Daily Sabah: Turkey’s 1st internet celebrity eschews social media. “Mahir Çağrı, better known as “I Kiss You” Mahir after the innocuous message he wrote on the top of his website, was an ubiquitous presence online at the dawn of the millenium. It was a time when social media was limited to primitive chatrooms but a man with broken English like Çağrı was still able to break records with visitors to his website. While Turkey was still navigating its way through the world wide web, he found international fame with his weird but simple website. Fast-forward to 21 years later, Mahir’s naive website resembles a relic from ancient ages and the man himself is far from his celebrity status where he counted Hollywood A-listers among his fans.”
internet
Mashable: Archie, The Very First Search Engine, Was Released 30 Years Ago Today
Mashable: Archie, The Very First Search Engine, Was Released 30 Years Ago Today. “On Archie’s 30th anniversary, we salute the world’s first search engine, a pioneer that paved the way for giants to come. Archie was first released to the general public on Sept. 10, 1990. It was developed as a school project by Alan Emtage at McGill University in Montreal.”
Voice of America: US Global Internet Freedom Group Says Work Limited by Funding Dispute
Voice of America: US Global Internet Freedom Group Says Work Limited by Funding Dispute. “A U.S.-funded global internet freedom group says it has had to sharply curtail its work in a new funding dispute with the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM). Laura Cunningham, the acting chief executive of the Washington-based Open Technology Fund, in a letter… accused the agency and its leader, Michael Pack, of withholding $20 million in congressionally approved funds intended to promote internet access throughout the world, especially in such authoritarian countries as China and Iran.”
TNW: Mike Pompeo wants to build the US a ‘clean’ internet free of Chinese tech
TNW: Mike Pompeo wants to build the US a ‘clean’ internet free of Chinese tech. “With the Clean Carrier policy, Pompeo wants to keep Chinese network companies out of the US networks. Clean Store and Clean Apps initiative signal towards booting out untrustworthy and potentially dangerous apps from phones of folks in the US. Clean Cloud is aimed towards keeping the cloud data out of reach from the Chinese companies. And finally, Clean Cable policy is to ensure that China is not spying on the country by sabotaging undersea cables.”
KTSP: New website tracks broadband access and internet speed across Minnesota
KTSP: New website tracks broadband access and internet speed across Minnesota. “The Minnesota Rural Broadband Coalition is asking people to take the speed test on their website. Participants give their address or a nearby location data. The website then measures the download and upload speeds of the internet connection. The results are then recorded and displayed on a map. Green dots indicate a fast connection; red dots equal a slow connection.”
Washington Post: Trump administration is crippling international Internet freedom effort by withholding funds, officials say
Washington Post: Trump administration is crippling international Internet freedom effort by withholding funds, officials say. “The Trump administration is withholding $20 million in funding approved by Congress for a U.S. Internet freedom organization, forcing the cutoff Friday of tools used by tens of millions of people worldwide to access the Internet and uncensored news through the Voice of America, officials said. The head of the Washington-based Open Technology Fund said Thursday that it is being forced to halt 49 of the fund’s 60 Internet freedom projects. The move, according to the head of the fund, affects about 80 percent of the group’s work helping human rights and pro-democracy advocates, journalists and others in 200 countries.”
Mashable: The ‘I have a joke’ meme gives us some much-needed humor
Mashable: The ‘I have a joke’ meme gives us some much-needed humor . “2020 has already ushered in new and sometimes painful memes — which, given that many of us are in front of our screens while social distancing, isn’t wholly surprising. Not all of these new memes have to do with our current reality, either. In recent days, the people of Twitter decided to add some levity to our strange year as the ‘I have a joke’ meme erupted on the platform.”
The Web Before the Web: A Look Back at Gopher (How-To Geek)
How-To Geek: The Web Before the Web: A Look Back at Gopher. “Before the rapid growth of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, a protocol called Gopher briefly made the internet easy to use by combining the world’s online resources. Here’s what made it special, and why it was quickly eclipsed by the web.”
