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On a basic level, domain names are critical in light of the fact that the Internet's addressing scheme is not extremely compelling without them.<br />
<br />
Every computer on the Internet has an Internet protocol (IP) address: a unique string of four numbers separated by periods. Since recalling the IP addresses of your most loved websites would be almost incomprehensible, a group of computer scientists made the domain name framework to dole out a unique name to each numeric IP address. How did it begin?<br />
<br />
<strong>History</strong><br />
<br /> In the late 1960s, computers at Stanford and <keyword id="6412602" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="UCLA">UCLA</keyword> associated for the first run through <keyword id="1061816" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="ARPANET">Arpanet</keyword>. Arpanet was running on packet switching and was thought to be the first network to do as such. After these two colleges effectively associated, different colleges took action accordingly and joined the network. Not long after the ascent of this networking, Ray Tomlinson created email in 1971. His idea was to separate a user name from the computer name by utilizing the @ symbol which we're so acquainted with today. The acquaintance of email is vital with note in light of the fact that the computer name inside an email address was basically a domain name.<br />
<br />
Many users networking with each other made created a demand for a more straightforward and simple to-recollect framework than the massive and frequently befuddling IP arrangement of long, lumbering strings of numbers. This interest was replied by researchers and technicians at the University of Wisconsin who built up the first 'name server' in 1984. With the new name server, users were no more required to know the definite way to different systems.<br />
After a year the Domain Name System was actualized and the underlying top-level domain names, including .com, .net, and .organization, was launched.<br />
<br />
<strong>Market</strong><br />
<br />
A large number of new domains have as now been enlisted for various reasons. A few organizations use them as integral domains to extend their current brand others use them as a primary URL; some observe an advertising reason, others have protective reasons.<br />
<br />
It's not extraordinary to spend well over $100,000 for a premium domain name. Be that as it may, purchasing an extension is an entire other league— an association in which brands have been excessively upbeat, making it impossible for others to play.<br />
<br /> For instance, the rights to .BLOG were bought by <keyword id="825836" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="Wordpress">Wordpress</keyword> for $19 million, <keyword id="6355629" type="CITY" weightage="20" keywordseo="Google">Google</keyword> paid $25 million for .APP, Amazon paid up to $10 million for .BOOK and <keyword id="147103" type="COMPANY" weightage="20" keywordseo="VeriSign">Verisign</keyword> supported a $135 million winning offer for .WEB — and a large portion of these organizations have obtained the rights to more than one new expansion. (Data Credits: TechCrunch)<br />
<br />
<strong>Here is how high the pricing can go for domain name</strong><br />
<br />
VacationRentals.com: $35 million<br />
PrivateJet.com: $30 million<br />
Insure.com: $16 million<br />
Sex.com: $14 million<br />
Hotels.com: $20 million<br />
<br />
 If you ever consider profiting by means of domain flipping and found an astonishing domain name which is accessible, get that name immediately. You can later on offer those domains for a higher price.<br />
<br />
(<a href="https://www.nxgdomains.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/backgrounddomains-min.jpg">Image Credits</a>)<br />

