less_retarded_wiki/internet.md

Internet

Internet (sometimes just the net) is the grand, decentralized global network of interconnected computer networks that allows advanced, cheap, practically instantaneous intercommunication of people and computers and sharing of large amounts of data and information. Over just a few decades since its birth in 1970s it changed the society tremendously, shifted it to the information age and stands as possibly the greatest technological invention of our society. It is a platform for many services and applications such as the web, e-mail, internet of things, torrents, phone calls, video streaming, multiplayer games etc. Of course, once Internet became accessible to normal people and has become the largest public forum on the planet, it has also become the biggest dump of retards in history.

Sometimes we distinguish between lowercase i "internet", meaning a large computer network, and capital I "Internet", meaning the one, biggest worldwide internet. As many networks just become part of the great Internet, we see this distinction less often and without saying otherwise, in normal speech both "internet" or "Internet" typically stand for the big Internet.

Internet is built on top of protocols (such as IP, HTTP or SMTP), standards, organizations (such as ICANN, IANA or W3C) and infrastructure (undersea cables, satellites, routers, ...) that all together work to create a great network based on packet switching, i.e. a method of transferring digital data by breaking them down into small packets which independently travel to their destination (contrast this to circuit switching). The key feature of the Internet is its decentralization, i.e. the attribute of having no central node or authority so that it cannot easily be destroyed or taken control over -- this is by design, the Internet evolved from ARPANET, a project of the US defense department. Nevertheless there are parties constantly trying to seize at least partial control of the Internet such as governments (e.g. China and its Great Firewall, EU with its "anti-pedophile" chat monitoring laws etc.) and corporations (by creating centralized services such as social networks). Some are warning of possible de-globalization of the Internet that some parties are trying to carry out, which would turn the Internet into so called splinternet.

Access to the Internet is offered by ISPs (internet service providers) but it's pretty easy to connect to the Internet even for free, e.g. via free wifis in public places, or in libraries. By 2020 more than half of world's population had access to the Internet -- most people in the first world have practically constant, unlimited access to it via their smartphones, and even in poor countries capitalism makes these devices along with Internet access cheap as people constantly carrying around devices that display ads and spy on them is what allows their easy exploitation.

The following are some stats about the Internet as of 2022: there are over 5 billion users world-wide (more than half of them from Asia and mostly young people) and over 50 billion individual devices connected, about 2 billion websites (over 60% in English) on the web, hundreds of billions of emails are sent every day, average connection speed is 24 Mbps, there are over 370 million registered domain names (most popular TLD is .com), Google performs about 7 billion web searches daily (over 90% of all search engines).

PRO TIP: you should print your own offline Internet (or maybe we should rather say offline web). Collect your favorite websites and other resources (gopher holes, Usenet threads, images, ...) and make a single dense PDF out of them. Process each page so that it's just plain text, remove all graphics and colors, unify the font, make the font small and decrease margins so that you fit as much as possible on a single page to not waste paper. For many pages, like Wikipedia, a small script will be able to do this automatically; the uglier pages may just be edited manually. An easy approach is for example to convert the pages to plain HTML that just contains paragraphs and heading of different levels, then copy-pasting this to LibreOffice, globally editing the font and auto-generate things like table of contents and page numbers, then exporting as PDF. You can even make a script that contains the list of pages you want to scrap so that you can make a newer print a few years later. Once you have the PDF, print it out and have your own tiny offline net :) It will be useful when the lights go out, it's a physical backup of your favorite sites (the PDF, as a byproduct, is also a single-file backup in electronic form), something no one will be silently censoring under your hands, and it's also just nice to read through printed pages, the experience is better than reading stuff on the screen -- this will be like your own 100% personalized book with stuff you find most interesting, in a form that's comfortable to read.

History

see also history

TODO: https://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/, https://www.freesoft.org/CIE/Topics/57.htm

Alternatives To The Internet

Internet overtook the world thanks to having enabled great number of services to be provided very cheaply, at great scales and/or with extremely elevated attributes such as minimal delay or great bandwidth. This is crucial to many industries who couldn't do without such a network, however to individuals or even smaller organizations Internet is frequently just a tool of comfort -- they could exist without the Internet, just a little less comfortably. As Internet is becoming more and more monitored, controlled, overcrowded, limited and censored, we may start to consider the less comfortable alternatives as good enough ways that actually gain us advantages in some other ways, e.g. more freedom of expression, more robust network (independence of the Internet infrastructure), technological independence etc. We have to keep in mind the services allowed by the Internet, such as long distance communication, information searching or playing games still mostly exist even without Internet, just usually separated or somehow suffering a few disadvantages; nevertheless these disadvantages may be bearable and/or made smaller, e.g. by adjusting ourselves to the limitations (if our communication becomes slower, we'll simply write longer messages to which we put more thought and information etc.) or combining these alternative services in a clever way. Additionally we can make use of the lessons learned from the Internet (e.g. cleverly designed protocols, steganography, broadcasts, digital data, ...) and apply them to the alternative networks. Let us now list a few alternatives to the Internet:

