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 govern-ment 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 peo-ple 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 telecommunica-tions 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 consult-ing 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 im-portance of
this networking concept.
(SFEC, 3/16/97, Z1
p.3)(www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml#Origins)
1968-1998 Engineer Jon Postel (d.1998) coordinated
the Internet’s protocols and addressing sys-tem.
(Econ, 11/19/05, p.68)
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 Con-trol 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)(CompuServe Mag., 6/95, p.18)(SFC, 8/30/99, p.C10)(SFC,
9/3/99, p.C1)
1969 Oct 29, Researchers at
Stanford sent the first e-mail message across the Arpanet. 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 to-day’s
Internet was marked [see Sep 2].
(CS Mag., 6/95, p.18)(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 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.
(WSJ,11/14/94, p.R26)(SFEC, 3/28/99, Z1 p.8)(Econ,
6/12/04, p.26)
1972 Vinton Cerf, hearing-impaired
since birth, developed e-mail-like text messaging proto-cols for the
Arpanet.
(SFC, 7/26/00, p.D3)
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 Chi-cago.
(www.historyoftheinternet.com/chap3.html)
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 ex-periment 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 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)
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, pub-lisher 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 soft-ware. 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 Water-loo 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 ac-quired 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, 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, discov-ered 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 in-vented 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)
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 be-tween
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 trig-ger on
March 6, but only scattered cases of lost files were reported. The
Michelangelo com-puter 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 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)
1993 Jun, Marc Andreeson and Eric
Bina at the National Center for Supercomputing Applica-tions 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 Micro-soft 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 trans-mitting 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 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' com-pany 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 pur-chasing
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
Ameri-trade 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 An-other 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 investi-gation 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 communi-cations, 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 be-came 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 Solu-tions. 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 em-ployee’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)
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 Mo-torola 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 com-puters 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 trad-ing.
(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 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 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 engi-neering 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 Scott Kurnit founded
About.com, a web site for information originally known as the Min-ing
Company.
(WSJ, 7/7/99, p.A23)
1997 Electronic Arts launched
Richard Garriott’s Ultima Online, the 1st truly successful mas-sively
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 Anony-mouse.org, which
allowed users to type in a Web address in a box and with a click the
Anony-mouse server fetches and displays the page. This allowed
anonymous Web searches.
(Econ, 12/2/06, TQ p.3)
1998 Jan 17, Matt Drudge reported
over the Internet that Monica Lewinsky had paid numer-ous 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 communi-cations, 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 em-bedding 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 ven-ture, 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 set-tlement
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 Communi-cation 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
in-dustry. 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
In-dian 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 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 ac-quired 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 replac-ing 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 in-stant
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)
1998-1999 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 May 6, A US appeals court
ruled that government restrictions on the export of encryp-tion
software violated free speech.
(WSJ, 5/7/99, p.A1)
1999 May, Chinese hackers broke in
and vandalized American government websites in re-taliation 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 com-puter 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 commu-nity that
included a promise to keep the Internet free.
(SFC, 6/24/99, p.A1)
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 vis-its
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 elec-tronic 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 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 edi-tors 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 Jack Ma, a former English
teacher, started Alibaba.com to support small business peo-ple in
China. In 2005 Yahoo agreed to pay $1 billion in cash and turn over its
Chinese opera-tions 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.
(WSJ, 8/12/05, p.A1,B1)(SFC, 11/5/07, p.A15)
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 sys-tem of
Operative and Investigative procedures. It required every Internet
service provider to in-stall 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 dou-bled 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 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. Con-tent and service providers were also required to
undergo a "security certification" prior to opera-tion.
(SFC, 1/27/00, p.A1)
2000 Feb 3, The Ford Motor Co.
said it would provide new PCs and a printer with Internet ac-cess 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 in-fringement
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 dis-guised 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 com-puter networks.
