THE internet has only just started to flourish, its founders say, and will expand in the future with appliances and international users.

“The web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past,” said Tim Berners-Lee, one of the inventors of the World Wide Web, at a seminar on its future this week.

Just 23 per cent of the globe’s population currently uses the internet, according to the United Nation’s International Telecommunications Union, with use much higher in developed nations.

By contrast, just five per cent of Africans surf the web, it said in a report issued in March.

But that level is expected to rise, especially in developing nations, as mobile internet access takes off, making it no longer necessary to use a computer to surf the web, said internet co-founder Vinton Cerf.

“We will have more internet, larger numbers of users, more mobile access, more speed, more things online and more appliances we can control over the internet,” the Google vice president and chief internet evangelist said.

Robert Cailliau, who designed the web with Berners-Lee in 1989, said having more data on the internet, and more people with the ability to access it, will spur the development of new technology and solutions to global problems.

“When we have all data online it will be great for humanity. It is a prerequisite to solving many problems that humankind faces,” the Belgian software scientist said.

The internet has already led to the development of businesses that could not have existed without it, boosted literacy and learning and brought people closer together through cheaper modes of communication, the internet pioneers said.

“We never, ever in the history of mankind have had access to so much information so quickly and so easily,” said Cerf.

With the help of other scientists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), Berners-Lee and Cailliau set up the web in 1989 to allow thousands of scientists around the world to share information and data.

The WWW technology - which simplifies the process of searching for information on the internet - was first made more widely available from 1991.

The number of websites has since ballooned from just 500 as recently as 1994 to over 80 million currently, with growing numbers of sites consisting of user-generated content like blogs.

Even its founders are surprised by its popularity.

“What we did not imagine was a web of people, but a web of documents,” said Dale Dougherty, the founder of GNN, the Global Network Navigator, the first web portal and the first site on the internet to be supported by advertising.

For his part, Cailliau said he was impressed that search engines can still sort through the myriad of material that is now online.

“To me the biggest surprise is that Google still functions despite the explosion in the number of sites,” said Cailliau.

Tags: internet begun, new internet

Google has already had to pull images from its Google Maps Street View tool launched on Thursday, after a number of early testers registered privacy complaints with the service, identifying images of themselves captured in the photos.

The tool, available for 25 UK cities, gives users a 360 degree view of particular streets through merging photos collected by Google drivers using car-mounted cameras.

Images taken down so far include a man vomiting in Shoreditch and another man outside a Soho sex shop. Replacing them is now a message that reads “This image is no longer available”.

According to reports, Google has said the number of images removed has been “less than expected”.

“The tools are there for users to remove pictures they are not happy with,” a Google spokesman told The Independent.

But concerns over Street View are not new. Before the tool was launched in the UK, a number of privacy experts had queried the service, including UK rights group Privacy International’s Simon Davis, who believed Street View would break data protection laws.

“The idea that a commercial organisation could turn public images into profit is something that was not envisioned by the law,” he said last July.

But the reason Street View could launch in the UK was because the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), after discussing the system with Google, was satisfied it did not breach the Data Protection Act.

The ICO said before the launch that “Google is keen to capture images of streets and not individuals” and that the all clear had been given because the company had promised to blur number plates and faces to protect privacy.

However because users are now finding it easy to identify themselves, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has promised to investigate complaints and Privacy International has again put forward its case.

“These images are being captured without people’s permission for commercial user, and we believe that it is not legally acceptable,” Davis told The Telegraph. “They are also putting into place a system for updating these images in the future, and for storing the images digitally where they could be misused, ” he said.

Google is still dealing with privacy cases in the US concerning Street View where it was launched in early 2007.

Last year, a high profile legal case erupted when a US Pennsylvania couple sued Google for trespass and invasion of privacy, after the firm took pictures of their drive which was marked with ‘Private Road’ and ‘No Trespassing’ signs. The couple said that the pictures had caused their home to diminish in value by $25,000, but the US court ruled in Google’s favour.

Street View is also available in the Netherlands, France, Italy, Spain, Australia, New Zealand and Japan.

Google and the ICO could not immediately be reached for comment.

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Radio 91.3 Today’s Best Music Launches Official Forum on Limebox Network.
www.913fm.sg

More Radio Stations from Singapore Press Holding’s Launching Soon.

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Microsoft plans to release a total of three security updates for Windows Tuesday, repairing at least one critical vulnerability that enables remote hackers to execute malicious code on users’ PCs. One of the patches included in Microsoft’s March security bulletin, set for release Tuesday, addresses a critical Windows error that allows attackers to execute arbitrary code, usually without any user intervention, according to the software company’s advanced notification posting. The other two security updates slated for Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday release are both given the slightly less severe ranking of “important,” one of which does not affect XP or Vista. Both vulnerabilities allow a kind of attack known as “spoofing,” in which hackers can redirect unsuspecting users to a bogus or dangerous Web site and then launch malware or steal credit cards, login credentials or other personal information submitted by the user.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s March security bulletin won’t be fixing a critical Excel vulnerability, which allows attackers to launch malicious code remotely on users’ computers via an infected Excel spreadsheet file. Upon opening an infected Excel file, users unknowingly execute a Trojan horse onto their computers, which can be used to stealthily record keystrokes and steal personal and financial data. Security experts say that a targeted attack has already been observed in the wild, but does not appear to be widespread. So far, Microsoft has not issued a fix for the vulnerability, although future actions to remediate the flaw could include providing a solution through a service pack, a subsequent monthly security update or an emergency out-of-band patch.

Source: Channel Web

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