Evolution
of Domains: Learn how to earn by being a Domainer

<p class="drop-cap">The first spam email. The first MP3. The first recorded appearance of "LOL." The AOL dial-up sound in all its staticky glory. The Hampster Dance. Friendster. All relics of a nascent, more freewheeling internet, long since buried in the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-splintering-new-less-toxic-era-meta-bluesky-twitter-2023-10">digital graveyard</a>. Or were, anyway. Because you can now experience them all firsthand, thanks to one of the web's most original minds.</p><p><a href="https://neal.fun/internet-artifacts/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Internet Artifacts</a> is the latest project from Neal Agarwal, the creative 25-year-old coder who launched <a href="http://neal.fun/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">neal.fun</a> six years ago today. You may not recognize the name, but there's a good chance you've encountered one of Agarwal's viral creations. They include The Deep Sea, a mind-bending data visualization of the ocean's depths; Asteroid Launcher, in which you can hurtle mile-wide space rocks into your hometown; the self-explanatory Absurd Trolley Problems; and the sadistically addictive Password Game, along with a few dozen others.</p><p>Agarwal's work is a joyful call to arms. He has spent his adult life infusing the web with a throwback spirit of discovery, defying preconceptions of what a website can and should be. The internet is boring. <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-dead-instagram-tiktok-bereal-replaced-group-chats-messaging-2023-8">Social media is dead</a>. Being online today is doom-coded, it's gloom-pilled, it's a wasteland of algorithmically attuned sludgery. You may encounter sparks of viral fun — you'll find no <a href="https://www.insider.com/skibidi-toilet-is-good-actually-2023-10">Skibidi toilet</a> erasure here — but very little joy. </p><p>It wasn't always so. The web used to be so much weirder. </p><p>"I grew up at the tail end of that era of the internet," Agarwal said. "There were just a lot of independent creators making cool stuff and it was clear that they were doing it for the fun of it, not to grow a business or anything like that. And then I kind of watched that all slowly die."</p><p>But within the corridors of Internet Artifacts, and through the work of Agarwal and a host of other creators dedicated to the web as a medium, you can see an urgent attempt at resurrection, echoes of an internet that was messy and unpredictable — and all the better for it. </p><p class="drop-cap">How did we wind up with today's anemic internet? The pocket version goes something like this: A couple of decades ago, give or take, easy-to-use web-design software like Adobe Flash, combined with mainstream internet availability, catalyzed a golden era of online experimentation. Animated series like Homestar Runner, nihilistic absurdities like QWOP, and single-serving meme shrines like YTMND dotted the landscape. They spread not by algorithmic ranking but by word of mouth. They had little in common beyond an antic sense of discovery and childlike play. After all, the web itself was just a kid.</p><p>Over a few short years, two concurrent tectonic shifts would reshape the internet. The first is that Apple killed Flash; Steve Jobs <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">exiled</a> it from the iPhone for being a buggy, sluggish, proprietary security risk — he wasn't wrong — which made the once-ubiquitous software a liability to work with. Suddenly building things on the web wasn't quite so simple, and eventually a lot of cherished sites no longer worked. Tools like HTML5 came along to take Flash's place, but by then it was too late. Developers increasingly built for the iPhone, prioritizing apps over browsers.</p><p>The other transformation is that websites themselves became largely obsolete, displaced by platforms. First came the likes of MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Reddit; then came the image- and video-focused wave of Instagram, Snap, and TikTok. To their credit, those tech giants did democratize the act of posting. You didn't need to be a software engineer to put a photo on your timeline. With powerful mobile editing tools, the act of <em>putting stuff online</em> is now easier than ever. But the result is a little like giving a room full of artists the same size canvas and identical matte paints. There are only so many variations one can bring to the theme. </p><p>"Now in lieu of the unique URL, you have the unique handle," Jamie Cohen, a digital culture writer and an assistant professor at CUNY-Queens, said. People once created their own distinct worlds; now they mostly shout at each other in the same rooms. "It's not the same. It's a flattening experience."</p><p>Neal Agarwal rejects that looming sameness. </p><p class="drop-cap">"When I was just a kid, the internet felt like a Wild West, at least more than it is now," Agarwal said. "I would always go down these long rabbit holes. Almost all the sites I visited were by solo creators or small teams of people. It felt like much more of an independent web. As I watched all that go away, I kept feeling that this probably isn't how it should be. There should be more people creating fun stuff on the web."</p><p>And so he did.</p><p>Unlike some origin stories, there's no single spark that ignited Agarwal. The first website he built, Kidcrash, was itself an act of curation, putting all his favorite Flash-based games in one place. He made it in 2006. He was 9. Like a lot of precocious young coders at that time, the Fairfax, Virginia, native soon found his way to Scratch, a programming website for kids, where he went by the handle <a href="https://scratch.mit.edu/users/awesomestickdude/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">awesomestickdude</a>. His first game was a knockoff of the reality-TV competition show "Wipeout." Then 12, he offered to build a new game level for every 15 "love-its" he got from the community, not anticipating that he'd eventually receive 1,167. He bailed after level 10. </p><p>In high school, Agarwal made a single mobile app, a game called Toast Man, before pivoting back to the web. He set up shop with a site called Kamogo, where he hosted projects with the same inventiveness and absurdist energy — albeit less polish, and often not much of a point — that would later animate neal.fun. Much of it still holds up. There's a <a href="https://www.kamogo.com/5" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Silicon Valley Idea Generator</a>, a tool for <a href="https://www.kamogo.com/30" target="_blank" rel="noopener">making vertical videos horizontal</a>, and a "<a href="https://www.kamogo.com/13" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Text to Hodor</a>" translator that turns whatever you type into, well, "hodor." </p><p>In 2016, Agarwal got his first glimpse of mainstream success when Insider <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-money-apple-makes-every-second-2016-8">wrote up</a> <a href="https://everysecond.io/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">everysecond.io</a>, an early data visualization. But it wasn't until he was enrolled at Virginia Tech that Agarwal committed himself more fully to making his so-called web toys.</p><p>"Programming for me was always a creative expression," he said. "It's like creative writing. I program because I want to have the ideas in my head become a reality." Formal computer-science studies felt like the exact opposite. When professors required students to use certain programming languages, Agarwal would often go his own way regardless — nearly failing a few assignments in the process.</p><p>But the abject boredom Agarwal felt during lectures had a silver lining: the creation of neal.fun, which he worked on while he should have been taking notes. One of his first entries, <a href="https://neal.fun/spend/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Spend Bill Gates' Money</a>, remains his most popular, with over 80 million page views since it launched in 2017. It took three days to make.</p><p>By the time he graduated, Agarwal was making something like a full-time living off ads on neal.fun. He gave himself a year to see if it could actually become a career. Two breakout visualizations — <a href="https://neal.fun/deep-sea/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Deep Sea</a> and <a href="https://neal.fun/size-of-space/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Size of Space</a> — suggested that it could, largely because he licensed the former to Ripley's Aquarium. After a detour working at MSCHF, a collective known for large-scale pranks and subversive art projects, Agarwal decided to go it alone for good.</p><p>"He is very, very impressive," said Josh Wardle, the creator of Wordle (which he sold to The New York Times for <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-times-buys-wordle-online-word-game-2022-1#:~:text=The%20New%20York%20Times%20has%20purchased%20the%20hit%20online%20word,in%20the%20low%20seven%20figures.%22">more than $1 million</a> last year), and who overlapped with Agarwal at MSCHF. "There is a joy to his work, and a levity, which I think reflects how Neal sees the world."</p><p>Virality has seemingly come easy in the years since, including most recently with Password Game, which has amassed over 10 million page views since it launched in June. It's wholly original but also quintessentially neal.fun, taking a mundane part of internet life — password policies — to an inconceivable extreme. </p><p>The creative process varies from project to project. Password Game started as a germ of an idea five years ago but took a few weeks to build once he got going. Internet Artifacts has taken closer to three months. He does his own research but has been increasingly open to soliciting outside feedback before going live; he estimates 20 people have given input on his internet museum. </p><p class="drop-cap">Internet Artifacts takes several touchstones of the anteplatformian internet and places them on literal digital pedestals. Homestar Runner makes the cut, as does Zombo, a joke web page that was once <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/jan/20/mondaymediasection8" target="_blank" rel="noopener">anointed</a> "the least useful website." Agarwal has lovingly recreated his references, down to a faithfully emulated Internet Explorer browser window for entries on the original MySpace and Wikipedia pages, and a Napster simulation that lets you download real MP3s. The exhibit unfolds chronologically, starting with a 1977 map of ARPANET, the government-funded precursor to the modern internet, and making dozens of stops across the next three decades.</p><p>The most surprising thing about Agarwal's undertaking may be that there's nothing really like it out there. (The closest thing may be Brandon Chilcutt's indispensable <a href="http://savethesounds.info/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Museum of Endangered Sounds</a>, which focuses on aural artifacts both on and offline: the whirring clicks of a rotary phone, a Tamagotchi's plaintive bloops.) "There's a value to having somewhere on the internet, something that says, 'This was important to a lot of people. This existed. It mattered,'" said Jessa Lingel, the author of "The Gentrification of the Internet" and an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. "It really shouldn't just be internet studies scholars who do that."</p><p>As delightful as Internet Artifacts is to click through, it also provides valuable context for Agarwal's larger ambition. Think of <a href="https://neal.fun/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">neal.fun</a> as a splintered reality, an alternate dimension where the web never stopped being weird. </p><p>Agarwal is hardly the only person making fun things online. He meets regularly with a group of six kindred spirits in New York to compare notes and test out ideas. You can find complementary energy in the work of <a href="https://nicole.pizza/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Nicole He</a>, <a href="https://matthewrayfield.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Matthew Rayfield,</a> and <a href="https://brianmoore.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Brian Moore</a>. <a href="https://www.immaculategrid.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Immaculate Grid</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Wordle</a> (along with its infinite imitators) provide a daily fix outside the confines of the major platforms. <a href="https://theuselessweb.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Useless Web</a> curates a dazzling selection of silliness. Even <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMkbjxvwur30YrFWw8kpSaw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Homestar Runner</a> has mounted a comeback, in the form of occasional YouTube videos.</p><p>But it's the variety of Agarwal's work, and his dedication to the web as a medium for artistic expression, that stands out. </p><p>"As the internet develops, there's a bunch of things that tech companies want to do around apps and push notifications. Neal had this focus on not doing any of that," Wardle said of their time as coworkers. "It made me excited about the web."</p><p>As for what's next, Agarwal has maintained a list of potential experiments, sorted by a five-star rating system that helps him prioritize his road map, since he was 18. The list now numbers somewhere around 1,300. He still adds one or two each day.  "At this point, even if I don't think of any more ideas, I have enough things to work on probably for the rest of my life," he said.</p><p>Internet Artifacts goes up to 2007. The last entry is a video of Steve Jobs announcing the iPhone at that year's MacWorld conference, played in an emulated QuickTime window. It's a fitting capstone for a certain era of the web, one that was open and weird and absurd. You're left with a sense of nostalgia, but also loss. </p><p>There's probably no going back to the web that was. Apps and platforms have fragmented but still dominate and will continue to lure this generation of creatives with the promise of monetization. But Agarwal's work suggests if not a return to the old ways then at least an alternate path forward. The web can be fun. It can be silly. It can be joyful. It can be anything you want. And isn't that the point? An infinite canvas, forever in search of an artist.</p><p><em>Brian Barrett is the former executive editor of Wired and author of The Art of the Minifigure. He has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, New York, and numerous other publications. </em></p>

