Internet turns 40 today

The 'Internet' turned 40 today. It may sound strange, but today it is quite impossible to think of world without the 'World Wide Web'. On Sept 2, 1969, around about 20 people gathered in a lab at the University of California, Los Angeles and two bulky computers were used to pass test data through a 15-foot gray cable. That was the beginning of the Internet. Now, 40 years later, we take a look at the Internet timeline. Key milestones in the development and growth of the Internet

1969: On September 2, two computers at University of California, Los Angeles, exchange meaningless data in first test of Arpanet, an experimental military network. The first connection between two sites UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California takes place on October 29, though the network crashes after the first two letters of the word "logon." UC Santa Barbara and University of Utah later join.

1970: Arpanet gets first East Coast node, at Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Mass.

1972: Ray Tomlinson brings e-mail to the network, choosing "at" symbol as way to specify e-mail addresses belonging to other systems.

1973: Arpanet gets first international nodes, in England and Norway.

1974: Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn develop communications technique called TCP, allowing multiple networks to understand one another, creating a true Internet. Concept later splits into TCP/IP before formal adoption on January 1, 1983.

1983: Domain name system is proposed. Creation of suffixes such as ".com," ''.gov" and ".edu" comes a year later.

1988: One of the first Internet worms, Morris, cripples thousands of computers.

1989: Quantum Computer Services, now AOL, introduces America Online service for Macintosh and Apple II computers, beginning an expansion that would connect nearly 27 million Americans online by 2002.

1990: Tim Berners-Lee creates the World Wide Web while developing ways to control computers remotely at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

1993: Marc Andreessen and colleagues at University of Illinois create Mosaic, the first Web browser to combine graphics and text on a single page, opening the Web to the world with software that is easy to use.

1994: Andreessen and others on the Mosaic team form a company to develop the first commercial Web browser, Netscape, piquing the interest of Microsoft Corp. and other developers who would tap the Web's commerce potential. Two immigration lawyers introduce the world to spam, advertising their green card lottery services.

1995: Amazon.com Inc. opens its virtual doors.

1996: Passage of US law curbing pornography online. Although key provisions are later struck down as unconstitutional, one that remains protects online services from liability for their users' conduct, allowing information and misinformation to thrive.

1998: Google Inc. forms out of a project that began in Stanford dorm rooms. US government delegates oversight of domain name policies to Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. Justice Department and 20 states sue Microsoft, accusing the maker of the ubiquitous Windows operating system of abusing its market power to thwart competition from Netscape and others.

1999: Napster popularizes music file-sharing and spawns successors that have permanently changed the recording industry. World Internet population surpasses 250 million.

2000: The dot-com boom of the 1990s becomes a bust as technology companies slide. Amazon.com, eBay and other sites are crippled in one of the first widespread uses of the denial-of-service attack, which floods a site with so much bogus traffic that legitimate users cannot visit.

2002: World Internet population surpasses 500 million.

2006: World Internet population surpasses 1 billion.

2008: World Internet population surpasses 1.5 billion. China's Internet population reaches 250 million, surpassing the United States as the world's largest. Netscape's developers pull the plug on the pioneer browser, though an offshoot, Firefox, remains strong. Major airlines intensify deployment of Internet service on flights.

Now, an intelligent system to help the elderly avoid forgetting everyday tasks

Scientists at the University of Granada (UGR) have announced the creation of a system that uses Artificial Intelligence techniques to help elderly people, or those with special needs, avoid forgetting certain everyday tasks. The researchers have revealed that their system uses sensors distributed in the environment to detect people's actions, and mobile devices to remind them. Suppose, say the researchers, an elderly lady who is about to go to bed goes into her room, sits down on the bed, takes off her slippers, and turns off the light. According to them, before she gets into bed, a small alarm will go off, and a mobile device will remind her that she has forgotten to take her tablets. "It is a prototype which, in a non-intrusive manner, facilitates the control of the activity of people with special needs and increases their independence," said Maria Ros Izquierdo, from the Higher Technical School of Computer Engineering of the UGR. The system recognizes the everyday actions of the users by means of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) labels. These labels are discreetly placed on the objects that the individuals touch most often, in such a way that, when they do so, a signal is sent to a computer or mobile device situated in the house itself or at an assistance centre some distance away. To compile a list of actions-such as remembering to take the keys or the mobile phone before leaving home-the activities of the people are assessed with Artificial Intelligence techniques. "It is not necessary to use cameras or microphones, and the devices which are used do not entail any technological complications for users, nor do they modify their daily routines," said Ros. To evaluate the novel system, the university team have also designed an intelligent space called 'Tagged World', which simulates the rooms of a house, with sensors embedded in the environment helping to recognize the behaviour of its occupants. The researchers monitored each user so as to obtain an individualized database. They later verified with a test the reliability of the system and the degree of intrusion felt by the participants. "The system does not modify the life of the users, but does positively modify that of the people who look after them," indicated Ros, who recalled that elderly people or those with special needs often reject the aid of others and demand more independence. The researcher believes that the new system may help to achieve this objective. A research article describing the new system has been published in the Expert Systems with Applications magazine.

