Making the Internet Better

 

From THE VERGE

Engineers and major companies are pushing a technology called L4S that they say could make the web feel dramatically faster. But how?

Building for tomorrow
A few months ago, I downgraded my internet, going from a 900Mbps plan to a 200Mbps one. Now, I find that websites can sometimes take a painfully long time to load, that HD YouTube videos have to stop and buffer when I jump around in them, and that video calls can be annoyingly choppy.

In other words, pretty much nothing has changed. I had those exact same problems even when I had near-gigabit download service, and I’m probably not alone. I’m sure many of you have also had the experience of cursing a slow-loading website and growing even more confused when a “speed test” says that your internet should be able to play dozens of 4K Netflix streams at once. 

So what gives?  READ MORE...

Future of Internet

On October 29, 1969, a message was sent from a rather nondescript room at UCLA in Southern California to a Stanford Research Institute computer console in Menlo Park, California. It read simply “Lo,” though it was supposed to say “Login.” The system crashed before completing the task. This was the world’s first message sent via an interconnected computer network known as ARPANET. On this unassuming fall day, the modern internet as we now know it was conceived.

In the five decades since, the internet has transformed human existence. From how we wage war to how we make each other laugh, it's unfathomable how much the internet has shaped life in that short amount of time.

But what will the future of the internet look like in 50 years? How will we solve the challenges that we are currently facing around privacy and data protection? Should we be hopeful—or fearful—for our changing digital world?

We asked these questions to a variety of experts, researchers, scientists, engineers, and futurists. The answers we got back were fascinating, clarifying, and somewhat scary.

In 2019, the Pew Research Center released its own data about the future of digital life after canvassing 530 experts. Lee Rainie, director of internet and tech research at Pew, was one of the co-authors of the study. He says that the answers were eye-opening in terms of how our digital presence will come to further define our existence. “[In their responses], they talked about what the definition of a human being, literally, will be once this technology is available for our bodies and brains.”

According to our experts, that will come sooner rather than later. Within only the next quarter century, the way we search or use the internet will be considered “archaically clunky,” writes Judith Donath, who is a researcher for the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University and author of the 2014 book The Social Machine. Rather, our digital presence will not be separate from the physical world, but ingrained in it.

“Gone will be keyboards, the mouse, and screens,” continues Donath.

Toby Negrin, Wikimedia Foundation’s Chief Product Officer, compared the internet to electricity as it becomes an “omnipresent utility, something we expect to always be available and around us... intertwined in our daily lives.”

The world in front of us will be a mix of reality and the virtual and, at times, it will be impossible to decipher which one is which. Mike Liebhold—a senior researcher at the Institute of the Future and at Apple's Advanced Technology Lab in the 1980s—writes that, in the near future, everyone will wear augmented reality glasses and use them to interact with their environment. “Information will be displayed, floating in the air ... the web will appear in the real world, not just on glass screens.”  READ MORE...

We Didn't Start The Fire

 

Listening to the lyrics of this song brings back memories of the 60's...     70's...    80's...    etc.     Lyrics  to  songs  about our past cause me to reflect upon the fact that very little has actually changed in the United States and throughout the world, except for maybe  the INTERNET and TERRORISM...  Millionaires and Billionaires and immigration...   wages have not  really increased proportionately to those of management... 

• Governments start fires
• Wealthy people start fires
• Rebels start fires
• Politicians start fires
• Hatred starts fires
• Progress starts fires
• Technology starts fires
• Education starts fires
• Incompetence starts fires
• Religions start fires
• Ignorance starts fires

WHAT FIRES HAVE YOU STARTED???