Facebook's estimated 400 million users in an
effort to steal banking passwords and gather other sensitive
information.
(Reuters, 3/19/10)
2010 Mar 21, China’s state
media reported that authorities in Xinjiang have restored access to
email services and 32 Internet sites that were blocked after ethnic
unrest broke out in the region in July.
(AFP, 3/21/10)
2010 Mar 21, Conservationists
at the CITES meeting in Qatar said the Internet has emerged as one
of the greatest threats to rare species, fueling the illegal
wildlife trade and making it easier to buy everything from live baby
lions to wine made from tiger bones.
(AP, 3/21/10)
2010 Mar 22, Google announced
that its China search engine, google.cn, would automatically
redirect queries to its service in China's semiautonomous territory
of Hong Kong, where Google is not legally required to censor
searches.
(AP, 3/23/10)
2010 Mar 22, In Nigeria the
Magajin Gari Sharia court in the northern city of Kaduna ordered the
Civil Rights Congress (CRC), one of the country's leading rights
groups, to suspend its Twitter and Facebook online debates on Malam
Buba Bello Jangebe’s wrist amputation for theft, which was carried
out in 2000.
(AFP, 3/23/10)
2010 Mar 23, Internet giant
Google led high-profile criticism of Australia's controversial plan
to filter the Internet, saying it went too far and could set a
dangerous precedent.
(AP, 3/23/10)
2010 Mar 23, Luxury goods
manufacturers said a ruling from the EU's highest court will stop
Google Inc. selling their brand names as advertising keywords to
unauthorized sellers or counterfeiters.
(AP, 3/23/10)
2010 Mar 26, Hacker Albert
Gonzalez (28), who participated in a cybercrime ring that stole tens
of millions of credit and debit card numbers, was sentenced in US
District Court to 20 years in prison. Gonzalez was living in Miami
at the time of the crimes in the three cases, which occurred over
almost two years before he was arrested in May of 2008 and
subsequently indicted in New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts.
(http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/hackergonzalezsentencedto20yearsforexploits)
2010 Mar 30, Google Inc said
its mobile services have been partially blocked in China for two
days, while searches on its Chinese-language site became erratic,
about a week after the company shut its mainland Chinese portal and
rerouted Web searches to a Hong Kong site.
(AP, 3/30/10)
2010 Mar 31, Google Inc. says
malicious software has been used to spy on Vietnamese computer users
opposed to a controversial bauxite mine in the Southeast Asian
country. Computer security firm McAfee said the perpetrators may be
linked to the communist government.
(AP, 3/31/10)
2010 Apr 6, The US Court of
Appeals in Washington, DC, ruled that the FDIC has no authority to
regulate how Internet service providers manage traffic to their
customers.
(Econ, 4/10/10, p.35)
2010 Apr 6, A group of Canadian
researchers released a report saying a cyber-espionage group based
in southwest China stole documents from the Indian Defense Ministry
and emails from the Dalai Lama's office.
(Reuters, 4/6/10)
2010 Apr 30, In Argentina over
2,000 adolescents in schools across the province of Mendoza skipped
classes and met in a plaza in a mass truancy organized on Facebook.
A judge in Mendoza soon ordered Facebook to shut groups created by
minors to organize the truancy.
(SFC, 5/13/10, p.A2)
2010 May 6, The US FCC
announced a plan to classify the last mile of internet access as a
telecommunications service.
(Econ, 5/15/10, p.86)
2010 May 14, In Australia the
body of Nona Belomesoff (18) was found in an isolated bushland area.
Christopher James Dannevig (20) was charged with her murder. He had
allegedly set up a fake identity on Facebook and enticed Belomesoff
to a nature reserve in Sydney's southwest on May 12.
(AFP, 5/16/10)
2010 May 14, In China Internet
service was restored to Xinjiang province, 10 months after it was
blocked following deadly rioting in Urumqi, the regional capital.
(SFC, 5/15/10, p.A2)
2010 May 17, A group of French
technology firms know as the association for digital Economy in
France called on local governments to partner with private companies
to build a network of data centers and shared cloud platforms
catering to French needs.
(SFC, 5/31/10, p.D5)
2010 May 19, Pakistan's
government ordered Internet service providers to block Facebook amid
anger over a page that encourages users to post images of Islam's
Prophet Muhammad.
(AP, 5/19/10)
2010 May 20, The Pakistani
government blocked access to YouTube because of "sacrilegious"
content on the video-sharing website, signaling a growing Internet
crackdown against sites deemed offensive to the country's majority
Muslim population.
(AP, 5/20/10)
2010 May 21, Norwegian browser
developer Opera Software said it is moving its data processing
capacity to a newly-built center in Iceland, one of the first
foreign investment deals for the crisis-hit island as it tries to
rebuild its economy.
(AP, 5/21/10)
2010 May 21, Pakistani
protesters shouted "Death to Facebook", "Death to America" and burnt
US flags, venting growing anger over "sacrilegious" caricatures of
the Prophet Mohammed on the Internet.
(AP, 5/21/10)
2010 May 24, Brian Thomas
Mettenbrink of Nebraska was sentenced to one year in federal prison
for his role in a cyber attack on the Church of Scientology.
(SFC, 5/25/10, p.A4)
2010 May 27, Pakistan restored
access to popular video website YouTube, but Facebook and 1,200 web
pages remained blocked as a row about "blasphemous" content on the
Internet rumbled into a second week.
(AFP, 5/27/10)
2010 May 28, A South Korean
couple were convicted of abandoning their newborn daughter, who
starved to death while they addictively played an online game
raising a virtual child.
(AP, 5/28/10)
2010 May 30, Bangladesh said it
has blocked the popular social networking website Facebook over a
page that urges people to draw images of Islam's prophet Muhammad.
(AP, 5/30/10)
2010 May 31, Pakistan lifted a
ban on Facebook after officials from the social networking site
apologized for a page deemed offensive to Muslims and removed its
contents.
(AP, 5/31/10)
2010 Jun 3, A federal jury in
Minneapolis found vendors Russell and Abby Cole guilty of using an
online auction to defraud Best Buy of $41.6 million between
2003-2007. The vendors had the help of Robert Bossany, a Best Buy
employee.
(SFC, 6/14/10, p.E3)
2010 Jun 6, Australia’s
attorney general said police have been asked to investigate internet
giant Google over possible breaches of telecommunications privacy
laws. The investigation followed complaints from members of the
public about activities of Google employees while taking photographs
for Google Maps, the search engine's maps page. Google said it would
cooperate with the investigation.