The Verge: TikTok turned his song into a creepy meme — until fans took it back
The Verge: TikTok turned his song into a creepy meme — until fans took it back. “Unlike most content fights, this one has mostly taken place among users, avoiding top-down moderation in favor of mass action within the strange ecosystem of TikTok. But for [Jonathan] Visger and other musicians who have used the platform to reach a new audience, it’s an ugly reminder of how little control there is over how a song is used, and how hard it can be to take back your work.”
Bustle: Why Cake Memes Are Taking Over Your Feed Right Now
Bustle: Why Cake Memes Are Taking Over Your Feed Right Now. “We’ve seen some pretty weird internet trends circulate in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. There was the bizarre #PillowChallenge where people were tying their pillows to their bodies with a belt like a dress. Then there were those ridiculous but hilarious Gossip Girl memes that demonstrated that people were very bored in quarantine. And now, social media is swarming with new ‘made of cake’ memes based on a running joke where people are convinced they’re… made of cake. Yes, we have collectively lost it.”
BetaNews: 80 percent of companies see more cyberattacks during the pandemic
BetaNews: 80 percent of companies see more cyberattacks during the pandemic. “Since the onset of the COVID-19 crisis earlier this year 80 percent of companies have seen ‘slightly to considerably more’ cyberattack attempts, breaking down to 88 percent in the US and 74 percent in the UK. SIEM specialist Exabeam surveyed more that 1,000 IT security professionals at small- to medium-sized enterprises and finds that a third of respondents experienced a successful cyberattack during COVID-19, leading to network downtime for 40 percent of UK companies and 38 percent of US companies.”
New York Times: A Short History of ‘Simp’
New York Times: A Short History of ‘Simp’. “The word ‘simp’ isn’t new. In fact, it’s pretty old. But it has been dragged into fresh popularity. In the same way that older songs can find new audiences on TikTok, older slang emerges on the app to be championed by a broader, younger audience.”
New York Times: Goodbye to the Wild Wild Web
New York Times: Goodbye to the Wild Wild Web. “Within a 48-hour period this week, many of the world’s internet giants took steps that would have been unthinkable for them even months earlier. Reddit, which spent most of its life as a lawless free-for-all, banned thousands of forums for hate speech, including the largest pro-Trump forum on the internet. Twitch — an Amazon-owned video-gaming platform not known for its political courage — suspended President Trump’s official account for ‘hateful conduct,’ while YouTube purged a handful of notorious racists and punished a popular creator with a history of problematic videos. Facebook, under pressure from a growing advertiser boycott, took down a network of violent anti-government insurrectionists who had set up shop on its platform.”
A Brief History of Computing and the Web: From 17th Century Computers to Today’s Digital Empires (Interesting Engineering)
Interesting Engineering: A Brief History of Computing and the Web: From 17th Century Computers to Today’s Digital Empires. “Today, most of us depend heavily on the Internet, for everything from work, to managing our finances, answering correspondences, or our social lives. The applications of the web are both endless and vital to modern life. While many of us have been online since the 1990s, the history of computing stretches back even far further – and after all, without computing, there can be no web. In fact, the first primitive computing devices were conceived as long ago as the 17th Century, with the earliest concepts for programmable computers emerging in the mid-19th Century.” Extensive article, chockablock with links.
Mashable: Best of the nice internet in 2020, so far
Mashable: Best of the nice internet in 2020, so far. “We’re officially halfway through 2020 and it’s, uh, not great, Bob! Between the global pandemic and the massive social unrest, many of us are left anxious without much to do but…stare at our screens and become more anxious. In addition to being a hellscape, the internet is — thankfully — also always home to some wholesomeness, no matter what’s going on IRL. Here’s some niceness that’ll keep you going throughout the rest of the year (well, hopefully):”
