Tagged: edward snowden
A definitive history of the Internet, as the World Wide Web turns 25
The World Wide Web, which has grown into over 600 million websites now, started 25 years ago. Here is a look at some of the milestones in the history–and pre-history–of WWW.
Embed from Getty ImagesOctober 29, 1969
A computer sends another computer a message for the first time through ARPANET, the computer network that would eventually become the Internet. ARPANET, named after the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, was a network of four computer terminals installed at universities and research institutions in California and Utah. The computers involved in the first ‘messaging’ were 643 km away from each other: One at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the other at Stanford Research Institute. The first message was supposed to be “login”, but the system crashed soon after sending only “lo”.
March 15, 1985
Symbolics computers of Cambridge, Massachusetts registers Symbolics.com, the internet’s first ever domain name.
March 12, 1989
The idea of World Wide Web develops with Computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee’s paper ‘Information management: a proposal’, which suggests improving information flows and creation of a web of notes with links between them. Berners-Lee proposes a digital information sharing system at CERN, using linked information, nodes, and hypermedia to form a web.
“Though CERN, as a physics lab, couldn’t justify such a general software project, my boss Mike Sendall allowed me to work on it on the side. In 1990, I wrote the first browser and editor. In 1993, after much urging, CERN declared that WWW technology would be available to all, without paying royalties, forever.”
1991
First web pages go live.
April 30, 1993
CERN makes the World Wide Web technology available to all on a royalty-free basis. The open web is born.
1993
The era of web browsers starts with the entry of Mosaic, an intuitive, user-friendly browser.
1994
Jeff Bezos starts online bookstore Amazon.com, which goes on to become an e-commerce giant.
December 15, 1994
Netscape Navigator becomes the top choice for web browsing. By 1996, Netscape Navigator, which would later pave the way for Mozilla Firefox, accounts for 80% of browsers used.
January 1994
Yahoo.com started at Stanford University by electrical engineering students Jerry Yang and David Filo.
September 3, 1995
French-born Iranian-American computer programmer Pierre Omidyar launches
AuctionWeb in San Jose, California. Formed as part of Omidyar’s personal site, AuctionWeb metamorphoses into eBay, the online auction giant.
1996
The era of browser wars begins when Windows offers Internet Explorer 3.0 for ‘free’ with its Windows 95 operating system.
Mid-1990s
Blogging emerges as a forum to vent, discuss, reflect, record and agrue. The beginning of user-generated content.
July 4, 1996
Commercial launch of Hotmail.com, created by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith.
1997
Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Stanford University launch google.com, a large-scale ‘Hypertextual Web Search Engine’.
1997
The one-millionth dotcom address registered.
1998
Open Diary introduces reader response and comments sections on specific blog entries.
March 1999
Brad Fitzpatrick starts blogging platform LiveJournal.
August 1999
Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan launch Blogger.com.
January 15, 2001
Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launch Wikipedia, a collaboratively edited, multilingual, free Internet encyclopaedia.
December 2002
LinkedIn–a social network for professionals–is founded. The actual website launches on May 5, 2003. Note that the networking site founded by Reid Hoffman, Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Eric Ly and Jean-Luc Vaillant predates Facebook.
February 2003
Google purchases Blogger.com
2003
China introduces a system of web filters, collectively known as ‘The Great Firewall’, that allows authorities to block web pages, whole websites or any page referencing a particular term.
August 2003
MySpace, one of the most spectacular failures among social networking sites, is launched.
February 4, 2004
Facebook, the epitome of social media, is launched by Harvard University students Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.
February 14, 2005
Former PayPal employees Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim launch YouTube, a site for uploading, viewing and sharing videos.
April 23, 2005
The first YouTube video titled ‘Me at the zoo,’ shows co-founder Karim at the San Diego Zoo.
2006
Google buys YouTube.
2006
Google agrees to censor search results in its Chinese entity, in order to get market access.
March 2006
Microblogging service Twitter created by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams (who had founded blogger.com), Biz Stone and Noah Glass.
June 29, 2007
Apple releases the first iPhone, starting the definitive trend of Internet browsing from mobile devises as opposed to computers. The ecosystem of Apps, or applications heralded.
2008
Google introduces free browser Chrome and Chrome operating system.
October 2009
Finland becomes the first country to declare broadband Internet access a legal right for all of its 5.2 million citizens.
January 2010
Google ends self-censorship in China.
March 23, 2010
Google exits mainland China and Google.cn re-directs to Google.com.hk or Google Hong Kong, bypassing Chinese regulators and allowing uncensored search results.
April 2010
WikiLeaks, founded by Julian Assange, starts releasing documents supplied by US soldier Bradley Manning, which includes footage of a US army helicopter firing on and killing unarmed civilians. The site also publishes US embassy cables, creating ripples across the diplomatic world.