(Reuters, 6/6/10)
2010 Jun 8, France officially
opened up its online gaming market, granting 17 licenses to 11
operators three days before the start of the soccer World Cup in
South Africa.
(AFP, 6/8/10)
2010 Jun 22, Austin Heap (26)
launched Proxyheap, the precursor to anti-censorship software called
Haystack. He soon received a license from the US treasury, State
Dept. and commerce Dept. to export it to Iran. The software was
withdrawn on Sep 10 due to security issues.
(Econ, 9/18/10, p.75)
2010 Jun 25, ICANN, the
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, agreed in a
meeting to start using Chinese characters for suffixes handed out by
Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwan-based Internet registries. It started
allowing Arabic earlier this year.
(AP, 6/25/10)
2010 Jun 29, Google Inc said it
will stop automatically rerouting users in China to an uncensored
search page, a move that aims to preserve its operating license and
signals a fight to save the firm's Chinese business.
(Reuters, 6/29/10)
2010 Jun, Stuxnet, computer
malware, was first detected by VirusBlokAda, a security firm in
Belarus. It was tailored for Siemens supervisory control and data
acquisition (SCADA) systems commonly used to manage water supplies,
oil rigs, power plants and other industrial facilities. It was able
to recognize a specific facility's control network and then destroy
it. The code had a technology fingerprint of the control system it
was seeking and would go into action automatically when it found its
target. In September German computer security researcher Ralph
Langner said he suspected that Stuxnet's mark was the Bushehr
nuclear facility in Iran. Unspecified problems have been blamed for
a delay in getting the facility fully operational.
(AP, 9/24/10)(Econ, 10/2/10, p.63)
2010 Jul 9, Google said China
has renewed its license to operate a website, preserving the search
giant's toehold in the most populous Internet market after it gave
up an attempt to skirt Beijing's Web censorship.
(AP, 7/9/10)
2010 Jul 23, Thailand’s Culture
Ministry said Facebook and Twitter are causing deteriorating
language skills among Thai students and authorities want them to
return to the bygone tradition of letter-writing.
(AP, 7/23/10)
2010 Jul 18, In Slovenia a
cyber mastermind, suspected of creating a malicious software code
that infected 12 million computers worldwide and orchestrating other
huge cyber scams, was arrested and questioned. His arrest came about
five months after Spanish police broke up the massive cyber scam,
arresting three of the alleged ringleaders who operated the Mariposa
botnet, which stole credit cards and online banking credentials. On
July 28 the FBI later said that a 23-year old Slovene known as
Iserdo was picked up in Maribor, after lengthy investigation by
Slovenian police, FBI and Spanish authorities. The FBI also
identified, for the first time, the three individuals arrested in
connection with the case in Spain: Florencio Carro Ruiz, known as
"Netkairo;" Jonathan Pazos Rivera, known as "Jonyloleante;" and Juan
Jose Bellido Rios, known as "Ostiator.
(AP, 7/28/10)
2010 Jul 26, WikiLeaks founder
Julian Assange promised that the release of some 91,000 secret US
military documents on the Afghanistan war is just the beginning,
adding that he still has thousands more Afghan files to post online.
The files were mostly field reports and intelligence
assessments from 2004-2009. Pakistan's most powerful spy agency on
lashed out against a trove of leaked US intelligence reports that
alleged close connections between it and Taliban militants fighting
NATO troops in Afghanistan, calling the accusations malicious and
unsubstantiated.
(AP, 7/26/10)(Econ, 7/31/10, p.28)
2010 Jul 30, The Australian
government committed to expanding its fiber broadband Internet
network to a further 300,000 homes across the vast island continent
if re-elected at next month's polls.
(AFP, 7/30/10)
2010 Aug 9, Skype SA, the
Internet calling service that was controlled until last year by eBay
Inc., filed for a US initial public offering.
(AP, 8/9/10)
2010 Aug 10, Saudi Arabia's
telecommunications regulator said it would allow BlackBerry
messaging services to continue in the kingdom, citing "positive
developments" with the device's Canadian manufacturer.
(AP, 8/10/10)
2010 Aug 19, South Korea said
it has blocked North Korea's new Twitter account from being accessed
in the South, saying the tweets contain "illegal information" under
the country's security laws.
(AP, 8/19/10)
2010 Aug 24, Attorneys general
in 17 US states demanded in a joint letter that SF-based Craigslist
remove its adult services section because the website cannot
adequately block potentially illegal ads promoting prostitution and
child trafficking.
(SFC, 8/25/10, p.D1)
2010 Aug 26, Canada-based
Research in Motion said it was willing to work with India to support
the country's needs to lawfully access encrypted services on the
company's Blackberry smartphone.
(Reuters, 8/26/10)
2010 Aug 27, Australian police
warned social networking sites to be alert to illegal child sex
activity, after cracking an alleged pedophile porn ring operating on
Facebook. Australian police said six arrests had been made in
Britain, including the alleged head of the network, three in
Australia and two in Canada.
(AFP, 8/27/10)
2010 Sep 1, Apple CEO Steve
Jobs introduced Ping as the social network of music.
(SFC, 11/12/10,
p.D1)(http://venturebeat.com/tag/ping/)
2010 Sep 3, SF-based Craigslist
yielded to pressure and removed its controversial adult services
section. On Sep 15 Craigslist said the shutdown was permanent.
(SSFC, 9/5/10, p.A1)(AFP, 9/16/10)
2010 Sep 8, Belgian police say
10 people have been arrested in raids across Europe against hackers
who put illegal copies of movies and television series on the
Internet. Police said 5 arrests were in Belgium and the other
arrests were made in Poland, Norway and Sweden, where the alleged
leaders of four computer piracy networks were being held.
(AP, 9/8/10)
2010 Sep 15, Microsoft Corp.
unveiled the "beta" test version of Internet Explorer 9, the first
of a new generation of Web browser programs that tap into the
powerful processors on board newer computers to make websites load
and run faster.
(AP, 9/16/10)
2010 Sep 16, Israel's Supreme
Court ordered the Jerusalem city government to provide more than
$120,000 in funding for a prominent gay community center. It was
reported that Israeli government offices, that provide a wide array
of public services, are pulling the plug on online payments on the
Jewish Sabbath and holidays, creating a potential new source of
friction between the religious and secular in the Jewish state.
(AP, 9/16/10)
2010 Sep 18, In Hungary
Hacktivity 2010, the largest computer hackers' conference in eastern
Europe, kicked off, with some 1,000 participants expected to attend
the two-day event.