ESA investigates new methods of mapping tropical forests from space

The European Space agency (ESA) is investigating new methods of mapping tropical forests from space. Tropical forests play an important role in the terrestrial carbon budget by absorbing huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and sequestering it as biomass. These regions are, however, also subject to high rates of deforestation, which then releases the carbon back into the atmosphere. Tropical forest biomass and its distribution across the world are currently poorly known. Since tropical regions are often covered by clouds and therefore at times inaccessible to optical sensors, it is difficult to assess these carbon stocks from space. In addition, forests are highly complex in structure and the large trees and dense canopy greatly complicate the generation of biomass maps from satellite images. An airborne campaign, being carried out in South America, is showing how spaceborne radar could be an answer. Appropriately, how best to map tropical forest biomass from space using radar is the focus of ESA's Tropisar airborne campaign. The campaign is currently being carried out, in collaboration with French space agency CNES, in French Guiana, South America. By providing answers to this crucial question, the campaign is helping to address one of the key objectives of ESA's candidate Earth Explorer mission BIOMASS. The main objective of the BIOMASS mission is to provide consistent global estimates of forest biomass, its distribution and changes over time. In this manner, the mission is expected to greatly improve our knowledge of carbon stored in forests, and better quantify the carbon fluxes to and from the atmosphere from land. To reach this goal, the mission, if selected for implementation, would exploit the longest radar wavelength available to Earth observation - P-Band and its unique sensitivity to forest biomass. An airborne radar system called Sethi is central to the Tropisar campaign, and is flown on a Mystere-20 jet. According to Jerome Chave, a member of Ecologie des Forets de Guyane and expert in tropical forest biomass estimation, "French Guiana represents an ideal site for such a campaign because we can build on long-standing efforts in the region to measure forest properties with the help of the many different organisations here." In total, it is expected that approximately 3.5 million gigabytes of radar data will have been collected during the campaign. The last flight of the Tropisar campaign is planned for September 1. After this, the data will be processed by experts at ONERA in France and analysed by the Tropisar team.

The curious case of the 2,500-yr-old bizarre Nok people of Nigeria

A team of German archaeologists is looking for clues to explain the mysterious culture of the 2,500 years old Nok people in Nigeria. The Nok people left behind bizarre terracotta statues, broken pots, storage vessels, a clay lizard and fragments of clay faces with immense nostrils. The chipped head of a statue depicts an African man with a moustache, a fixed glare and hair piled high up on his head. He looks gloomy, almost sinister. Peter Breunig from the University of Frankfurt am Main runs an excavation near the Nigerian highlands of Jos, where the mysterious Nok culture once blossomed. Spanning more than 80,000 square kilometers (31,000 square miles), the tropical region they lived in was larger than Ireland. Its inhabitants lived in wooden huts and ate porridge made from pearl millet. Some women subjected themselves to bloody "scar ornaments" scratched into their breasts with knives. As archaeologists imagine it, smoke hung in the air as people fired masterly terracotta creations in kilns heated to 700 degrees Celsius (1,300 degrees Fahrenheit). The most astonishing fact about what Breunig calls "a society without writing" is its age. It dates from around 2,500 years ago, a time when a wave of change in belief systems washed over other continents. Nok sculptors were contemporaries of Solon, Buddha and the early Mayans. For years, people have believed that Africa was left behind at that time - but Breunig knows better. "Around 500 B.C., the population exploded," he said. People that had been living a Stone Age-like nomadic existence suddenly settled. Breunig speaks of a "cultural Big Bang." In their excavations, the team discovers shards of clay statues everywhere - on rock slopes, in ancient refuse pits and in open spaces. The largest of these impressive figures can stand up to one meter (3.3 feet) tall and resemble what might be kings or members of a social elite. Others wear horned helmets or carved-out gourds on their heads. A third of these figures are women. The clay figures are strangely uniform, almost as if they had been mass produced. The eyes are always triangular, the pupils are pierced, and the eyebrows are high and arched. They look sedate and immersed in their thoughts. Lightning-shaped tattoos adorn their cheeks.cientists are puzzled about who could have created this collection of curiosities. The German researchers have now used state-of-the-art analytical devices to examine this area. The project could finally shed some light on a phenomenon that is one of the biggest mysteries of early history.