Can anyone save the internet? Neal Agarwal is trying, one Hampster Dance at a time.

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/fan-poses-with-the-ufo-during-the-foxs-the-x-files-ufo-news-photo/506280610?adppopup=true">Tommaso Boddi / Getty Images</a></span></p><p class="caption">Fan wears "I want to believe" t-shirt in front of UFO model for Fox's "The X-Files" UFO episode.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><ul class="summary-list"><li><a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/597ebn/meet-silicon-valleys-ufo-hunters">Vice</a> talked to a handful of technologists who are fascinated with the tech behind UFOs.</li><li>"If we pay close attention and reverse these technologies to bring to the masses, we will see a world with interstellar travel at our fingertips," said <span>one quantum computing tech CEO about UFOs.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/?hprecirc-bullet">Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories</a><span>.</span></li></ul><p>There are some technologists who are fascination with UFOs and what they could mean for technology here on Earth, according to <a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/597ebn/meet-silicon-valleys-ufo-hunters">Vice</a>. <span>And with US Navy pilots <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/senators-briefed-on-ufo-sightings-by-navy-pilots-report-2019-6">reporting mysterious spherical objects flying around at high speeds</a>, these tech execs may get their chance. </span></p><p>Vice interviewed three tech executives willing to admit their fascination with UFOs for the piece. The article says that admitting an interest in hypothetical alien spacecraft is "still a pretty taboo subject" in the tech industry, and that many investors are unwilling to support related ventures because there is "no guarantee of payoff."</p><p><span>Deep Prasad, CEO of Canadian quantum computing startup ReactiveQ, told Vice that his goal is ultimately to find a UFO and reverse engineer it, for the betterment of mankind. </span></p><p>"In front of our eyes are technologies underlying these UFOs that are far beyond our understanding" Prasad said, but "if we pay close attention and reverse these technologies to bring to the masses, we will see a world with interstellar travel at our fingertips."</p><p>Rizwan Virk, executive director of Play Labs @ MIT, told Vice that UFOs could have technology beyond what modern <keyword id="41551" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="60" keywordseo="science">science</keyword> thinks is possible. </p><p>"This phenomenon seems to be about advanced technology that doesn't always fit into our current model of 'what is technology' and what isn't," Virk said to Vice.</p><p>Vice also references "<a href="https://www.americancosmic.com/">American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology</a>" by Dr. Diana Walsh Pasulka, chair of the University of North Carolina Wilmington's philosophy and religion department. That book argues that much of the fascination with UFOs is tied up with religious elements, but that there are those who approach the matter scientifically.</p><div title="Page 3"><p><span>In an excerpt from the book published by Vice, Pasulka highlights <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Vall%C3%A9e">Jacques Vallée</a></span><span> - a computer scientist who worked on ARPANET, the basis of the modern Internet - as both a technologist and ufologist, counting him among "those</span> who refrain from mythologizing the UFO, who instead engage with it, to understand its truth." Walsh writes, "You can find these people in Silicon Valley."</p><p><a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/597ebn/meet-silicon-valleys-ufo-hunters">Read the full Vice report here.</a></p></div>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-to-android-switch-new-phone-stuck-ecosystem-2019-6">Here's why it's so hard to switch from Apple to Android</a></h3>        <div>                    </div>    </div>

Some tech execs want to find a UFO and reverse-engineer it for the betterment of mankind

