What Is The Internet | What Is The WWW | What Is The Dark Web ?

What Is The Internet :

The internet is the wider network that allows computer networks around the world run by companies, governments, universities and other organisations to talk to one another. The result is a mass of cables, computers, data centres, routers, servers, repeaters, satellites and wifi towers that allows digital information to travel around the world.It is that infrastructure that lets you order the weekly shop, share your life on Facebook, stream Outcast on Netflix, email your aunt in Wollongong and search the web for the world’s tiniest cat. 

(Image Credit - pixabay.com)

The Internet has millions of smaller domestic, academic, business, and government networks, which together carry many different kinds of information. The short form of internet is the 'net'. The World Wide Web is one of its biggest services.

Origin And Development :

The Internet was developed in the United States by the "United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency" (DARPA). The Internet was first connected in October of 1969 and was called ARPANET. The World Wide Web was created at CERN in Switzerland in 1990 by a British (UK) scientist named Tim Berners-Lee. Today, people can pay money to access the Internet from internet service providers. Some services on the Internet cost nothing to use. Sometimes people who offer these free services use advertising to make money. Censorship and freedom of speech on the Internet can be controversial.

ARPANET was one of the first general-purpose computer networks. It connected time-sharing computers at government-supported research sites, principally universities in the United States, and it soon became a critical piece of infrastructure for the computer science research community in the United States. Tools and applications—such as the simple mail transfer protocol for sending short messages, and the file transfer protocol (FTP), for longer transmissions—quickly emerged. In order to achieve cost-effective inte. It supports human communication via social media, electronic mail (e-mail), “chat rooms,” newsgroups, and audio and video transmission and allows people to work collaboratively at many different locations. It supports access to digital information by many applications, including the World Wide Web. The Interneractive communications between computers, which typically communicate in short bursts of data, ARPANET employed the new technology of packet switching.

DARPA :

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; formerly ARPA) supported initiatives for ground-based and satellite-based packet networks. The ground-based packet radio system provided mobile access to computing resources, while the packet satellite network connected the United States with several European countries and enabled connections with widely dispersed and remote regions. With the introduction of packet radio, connecting a mobile terminal to a computer network became feasible. However, time-sharing systems were then still too large, unwieldy, and costly to be mobile or even to exist outside a climate-controlled computing environment. A strong motivation thus existed to connect the packet radio network to ARPANET in order to allow mobile users with simple terminals to access the time-sharing systems for which they had authorization. Similarly, the packet satellite network was used by DARPA to link the United States with satellite terminals serving the United Kingdom, Norway, Germany, and Italy. These terminals, however, had to be connected to other networks in European countries in order to reach the end users. Thus arose the need to connect the packet satellite net, as well as the packet radio net, with other networks.

● Also read : Elyments - Indian First Social Media Application

Services On The Internet :

The Internet is used for many things, such as electronic mail, online chat, file transfer and other documents of the World Wide Web. The most used service on the Internet is the World Wide Web. The web contains websites, including blogs and wikis like Wikipedia. Webpages on the Internet can be seen and read by anyone. The second biggest use of the Internet is to send and receive e-mail. E-mail is private and goes from one user to another. Instant messaging is similar to email, but allows two or more people to chat to each other faster.

Ways To Connect To Internet :

The different ways in which one can connect to the Internet are discussed below in brief:

● Dial-Up – In such connections, users are required to link their phone line to a computer to access the Internet. Under this connection, the user cannot make or receive phone calls through tier home phone service

● Broadband – Provided either through cable or phone companies, Broadband is a high-speed internet connection which is widely used today

● Wireless Connection – Wi-fi and Mobile service providers fall under this category. Internet connectivity is made via radio waves and the Internet can be connected anywhere, irrespective of the location. Given below are a few examples of wireless connection:

   ■ Wi-fi – Wireless Fidelity or wi-fi allows high-speed internet connectivity without the use of wires

   ■ Mobile Phones – All smartphones are now equipped with an option for Internet connectivity which can be availed using Internet vouchers and packs. No external connection or wire is required for these

   ■ Satellite – Where broadband connections are unavailable, satellites are used for wireless Internet connectivity

   ■ Integrated Services Digital Network – ISDN allows users to sent audio or video data using telephone lines

How Big Is The Internet ?

One measure is the amount of information that courses through it: about five exabytes a day. That’s equivalent to 40,000 two-hour standard definition movies per second. It takes some wiring up. Hundreds of thousands of miles of cables criss-cross countries, and more are laid along sea floors to connect islands and continents. About 300 submarine cables, the deep-sea variant only as thick as a garden hose, underpin the modern internet. Most are bundles of hair-thin fibre optics that carry data at the speed of light.

The cables range from the 80-mile Dublin to Anglesey connection to the 12,000-mile Asia-America Gateway, which links California to Singapore, Hong Kong and other places in Asia. Major cables serve a staggering number of people. In 2008, damage to two marine cables near the Egyptian port of Alexandria affected tens of millions of internet users in Africa, India, Pakistan and the Middle East. Last year, the chief of the British defence staff, Sir Stuart Peach, warned that Russia could pose a threat to international commerce and the internet if it chose to destroy marine cables.

How Much Energy Does The Internet Use ?

The Chinese telecoms firm Huawei estimates that the information and communications technology (ICT) industry could use 20% of the world’s electricity and release more than 5% of the world’s carbon emissions by 2025. The study’s author, Anders Andrae, said the coming “tsunami of data” was to blame. In 2016, the US government’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that American data centres – facilities where computers store, process and share information – might need 73bn kWh of energy in 2020. That’s the output of 10 Hinkley Point B nuclear power stations.

What Is The World Wide Web ? 

The web is a way to view and share information over the internet. That information, be it text, music, photos or videos or whatever, is written on web pages served up by a web browser. Google handles more than 40,000 searches per second, and has 60% of the global browser market through Chrome. There are nearly 2bn websites in existence but most are hardly visited. The top 0.1% of websites (roughly 5m) attract more than half of the world’s web traffic.

Among them are Google, YouTube, Facebook, the Chinese site Baidu, Instagram, Yahoo, Twitter, the Russian social network VK.com, Wikipedia, Amazon. The rise of apps means that for many people, being on the internet today is less about browsing the open web than getting more focused information: news, messages, weather forecasts, videos and the like.

(Image Credit - pixabay.com)

● Also read : What is Google 

What Is The Dark Web ?

A search of the web does not search all of it. Google the word “puppies” and your browser will display web pages the search engine has found in the hundreds of billions that has logged in its search index. While the search index is massive, it contains only a fraction of what is on the web. Far more, perhaps 95%, is unindexed and so invisible to standard browsers. Think of the web as having three layers: surface, deep and dark. Standard web browsers trawl the surface web, the pages that are most visible. Under the surface is the deep web: a mass of pages that are not indexed. These include pages held behind passwords – the kind found on the office intranet, for example, and pages no one links to, since Google and others build their search indexes by following links from one web page to another.

Buried in the deep web is the dark web a bunch of sites with addresses that hide them from view. To access the dark web, you need special software such as Tor (The Onion Router), a tool originally created by the US navy for intelligence agents online. While the dark web has plenty of legitimate uses, not least to preserve the anonymity of journalists, activists and whistleblowers, a substantial portion is driven by criminal activity. Illicit marketplaces on the dark web trade everything from drugs, guns and counterfeit money to hackers, hitmen and child pornography.