3 bodies of 1,000-yr-old mysterious tribal group found in Alaska

Construction workers unearthed the remains of three humans in Kivalina, Alaska, who are believed to have been members of a mysterious tribal group from about 1,000 years ago. According to a report in The Arctic Sounder, the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium was doing excavation for Kivalina's new wastewater treatment plant when they came across some old bones, which an onsite archeologist determined to be animal bones. Construction resumed until more bones were found - this time human. Three bodies were found close to each other, two together and one in what could have been a wooden house. Archeologists won't be certain how old the Kivalina remains are until radiocarbon dating is done, but they believe the bodies were members of the Ipiutak - a group that lived in Alaska from about 500 to 900 A.D. Artifacts found with the bodies show the elaborate, stylized engravings on ivory and artistic motifs that were characteristic of the group. The discovery shows that Kivalina was occupied by humans about a thousand years longer than historians previously knew. It also sheds light on a mysterious group whose range and numbers are only just coming to light. Ipiutak are culturally distinct from the western Thule, who were whale hunters that are more clearly ancestors of the modern Inupiaq. Ipiutak hunted seals and smaller mammals on the coast but don't seem to have hunted whale. Caribou bones and the use of wood suggest that they also used areas in the Interior. How the Ipiutak would have sustained a village of hundreds on the resources of the area, without evidence of whaling, is a puzzle to historians and archeologists, as is where the Ipiutak went. "It seems to be a prehistoric population that was functioning quite well on both the Siberian and the Alaskan side up until 900 AD," said Peter Bowers, principal archeologist with Northern Land Use Research, which is studying the site. "Finding out what happened after that is one of the mysteries we're trying to solve and the reason this (discovery) is important," he added. As for the bones unearthed in Kivalina,city administrator Janet Mitchell said that the remains are being kept by the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium until the excavation was finished in case more bodies are found.

Indian defence establishment gears up to thwart cyber threat

Facing mounting attacks from the virtual world, the Indian defence establishment is now gearing up for cyber warfare. Officials working in South Block, where the Indian defence ministry is located, have been receiving mails from fake email identities (IDs) on a regular basis that is aimed at hacking into its computer systems. 'We regularly receive emails from fake IDs like from Chief of Army Staff Secretariat, director media, media cell etc. We know that it is from a fake ID so we do not open it lest it bugs our systems,' a senior Indian Army official working in the defence ministry official told IANS. He wished to remain anonymous as he was not authorised to speak to the media. Recently, mediapersons covering defence related matters received an email from the DPR (Defence Press Relations) ID outlining plans of the Pakistan Army against India. The defence ministry immediately took note of the email and swung into action. 'The email ID on Yahoo was used by the defence public relations office earlier. However, when an ID was created on gmail it was abandoned. Somebody apparently hacked the ID and sent the mail,' a defence ministry official said. 'The password of the abandoned email was immediately restored. The matter is currently being looked into,' the official added. There have been attempts in the past where Chinese hackers have broken into the computer network of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), prompting the government to fortify their systems. Earlier this year a number of computers were reportedly found to be compromised with a malicious spyware that had been sending copies of internal e-mail messages to a rogue address. During last year's Army Commanders' Conference it was decided to boost the 'cyber-security' of its information networks right down to the level of divisions, which are field formations with over 15,000 troops. Apart from creating cyber-security organisations down to the division-level to guard against cyber warfare and data thefts, the army top brass also underlined the urgent need for 'periodic cyber-security audits' by the Army Cyber Security Establishment. 'We have our cyber experts conducting cyber audit on our systems from time-to-time to check against possible bugs,' said an armed forces official. During the cyber audits, the experts check the password strength of the accounts. 'We are being advised to give an alpha-numeric password with characters in upper and lower case,' the official added. Generally the armed forces refrain from finding the sender's identity as it involves a long procedure of writing to the Google headquarters with proper authorisation. However, the Indian armed forces have also issued a set of 'do's and dont's' to contain the menace of cyber crime. 'We have been instructed to work on stand-alone computers with no internet connections. Moreover, we cannot keep any confidential data in our hard disks. Nobody is allowed to use a pen drive inside the South Block and the rule is strictly adhered to,' said another Indian Army official. Also the Indian Army had issued circular to its officials asking them not to post work-related information like ranks, place of posting etc on social networking sites like Orkut and Facebook. The circular had asked soldiers to remove such information from their networking profiles in case they had already posted it. The armed forces have also undertaken various measures to sensitise its officials on cyber usage.

Why is the sun hotter outside than inside?

The mystery of why temperatures in the sun's outer atmosphere soar to several million degrees, far hotter than temperatures near the sun's surface, has been solved. New observations made with instruments aboard Japan's Hinode satellite reveal the hotter outer atmosphere is due to nanoflares. Nanoflares are small, sudden bursts of heat and energy. 'They occur within tiny strands that are bundled together to form a magnetic tube called a coronal loop,' said James Klimchuk, an astrophysicist at the Goddard Space Flight Centre's Solar Physics Lab in Maryland. Coronal loops are the fundamental building blocks of the thin, translucent gas known as the sun's corona. Scientists previously thought steady heating explained the corona's million degree temperatures. Observations from the NASA-funded X-Ray Telescope (XRT) and Extreme-ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer (EIS) instruments aboard Hinode reveal that ultra-hot plasma is widespread in solar active regions. The XRT measured plasma at 10 million degrees Kelvin, and the EIS measured plasma at five million degrees Kelvin; 273 degrees Kelvin equal zero degree Celsius. 'These temperatures can only be produced by impulsive energy bursts,' said Klimchuk, who presented the findings at the International Astronomical Union General Assembly meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.