Living in the twenty-first century technology, is all around us, and the Internet has become a large part of our lives. Many of us use the Internet daily, but do we really have a true understanding of what it is and can fully do?
The definition of Internet, according to the Dictionary Online, is a global computer network providing a variety of information and communication facilities, consisting of interconnected networks using standardized communication protocols. You’re probably asking, “okay so what does that mean exactly?” It is simply a centralized network that connects billions of computers and people together.
What you may not know is that everything you search for or do on the internet is monitored and logged. Have you ever wondered why the same day or few days after you google something a ton of random ads will continue to pop up on the exact thing you searched for? Every click is logged and monitored, not just by your browser, but by hundreds of smaller companies that auction off the data to be sold to larger companies. Business Insider reported that big data has been used to predict crimes before they happen. In California a “predictive policing” trial was able to identify areas where crime was going to occur three times more accurately than any existing method had forecasted. This is due to the amount of people using the Internet.
There are almost 4 billion people using the internet daily. According to Computerworld, if you burned all the data created in just one day onto DVDs, you could stack them on top of each other and reach the moon-twice. According to other researchers the “Stack of DVDs” will reach Mars by the end of the decade.
Some other interesting facts are:
-The internet sends approximately 204 million emails per minute and 70% of all the emails sent are spam, and 2 billion electrons are required to produce a single email.
-The internet also requires 50 million horsepower to keep running the current state.
-The majority of internet traffic is not generated by humans, but by bots and malware. According to a recent study conducted by Incapsula, 61.5% or nearly two-thirds of all the website traffic is caused by Internet bots. But these bots are just searching one level of a very complicated system.
Most people think that they can go to Google and find out almost anything, but the truth is that they are just hitting the surface of what all the Internet contains. The queries that you search for are just a small percentage of the internet and is often referred to as the ‘Surface Web.’ The remaining part is called ‘Deep Web’ and it is much larger than the Surface Web. (See Image below)
We will never know how the Internet fully works or what all knowledge it holds, but it continues to grow at a rapid pace, and according to Cisco the amount of devices that connect to the Internet will rise from about 13 billion to 50 billion by 2020.
By: Christa Vandenburgh