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Studies show the <keyword id="6357247" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="Internet">internet</keyword> is bad for our <keyword id="6354774" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="Mental-health">mental health</keyword>, and more people are realizing its harms. </li><li>Internet gurus encourage us to give up <keyword id="6354632" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="social-media">social media</keyword> and tech execs send their kids to anti-internet schools.</li><li>But we need a more systemic solution to the internet's grasp on our lives; we need to see the internet as a factory. </li><li>P.E. Moskowitz is an author and runs Mental Hellth, a newsletter about capitalism and psychology.</li><li>This is an <keyword id="6356002" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="100" keywordseo="opinion">opinion</keyword> article. The thoughts expressed are those of the author. </li></ul><p>This year seems to be the tipping point for social <keyword id="6354777" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Media">media</keyword> users' feelings about the internet. Once seen as a liberatory technology that would usher in an era of creativity and new connections across the globe, many - from casual Twitter users to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/style/creator-burnout-social-media.html">professional content creators</a> - have turned on the technology. </p><p>You can get a sense of the shift in mood from our media output: There's Netflix's popular, dystopian reality show "<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/the-circle-netflix-unlike-any-other-reality-show-on-tv-2020-1">The Circle</a>," in which contestants cynically compete for money using often fake internet personas. One of the streaming site's most popular documentaries in the last year was "<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/09/movies/the-social-dilemma-review.html">The Social Dilemma</a>," which captured viewers' attention with its explanations of Facebook's privacy faux-pas. And even some of the most buzzed-about novels this year are about the darker sides of the internet, like Lauren Oyler's "<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/15/fake-accounts-by-lauren-oyler-review-a-whole-lot-of-swiping">Fake Accounts,</a>" and Patricia Lockwood's "<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/634158/no-one-is-talking-about-this-by-patricia-lockwood/">No One Is Talking About This</a><em>.</em>"</p><p>We're all re-analyzing our relationship to the internet for good reason, but we've misclassified what this relationship really is. It's not like a bad relationship, where you can just walk away, and it's not like junk food, where you can decide to eat less - it's an all-encompassing technology, our main economic engine, the tool we are forced to use to meet others and mediate our entire lives. </p><p>A solution to our current internet-use crisis cannot come at an individual level anymore than one person quitting their job would solve capitalism's poor working conditions. If we want any hope of making the internet less stressful, less back-breaking, and more fulfilling, content creators, gig economy workers, and even casual internet users need to push for a systemic solution.</p><h2><strong>We know the internet is rotting our brains</strong></h2><p>A growing body of evidence suggests that the internet really is terrible for us. A <a href="https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/10.1521/jscp.2018.37.10.751">2018 study</a> of college students found that limiting social media use to 10 minutes a day significantly reduced anxiety in its participants. A <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/2749480">2019 study</a> found that teens who spent more time online were more likely to have mental health conditions. <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/i-hear-you/201906/is-social-media-bad-you">Other studies find</a> that social media users end up feeling more lonely, more isolated, and less self confident. </p><p>A veritable cottage industry has cropped up to capitalize on people's knowledge that the internet is bad for them. The web is littered with how-tos on taking a break from social media, and self-help books have been written encouraging us to unplug. There are <a href="https://www.ted.com/playlists/679/how_did_the_internet_take_over_our_lives">several popular TED Talks</a> from former internet engineers and executives telling people that the internet is bad for them and they should leave social media behind. <a href="https://garage.vice.com/en_us/article/wjkbv4/tech-free-retreat">Retreats for the wealthy</a> which forbid phones and computers have cropped up, and, perhaps most worryingly, the very people who build this technology are <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-parents-raising-their-kids-tech-free-red-flag-2018-2">sending their kids to schools</a> where the technology is banned - a tacit admission of its potential to harm people's minds.</p><p>We're constantly reminded that the internet is bad for us and yet social media use is as high as it's ever been, <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/433871/daily-social-media-usage-worldwide/">averaging 145 minutes per person per day globally</a>. We're stuck in a cycle where we know something is bad, we want to stop, and yet, seemingly, we can't.</p><h2><strong>The internet as a factory where we work, but don't get paid</strong></h2><p>We can't quit the internet because we've conceptualized the problem all wrong. Social media is not an individual addiction that can be addressed at an individual level - it's a societal problem that needs a societal fix. We need to think of the internet less as a tool we all somehow can't stop using, and more as a factory we're required to be in. </p><p>Our entire society has been reformulated around the internet, much like it was centered around the factory during the Industrial Revolution. If there's an <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/25/21719396/amazon-web-services-aws-outage-down-internet">Amazon Web Services outage</a>, much of our society stops functioning. Without the internet, we couldn't find jobs, or, at this point, even friends. </p><p>The "gig economy" - the often <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-uber-driver-wages-20180518-story.html">underpaid</a> and <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/93yw73/we-are-devastated-instacart-is-deactivating-workers-and-they-dont-know-why">exploitative</a> labor performed by Uber drivers and Instacart shoppers - was enabled by the internet, and now <a href="https://www.gigeconomydata.org/basics/how-many-gig-workers-are-there">more than a quarter of workers</a> in the US participate in this economy in some form. During the pandemic, office workers were only able to fulfil their required job duties through the internet, and college students forked over full tuition for the privilege of staring at Zoom for hours each day. </p><p>We're all required to be here - online - for our livelihoods. But even when we're not required to be here, companies attempt to make sure we still are: App and game developers <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/03/how-technology-companies-are-keeping-you-addicted-your-phone">use the same science</a> that keeps people playing the slots in Las Vegas to keep us glued to our screens.  </p><p>As culture and media theorist McKenzie Wark <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/3762-capital-is-dead">writes</a> in her book "Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?", the internet uses our labor without us really knowing it. Unlike the broadcast era of media, during which the owners of television networks and movie studios had to at least create the content to sell to us, we now create all the content for each other, mostly without being paid. </p><p>"[Social media companies like Facebook] don't even bother to provide any entertainment," Wark writes. "We have to entertain each other, while they collect the rent, and they collect it on all social media time, public or private, work or leisure, and (if you keep your FitBit on) even when you sleep." </p><p>We produce the memes, tweets, posts, and pictures that keep us tethered to the internet, and then that <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/120114/how-does-facebook-fb-make-money.asp">content is monetized</a> in the form of advertisements - revenue users help produce, but do not usually see a penny of. </p><p>Although a very select number of internet users <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/snapchat-ends-spotlight-paydays-still-paying-creators-millions-2021-5">can get paid</a> for their labor - i.e. <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/top-ways-to-make-money-instagram-influencer-guide-2020-1">influencers</a> or popular YouTubers  - most of us do not. If the internet is a factory, it is one in which the vast majority of people are not getting paid. Instead, users often fight with each other for non-monetary payment <a href="https://reallifemag.com/paid-in-full/">in the form of clout</a> - recognition that we can produce the most and best content for free.</p><p>"In some quarters [of society], this affective currency has replaced the wages of industrialization, especially for professionals who used to earn a structured living from paid content and who now disseminate their bylines far and wide in hopes of securing a niche livelihood from name recognition," the sociologist Andrew Ross <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Digital-Labor-The-Internet-as-Playground-and-Factory/Scholz/p/book/9780415896955">writes</a>.</p><p>This free or cheap labor has widened income inequality massively, according to some theorists. We fight for followers, retweets, and likes, all for free, while the platforms we're on profit massively. And only a few, large companies are collecting these profits; <a href="https://martech.org/almost-70-of-digital-ad-spending-going-to-google-facebook-amazon-says-analyst-firm/">almost 70% of all digital ad spending</a> goes to either Google, Facebook, or Amazon.</p><p>As Yasha Levine writes in his book "<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/06/surveillance-valley-by-yasha-levine-review">Surveillance Valley</a>," the internet was never meant to be a place friendly to the average user - it was developed by the US military to spy on people during wars, and then used to spy on Americans at home too. Some of Google's initial funding <a href="https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance/">came from grants from US spy agencies</a>. When the infrastructure of the internet was sold off by the US government to private companies, the people who stood to profit off that privatization funded magazines, advertisements, and lobbying to reframe the internet from a surveillance tool to one that could liberate us culturally. As detailed by Levine, Louis Rossetto - the founder of Wired Magazine, the biggest megaphone for evangelizing the new, privatized internet in the 1990s - was an Ayn Rand fan who believed the internet would come to replace the need for a government. </p><p>Today we live in this libertarian vision of the internet in which companies exist largely unregulated, undertaxed, and able to do what they want without worry that the government will interfere.</p><h2><strong>So… What do we do?</strong></h2><p>But now, more people seem to be seeing through the hype. So, the question now is what to do with this new, collective revelation.</p><p>If the internet is somewhat like a factory, perhaps we should treat it like one. In 2014, the artist Laurel Ptak created a manifesto called <a href="http://wagesforfacebook.com/">Wages for Facebook</a> in which she argued that Facebook should pay users for their content: </p><p>"They say it's friendship. We say it's unwaged work. With every like, chat, tag or poke our subjectivity turns them a profit. They call it sharing. We call it stealing."</p><p>Though Ptak's work is a piece of art, not a <keyword id="6363690" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="Strategy">strategy</keyword> for changing the web, it could be a starting point. Perhaps we as internet users can organize to stop giving away our hearts and minds for free so that a select few can profit off of them. Just as labor organizers have pushed to make other industries less exploitative, perhaps we need a movement to do the same with the internet. </p><p>As Levine writes, in 1969, hundreds of students at Harvard gathered to protest the university's involvement in the creation of ARPANET, the precursor to the modern internet. The students saw it as a dangerous technology that would be used to surveil the entire world. If, at the beginning of the internet, the technology's potential for harm was already obvious to some, there's no reason it cannot become obvious to us again. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before enough of us say "enough," and protest the internet's totalizing grasp on our labor and our lives.</p>

