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$>THE_INTERNET

Alexius Sayco Academia

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PREFACE
This book is not about someone. It’s not about a single group of people.
This may not even be about you, or maybe all about you. I cannot say at this
early stage. Maybe you can’t too. But we’ll see about that after reading the
whole thing.

There are a lot of thinking before pursuing this topic. I don’t know if a
lot of people will hate me. I don’t know if they will like me. And most of all, I
don’t know if they will even like what they read here.

Before proceeding, you must know that I don’t hate anyone that makes
me write this piece. This is about my care for humanity. This is not for judging
them, or us. This is more of an enlightenment. To see what we have become. To
see where we are heading. To stop and think for a second, are we really
evolving for the better?
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Chapter 1: Birth of the Internet

Let’s have a little peak in history.

Internet was not about for everyone, at least not initially. The name of the
project was ARPANET. The predecessor and basis of what we know today as
the Internet.

The initial purpose of the project was to connect specific computers from
a number of universities so that scientific resources maybe shared between them.
This is through breaking the data into smaller pieces called packets, then
sending them through the wires and reconstruct at the destination. The people
behind the project then, takes advantage of this idea and expanded it.

A lot has happened back then. A lot of changes and transfers of the
project and ideas to different entities like military institutions. Purposes evolves
too. Until brilliant people decided to connect the people around the globe.

Can you imagine how great the idea was? It was so great and beautiful.
Tiny bits of data flowing across the globe in a matter of seconds! That is the
Internet and the birth of the new era of communication.

Can you still remember the time of mails? Some person waiting for days
or weeks or maybe a month before he can receive a message from his cousin
from another country? Or the other side of the globe? Then there could be a
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time that they would meet before the message arrive? How frustrating that was?
It was like:

Jay : Hey man! How are you? Did you bring the package I mentioned in the
letter?
Cay : What letter?

Well that was before. Today, it’s way cooler if you think about it. If you
sent a message through e-mail or chat message or something else, it would
arrive instantly to the person you’re communicating with. Maybe a few
seconds delay but that should be okay, right? But then you may hear some
arguments like:

Elle (girlfriend) : What took you so long to answer my message?

Em (boyfriend) : What? I replied, what’s your problem!
Elle : Yeah you replied, after 30 seconds!

That was amazing right? And yet some are still not satisfied.

In the early days of the internet, there are only a limited number of
internet service providers. Only phone companies are the means to connect to
the internet. So, in order to access the internet, users have to connect to a
telephone first. But look at today, somebody sniffed a wifi connection, after a
few moments, they’re already asking the password. That’s how easy it is now.
We acquired speed for a number of things over the years, yet we lost some
important things as well. One of those is patience.
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Chapter 2: Bread and Butter

Speed of communication; that’s just one of the few things that the power
of the internet has given us. It is also the fundamental aspect that drives onto so
many applications in our everyday lives, from small things like sending
messages to friends and to industry-large applications like controlling a power
plant or weather forecasting.

If we’ll look at the applications, it’s almost limitless. It’s becoming more
and more essential in our everyday lives. Just like cellphones right? Before,
cellphones are like wants in life. We have to have them because we want them,
but look now, it’s as if we really have to have them because we needed them.
And for most people this is true.

Let’s look around us and we can see that payphones are becoming less
popular nowadays. It’s just because they’re not always available at our
disposal. Just imagine for example, I am sick and cannot go to the office, I have
to let my boss know that I have to take a leave today but there’s no nearby
payphone near my house. How hard it is if you don’t have a landline or
cellphone in this kind of situation? That’s one of the reasons why mobile phones
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became needs to most people. Well not everyone obviously because there are
still people living without a phone with them.

With mobile phones, you can bring and use them when necessary
anywhere where there’s signal. Not to forget the phone’s juice (battery charge
and prepaid or postpaid loads). With this little thing in our possession every
day, they are becoming more attached to us than we can even imagine. One
more powerful tool that make us get out more from our phone is the internet.
Well specially today, with modern day smartphones, we held the internet
everywhere we go. This is a very big leap for mankind. More than we care
about or their existence. We don’t know this, but try to remove it now. Remove
it and we’ll see a big impact.

