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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