Reflections: 21 January 2011

The Clause 69 of Information Technology law has been modified. The police have been authorised to tap email account or internet chatting of those against whom investigations are in progress for serious charges.They only require permission from the State or Central Government. This provision is bound to be misused, going by the previous experience. As a precaution, the law should be further amended. Instead of government, it should be mandatory for police to seek permission from the court of law. 

The honorable Supreme Court of India has asked the Government to bring back black money stashed abroad. The news is grabbing headlines since past few days. The Government appears to be reluctant.

The Indians reportedly rank 7th on the global scale in the G-math test. What about the lakhs of below-average engineers and doctors turned out year-by-year by the substandard institutions? The higher education in the country is indeed in poor state.

*

The world wide web is just 40

Chronology of events in the life of Internet

1969

On September 2, two computers at University of California, Los Angeles, exchange meaningless data in first test of Arpanet, an experimental military network 1972

Ray Tomlinson brings email to the network, choosing @ as a way to specify email addresses belonging to other systems 1973

Arpanet gets first international nodes, in England and Norway 1974 Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn develop communications technique called TCP, allowing multiple networks to understand one another, creating a true internet 1983

Domain name system is proposed. Creation of suffixes such as ‘.com’, ‘.gov’ and ‘.edu’ comes a year later

1988

One of the first internet worms, Morris, cripples thousands of computers

1990

Tim Berners- Lee creates the World Wide Web while developing ways to control computers remotely

1993

Marc Andreessen and colleagues at University of Illinois create Mosaic, the first web browser to combine graphics and text on a single page

1994

Andreessen and others on the Mosaic team form a company to develop the first commercial web browser, Netscape. Two immigration lawyers introduce the world to spam, advertising their green card lottery services

1999

Napster popularizes music file-sharing and spawns successors that have permanently changed the recording industry

2000

The dot-com boom of the 1990s becomes a bust as technology companies slide

2004

Mark Zuckerberg starts Facebook at Harvard University

2005

Launch of YouTube video-sharing site 2007

Apple releases iPhone, introducing millions more to wireless internet access

World internet population surpasses 250 million in 1999, 500 million in 2002, 1 billion in 2006 and 1.5 billion in 2008

Just imagine how would it be if there was no Internet today?