• books, encyclopedias, magazines, libraries, printed media, paper, film, ...: Paper is an awesome medium, it's cheap and can hold quite a lot of information, both digital and analog, it can be used without a computer but can still be combined with computers (e.g. printers, scanning and OCR, ...) and/or lower tech tools like typewriters that may help manually copy books (see e.g. samizdat). Quality paper can be used for reliable backups. Posters can leave information for others to find. Books that have been written throughout history provide enormous amount of data and information, great part of which isn't even accessible through the Internet. Books are generally of much higher quality than websites, older ones are additionally free of modern propaganda and censorship. Print encyclopedias can here and there be used instead of Wikipedia, and they are extremely cheap (seek second hand book stores, no one wants them anymore). Books also provide entertainment, from traditional fiction, poetry etc. to entertaining reads such as the Guinness World Records book or even interactive RPG games (see gamebooks). Making your own small library of quality books isn't expensive at all and can really greatly reduce your dependence on the Internet in many ways. Micrography (scaling down documents to fit many of them on a small film) can help maximize store quite large amounts of data on small media without computers.
• snail mail, avian carriers, arrows, messengers, USB exchange, messages in bottle, ...: Physically transforming messages is another historically tested option, travelers will always be around wanting to get from point A to point B and while at it they may also serve as information carriers -- information doesn't weight that much. There even exist volunteer organizations that distribute mail. People used to play correspondence chess over snail mail, with enough dedication you could probably scale it up to some turn-based MMORPG game. Owing to the small weight, data can be transferred also by small animals such as pigeons (in some places with very bad Internet this is allegedly still the superior way even nowadays, in wars pigeons helped carry huge numbers of messages on microforms) or even just by "throwing", shooting an arrow with message on it, sending it down the river stream and so on. USB sticks are used by activists to send western propaganda to North Korea (e.g. small helium balloons carrying USB sticks with movies and books over the borders for the inhabitants to find). The disadvantage is high communication delay but even if it's orders of magnitude worse than what Internet offers us, bandwidth can still be excellent, sometimes even beating the Internet! Consider that a truck carrying 1000 1 terabyte harddrives arriving from start to its destination in a week achieves a bandwidth of about 1.6 gigabytes per second. That's pretty solid. Future inhabitans of Mars and other planets will inevitably have to deal with interplanetary Internet that's doomed by laws of physics to have high delays -- if they can get around the issue, so can we. An interesting concept might be a "slow" network of people who simply meet up once a week and exchange their USB sticks (or SD cards or diskettes or whatever) on which they pass files and messages to others, such as requests for files etc.
• leaving signs (rocks, sticks, leaves, messages in sand, bulletin boards, ...): Some forest people communicate by leaving signs for others e.g. by leaving tears on leaves or making shapes from sticks or rocks -- these can carry messages like "beware, dangerous animal around", "today I hunted down a monkey here" or "I have extra food, come take some". When improved, we could communicate whole text messages, numbers and any binary data this way -- imagine e.g. a small "bulletin board" on some frequently visited crossroads between villages where people leave latest news, offers, demands, jokes etc.
• intranet, LAN, WAN, ...: Networks using basically the same technology as the Internet (TCP/IP, ethernet, wifi, routers, ...), just on smaller scales -- the technology can actually be simpler: simpler routers can be used, no high performance backbone routers are needed, Ronja may be used instead of wifi, DNS may be omitted and so on. There are many such networks, military has its own isolated networks, North Korea has its famous nation-wide isolated intranet (Kwangmyong), Cuba has the famous SNet -- "street net" that's used for pirating and games -- and so on. The advantage is relative simplicity of implementation -- the technology is all there and quite cheap, you can set up your own network in the neighborhood and have complete control over it, government isn't gonna bully you for sharing movies, it won't spy on your communication (at least not so easily) etc.
• radio, telegraph: Plain FM/AM radio communication is a serious competition to Internet in terms of delay, bandwidth and distance of reach, while being very simple in comparison -- a skilled individual can construct or repair a radio with just some basic electronic components, which can't be said about digital computer networks that require extremely complex computer chips. Radio can relatively easily transfer analog information such as voice, but it can also send digital information. With Morse code even the most primitive radio communication system can turn into something extremely powerful.