The internet is destroying our brains, but we can't quit. It's a factory we're forced to work in without any pay.

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>YouTube</span></p><p class="caption">The YAL Airborne Laser Testbed's turret assembly.</p></div><p></p></div></div><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"></span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The imperatives of the military have always been one of the main drivers of technological development.</span></p><p>ARPANET, <a href="http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/october-29-1969-happy-40th-birthday-to-a-radical-idea/">one of the internet's most important precursors</a>, was a Pentagon project while <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-military-is-responsible-for-almost-all-the-technology-in-your-iphone-2014-10">most of the technology in an iPhone</a> originated with the US Department of <keyword id="6354810" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="100" keywordseo="Defense">Defense</keyword>.</p><p>Just as smart gadgets have invaded our homes and revolutionized our lives over the last 15 years, next-level weaponry has transformed the military.</p><p>Today, militaries and irregular forces around the world are still pushing technological boundaries. </p><p>Everything from concealed roadside bombs - cheap, primitive, and deadly  - to multibillion-dollar aerial lasers<span> have transformed conventional methods of combat and altered the world's technological and political landscape.</span></p><p><span>Here are 19 of the most important weapons of the last 15 years.</span></p>

These are the 19 most game-changing weapons of the 21st century

<p><span class="KonaFilter image-container float_right no-rightrail"><span data-post-image="" class="image on-image"><span class="source"><span>YouTube</span></span><span class="caption">The YAL Airborne Laser Testbed's turret assembly</span></span><p></p></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"></span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">We've come a long way since the stealth bomber.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Just as smart gadgets have invaded our homes and revolutionized our lives over the last 15 years, next-level weaponry has transformed the military.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The imperatives of the military have always been one of the main drivers of technological development.</span></p>
<p>ARPANET, <a href="http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/october-29-1969-happy-40th-birthday-to-a-radical-idea/">one of the internet's most important precursors</a> was a Pentagon project, while <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-military-is-responsible-for-almost-all-the-technology-in-your-iphone-2014-10">most of the technology in an iPhone</a> originated with the US Department of <keyword id="6354810" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="100" keywordseo="Defense">Defense</keyword>.</p>
<p>Today, militaries all over the world are still pushing technological boundaries. Since the turn of the millennium, weapons featuring a vast range of technical sophistication have proven to be game-changers.</p>
<p>Everything from concealed roadside bombs - cheap, primitive, and deadly &#xa0;- to multi-billion-dollar aerial lasers<span>&#xa0;have transformed conventional methods of combat and altered the world's technological and political landscape.</span></p>
<p><span>Here are 19 of the most important weapons of the last 15 years.</span></p>

