In computer news this week, 03/06/2002

Things to know about the Internet

Most people don't understand a whole lot about the Internet, or the world wide web, but they use it daily. The more you know about something - usually the more you get out of it, so here's some facts that you might not know.

The internet has been around since the 1960's, and was in some ways a response to Russia's launching their Sputnik satellite in 1957. In the cold war paranoia, it was feared that the Russians might gain a technological superiority over the United States, and the department of defense decided to build a computer network that would tie key military and university computers together in the event of nuclear war.

When most of us access the internet today, we access the Word Wide Web - that's the www in all internet addresses - which was created as a result of a research project in 1991 in Switzerland, and a fellow named Tim Berners-Lee is credited as one of the fathers of the web. His idea included linking thousands of computers together using hyper text transfer protocol - that's the http in all internet addresses.

Nobody owns the World Wide Web; that's probably the biggest misconception people have. The United States doesn't own it, nobody owns it. The closest thing to a governing agency is icann.org - The internet corporation for assigned names and numbers - which is composed of representatives from several countries - and it has been under a lot of criticism. There are even opposing organization that have sprung up creating their own rules regarding the web, and creating their own naming conventions.

There are some ways to figure out who actually owns a website - you can go to one of several "whois" sites and see who is the official registered owner of a site, and their address and email.

But if you have a problem with a website, you either have to handle it through that website, or complain to the washington state attorney general's office. You do the same thing with spam - we do have anti-spam laws in our state although they are hard to enforce. And if you get a virus from the internet or somebody on the internet, again there's not single place you can go to complain. Nobody will guarantee it won't happen again - all you can do is use antivirus software and keep it updated daily, and keep your computer backed up often.

Most people know about ecommerce - the term for business on the web - but most people don't understand the basic economic unit that pays the big bucks.

The unit is mouse clicks - or one site paying another site for referrals. Imagine how many millions of mouse clicks there are daily as people surf the web. My daughter worked for a dotcom in Seattle and explained this oddity to me. One of the biggest battles on the web is to be the entry portal - which means the website you always come to when you log onto the internet. Everybody wants to be that entry site - because then they get paid by other sites that their users click off to. This is also how search engines make their money. This gets into the concept of cookies and other secrets, and how your movements on the internet are secretly tracked and recorded, and even sold by evil programs named as adbots - but you can set any site you want as your home page - you don't have to come to the AOL home page, or earthlink, or the homepage of your isp. They make money off you when you do.

So set your home page to where you want to go; it's your free choice.Enjoy surfing the web, but be careful.

For Raw Bytes, This is Frank Delaney

POB 222 Spangle, Wa 99031 (509)245-3736 624-7230