(AP, 9/18/10)
2010 Sep 22, Rutgers Univ.
freshman Tyler Clementi jumped to his death from the George
Washington Bridge. On Sep 19 his roommate and another student had
used a webcam to broadcast live images on the Internet of Clementi
having sex with another man. Roommate Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei were
soon charged with invasion of privacy.
(www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/nyregion/30suicide.html?_r=1)
2010 Sep 24, Facebook founder
Mark Zuckerberg announced a $100 million donation to Newark, N.J.,
public schools in a move that could enhance his reputation just
before the opening on an unflattering movie about him, "The Social
Network."
{Donation, Education, New Jersey, USA, Internet}
(AP, 9/24/10)
2010 Sep 25, Iran’s
semi-official ISNA news agency says Iranian nuclear experts met this
week to discuss how to remove the malicious computer code, dubbed
Stuxnet, which can take over systems that control the inner workings
of industrial plants.
(AP, 9/25/10)
2010 Sep 26, Iranian officials
said the malicious Stuxnet computer worm has hit 30,000 industrial
computers, but denied the Islamic republic's first nuclear plant at
Bushehr was among those infected. The malware has infected as many
as 45,000 computer systems around the world. 60% of the infected
computers were in Iran, 18% in Indonesia, and less than 2% in the
US. Two computer servers in Malaysia and Denmark, which controlled
the malware, have been shut down.
(AFP,
9/26/10)(http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_computer_attacks)(SFC,
9/27/10, p.A4)
2010 Sep 27, Sponsored by the
US Department of Homeland Security, Cyber Storm III kicked off for a
3-day series of simulated events designed to exploit holes in the
nation's cybersecurity system. It was Washington's first chance to
test the new National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration
Center, which was set up last fall to act as a hub for coordinating
cybersecurity.
(http://tinyurl.com/24jewsu)
2010 Sep 27, Iran’s IRNA news
agency reported that the Stuxnet worm is mutating and wreaking
further havoc on computerized industrial equipment in Iran where
about 30,000 IP addresses have already been infected.
(AFP, 9/27/10)
2010 Sep 28, AOL acquired
SF-based TechCrunch, the operator of an influential network of
technology news blogs, for an estimated $25 million.
(SFC, 9/29/10, p.D1)
2010 Sep 30, The South China
Morning Post quoted Derek Reveron, a cyber expert at the US Naval
War School, as saying: "The Stuxnet worm is a wake-up call to
governments around the world." China’s state media had reported this
week that the Stuxnet computer worm has wreaked havoc, infecting
millions of computers around the country.
(AFP, 9/30/10)
2010 Sep, The FBI and its
counterparts in Ukraine, the Netherlands and Britain took down a
cyber-theft ring they first got wind of in May 2009 when a financial
services firm tipped the bureau's Omaha, Neb., office to suspicious
transactions. Since then, the FBI's Operation Trident Breach has
uncovered losses of $14 million and counting.
(AP, 11/22/10)
2010 Oct 4, An official said
Syria has accused a 19-year-old blogger who is in prison of being a
spy in the first comment from authorities on a case that sparked
calls by a leading rights group for the young woman's release. Tal
al-Mallohi was taken into custody in December. Her blog, known for
poetry and social commentary, focused mostly on the suffering of
Palestinians.
(AP, 10/4/10)
2010 Oct 6, Facebook launched a
new way for members to organize their friends, archive personal
information and a new dashboard to control personal information
sought by 3rd party applications and Web sites.
(SFC, 10/7/10, p.D1)
2010 Oct 6, Logitech introduced
Revue, a $299.99 set-top box for Google’s new TV service. The device
allows users to access websites, Internet video, digital pictures
and music from their televisions. Apple’s set-top box was introduced
on Sep 1 for $99.
(SSFC, 10/10/10,
p.D5)(http://tinyurl.com/2vzxpar)
2010 Oct 8, The Swiss Im
Grueene Foundation awarded Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales $104,000
for “democratizing the access to knowledge.”
(SFC, 10/9/10, p.A2)
2010 Oct 12, Australian PM
Julia Gillard renewed her backing for a controversial Internet
filter, saying it was driven by a "moral question."
(AFP, 10/12/10)
2010 Oct 15, A security
researcher said criminals are using a Zeus botnet to pillage Charles
Schwab investment accounts. Although police in the US, the UK and
Ukraine collared more than 100 members of a Zeus crimeware gang
three weeks ago, experts warned that the arrests wouldn't stop the
botnet. Other gangs can simply step into the void.
(http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=B7C76BC0-1A64-67EA-E459F0D62DD95E83)
2010 Oct 16, In China Li Qiming
(22) reportedly hit two students with his car at a university campus
in the northern province of Hebei. The drunk man shouted "sue me if
you dare" when a crowd stopped him from fleeing. On Oct 26 state
media reported that Qiming, the son of a senior police officer, was
arrested after the incident sparked outrage on the Internet.
(AFP, 10/26/10)
2010 Oct 21, A partnership
backed by Amazon.com, Comcast, Facebook and other technology firms
established the “S Fund,” a $250 million fund led by venture capital
firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, to capitalize on the
growing reach of social networking.
(SFC, 10/22/10, p.C1)
2010 Oct 22, The WikiLeaks
website released 391,831 purported Iraq war logs in the biggest leak
of secret information in US history. The documents date from the
start of 2004 to Jan 1, 2010. They suggested that far more Iraqis
died than previously acknowledged during the years of sectarian
bloodletting and criminal violence unleashed by the American-led
invasion in 2003. Accounts of civilian deaths included deaths
unknown or unreported before now, as many as 15,000 by the count of
one independent research group.
(AP, 10/23/10)
2010 Oct 23, The whistleblowing
organization WikiLeaks said it will soon publish 15,000 more secret
Afghan war documents.
(AP, 10/23/10)
2010 Oct 23, In Vietnam Le
Nguyen Huong Tra, who blogged under the pen name of Do Long Girl,
was taken into police custody from a home in Ho Chi Minh City for
allegedly slandering a senior government official. Police in Ho Chi
Minh City also arrested blogger Phan Thanh Hai, known as Anhbasg,
over the weekend and continued to detain Nguyen Van Hai, a blogger
known as Dieu Cay, even though he had served out his 30-month
sentence on "trumped-up" tax evasion charges.
(AP, 10/26/10)
2010 Oct 24, Lady Gaga became
the first singer to reach 1 billion hits on YouTube.