The 19 most game-changing weapons of the last 15 years

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Computer Science Museum/Wikimedia Commons</span></p><p class="caption">This is the log of the first transmission.</p></div><p></p></div></div>The contemporary internet is filled to absolutely bursting with words. In fact, there are some who believe there are too many words on the internet, that people should censor themselves just a tad more often. But this wasn't always the case.</p><p><a href="http://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/internet_first_words.html">In 1969, when the pioneers of the web were tinkering with ARPANET</a> - the precursor to the modern internet - even one word was a big deal. In October of 1969, researchers at UCLA and Stanford were working on a simple problem: getting the message from one campus to another.</p><p>At 9:00 p.m., UCLA's professor Leonard Kleinrock and his student Charley Kline were ready to attempt the first transmission that would travel a few hundred miles up California to Stanford. The message wasn't meant to be anything fancy, simply the word "login." But they didn't quite make it there.</p><p>The pair succeeded in transmitting the "l" and the "o," but then an event familiar to anyone who has used the internet happened: the system crashed. They were able to send the full message of "login" about an hour later, but this chapter in the history of the internet had already been written.</p><p>Accidentally or not, Kleinrock and Kline didn't just send a series of letters, they technically sent a word. "Lo," <a href="http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lo">according to Merriam-Webster Dictionary,</a> is an interjection "used to call attention to something or to show wonder or surprise."</p><p>As in, "Lo, the internet is born!"    </p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/sharks-spotted-coast-england-2015-7">People were baffled by 50 sharks circling in shallow waters off the English coast</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="R1c2tjdjrwFAGrHUqd0W71KfHPLzHONw" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

The first word ever sent on the internet was an accident

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marvin_Minsky_at_OLPCb.jpg">Uploaded to English Wikipedia by Sethwoodworth, taken by Bcjordan</a></span></p></div><p></p></div></div>We've lost one of the world's most brilliant scientists.</p><p>Marvin Minsky, the MIT scientist who helped pioneer the field of artificial intelligence and laid the foundations for the computer and the internet, has died at 88, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/business/marvin-minsky-pioneer-in-artificial-intelligence-dies-at-88.html">The New York Times reports</a>. The cause was a cerebral hemorrhage, according to his family.</p><p>"The world has lost one of its greatest minds in <keyword id="41551" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="100" keywordseo="science">science</keyword>," Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, wrote in an email to colleagues, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/01/25/marvin-minsky-1927-2016/">according to The Washington Post</a>.</p><p>Beginning in the 1950s, Minsky began working to create intelligent machines, a field that would come to be known as artificial intelligence, or AI.</p><p>AI has become vastly more sophisticated since then, though we have yet to develop a machine that has true general intelligence - the ability to do anything a human being can. But that never daunted Minsky:</p><p>"The problem of intelligence seemed hopelessly profound," Minsky <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/12/14/a-i">told The New Yorker</a> when it profiled him in 1981. "I can't remember considering anything else worth doing."</p><h2>Here are some of Minsky's greatest achievements in AI:</h2><ul><li>In 1951, <a href="http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/">Minsky built "SNARC"</a> (short for Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator) - a neural network that could be considered the first artificial learning machine.</li><li>He co-founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Project (later renamed the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) in 1959 with computer scientist John McCarthy, who coined the term "artificial intelligence." The lab was part of the <a href="http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet">ARPAnet</a> - the precursor to the internet - and helped pioneer the notion that software should be shared freely (aka open-source).</li><li>In the 1960s, Minsky developed some of the <a href="http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/">first</a><a href="http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/"> mechanical arms</a>, laying the foundation for modern robotics.</li><li>During the early 70s, along with computer scientist Seymour Papert, he developed "The Society of Mind" theory of human intelligence (described in his <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Society-Mind-Marvin-Minsky/dp/0671657135">1986 book</a>), based on research in developmental child psychology and artificial intelligence.</li><li>Director Stanley Kubrick consulted Minsky for his film "2001: A Space Odyssey," according to The New York Times - which contains perhaps the most famous AI in film history, HAL 9000.</li></ul><p>These were just a few of Minsky's many achievements, which also spanned fields such as computational linguistics, mathematics, and optics.</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/benedict-cumberland-artificial-intelligence-2014-11">Benedict Cumberbatch And The Cast Of 'The Imitation Game' Have Mixed Feelings About Artificial Intelligence</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="s0OGZ3cTqfMMsZDzkGuudgcQCjnBFpDH" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

Artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky has died 88 - here are some of his greatest achievements