(SFC, 12/9/00, p.A3)
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 Mar 6, US District Judge
Marilyn Patel ordered Napster to block access to its files of Mil-lions
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, ex-ploiting 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 resi-dents
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 Zenn-strom 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 Jimmy Wales (35), a retired
futures and options trader, founded Wikipedia, an Internet encyclopedia.
(SFC, 12/6/05, p.A10)
2002 Jan 19, It was reported that
China had imposed new Internet controls and required ser-vice 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 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)
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 advertis-ing
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 rap-idly 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 chair-man: "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 Corpora-tion 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 Net-scape
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.
(SFC, 3/10/06, p.A16)
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
prop-erty by charging an average of $20 per virtual “acre” per month.
In 2008 Wagner James Au au-thored ”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 stu-dents, who alleged he stole their idea.
(SSFC, 10/23/05, p.A1)(Econ, 9/16/06, p.69)(Econ,
7/21/07, p.66)
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
at-tempt 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 de-signed 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 at-tack 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 Net-sky 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
sus-pended 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 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 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 librar-ies,
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 Joe Kraus co-founded JotSpot
as the first company to provide an application wiki. Jot-Spot has since
launched several other products.
(http://www.jot.com/)(Econ, 4/22/06, Survey p.14)
2004 Nov 3, Jeremy Jaynes of North
Carolina became the first person in the US to be con-victed 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 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 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)
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 re-mote 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 data-base 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 vi-rus 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 network-ing website, for
$580 million.
(SSFC, 10/23/05, p.A1)
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)
2005 Dec, Steve Chen and Chad
Hurley officially launched YouTube, an Internet based site for sharing
video clips. The YouTube Web site had gone live in February.
(Econ, 4/29/06, p.68)(WSJ, 10/13/06, p.A12)
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 Krishnan Ganesh founded
TutorVista, an Internet service using Indian tutors for West-ern
students.
(Econ, 6/23/07, p.76)
2005 Microsoft released MSN
Search, powered by its own internally developed search en-gine. MSN had
previously relied on Yahoo for its search function.
(SFC, 2/2/08, p.C1)
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 net-work 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 net-work 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 lan-guage, 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 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 Aug 2, AOL shifted to an
advertising strategy as customers cancelled their dial-up ser-vice 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 com-bination 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 in-dicted for perpetrating an online hoax, which led to Meier’s
suicide. Drew 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.
(SFC, 5/16/08,
p.A4)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan_Meier_suicide_controversy)(AP,
11/27/08)
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 Tim Berners Lee, creator of
the world wide web, helped establish the Web Science Re-search
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)
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 de-cide 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 Jun 4, China promised to
better control emissions of greenhouse gases, unveiling a na-tional
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 li-cense 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 sen-tenced 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 23, Hewlett-Packard
acquired Opsware, a software company founded by Marc An-dreessen, 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 be-lieved
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 Dou-bleClick 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 launder-ing, and obscenity. Last week,
the judge in the case sentenced Schaffer to 63 months and Kil-bride 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 ex-pected 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 king-pin 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 possess-ing software
for committing crime, and two counts of accessing a computer system
without au-thorization. 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 se-lected
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 Can-ada 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 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)
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 anti-virus 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 Double-Click, saying
the acquisition won't curb competition for online ads.
(AP, 3/11/08)
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 num-bers 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, heed-ing 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 refer-ence
book based on entries from Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia.
The single vol-ume, 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 na-tion's borders. Outrage over the statute soon led to 2
million protests, filed by e-mail. In Sep-tember 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 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 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 com-petition 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 re-lating 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 wire-less
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 in-trusion and one of
conspiracy.
(AP, 11/10/08)
2008 Nov 12, The US issued rules
barring banks from processing payments tied to most online gambling
sites, effectively making Web betting illegal.
(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 him-self and planned to die. It was only then that the
Web feed stopped. Some users told investiga-tors they did not take him
seriously because he had threatened suicide on the site before.
(AP, 11/22/08)
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 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)
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