(SSFC, 12/12/10, Par p.9)
2010 Oct 25, In Egypt a planned
website, Harrasmap, will allow women to quickly report instances of
harassment via text message or Twitter, to be loaded onto a digital
map of Cairo to show hotspots and areas that might be dangerous for
women to walk alone. The data will be shared with activists, media,
and police. Cairo's online map will run off a platform called
Ushahidi, an open-source software first developed to report violence
in Kenya after 2008 elections there. Since then test models of it
have run in South Africa, Gaza and India.
(AP, 10/25/10)
2010 Oct 26, Armenian police
arrested Georg Avanesov (27). He allegedly operated the “Bredolab”
botnet of nearly 30 million PCs. Investigators alleged that Avanesov
made up to US$139,000 each month renting the botnet to criminals who
used it for sending spam and for installing password-stealing
malicious software.
(www.securelist.com/en/analysis/204792148/Spam_report_October_2010)
2010 Oct 28, US microchip giant
Intel said it plans to team up with Taiwan to set up a multi-million
dollar Internet computing research laboratory.
(AFP, 10/28/10)
2010 Oct 30, Turkey said it was
lifting a ban on YouTube more than two years after it blocked the
site because of videos deemed insulting to the country’s founder.
(SSFC, 10/31/10, p.A2)
2010 Oct 31, Walid Husayin
(26), a Palestinian blogger, was arrested in the West Bank. He had
set off an uproar in the Arab world by sarcastically claiming he was
God and hurling insults at the Prophet Muhammad. He was caught in a
sting that used Facebook to track him down.
(AP, 11/12/10)
2010 Nov 2, State Vietnam News
said blogger Le Nguyen Huong Tra (35), who blogged as Co Gai Do
Long, has been detained for "infringing on the interests of the
state" after she criticized a security official and his family.
(AFP, 11/2/10)
2010 Nov 4, European computer
guards battled against a simulated attempt by hackers to bring down
critical Internet services in the first pan-continental test of
cyber defenses. All 27 of the EU member nations as well as Iceland,
Norway and Switzerland took part in the simulation. The USA held its
own major exercise against a large-scale cyber attack on critical
infrastructure in late September with 12 international partners and
60 private companies. Cyber security will be one of the top issues
that NATO leaders will tackle at a summit of the 28-nation military
alliance in Lisbon on November 20-29.
(AFP, 11/4/10)
2010 Nov 14, In China a court
convicted Cheng Jianping (46) of "disturbing social order" after she
added a few words to a message written by her fiance, Hua Chunhui,
whose Twitter post mocked anti-Japanese protesters. On Nov 16
Amnesty Int’l. urged the government to release Cheng, saying she
could be the first Chinese citizen to become "a prisoner of
conscience on the basis of a single tweet."
(AFP, 11/18/10)
2010 Nov 15, In South Korea a
15-year-old boy committed suicide after killing his mother in a
fight over Internet games.
(AP, 11/16/10)
2010 Nov 28, More than 250,000
classified US State Department documents were released by online
whistleblower WikiLeaks. Among the leaked memos was information that
Iranian Red Crescent ambulances were used to smuggle weapons to
Lebanon's militant Hezbollah group during its 2006 war with Israel.
Memos said the "IRC shipments of medical supplies served also to
facilitate weapons shipments." Documents also detailed concerns by
US officials in Baghdad about Iran’s influence on Iraq. Memos also
said King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia had repeatedly urged the United
States to attack Iran to destroy its nuclear program to stop Tehran
from developing a nuclear weapon. One cable revealed that the US
kept nuclear weapons in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and
Turkey.
(AP, 11/28/10)(Econ, 12/4/10, p.35)
2010 Dec 3, Wikileaks struggled
to stay online as corporations and governments moved to cut its
access to the Internet, a potentially crippling blow for an
organization dedicated to releasing secret information via the web.
(AP, 12/3/10)
2010 Dec 3, Online payment
service provider PayPal said in a company blog it has cut off the
account used by WikiLeaks to collect donations.
(AP, 12/4/10)
2010 Dec 6, Internet giant
Google fielded a new champion on the mobile phone market
battlefield, a "Nexus S" smartphone made by South Korea's Samsung.
It included built-in support for Near Field Communication, a
wireless standard that enables customers to make payments over an
electronic reader.
(AP, 12/6/10)(SFC, 12/7/10, p.D1)
2010 Dec 7, WikiLeaks' founder
Julian Assange was remanded in custody until December 14 by a London
court after he said he would fight extradition to Sweden where he
faces rape allegations.
(AFP, 12/7/10)
2010 Dec 8, Cyber attacks
apparently organized by Internet activists sympathetic to WikiLeaks
founder Julian Assange shut down the website of credit card company
Mastercard and two Swedish sites. WikiLeaks published a new set of
cables, and in a defiant message posted online the secret-spilling
website promised that the leaks would keep on flowing despite the
arrest and jailing of its founder on sex allegations.
(Reuters, 12/8/10)(AP, 12/8/10)
2010 Dec 9, Netherlands
arrested a young hacker who confessed to participating in attacks by
WikiLeaks sympathizers on websites, including MasterCard, PayPal and
Visa.
(AP, 12/10/10)
2010 Dec 15, Facebook founder
and CEO Mark Zuckerberg (26) was named Time's "Person of the Year"
for 2010, joining the ranks of winners that include heads of state
and rock stars as the person the magazine believes most influenced
events of the past year.
(AP, 12/15/10)
2010 Dec 20, Facebook CEO Mark
Zuckerberg toured the offices of Baidu, China's top search engine,
during a visit that has sparked speculation the social networking
magnate is looking for business opportunities in the world's largest
Internet market.
(AP, 12/20/10)
2010 Dec 20, Venezuela’s
government formally rejected Larry Palmer, Washington's nominee for
ambassador. The US State Department said the decision will have
consequences on their relations. Venezuela’s parliament passed a law
banning for the first time Internet content that promotes social
unrest, challenges authority or condones crime, fueling outrage by
the opposition.
(AP, 12/20/10)(AFP, 12/21/10)
2010 Dec 25, China’s state
media said police are offering cash and other rewards to encourage
the country's millions of Internet users to help solve criminal
investigations. China announced a 25-basis point increase in
benchmark one-year interest rates, providing much-needed reassurance
that it was determined to rein in price pressures.
{China, Internet, Banking}
(AFP, 12/25/10)(Reuters, 12/27/10)
2010 Dec 30, Cyber activists
said they have brought down Zimbabwean government websites after the
president's wife sued a newspaper for publishing a WikiLeaks cable
linking her with illicit diamond trading.