2011
Many companies withdraw services to WikiLeaks, including online payment facilitators Visa and Paypal. Apple removes WikiLeaks app from its store. The revelations from Wikileaks and exhortations over social media–particularly Twitter and Facebook–contribute to ‘revolutions’ that collectively came to be called the Arab Spring, starting with Egypt and Tunisia and extending to Libya and Syria in bloodier forms.
2012
Enter the regulated Internet with a slew of attempts at legislation and multilateral treaties. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) introduced in the US Congress fail after widespread resistance including the ‘internet goes dark’ protests led by some of the most popular sites such as Wikipedia.
The contest between copyright protection and web censorship is played out in courts and in raids, eventually leading to the partial or full shutting down of a number of sites, including megavideo of Kim Dotcom, btjunkie.org, isohunt and piratebay.
Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secretive multilateral pact that seeks to counter online piracy, among other things, remains a bone of contention between internet freedom activists, governments and content producers.
Apr 2013
CERN restores the very first website, http://info.cern.ch/, to mark the 20th anniversary of open web.
June 5, 2013
The first of a series of revelations on the massive internet surveillance programs of intelligence organisations, particularly National Security Agency of US and GCHQ of UK, are revealed in the media, mainly in The Guardian newspaper. The leaker of these documents is revealed to be Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, who subsequently seeks asylum in Russia.
January 14, 2014
A US court strikes down a rule that required broadband providers to treat all internet traffic the same regardless of the source, a concept generally known as ‘net neutrality’. The US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit says the Federal Communications Commission does not have the power to mandate net neutrality rules.
Striking down FCC’s anti-blocking and anti-discrimination requirements, the court says the FCC has proven that broadband providers represent a threat to internet openness, but that the government can’t impose common carrier rules on information service providers.
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The Intercept, new media venture from e-Bay founder, goes live
Whenever Big Money backed media ventures, some courageous journalism has been the result, at least in the initial years of operations. The English edition of Al Jazeera channel, funded by the Qatar royal family, is a case in point. Now, The Intercept, an online news magazine from First Look venture backed by Pierre Omidyar, the Iranian-American co-founder of eBay and democracy activist, has gone live.
The Intercept front page
With Glenn Greenwald –the investigative journalist famous for helping Edward Snowden reveal secrets that had epochal consequences for politics and national security–at the helm, it was expected that The Intercept will begin with a bang. And it did.
Among its first pieces is a story on NSA’s role in US assassination program and a set of unseen pictures of some of the biggest intelligence agencies in the US.
Omidyar’s group promises more. The media group on which he reportedly invested as much as $250 million is going to come up with a family of digital magazines, each with its own editorial voice, its own look and feel, covering a variety of fields including national security, technology and the environment.
The venture is likely to herald the shape of things to come for media: Web and mobile-optimized content, fearless journalism, backing from tech industry stalwarts, innovative categorization and presentation, enhanced and interactive user experience, and possible non-dependence on old revenue models that had made media outlets eager not to hurt their advertisers.
Next up is the media plans of Jeff Bezos, who bought Washington Post last year for around $250 million, though it’s yet to be seen what kind of change the WaPo has gone through after the Amazon founder entered the game.
With the worries about funding removed, will great journalism prevail? Or will it end up foregrounding or imposing the political agenda of its founders and financial backers? We will wait and watch.
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Obama does a balancing act in first major speech on surveillance
In his first major speech on the raging controversy over US intellgence agencies’ massive snooping operations, President Barack Obama sought to make a distictinction between the necessity to gather information and the obligation to honour the privacy of citizens.
The speech does not seem to change much and definitely will not herald any major changes in the National Security Agency’s ways of functioning.
According to the Washington Post, while Obama placed restrictions on access to domestic phone records collected by NSA, the changes he announced will allow it to continue — or expand — the collection of personal data from billions of people around the world, Americans and foreign citizens alike.
You can see the full speech along with text here
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NSA spied on millions of text messages; infected thousands of computers with spyware
More skeletons are tumbling out of the National Security Agency surveillance cupboard, with The Guardian reporting that the US agency hacked into hundreds of millions of text messages, a day after New York Times reported on the implanting of spying software in some 100,000 computers to enable cyber attacks.
The NSA “has collected almost 200 million text messages a day from across the globe, using them to extract data including location, contact networks and credit card details,” the British newspaper reported after an investigation based on top-secret documents leaked by Edward Snowden.
Presentation slides revealed by the paper shows that NSA’s ‘Dishfire’ program extracts location, contacts and financial transactions including credit card data from the hacked text messages.
The program sweeps up ‘pretty much everything it can’, the paper reported citing British intelligence documents.
On average, each day the NSA was able to extract:
• More than 5 million missed-call alerts, for use in contact-chaining analysis (working out someone’s social network from who they contact and when)
• Details of 1.6 million border crossings a day, from network roaming alerts
• More than 110,000 names, from electronic business cards, which also included the ability to extract and save images.