<p><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;"><span><div class="KonaFilter image-container float_right"><div class="image"><p class="source"><span><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035766041@N01/3240912120/in/photolist-5Wowgb-5Wowib-63vvrX-63vvug-63vvTk-63vwfe-63vwq8-63vwMF-63zLsq-63zLDw-63zLSm-63zLVq-63zMpy-63zMwN-6cMi1w-6fZHRq-6tZ23M-6tZ274-6Cp4YV-6Cp51k-6Cp52P-6CtcrG-6CtcA7-6F1Vxe-6F1Vza-6F1VAx-6F65a5-6F65bG-6F65cG-6GtW6x-6UXcSa-6UXd1v-6UXdaR-6UXdeT-6UXdFx-6UXdJp-6UXe4a-6UXe8F-6UXefZ-6UXeuk-6UXexn-6UXeCH-6UXeVB-6UXfbD-6UXfiP-6UXg56-6UXg8T-6UXgjF-6UXgAi-6UXgNi-6UXgXT">Flickr/Phil Hollenbeck</a></span></p><p class="caption">One of the first Internet servers, part of ARPANET.</p></div><p></p></div><em>Governments' relationship with the tech sector is hideously complicated.</em></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">If there is an industry that exemplifies the virtues of the private sector, it is technology. In the past 30 years a wave of innovations has transformed the lives of consumers in the developed world, allowing people to engage in a huge range of activities by using devices they can hold in their hand.</span></p>
<p>Governments' role in pushing forward technological progress has been widely underestimated, as Mariana Mazzucato shows in her book, "The Entrepreneurial State". The first computers were developed by governments, as were jet engines, nuclear power and lasers. The internet grew out of ARPANET, a project nurtured by America's Defence Department. It took government-launched satellites to enable global positioning systems to work. Touchscreen technology was invented by academics with the help of government funding. Even the algorithm that made Google so successful was created with the aid of a grant from America's National Science Foundation.</p>
<p>The state is very good at funding basic scientific research and at helping fledgling companies, many of which are too small, or still too far from profitability, to attract the interest of the venture-capital industry. A report by the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology commented that "industry generally invests only in developing cost-competitive products in the three-to-five-year time frame."</p>
<p>Most people accept that the private sector is best placed to turn that basic research into commercial products. But government interaction with the technology sector does not stop there.</p>
<h3>A digital Domesday book</h3>
<p>The internet has created the greatest treasure trove of personal data ever assembled--a Domesday book for the 21st century. Most consumers, initially reluctant to hand over data to buy goods online, have long since got used to the idea. People happily publish their likes and dislikes, their pictures and the names and contact details of their best friends on social media. Such data are invaluable for companies that want to target their marketing more closely. Thanks to technology, companies can even find out where people are at any particular moment.</p>
<p>But that raises serious questions. Who should be responsible for the data's security? And should there be limits on how they can be used? Governments have been alert to this problem from the earliest days of the internet, but recent European draft legislation looks far too heavy-handed. Every business covered by the rules will have to appoint a data-protection officer at an estimated cost of €80,000 a year, according to the European Small Business Alliance. Businesses with fewer than 5,000 data points are exempt, but even a small outfit with a mailing list of customers could easily exceed that.</p>
<p>Germany has 16 Länder, each with its own data-protection commissioner who can interpret the rules in his own way. In Bavaria websites must allow users to remain anonymous. That is a problem for Facebook users, because the networking site insists that customers use their own names.</p>
<p>Governments play a triple role in all this. They represent consumer rights, but they also expect the corporate sector to provide a raft of data when they have security concerns, and in addition they track e-mail and phone conversations directly. Such data can be helpful to monitor terrorists and tax cheats, but in the hands of an unscrupulous government they can be used to keep an eye on dissidents as well. And if a government is careless, those data can be pre-empted by fraudsters and other undesirables. This debate has been fuelled by the revelations of Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who leaked details of American surveillance operations to the media.</p>
<p>If the state has proved less than trustworthy, private companies are not perfect either. Some have lost large amounts of customers' data, either by accident or because they have been hacked. The records of more than 100m customers each were stolen from Sony and Target. But Luc Delany, a former Facebook employee who now works as a consultant, points out that companies have a strong incentive to get it right. If people lose trust in a business, the brand will suffer. Companies are walking a fine line, trying to meet the authorities' requests for information but being open about it (see chart 4, previous page). Apple, for one, revealed last year that it had received requests for information from 31 governments. The vast majority came from America's.</p>
<p>As the internet penetrates ever deeper into people's lives, such issues will become increasingly important, raising a raft of questions. Should service providers be responsible for offensive messages posted on platforms such as Twitter? What can be done about child abuse online, given that many of the sites concerned are based offshore? If internet companies help authorities in the West track down dangerous individuals, will that encourage authoritarian regimes elsewhere to demand access to their critics' personal details?</p>
<p>The internet may be the ultimate instance of globalisation. Its flexibility makes it very difficult to monitor, with new sites springing up all the time. And as a weapon it can be used by anyone, from protesters who want to undermine governments to disgruntled customers who want to give companies a bad name.</p>
<p>In many such instances governments may want to intervene and companies could find themselves on the defensive. It is an area where a number of different principles--free speech, the right to privacy, the freedom to innovate--collide. The trade-off among these principles will have to be negotiated within each country and by each individual, but in an interconnected world there may be no satisfactory answer.</p>
<p>Click <a href="https://subscriptions.economist.com/nwcd">here</a> to subscribe to The Economist.</p>

Governments' Relationship With The Tech Sector Is Hideously Complicated

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container float_right click-to-enlarge"><div class="image on-image"><a title_source="Wikimedia, CC" title_caption="Vinton Cerf" class="zoomin" href="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/528e1b0b6da811ea5f6d4a28-960/vinton-cerf.jpg"><span class="click-to-enlarge-icon" title="Click to enlarge"></span></a><p class="source"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf">Wikimedia, CC</a></p><p class="caption">Vinton Cerf</p></div><p></p></div>One of <keyword id="6355629" type="CITY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Google">Google</keyword>'s top futurists, Vinton Cerf, said yesterday that "<keyword id="6355135" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Privacy">privacy</keyword> may be an anomaly" and "it will be increasingly difficult for us to achieve privacy."</p>
<p>They are scary words, coming from a man whose official job title at Google is vp/chief internet evangelist. Cerf is also known as the "father of the internet," after his role in developing ARPANET, the forerunner to the web.</p>
<p>His remarks came during a speech he made at an <a href="http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2013/10/iot.shtm">FTC conference on the Internet of Things</a>.</p>
<p>We've reconstructed Cerf's remarks from a variety of sources. Historically, Cerf said, humans have had very little personal privacy. The industrial revolution may have created a brief period in which humans enjoyed private, anonymous lives. But that temporary era may be over.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/google%E2%80%99s-vint-cerf-defines-internet-things-challenges">According to Network World</a>:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">The issue of privacy was a hot one.  For his part, Cerf said he would not "simply assert privacy is dead" but rather that it will be increasingly difficult to achieve.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/20/5125922/vint-cerf-google-internet-evangelist-says-privacy-may-be-anomaly">The Verge</a>:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Rather than privacy being an inherent part of society that's been stripped away by new technology, Cerf says that technology actually created it in the first place. "It's the industrial revolution and the growth of urban concentrations that led to a sense of anonymity," Cerf said. Cerf warned that he was simplifying his views - "I don't want you to go away thinking I am that shallow about it" - but overall, he believes "it will be increasingly difficult for us to achieve privacy."</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">"We are gonna live through situations where some people get embarrassed, some people end up going to jail, some other people have other problems as a consequence of some of these experiences," Cerf said. More respectful privacy conventions will likely develop as we move forward, he says, but for now, "This is something we're gonna have to live through. I don't think it's easy to dictate this."</p>
<p><a href="http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/google-s-chief-internet-evangelist-says-privacy-increasingly-difficult-to-achieve-1201175">Tech Radar</a>:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">"In a town of 3,000 people there is no privacy. Everybody knows what everybody is doing," he said at a US Federal Trade Commission event this week.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Cerf said that growing up in America before technology, no one had privacy. Keep in mind that he's credited as one of the fathers of the internet itself.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">His theory is that technology, or "the industrial revolution and the growth of urban concentrations," created a sense of privacy, but that that privacy "may actually be an anomaly" rather than the natural way of things.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">He said "it will be increasingly difficult for us to achieve privacy" going forward.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/20/vint_cerf_privacy_may_be_an_anomaly_online/">The Register</a>:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Cerf - who is Google's chief internet preacher - added: "Privacy may be an anomaly."</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">He said that the manner in which we interact with others on the 'net was problematic when it comes to our desire to keep personal information private.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">"Our social behavior is quite damaging to privacy. Technology has outraced our social intellect," Cerf said. ®</p>
<p><a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57613120-83/vint-cerf-privacy-may-be-an-anomaly/">CNET</a>:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">"Most of the experience with privacy is a result of our own behavior," Cerf said. "Our social behavior is quite damaging to privacy. Technology has outraced our social intellect." .</p>