(Reuters, 12/30/10)
2010 Nicholas Carr, American
commentator, authored “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to
Our Brains,” in which he claimed that the Internet is on its way to
smothering creativity and profound thinking.
(SSFC, 6/6/10, p.F1)(Econ, 11/6/10, SR p.18)
2010 David Kirkpatrick authored
“The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is
Connecting the World.”
(Econ, 6/5/10, p.92)
2010 Jaron Lanier (49), virtual
reality pioneer, authored “You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto.”
(SSFC, 2/7/10, p.A19)
2010 Josh Lerner and Mark
Schankerman authored “The Comingled Code: Open Source and Economic
Development.”
(Econ, 1/15/11, p.93)
2010 Clay Shirky authored
“Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.”
(Econ, 1/15/11, p.76)
2010 Tim Wu “The Master Switch:
The Rise and Fall of Information Systems.” He proposed that America
adopt a “Separations Principle” that would enforce a split between
creators of content, those that distribute it and makers of devices
on which it is consumed.
(Econ, 1/1/11, p.77)
2011 Jan 10, Canada-based
Research In Motion said it will filter pornographic internet content
for its Blackberry smartphone users in Indonesia, following
government pressure to stop access to porn sites or face its
browsing service being shut down.
(Reuters, 1/10/11)
2011 Jan 13, Canada’s
BlackBerry maker Research In Motion said it has given India the
means to access its Messenger service and reiterated that no changes
could be made to allow monitoring of secure corporate emails.
(Reuters, 1/13/11)
2011 Jan 17, Canada-based
Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM), the maker of BlackBerry, promised
Indonesia it will meet the country's request to filter out
pornographic content on its smartphones in the next four days.
(AP, 1/17/11)
2011 Jan 17, WikiLeaks founder
Julian Assange vowed to publish secret details of offshore accounts
after Rudolf Elmer, a Swiss banking whistleblower, handed over data
on 2,000 purportedly tax-dodging individuals and firms.
(AFP, 1/17/11)(SSFC, 1/23/11, p.A5)
2011 Jan 19, The European
Commission, which regulates the trading of carbon emissions
certificates, shut the trading system down following the theft of
certificates worth up to $38 million in a spate of computer attacks.
The shutdown was expected to last a week.
(SFC, 1/20/11, p.D3)
2011 Jan 23, Iran's state TV
said the country has launched its first cyber police unit in the
latest attempt by authorities to gain an edge in the digital world.
(AP, 1/23/11)
2011 Jan 28, In Switzerland
Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former member of the group that created
WikiLeaks, said a new platform called OpenLeaks will allow sources
to choose specifically who they want to submit documents to
anonymously, such as to a particular news outlet. He hoped it would
be fully operational later this year.
(AP, 1/28/11)
2011 Jan 30, The Myanmar
opposition group led by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi launched its
first official website: http://www.nldburma.org/.
(AP, 1/30/11)
2011 Jan 31, India rejected
Canada-based Research In Motion's (RIM) offer to allow it only
partial access to its BlackBerry data services, while neighboring
Pakistan reversed its earlier decision to restrict the popular
smartphone's services.
(Reuters, 1/31/11)
2011 Jan 31, In Sri Lanka a
group of men broke into the offices of a website critical of the
government and set fire to it. A journalist from the publication
said that he suspected a government role in the attack.
(AP, 1/31/11)
2011 Feb 3, Int’l. groups that
coordinate Internet addresses officially allocated the last blocks
of IPv4 addresses to regional registries. A new 128-bit address
system, IPv6, will begin testing on June 8.
(SFC, 2/4/11, p.D6)
2011 Feb 7, Internet company
AOL Inc. said it is buying news hub Huffington Post in a $315
million deal that represents a bold bet on the future of online
news. Founded in 2005, Huffington Post is owned by Arianna
Huffington, Kenneth Lerer and a group of other investors. The site
attracts 25 million monthly visitors.
(AP, 2/7/11)
2011 Feb 7, In Egypt Wael
Ghonim (30), a Google Inc. marketing manager, was released from 12
days of detention and gave an emotionally charged television
interview, sobbing at times over those who have been killed. He
dubbed the protests "the revolution of the youth of the Internet."
He was a key organizer of the online campaign that sparked the first
protest on Jan 25.
(AP, 2/8/11)
2011 Feb 7, RIA News reported
that a Russian man, Yevgeny Anikin (27), has pleaded guilty in court
to stealing $10 million from former Royal Bank of Scotland division
World Pay in 2008 by hacking into accounts. "I want to say that I
repent and fully admit my guilt," Anikin said in his final comments
to the court in Novosibirsk in Siberia, where he was charged with
theft.
(Reuters, 2/7/11)
2011 Feb 8, Cuban officials
celebrated the arrival of a 1,600km fiber optic cable from
Venezuela, whose government put up the $70 million cost. It was
expected to become operational this summer.
(SFC, 2/10/11, p.A2)(Econ, 3/5/11,
p.42)(http://tinyurl.com/4zgampd)
2011 Feb 10, The US computer
security firm McAfee Inc said in a report that hackers working in
China over the last 2-4 years broke into the computer systems of
five multinational oil and gas companies to steal bidding plans and
other critical proprietary information.
(Reuters, 2/10/11)
2011 Feb 11, Pandora Media
Inc., an Internet radio company, announced plans to go public and
raise as much as $100 million from sale of stock.
(SFC, 2/12/11, p.D1)
2011 Feb 16, Google CEO Eric
Schmidt unveiled the one-stop payment service, called One Pass, at
Berlin's Humboldt University. The announcement came a day after
Apple rolled out a long-awaited subscription service for
applications designed for its iPhone and iPad. Apple is demanding a
30 percent cut of all subscriptions sold on those mobile apps while
Google is charging 10 percent. Schmidt also announced that Google
was funding a Berlin-based institute in conjunction with Humboldt
University. It would examine the evolution of the Internet and its
impact on society.
(AP, 2/16/11)
2011 Feb 17, Cyber crime costs
the British economy some 27 billion pounds ($43.5 billion) a year
and appears to be "endemic," according to the 1st official
government estimate of the issue.
(Reuters, 2/17/11)
2011 Feb 17, A top Canadian
cabinet minister said a cyber attack on key economic ministries last
month was serious but will not affect the timing of next month's
federal budget. The Canadian Broadcasting Corp said hackers using
China-based servers had broken into computer systems at the Finance
Department and Treasury Board.