• Over 800,000 financial transactions, either through text-to-text payments or linking credit cards to phone users
The NYT had reported that the software was implanted into computers in countries including US allies such as Pakistan. The secret technology allows NSA to enter and alter data in computers not connected to the internet too, by way of radio waves that can be transmitted through USB cards inserted into them.
Meanwhile, NBC reported that President Obama is not going to announce sweeping changes in the surveillance programme, after all.
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US may be moving towards curbing surveillance dragnet
US President Barack Obama is moving towards extending privacy protections to non-U.S. citizens, Wall Street Journal reported, citing officials familiar with the process said on Thursday
Obama is also seriously considering a revamping of the National Security Agency program that collects phone-call data of nearly all Americans, the paper reported.
The reported move follows the President’s meetings with privacy advocates and business leaders, following Edward Snowden’s revelations about massive surveillance net of American security agencies, particularly the NSA.
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In first major interview, Snowden says he’s already won
In his first interview to a US daily since his exile in Russia, Edward Snowden claimed victory on what he set out to do.
“For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished,” the Washington Post quoted him as saying, after months of revelations on the massive, global surveillance operations of US and UK intelligence agencies.
The newspaper said it spoke to Snowden over two days in Moscow and published new pictures of the former NSA contractor.
Here are some interesting quotes from the interview:
“For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished. I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.”
“All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed. That is a milestone we left a long time ago. Right now, all we are looking at are stretch goals.”
“I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA…I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it.”
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US officials considered giving amnesty to Snowden in return for documents
According to a report in The Guardian, US intelligence officials considered offering Edward Snowden amnesty in exchange for the vast trove of documents he collected.
The report said:
The NSA official in charge of assessing the alleged damage caused by Snowden’s leaks, Richard Ledgett, told CBS News an amnesty still remains controversial within the agency, which has spent the past six months defending itself against a global outcry and legislative and executive proposals to restrain its broad surveillance activities.
“My personal view is, yes, it’s worth having a conversation about,” Ledgett, who is under consideration to become the agency’s top civilian, said in an interview on 60 Minutes. “I would need assurances that the remainder of the data could be secured, and my bar for those assurances would be very high. It would be more than just an assertion on his part.”
But the paper quoted State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf as saying that Ledgett was stating a “personal view”.
“Mr Snowden is facing very serious charges and should return to the United States to face them,” it quoted Harf as saying.
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Edward Snowden is Time Magazine’s NOT Person of the Year 2013
Edward Snowden, the man who shook the world by releasing information about the massive surveillance programmes of American and British spying agencies, is not Time Magazine’s Person of the Year 2013, Pope Francis is.
Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian newspaper reporter who collaborated with Snowden to bring to light his revelations, mocked the venerable magazine’s decision “as edgy, bold, courageous and innovative as ever”.
Mediaite has collected a selection of the Twitter reaction that followed the magazine’s decision to make Snowden first runner up in the race. One of them attributed the choice to fear.
The Time magazine article on Snowden describes him as the dark prophet, and writes:
He wanted to issue a warning to the world, and he believed that revealing the classified information at his fingertips was the way to do it. His gambit has so far proved more successful than he reasonably could have hoped—he is alive, not in prison, and six months on, his documents still make headlines daily—but his work is not done, and his fate is far from certain.
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Hit by Snowden revelations, NSA says snooping was authorized
Facing flak over the revelations on the extent of its surveillance net, the National Security Agency has said its 
tracking of cellphones overseas is legally authorized under a sweeping U.S. presidential order, according to a report in NBC News .
According to the report,
The distinction means the extraordinary surveillance program is not overseen by a secretive U.S. intelligence court but is regulated by some U.S. lawmakers, Obama administration insiders and inspectors general.
The report adds:
The NSA said Friday it was not tracking every foreign phone call and said it takes measures to limit how much U.S. data is collected. The NSA has declined to provide any estimates about the number of Americans whose cellphones it has tracked either because they were traveling overseas or their data was irrevocably included in information about foreigners’ cellphones.
“It is not ubiquitous,” NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines said in a statement. “NSA does not know and cannot track the location of every cell phone.”
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New Snowden leaks; This time it’s Australia
Edward Snowden’s new revelation is on Australia.
Apparently, the Australian surveillance agency, known as the Defense Signals Directorate, indicated it could provide material without some privacy restraints imposed by other countries such as Canada.
If a secret document from 2008 leaked by Snowden is to be believed, the agency offered to share information collected about ordinary Australian citizens with the country’s major intelligence partner.
According to a news report in The Guardian,
Australia’s surveillance agency offered to share information collected about ordinary Australian citizens with its major intelligence partners, according to a secret 2008 document leaked by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The document shows the partners discussing whether or not to share “medical, legal or religious information”, and increases concern that the agency could be operating outside its legal mandate, according to the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC.
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