It’s like oxygen, we don’t normally notice it but it’s there. We breath it.
Try to imagine without it and well see the difference. That’s if we can even see
after a few minutes without it.

Easy Information Access

With the internet today, we almost don’t need to go to a library.
Information is reachable with our fingertips.
I still remember the first time I used the internet. I was in high school and
I’m doing a research about diabetes. That time, we only had one computer in
our school and it’s in the faculty room. No internet connection so I still have no
idea what is internet. So I asked my mother how can I do a research and she
told me that there is a public library on the next town from ours. So I went with
my classmate and we looked at this library. We for half day of looking and
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asking, we found out that the public library was already closed a few years
ago. Then with more asking, we stumbled on an establishment called an internet
cafe. But before it wasn’t called by that, those establishments are more
popularly known as computer shops.

That was my first glimpse of the so called internet and my first use of the
web. That was in 2003 and a year earlier of the birth of the most used social
networking site today.

Anyway, that was my early moments of amazement of the internet. I still

have no idea though how it works at that time as that was my first time. But I
am so amazed how easy it was to be able to gather so much information. I don’t
know why, I’m a forgetful person, but one of the things that I still remember from
that day is the search engine I used. Back then, the most popular I think is this
web crawler that some students from Stanford University created called Yet
Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle. There’s already Google at the time
but it was not as popular as today.

Easy Sharing
As I’ve mentioned earlier in the book, when Jay sent a letter to Cay, well
that was ancient. Now with the rising of so many sharing and messaging
applications, sharing and communicating has never been easier. We can even
talk face to face while sending files or whatever to the other end. Well that’s
thanks to yahoo messenger which is one of the pioneer on this kind of service.
But now it’s gone, then came messenger which is now part of facebook which
practically does the same thing but with some enhancement.
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Maybe some of you may have heard of the Cloud. It’s a service that
offers us to store our files on the internet. You can try for free with the free tier
and pay if you ever need more space. This is a very convenient service, again
I speak for myself on this. I’ve used it for a long time now and it’s quite a charm.
I don’t have to worry about my files in the office if ever my computer breaks
down. That’s because most of my files are stored in various cloud services. I use
different services because I don’t have to pay. Yeah silly me. But that’s just that
for me, why pay if you can have it for free legally right?

Not only that my files in the cloud are safe, but I can also access them
using any computer or smartphone. That’s easy access and sharing right there.

Less Lines
Another important thing the internet brought us is automation. With this,
various online applications are implemented to lessen our time and effort of
falling in line. One example of this is the online enrollment systems
implemented by different schools. This is a real hassle-free service. You don’t
have to be physically be in the institution just to enroll. Although not all
institutions have embraced this technology, more and more are. Maybe not for
long, it will be used by every schools to make some of the services like this an
ease.

Other examples are online banking, online booking of airplane flights

or hotels and many more. Just one of the thing I wish the systems creators don’t
forget is the security. Well, as we open more doors and windows, we are also
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welcoming more point of entries, therefor more point of vulnerabilities. This

may, instead of making life better, may make it worse. It’s harder to secure
than to create, harder to implement and more expensive, but also very crucial.

This goes not only in topics discussed now but for others as well which
will still be discussed in this book.

Ease of Collaboration
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CHAPTER THREE: Sickness Created

. . . How it was abused. All the way from old simple hacking to modern
cyber-attacks.
. . . Some bad things are result of good intentions
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CHAPTER FOUR: Automation? Is it safe?

. . . Explains what it brought us today. World of automation and internet
of things. But aside from that, how the companies that made these tools gave
away a lot for being first in the race.
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CHAPTER FIVE: Rise of Online Media

. . . Inventions of early social networks and now
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CHAPTER SIX: Good Fruits

. . . How the online social media is used well
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CHAPTER SEVEN: Modern Heroine

. . . Talks about more and more about how close we become with the
social media. How more people are addicted to being updated with
everyone and the bad effects
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CHAPTER EIGHT: Bad Fruits

. . . The results of misuse
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CHAPTER NINE: Which way?

. . . Are we heading for the better or for worse? We have to choose