(Reuters, 2/17/11)
2011 Feb 17, China warned the
United States not to use calls for uncensored access to the Internet
as a pretext to interfere in the domestic affairs of other
countries.
(AP, 2/17/11)
2011 Feb 22, A French creator
of specialized search engines filed a new complaint with the
European Union about alleged anticompetitive behavior by Google Inc.
(AP, 2/22/11)
2011 Feb 23, Chinese activists
said officials have rounded up Internet users who had reposted a
call for protests and charged them with subversion as the
authoritarian government continued its campaign to crush any Middle
East-style democracy movement. Unidentified organizers had issued a
renewed appeal to gather peacefully in parks or near monuments at 2
p.m. on Sundays. China's Vice President Xi Jinping urged greater
outreach by the ruling Communist Party to handle issues related to
education, employment, health care and housing.
(AP, 2/23/11)(AP, 2/24/11)
2011 Feb 24, A British judge
ruled that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (39), who rocked the US
government by publishing thousands of secret diplomatic memos, must
be extradited to Sweden to face sex crimes allegations.
(Reuters, 2/24/11)
2011 Feb 25, China widened its
Internet policing after online calls for protests like those that
swept the Middle East, with social networking site LinkedIn and
searches for the US ambassador's name both blocked. Access to
LinkedIn resumed on Feb 26.
(AP, 2/25/11)(AP, 2/26/11)
2011 Mar 2, The US Army filed
22 new charges, including aiding the enemy, against Pvt. 1st Class
Bradley E. Manning, suspected of leaking sensitive and classified
documents to WikiLeaks.
(SFC, 3/3/11, p.A4)
2011 Mar 5, In South Korea
unidentified attackers targeted more than two dozen government and
private websites. Officials reported no serious damage a day after a
pair of similar assaults.
(AP, 3/5/11)
2011 Mar 11, Amazon.com
notified its Illinois partners that it will stop doing business with
them on April 15 because of a new state law requiring the online
store to collect sales taxes.
(SFC, 3/12/11, p.D2)
2011 Mar 14, An Iranian
state-owned newspaper reported that Iranian hackers working for the
powerful Revolutionary Guard's paramilitary Basij group have
launched attacks on websites of the "enemies," in a rare
acknowledgment from Iran that it's involved in cyber warfare.
(AP, 3/14/11)
2011 Mar 15, A Thailand court
sentenced Thanthawut Taweewarodomkul (38), the administrator of an
anti-government website, to 13 years in prison on charges of
defaming the monarchy and violating the computer crime act.
(SFC, 3/16/11, p.A2)
2011 Mar 18, The Internet
Corporation for Assigned names and Numbers approved the .xxx domain
for adult-content websites.
(SFC, 3/19/11, p.D2)
2011 Apr 4, The names and
e-mails of customers of Citigroup Inc and other large US companies,
as well as College Board students, were exposed in a massive and
growing data breach after a computer hacker penetrated online
marketer Epsilon.
(Reuters, 4/4/11)
2011 Apr 4, Israel asked
Facebook to pull down a page with 350,000 “fans” calling for “the
third Palestinian uprising.” Facebook at first refused, but took the
page down a day later.
(SSFC, 4/10/11, p.F9)
2011 Apr 8, In Russia a cyber
attack paralyzed the website of a popular independent newspaper,
days after similar attacks knocked off Russia's most popular
blogging site.
(AP, 4/8/11)
2011 Apr 11, Tajikistan state
religious affairs committee head Abdurakhim Kholikov said that
sending text messages with the "triple talaq," a Muslim ritual
whereby a husband can end a marriage by reciting the term for
divorce three times, breaches Islamic law.
(AP, 4/11/11)
2011 Apr 13, The US Justice
Dept. and FBI said they have seized computers and filed a civil
complaint in a bid to disable a malicious botnet system called
Coreflood, which has operated for nearly a decade stealing personal
passwords and private financial information. The civil complaint was
against 13 John Doe defendants related to the Coreflood botnet.
(SFC, 4/14/11, p.D6)
2011 Apr 15, Indictments were
unsealed in Manhattan against 11 people including the founders of
the three largest online poker sites open to US players. They were
charged with bank fraud, money laundering and violating gambling
laws.
(SFC, 4/16/11, p.A6)
2011 Apr 16, A senior Iranian
military official said experts have determined the United States and
Israel were behind a mysterious computer worm known as Stuxnet that
has harmed Iran's nuclear program.
(AP, 4/16/11)
2011 Apr 17, Iran’s Kayhan
daily reported that an Iranian military commander has accused German
engineering company Siemens of helping the United States and Israel
launch the Stuxnet virus, a cyber attack on its nuclear facilities.
(Reuters, 4/17/11)
2011 Apr 19, Sony Corp. in the
US noticed unauthorized activity on its network, and discovered that
data had been transferred off the network the next day. The
company's general counsel gave the FBI information about the breach
on April 22.
(AP, 5/4/11)
2011 Apr 19, Investors
announced that West Africa Cable System (WACS), a new $650 million
undersea telecommunications cable, has landed in South Africa,
saying the link would double the broadband capacity of the
continent's largest economy.
(AFP, 4/19/11)
2011 Apr 21, A group of
Japanese internet service providers started blocking access to child
porn websites as part of efforts to crack down on the spread of
sexually explicit images of children.
(AFP, 4/21/11)
2011 Apr 25, A senior Iranian
military official said Iran has been hit by a second computer virus,
the Stars virus, suggesting it was part of a concerted campaign to
undermine the country's disputed nuclear program.
(AP, 4/25/11)
2011 May 10, Malaysian local
papers highlighted how underworld groups were using Facebook and
other social media to recruit members, the majority of whom are
still at secondary school. The next day the government announced a
major crackdown on criminal gangs using social networking sites to
enlist teenage recruits as "street fighters."
(AFP, 5/11/11)
2011 May 11, In Australia
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was awarded the Sydney Peace
Foundation's top honor for "exceptional courage in pursuit of human
rights", joining the likes of Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama.
{Australia, Internet}
(AFP, 5/11/11)
2011 May 11, Three top French
publishers said they were suing US Internet giant Google for
scanning thousands of their books for its online library without
permission.
(AP, 5/11/11)
2011 May 12, Journalist learned
that PR agency Burston-Marsteller had tried to persuade newspaper
writers to say nasty things about Google, while concealing that
Facebook was paying for the lobbying.
(Econ, 5/21/11, p.72)
2011 May 19, The LinkedIn IPO
was priced at $45 per share and closed at $94.25 after reaching a
high of $122.70. It was the first major US social networking company
to sell stock on a public market.
