No she didn’t
Luckily she didn’t, the internet didn’t ‘break’, we can all carry on with our lives. The people who know and care about Kim Kardashian have no doubt moved on to other things…the rest of us may be left with a vague worry, ‘what if’?
In recent months there have been other scares, high profile Twitter and Facebook crashes, the North Korea/Sony hacking, the use and abuse of the web and social media by trolls & terrorists (of the ‘cyber’ and the real type). But remember the internet is neither a force for good or a force for evil, but to borrow a quote from a different age, ‘…a place for good and evil”.
However, this headline got me thinking about what the internet is, why it is not in the power of one lady (however large her ass-ets are!) to break it, or even do any serious damage.
10 random things about the internet and the web
(1) The internet as we know it evolved from a network of computers (ARPANET) developed in the USA in the late 1950’s.
(2) The ARPA group had government funding, but despite the myth it wasn’t a secret nuclear defence project. It was intended to develop and foster scientific research and education.
(3) In 1969 the first message “Lo” was sent across a computer network between UCLA and Stanford. It was meant to be ‘Login’ but the system crashed!
(4) The internet and the World Wide Web are different things. I like to think of the internet as the road system, the laws (protocols), junctions, and sign-posts etc. and the web as the vehicles that use the road network…or the information superhighway as it used to be called.
(5) At the risk of stretching this metaphor too thinly, the internet supports other types of traffic(!), such as SMTP (e-mail), FTP (file transfer) and Usenet (messaging and bulletin boards).
(6) Whilst working as a scientist at the CERN lab in Switzerland in1989 Tim Berners-Lee ‘invented’ the world wide web by sending the first message between a client and a server over the internet using a hypertext protocol (HTTP).
(7) It wasn’t until 1991 that the first website was launched and the web was born! (Look how far we’ve come, thanks to some fellow bloggers, the first web page and some facts and figures)
(8) TimBL is now the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an organisation that oversees the webs continued development, but it doesn’t own or control it.
(9) Nobody owns the internet either, although there are some groups such as ICANN that manage domain names and internet (IP) addresses, and national registration organisations like NOMINET in the UK. The internet is however a collaboration of the software and hardware suppliers, the public and private sectors, technicians, users, buyers and sellers, mostly good people who want to communicate, share, do business and stay connected.
(10) The internet has no on/off switch! It is a massive resilient network of networks (hence inter-network), computers, routers, gateways and servers – arguably the biggest man-made system ever built. Barring a number of armageddon scenarios the internet cannot be broken!
Endnote: by the way, who is Kim Kardashian?
As always thank you for your feedback and comments.
Tony
(c) 2015 Antony Lawrence CBA Ltd.
[…] it all started at Tim Berners-Lee’s desk at the CERN laboratory in 1991 with an editor called WorldWideWeb and the first hypertext (HTTP) message to a […]