Inventor of Internet Tells Putin Web Is ‘Not a CIA Creation’

[uhnope]

Source: Reuters

The inventor of the world wide web refuted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assertion that the Internet is a “CIA project,” Reuters reports. The statement comes eight months after Putin’s comment, which made some worry that he might restrict Internet access in Russia.

Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the Internet in 1989, says the project did receive U.S. government funding, but was primarily built and popularized in the academic sphere as universities worked to get their campuses online.

Berners-Lee went on to defend the Internet against claims that interconnectivity is allowing the spread of militant Islamism through the distribution of videos like those depicting beheadings of journalists. “Like all powerful tools,” he said, “it can be used for good and evil.”

He continued: “It’s time to recognize the Internet as a basic human right..."

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/r-father-of-web-tells-russias-putin-internet-is-not-a-cia-project-2014-12

[unrepentant progress]

1. Tim Berners-Lee did not "invent" the internet

Robert Cailliau and he are the architects of the world wide web.

[Kablooie]

3. You could say he invented the web, though.

And he came up with the obnoxious www that we have to say and type all the time.
I heard he was asked to change it by his friends because of it being so clumsy.
He says now that he wished he listened to them.

[William Seger]

4. I hardly ever say or type www. -- it's obsolete (n/t)

[Igel]

5. Typing it isn't necessary.

There are bits of code that do that work for you.

Think of it as a kind of safety net that most people are oblivious to and take for granted.

[Recursion]

8. Very few webservers have "www" as their hostname now anyways

It's an older DNS convention that people have gotten habituated to.

[PersonNumber503602]

10. Which leads to emails/calls from people asking why a website is down

because they're typing www.whatever.com. Which is easily fixed by adding a CNAME record to the zone, but that just keeps the annoying www issue something that needs to be handled. Other than a select few scenarios, it really is a convention that isn't needed.

[William Seger]

9. Yes, but it's hardly ever necessary

These days, most hosting services set up the primary domain as a DNS A record, pointing to the host IP, and then add a CNAME record for the www subdomain that's an alias for the A record, just because so many people still insist on typing www in front of everything.

[unrepentant progress]

25. That's a religious argument

There are some good technical reasons why www is still useful, largely depending on the site's size and what you want to do with it. However, the site should always be accessible from both www and the naked domain. Just make sure to redirect from the naked domain to the www subdomain.

http://www.yes-www.org/why-use-www

[William Seger]

28. That's just the case for using subdomains for large sites

The subdomain that you use that way still doesn't need to be www. It could be something more meaningful or something entirely arbitrary, and it shouldn't matter at all to users because they don't need to be aware of it. The point is, regardless of the underlying configuration, requiring www in URLs in a web browser is an obsolete concept with various work-arounds for "backward compatibility."

[unrepentant progress]

31. Are those goal posts very heavy?

I wouldn't want you to strain your back.

You said www subdomains were obsolete. I said, no, there are good technical reasons to use www subdomains. Now you're changing your argument to requiring www subdomains is obsolete.

Yes, you could use flibbitygibbits.example.com but www is shorter, and more meaningful.

[William Seger]

32. What I actually said was...

"I hardly ever say or type www. -- it's obsolete." I do try to be careful with wording.

[Recursion]

7. That's a DNS convention from the late 80s and early 90s

Back then the popular thing to do was to have the mail server be mail.example.com, Dilbert's computer be dilbert.example.com, the www server be www.example.com, etc.

[bananas]

17. DNS is a good example of what Putin is talking about.

I don't know if you're aware of the controversies when DNS was privatized. The US government stills maintains control over the DNS system.

[Recursion]

18. Are you claiming it's privatized or that the US government controls it?

3 of the root servers are controlled by the military (and that's only if you count NASA). They have always been a public-private mix with non-US players involved.

[bananas]

19. I was thinking of two things.

1) The privatization controversy I was referring to was when SAIC bought Network Solutions, SAIC is a defense/intelligence contractor, it's board of directors includes former NSA chiefs etc. There was a lot of concern it might do things like turn off or redirect political websites it didn't like.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Solutions

Initially, the service was subsidized by the government. But, in May 1993, the National Science Foundation privatized the name registry (InterNIC - Internet Network Information Center) and paid NSI $5.9 million to administer it. In September 1995, NSI instituted the fee system. A few months earlier, it had been bought out by Science Applications International Corp (SAIC).