(SFC, 5/20/11, p.A1)
2011 May 21, Hackers launched a
"significant and tenacious" cyber attack on Lockheed Martin, a major
defense contractor holding highly sensitive information.
(AP, 5/29/11)
2011 May 23, Square, a startup
co-founded by Jack Dorsey (one of the creators of Twitter), unveiled
a new payment system that undercut credit card processing fees
charged to small businesses and making it easy for them to accept
digital payments.
(Econ, 5/28/11, p.79)
2011 May 24, In France the
world's most powerful Internet and media barons gathered in Paris in
a show of strength to leaders at the G8 summit, amid rows over
online copyright, regulation and human rights.
(AFP, 5/24/11)
2011 May 24, Japan’s Sony Corp.
said it discovered a security breach affecting 8,500 user accounts
in a music entertainment website in Greece that comes on the heels
of a hacker attack which forced its flagship gaming site offline.
(AP, 5/24/11)
2011 May 28, Lockheed Martin
confirmed that hackers had launched a "significant and tenacious"
cyber attack on May 21. Lockheed, a major defense contractor holding
highly sensitive information, said its secrets remained safe.
(AP, 5/29/11)
2011 May 28, An Egyptian
administrative court fined ousted President Hosni Mubarak and two
former officials 540 million Egyptian pounds ($91 million) for
cutting off mobile and internet services during protests in January.
Egypt charged former Information Minister Anas el-Fekky with
"deliberately causing financial harm" to the state-run Radio and
Television Union.
(Reuters, 5/28/11)
2011 May 31, Turkey's
government defended a new regulation that will filter the Internet
and restrict access to websites that show pornography, bomb-making
and violent content. The new regulation was set to come into effect
in August.
(AP, 5/31/11)
2011 Jun 5, InfraGard, an
Atlanta FBI partner organization, confirmed that almost 180
passwords of its members had been stolen and leaked to the Internet.
Lulz Security (LulzSec), an online hacking collective, said it was
acting in a response to a recent report that the Pentagon was
considering whether to classify some cyber attacks as acts of war.
(SFC, 6/6/11, p.A6)
2011 Jun
5, In France, the Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel (CSL)
announced that radio and TV stations would no longer be allowed to
promote or recommend their Facebook pages and Twitter feeds on air,
unless such sites are part of a news story. The decision, which was
first issued quietly on May 27, has now attracted international
media outrage thanks to the French bloggers who began writing about
it yesterday.
(AP, 6/6/11)
2011 Jun 6, Apple CEO Steve
Jobs, who had been on medical leave while battling pancreatic
cancer, attended a conference of software developers to unveil a new
service called iCloud. The iCloud stores music, photos, documents
and electronic books “in the cloud,” and is able to transfer them
between Apple devices, without the need for hooking up a
cable.
(AFP, 6/6/11)
2011 Jun 9, In New York
officials of Citibank acknowledged that hackers had breached their
system in May and gained access to the names, account numbers and
e-mail addresses of about 200,000 customers.
(AP, 6/9/11)
2011 Jun 10, The Spanish
government announced it had arrested three men who were suspected of
being part of the hacker group known as Anonymous; the men, called
“hacktivists,” were charged with organizing and carrying out the
hacking of the websites of Sony Corporation, as well as several
banks.
(Reuters, 6/10/11)
2011 Jun 11, The International
Monetary Fund acknowledged that it had been the victim of a
cyber-attack on its computers. The attack was said to be very
sophisticated, and its intent was to install spyware. The intruders
were able to access and read numerous e-mails and documents; several
published reports said the attack was “connected to a foreign
government,” but did not reveal which
one.
(Reuters, 6/11/11)
2011 Jun 13, Police in Turkey
rounded up 32 alleged members of Anonymous, hacker group, which had
recently attacked a couple of official websites.
(Econ, 6/18/11, p.67)
2011
Jun 15, In another hacker attack, a group known as Lulz Security
(LulzSec) was able to take down the public website of the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA). The group announced the attack at 6pm by
sending out a message on Twitter. Service was restored on the CIA
site later in the evening, and sources at the agency said no
sensitive files were breached.
(Reuters, 6/15/11)
2011 Jun 15, Citigroup admitted
that its original estimate of the number of people affected by a
cyber-attack was low. Rather than about 200,000, hackers gained
access to the account information of over 360,000 customers.
(Reuters, 6/15/11)
2011 Jun 15, In Arizona a grand
jury indicted Donald Lapre, a Phoenix-based TV pitchman, accused of
running a nationwide scheme to sell essentially worthless
Internet-based businesses to more than 200,000 people. Victims were
defrauded of nearly $52 million.
(AP, 6/16/11)
2011 Jun 19, Chinese public
relations consultant Chen Hong closed down his website which let
people post anonymous tips on official bribery after censors stepped
in blocking access to the site for people inside China. His website,
http://www.ibribery.com, had drawn 200,000 unique visitors in two
weeks.
(AP, 6/22/11)
2011 Jun 19, Japanese game
maker Sega said hackers have stolen the personal data of some 1.29
million customers of the, in a theft via a website of its European
unit.
(AP, 6/19/11)
2011 Jun 20, ICANN, the
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, announced that
websites will be able to have any suffix for almost any word in any
language for an application fee of $185,000.
(SFC, 6/21/11, p.D6)
2011 Jun 20, British police
arrested a man (19) suspected of hacking attacks on int’l.
businesses and intelligence agencies. The arrest took place
following a joint operation by its Internet crimes unit and the FBI.
Police would not say whether the man is believed to be linked to
either the Anonymous or Lulz Security (LulzSec) hacking collectives,
which have called for "war" on governments that control the Internet
and claimed responsibility for a string of high-profile attacks on
targets such as Sony, the CIA web page and the US Senate computer
system.
(AP, 6/21/11)(SFC, 6/23/11, p.A2)
2011 Jun 21, Indian police said
they had ordered Google to stop taking photos of the city of
Bangalore for its Street View product because of fears the images
could be used by militants.
(AFP, 6/21/11)
2011 Jun 22, The online
pranksters at Lulz Security (LulzSec) say they've taken down two
government Web sites in Brazil as they continue with their global
"Anti-Security" campaign. The cyber attack blocked traffic to the
website of the Brazilian presidency and two other government sites.
(AP, 6/22/11)(http://tinyurl.com/3ddjml6)
2011 Jun 20, Wyoming became the
first state to begin using a suite of cloud computing tools from
Google for its entire executive branch of government, allowing data
and applications to be stored on remote servers and accessed over
the Internet. The system was formally unveiled on June 22 as Gov.