• broadcast (see also world broadcast): broadcasts (one way communication towards many) can be implemented in many ways: with radio, audio, optically and so on. Broadcast only networks, such as teletext, TV or radio station broadcast, can be much simpler than a two way communication -- there don't have to be complex protocols, devices can work on low power (as they're only receivers) and the broadcaster can't be overloaded by client requests. These can cover a great range of services such as news, weather forecast, time synchronization, localization, work organization ("now we need you to produce this and this"), some forms of entertainment or providing generally useful data such as maps and books.
• optical telegraph, smoke signals, lanterns, flag semaphores, kites and other optical communication: Optical communication is another technique widely used throughout history -- the advantage here is speed as obviously light is the fastest medium you can ever use. Lighting bonfires on hill tops could send a message about incoming enemy at great distances, later on even a more complex information could be sent using optical telegraph -- a chain of towers that forwarded symbols one to another by positioning big arms on their rooftops to form some specific shape, with the next tower copying the symbol and so on. You can leave big symbols in your window to send a few bytes to anyone with a telescope in the line of sight of your house. Basically if you can make someone see something, you can send a message; you can increase the amount of data by utilizing color, movement, blinking and so on.
• audio signals (bells, canon shots, drums, horns, megaphones, ...): Audio signal were again used a lot in history, a church bell could tell people many different things by how it was rang, canon shots could warn of incoming enemies and so on, voice can be used too. Drums are still widely used this way in Africa. The principle of string telephone can be considered to make some audio based networks.
• pneumatic tube and similar non-electric networks: A network of tubes using pressured air to transform small capsule containers from one place to another pretty fast, often used in factories -- this can carry written messages but also, unlike the Internet, physical objects! Other mechanism could be explored to construct similar networks, e.g. something based on hydraulics, string pulling, steam engines, gears, simple gravity (sending a marble down some tunnel could be a quite fast message) and so on.
• phone networks, phreaking etc.: phone networks (and possibly other networks like the electric network, TV network etc.) can be hacked to be used for free or cheap communication -- old time hackers knew how to rape phone boots to let them make free calls. Nowadays many safety measures are in place but you may still e.g. exploit the fact that merely ringing someone's phone is completely free, which can be used to send a few bits of information. WARNING: It's generally illegal to mess with these networks, trying this shit's always on you :-) Also touching random electric cables can kill you. If you by accident take down some optical cable or something, you'll be fined to death.
• normal voice communication: As stupid as it sounds, we can sometimes just talk to other people, even if they live in another village, simply by going there and talking to them. You can use shouting to reach even people who are far away instantly -- some communities even invented things like whistling languages to communicate simple messages on extreme distances, this was used by hunters in forests etc. We got too much used to using cell phones to communicate with someone who just happens to be in another room, but this is just stupid, this can be just discarded as human degeneracy.
• petroglyphs (rock carving), wood carving, glass painting, knot tying, metal tables etc.: Data can be recorded manually in many materials, e.g. Incas used Quipu, a special knot tying language. Carving to stone is hard but will last for a long time, it is ideal for preserving small amounts of important information for a long time. See also rok carved binary data.
• human memory: Human memory can be used instead of computer memory, though we have to bear in mind its limitations. In very old times, before books became common and cheap, there existed people who made living by memorizing history in forms of long poems and recited them in public (this is how e.g. Iliad and Odyssey survived until they were actually recorded).
• public fora: Instead of an Internet discussion forum or chat it's possible to just allocate some public space for people to simply talk. Instead of YouTube videos people can go see someone's lecture, with the advantage of being able to actually talk to the guy and ask questions -- again, pretty obvious but the new generation may already be forgetting things can be done simply.
• local storage/paper and offline programs instead of cloud: This is again more of a note for the newer generation that's used to storing everything in the cloud and also using "cloud apps" -- you can (and SHOULD) store things locally of course, you can use offline programs and eve boomer solutions like a literal paper notebook for taking notes instead of using some online note taking "app". Similarly you can store your cash money and private photos in a physical safe instead of relying on Internet banking or password protected clouds and voila, suddenly you free of yet another bullshit.
• doing it yourself, becoming independent: you can replace many online services by just doing them yourself, for example instead of online weather forecast you can build your own small weather station, instead of online music streaming service you can just buy a harddrive, load it with mp3s and let it play on random, and so on.
• telepathy? :D
• ...

See Also

• JWICS, SIPRNet, NIPRNet (secret/military networks)
• smol internet
• World Wide Web
• splinternet
• Kwangmyong (North Korean intranet)
• Snet (large computer network on Cuba)
• interplanetary internet
• books