2. HISTORY
• The internet was developed in the United States by the "United
States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency" (DARPA). It was first connected in October, 1969. The
World Wide Web was created at CERN inSwitzerland in 1990 by a
British (UK) man 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 the people who offer these free services use
advertising to make money from them. The alternative (other) name,
"net" came from "inter(net)".
3. SERVICES ON THE INTERNET
• The internet is used for many things, such as electronic mail, online chat, file transfer,
and the interlinked web pages and other documents of the World Wide Web.
• The most used service on the internet is the World Wide Web (which is also called the
"Web"). The Web contains websites, blogs, and also wikis like Wikipedia.
Webpageson the internet can be seen and read by anyone (unless the page needs a
password, or it is blocked).
• 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 messagin (such as AIM or ICQ) is similar
to email, but allows two or more people to chat to each other much faster.
• Some governments think the Internet is a bad thing, and block all or part of it. For
example, the Chinese government thinks that Wikipedia is bad. Many times no one
inChina can read it or add to it.Some parents block parts of the internet they think are
bad for children to see. Well-known examples of the whole internet being blocked are
in North Korea and Myanmar.
4. DANGERS ON THE INTERNET
• The internet can also be a dangerous place. Information that people put on the internet is not
always checked, and some may not be true. Some may even be harmful. Also, if someone
sends information through the internet, sometimes other people can read it even when they are
not supposed to. For example, Facebook has had some problems with privacy settings. A
person can post information on a website, but this is often a bad idea unless the person is very
sure of what they are doing. A good way to check for a secure website is to make sure the URL
starts with https:// instead of http://, this means it is a secure site. (This only stops other people
from reading what a user types. It does not mean the website is safe)
• Some websites may trick people into downloading viruses that can harm a computer or spyware
that spies on its users (looks at what they are doing and tells someone else). E-mails can also
have harmful files with them as "attachments".
• In internet chatrooms, people might be preying on others or trying to stalk or abuse them.
• The internet contains content that many people find offensive such as pornography, as well as
content intended to be offensive.
• Criminals may steal people's personal information or trick people into sending them money.
5. TERMINOLOGY
• The term Internet, when used to refer to the specific global system of interconnected Internet Protocol (IP)
networks, is a proper noun and may be written with an initial capital letter. In common use and the media, it is
often not capitalized, viz. the internet.Some guides specify that the word should be capitalized when used as
a noun, but not capitalized when used as an adjective.
• The Internet is also often referred to as the Net, as a short form of network.
• Historically, as early as 1849, the word internetted was used uncapitalized as an adjective, meaning
Interconnected orinterwoven. The designers of early computer networks used internet both as a noun and as
a verb in shorthand form ofinternetwork or internetworking, meaning interconnecting computer networks.
• The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used interchangeably in everyday speech; it is common to
speak of "going on the Internet" when invoking a web browser to view web pages. However, the World Wide
Web or the Web is only one of a large number of Internet services. The Web is a collection of interconnected
documents (web pages) and other web resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs. As another point of
comparison, Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, is the language used on the Web for information transfer,
yet it is just one of many languages or protocols that can be used for communication on the Internet.
• The term Interweb is a portmanteau of Internet and World Wide Web typically used sarcastically to parody a
technically unsavvy user.