<snip>

Network Solutions, Inc. (NSI) first operated the domain name system (DNS) registry under a sub-contract with the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) in September 1991.

<snip>

The Network Information Center at SRI International had performed the work under Elizabeth J. Feinler since 1972.[13]

2) The US still has final authority over the root servers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_nameserver

the root zone is controlled by the United States Department of Commerce who must approve all changes to the root zone file requested by ICANN

[Recursion]

20. I miss the IANA days, personally

[Adrahil]

27. That doesn't mean the 'net was invented by the CIA.

It DID start out as a way for defense scientists and engineers to share data (as DARPAnet), but the internet as we know it today didn;t really explode until academics began using it.

[unrepentant progress]

24. That's more or less correct

Although the early domain name system, and initial implementation of BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain), evolved quickly through the 1980s.

However, www as a prefix didn't exist until late 1990s when Tim Berners-Lee authored the first versions of HTTP, HTML, and the first web browser (it doubled as an editor) which he named WorldWideWeb. That's where we get the www subdomain designation from, although I'm unsure if Berners-Lee was the first to use the www subdomain.

[Feral Child]

21. HA!

It was Al Gore, dammit!

[Brother Buzz]

33. West Coast forklore says UCLA and SRI invented the internets on Sept. 2, 1969...

and UCLA graduate student, Charley Kline is credited for causing the first crash.

http://www.dailynews.com/20091029/how-the-internet-was-born-at-ucla

Go Bruins!

[PoliticAverse]

2. ARPANET was funded by the US Department of Defense...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

[Recursion]

6. The Internet had been in place for 20 years when Berners-Lee invented the Web

And Web traffic is not even a majority of Internet traffic.

The Internet was certainly a DoD (if not CIA) creation.

[24601]

11. If it was certainly a DoD creation, then is definitely was not a CIA because neither are part of the

other.

[Recursion]

13. Very true. NSA, however, is part of the DoD

And, for that matter, NSA wrote the most popular access-control framework for the most popular operating system used on the Web...

[24601]

34. NSA is indeed a Defense Agency. But it is not part of CIA. Nor is CIA Part of it. When it comes

to the Intelligence Community, by budget & personnel, about 80% is in DoD. The Office of Director of National Intelligence is not. Nor are the the smaller IC elements within departments - like State, Treasury, Justice, DHS.

The CIA Director is the only IC Agency Chief that really works for the Director of National Intelligence (kinda, sorta, some of the time) - and only for their Intelligence Mission. President Obama's first DNI (Blair) lost the fight over supervising covert action and gets informed but is not running them.

Very few IC Chiefs have confirmation hearings before the SSCI. Defense Agency nominees go before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

[bananas]

16. Putin didn't say the CIA created it any more than Al Gore claimed to invent it.

He's being misquoted just as Al Gore was.
Unsurprising that people are falling for it again.

[bananas]

15. Sounds like they're misquoting Putin like they misquoted Al Gore.

Wouldn't be surprised if it's the same people doing the misquoting.

[Feral Child]

22. Damn!

You beat me. Sorry for stepping on your joke, all credit to guyton.

[William Seger]

29. "more challenging than most of the technical issues"

Absolutely, given the resistance. Without that push for a public internet, what we'd have today would likely be a plethora of private special-purpose networks, probably with incompatible protocols and conventions, that would be many orders of magnitude less useful and less valuable than what we have today. Thank you, Al Gore! (And fuck the ignorant assholes who denigrate him.)

[truthisfreedom]

14. Al Gore.

Period.

[Feral Child]

23. You, too?

Obviously I shouldn't sleep in till 6:00 on Saturday mornings.

[VanillaRhapsody]

26. DARPA was not CIA!

[Sunlei]

35. Mr. "gay hate" " singers go to prison" requires registration info to use his internet.