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The Internet's a 40-year-old 'teenager' today
(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-10-29 10:54 Growing with worms The Internet caught the public's attention in the form of e-mail systems in workplaces and ignited a "dot-com" industry boom that went bust at the turn of the century. "The original plan was that it should be very creative, basically it should be like a sandbox," British professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee said of creating the World Wide Web in 1990. Kleinrock pegs the launch of "the dark side of the Internet" to the 1988 release of the first malicious software "worm". It was April of 1994 when the first spam e-mail hit, according to the engineer. "We started sending e-mail back to those folks saying 'Stop it'," Kleinrock said. "We sent so much e-mail we crashed their computer. Inadvertently, the first spam e-mail created the first denial-of-service response." Kleinrock, 75, sees the Internet spreading into everything. "The next step is to move it into the real world," Kleinrock said. "The Internet will be present everywhere. I will walk into a room and it will know I am there. It will talk back to me." He also foresees intelligent software "agents" that do people's bidding online. During an on-stage chat at a Web 2.0 Summit that ended last week in San Francisco, Berners-Lee said governments and big firms shouldn't meddle with the Web. "I'm always worried, of course, about anything large coming in to take control," Berners-Lee said. "Web technology itself should not tell you what's right and wrong; humanity has ways of doing that. It isn't the Wild West. The laws apply." AFP
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