What Is The Internet?We are all used to the internet, but what is it?
We have all heard of ‘The Cloud’ it is where we store our music, our photos, our emails.
The cloud is not actually in the sky, it is hundreds of thousands of miles of fibre optic cables under the oceans. The busiest of these is the Louson Strait which is a strait between Taiwan and the Philippines.
Website servers all around the world contribute to the data that is made available.
Even the Marketing Quotes website is stored on a server somewhere in the UK, which can be accessed by anyone around the world that has an internet connection.
The same can be said for the billions and billions of websites, from Wikipedia to your local funeral home.
Cyber security is there to protect us and the internet from terrorist attacks, but what about nature, what if nature decided to bring the internet down?
Since data is sent between data centres around the world via a global fibre optic cable network, the network is at risk of being damaged.
Underwater earthquakes happen from time to time, which can cause data cables to become damaged. Many are now buried under the sea floor, but if the underwater terrain does not allow for this, they are at risk.
Sea life such as whales can get caught up with cables, causing danger to the network and also sea life.
Cash machines, banking, Youtube, iPhones, email, websites, all are 100% reliant on the internet.
Imagine if the internet went down, how we would be thrown back into a world centuries ago. Shipping would stop (as there is no communication), financial markets crash, communications crash, defence systems shut down, utilities stop, doomsday you might call it.
Since the internet is so diverse, the chances of this happening is very unlikely.
The forward facing internet for civilians is one part, the military have their own internet and so on and so fourth.
One way or the other, our lives are now mostly digital, controlled by satellites giving us our GPS data, to you reading this blog article, created many years ago and it could last for hundreds of years.
Road tax was scrapped a few years ago if you remember, it is now done digitally rather than by the tax discs we had to put in our car windscreen. Do you still have your old one?
Since 1983 when the internet first started, our lives as a species have become ever more addicted to technology.
Almost every area of our lives are reliant on the internet and what it brings. From our jobs, our leisure and our finances all based around the internet.
How many times do you walk down the street and have to navigate around people looking into their phones?
How many groups of children do you see that are all looking into their phones?
How many young girls do you see walking down the street, a vape in one hand and a phone in the other?
We are addicted to technology, but what for? Are that group of children all talking to each other in their group, unlikely.
Chances are they are talking to friends or looking at pictures of whatever people they fancy.
Older people use their phones for other things, such as getting directions or looking up a cooking recipe.
The dark web is the internet, but anonymous, so IP addresses do not appear and there is no regulation.
Website like Tor allow users to be able to browse without being monitored by internet giants like Google, monitoring user activity, tracking you via your smartphone (find my iPhone) and data collecting for advertising.
Government organisations like GCHQ also monitor the internet, to build a digital profile of us. The dark web removes this power.
Is the dark web better to use than the open internet?
Bear in mind it is not GCHQ that is monitoring us, but social media platforms such as Facebook, to sell to us. China has long been known to do intelligence gathering via the internet, both for it’s own population and it’s enemies.
When Back To The Future II was released, they second guessed what the year 2015 would be like, when hover boards were used by children, we had microwave ovens, and floating cars. While not all of this was accurate, some was.
What will the year 2041 look like?
Will we be as reliant on the internet then as we are now, is that dangerous?
What will come after smart phones?
The digital world has only been with us a very short time, yet it has evolved so quickly. Do you remember fax machines?
The internet we all know and love will most likely be with us for many decades to come, but will most likely be very different.
AI (artificial intelligence) is being developed as are robots. Inserting technology into our bodies is also being developed so we are ‘plugged in’ 24hrs a day. Can we view the internet via our eye (like they do in sifi films)?
Watch this space.
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