Google's Top Futurist Says Your 'Privacy May Be An Anomaly'

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">
<html><body><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><a href="https://flexpath.capella.edu/" target="_blank"></a><p class="source"><span>Shutterstock</span></p><p class="caption">You don't need to spend all day in the library to earn your degree anymore.</p></div><p></p></div></div><em>This post is sponsored by <a href="https://flexpath.capella.edu/" target="_blank">FlexPath by Capella University</a>.</em></p>
<p>Getting an <keyword id="6355445" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Education">education</keyword> has always been about gaining knowledge. In recent years, however, the <em>way</em> we gain that knowledge has changed dramatically, thanks largely to the development of online learning. Brick-walled campuses with grassy quads still exist, of course, but the many ways people can earn a degree or even take a class look very different from what early educators ever imagined.</p>
<p>Personal computers and the Internet have made education more accessible to more people, but the transformation goes well beyond that. Today, students don't need to sit in classrooms, study textbooks that have little relevance to their careers, and cram for deadlines dictated by somebody else. New online programs like <a href="https://flexpath.capella.edu/" target="_blank">Capella's FlexPath</a> emphasize a self-paced approach, letting students set their own schedules and use their professional experiences to show how they've mastered the material.</p>
<p>How has online education evolved since the concept began? Take a look at this brief history of online learning in the US to find out how higher education has grown into the varied multimedia experience it often is today.</p>
<h3>Pre-Digital Distance Learning</h3>
<p>Getting an education from home isn't a new idea. Private correspondence courses were advertised in the Boston Gazette <a href="http://www.worldwidelearn.com/education-articles/history-of-distance-learning.html" target="_blank">as early as 1728</a>, and The Society to Encourage Studies at Home, the first correspondence school in the US, was founded in 1873. Other methods of distance learning, including by telephone and via television, would follow in the mid-20th century. </p>
<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_left"><div><div class="image"></div><p></p></div></div></p>
<h3 class="p1"><span class="s1"><strong>Setting the Digital Stage for Online Learning</strong></span></h3>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">Before online learning could become the norm, a lot of technology had to first be developed and then become accessible to students. The first step in that long journey was taken in 1969 when the US Department of Defense <a href="http://www.straighterline.com/online-education-resources/online-education-tools/infographic-history-of-distance-education/" target="_blank">created ARPANET</a>, a network that would later be known as the Internet. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">It was the personal computer, however, that would start to change learning for students around the globe. One of the first affordable and consumer-friendly personal computers, the Apple II, hit the market <a href="http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/personal-computers/17/299" target="_blank">in 1977</a>, with the education-forward advertising headline, "Why every kid should have an Apple after school."  </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">Connecting those personal computers to the Internet was the final step in laying the groundwork for online education. The Internet started creeping into homes <a href="http://www.entrepreneur.com/dbimages/article/an-accelerated-history-internet-speed.jpg" target="_blank">in 1993</a>, and the technology transformed what we traditionally think of as institutions of higher learning. </span></p>
<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image"></div><p></p></div></div><strong style="font-size: 1.17em; color: #000000;">The Rise Of Online Universities</strong></p>
<p>The 1990s was a big decade for online education. Universities had been taking advantage of computers and the Internet for a quite a while, but the rise of online universities in the early '90s gave people the option to earn a degree without having to sit in a physical classroom. </p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That freedom proved incredibly popular. Today, hundreds of accredited schools offer online degrees in the US. Between 2002 and 2008, the number of students taking online classes almost doubled.</span></p>
<h3>Online + Brick-And-Mortar = Blended</h3>
<p>The early success of online universities in the 1990s inspired traditional colleges to fold digital learning experiences into their own course offerings. <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Blended learning was the result, </span><a href="http://www.academia.edu/563281/Blended_learning_systems_Definition_current_trends_and_future_directions" target="_blank">defined as</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> a combination of face-to-face and computer-mediated learning. Online portals are commonplace for all university courses, and both entirely online classes and hybrid online/in-class learning opportunities are available at many colleges.</span></p>
<h3><strong>MOOCs: Classes For The Masses</strong></h3>
<p>The power of the the Internet has led to different types of online education, even beyond the traditional educational system. MOOCs, or massive open online courses, offer the accessibility of online learning and are free to anyone. The first MOOC was <a href="http://moocnewsandreviews.com/a-short-history-of-moocs-and-distance-learning/" target="_blank">launched in 2008</a> in Canada, and 2,200 students signed up. Today, MOOC platforms are often used to supplement in-school learning, and universities are partnering with MOOC platforms to offer their own classes free and online. The New York Times even named 2012 "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/massive-open-online-courses-are-multiplying-at-a-rapid-pace.html?pagewanted=all&amp;_r=0%20%20" target="_blank">The Year of the MOOC</a>."</p>
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<h3><strong>The New Online Degree: Ultimate Flexibility</strong></h3>
<p>The latest approach to higher education takes online learning to the next level, adding flexibility, self-paced learning, and real-world experience into the mix.</p>
<p>Capella University's new <a href="https://flexpath.capella.edu/" target="_blank">FlexPath self-paced learning program</a> lets students earn advanced degrees on their own schedule and create their own due dates and deadlines. When students are satisfied that they've mastered the material, they determine when to demonstrate their competency and move on. For students balancing work and family, it's an innovative next step in this country's educational evolution.</p>
<p><a href="https://flexpath.capella.edu/" target="_blank"><strong>Learn more about Capella's new FlexPath self-paced learning program.</strong></a></p>
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5em;">- Written by Natalie Burg</em></p>
<p>Find out <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/sponsor-posts">more about Sponsor Posts</a>.</p></body></html>

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