Matt Mead cut a red data cable with scissors.
(AP, 6/22/11)
2011 Jun 24, Google said the
FTC has opened a broad investigation into its online search and
online advertising businesses to see if it has abused its dominant
position.
(Econ, 7/2/11, p.56)
2011 Jun 25, The Lulz Security
(LulzSec) group of rogue hackers announced it was disbanding with
one last data dump, which included internal AOL Inc and AT&T
documents.
(Reuters, 6/26/11)
2011 Jun 28, The Vatican
inaugurated its new information portal: www.news.va.
(www.news.va/en/news/presentation-of-new-vatican-multimedia-portal)
2011 Jun 29, It was reported
that News Corp. has sold Myspace to Specific Media Inc. for $35
million, a fraction of the $580 million it paid in 2005 for the
once-hot social media site even as a new generation of Web-based
start-ups is enjoying sky-high valuations. News Corp. will also get
a 5% stake in Specific Media.
(Reuters, 6/29/11)(SFC, 6/30/11, p.D3)
2011 Jun, The FBI and Interpol
conducted "Operation Hive," which resulted in the arrests of two
Metulji operators in Bosnia and Slovenia. The world's biggest
criminal botnet, that has enslaved tens of millions of computers
across 172 countries, was named “Metulji," Slovenian for
"butterfly."
(http://tinyurl.com/4346r4y)
2011 Jul 3, Belarus blocked
access to Facebook, Twitter and a major Russian social networking
site in an attempt to prevent opposition protests on a national
holiday. Thousands of police and special forces were deployed in the
center of Minsk, the capital.
(AP, 7/3/11)
2011 Jul 8, A 225-page
international review showing wide variances of Internet freedom gave
Finland the best marks for making citizens' access to a broadband
connection a legal right. The report was presented at OSCE
headquarters in Vienna.
(AP, 7/8/11)
2011 Jul 14, The US Pentagon
said a cyber attack in March by a foreign government stole some
24,000 files from a defense industry computer network.
(SFC, 7/15/11, p.A8)
2011 Jul 18, Lulz Security
(LulzSec) hacker group attacked the website of the Rupert Murdoch
owned Sun newspaper, replacing the online version with a fake story
pronouncing the mogul's death.
(AFP, 7/18/11)
2011 Jul 19, US authorities
announced 14 arrests of hackers and said they cooperated with
British and Dutch authorities. They were arrested for allegedly
mounting a cyberattack on PayPal’s website ion retaliation for the
firm’s suspending the accounts of WikiLeaks.
(AP, 7/20/11)(SFC, 7/20/11, p.A7)
2011 Jul 19, Harvard Univ.
fellow Aaron Schwartz, a student of ethics, was charged with hacking
into the MIT computer network to steal nearly 5 million academic
articles from JSTOR.
(SFC, 7/20/11, p.A7)
2011 Jul 20, Dutch prosecutors
released some details about four Dutch citizens arrested on
suspicion of involvement in cyber attacks as part of the
loosely-knit hackers group known as "Anonymous." They said the
suspects are thought to have belonged to a splinter group called
AntiSec NL, which hacked the sites of dating service Pepper.nl and
communications software maker Nimbuzz, among others.
(AP, 7/20/11)
2011 Jul 25, Saudi authorities
blocked the website of Amnesty International inside the kingdom
following criticism of a controversial new anti-terrorism draft law.
(AP, 7/25/11)
2011 Jul 27, In Australia a
25-year-old unemployed truck driver (online nickname "Evil"), who
had been unable to find a job in information technology, faced 49
charges after a six-month investigation into his online activities.
(AP, 7/27/11)
2011 Jul 27, Scottish teenager
Jake Davis (18) was arrested with 16 computers in the Shetland
Islands. This was the alleged nerve center of Lulz Security
(LulzSec), a group of internet hackers whose targets included
computer-security and online gaming firms. The group had broken from
Anonymous, another hacker group, three months earlier.
(Econ, 8/6/11,
p.49)(http://shetlopedia.com/Jake_Davis)
2011 Jul 29, Yahoo Inc.,
Japan's Softbank Corp. and the China’s Alibaba Group said they have
agreed on a compensation plan involving the Web payment service
Alipay.
(AP, 7/29/11)
2011 Aug 3, Computer hackers
attacked the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange website, prompting the
authorities at the bourse to shut it down. ZSE does not conduct
trading on the Internet.
(AFP, 8/5/11)
2011 Aug 4, Computer security
firms McAfee and Dell SecureWorks said Chinese hackers had attacked
over 72 networks beginning in 2006. McAfee dubbed the attacks
“Operation Shady RAT.”
(SFC, 8/5/11, p.D6)
2011 Aug 6, The group known as
Anonymous said it has hacked into some 70 law enforcement websites
across the southern and central United States in retaliation for
arrests of its sympathizers in the U.S. and Britain.
(AP, 8/6/11)
2011 Aug 9, South Korean
officials said its ministry which handles relations with North Korea
has been targeted by hackers in the latest of a series of online
attacks on government and corporate websites.
(AFP, 8/9/11)
2011 Aug 11, Online media said
authorities in Uzbekistan have blocked dozens of Internet sites in
an apparent attempt to further stem the flow of information into the
authoritarian Central Asian nation.
(AP, 8/11/11)
2011 Aug 14, The hacker group
known as Anonymous struck a Bay Area Rapid Transit website and
released customer information in retaliation for BART’s decision to
cut cellular phone service to prevent an antipolice protest in San
Francisco. Hackers carried out a 2nd attack on Aug 17 breaching the
website of the agency’s rank-and-file police.
(SFC, 8/15/11, p.A1)(SFC, 8/18/11, p.A1)
2011 Aug 15, Google moved to
acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion.
(SFC, 8/16/11, p.C1)
2011 Steven Levy authored “In
the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives.”
(SSFC, 4/17/11, p.G1)
2011 Evgeny Morozov authored
“The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom.”
(Econ, 1/8/11, p.82)
2011 Eli Pariser authored “The
Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You.”
(Econ, 7/2/11, p.70)
2011 Kevin Poulsen authored
“Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime
Underground.” It documented the story of hacker Max Butler, aka
Iceman, currently serving a 13-year sentence for the theft of credit
card data.
(SSFC, 3/6/11, p.G1)
2011 Siva Vaidhyanathan
authored “The Googlization of Everything: And why We Should Worry.”
(SSFC, 4/17/11, p.G1)
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