ME and Ophelia

FATHERS OF THE INTERNET
And World Wide Web

Following my post here yesterday on Desmond Tutu's message to the Internet and today's rally for the Sudan at Harvard in Boston, I emailed Vinton Cerf at Cerf's Up and sent him a copy of the post. Several hours later I was thrilled to receive this reply:

Ingrid, your email reached me easily.

Sir Tim did receive a handsome 1 million euro prize earlier this year so fortune has followed fame at least in some measure. However
neither Tim nor Bob Kahn nor I nor the others working on the Internet protocols patented or made intellectual property claims on the
technology so as to stimulate its uptake without obstacles. It seems to have worked :-)

vint

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Surely this proves the Internet is owned by *us* the people of the world, and that nobody can control it or take it away from us - it will be *ours* forever.

Or will it? What if bodies like Microsoft or Google could control it? If such a thing was possible, what could we do about it?

Hopefully, the Internet is like an amoeba or some sort of living organism that if cut in two could regroup, and replicate itself in cyberspace, to escape greedy predators trying to dominate us and take control.

Vinton Cerf, Bob Kahn and Tim Berners-Lee will go down in history. What a shame all three did not receive the same handsome prize earlier this year.

We need our three heroes to leave us a cyber manual on what to do if anyone tried to muscle in and take ownership of the Internet. And we Internet users ought to get up an online petition to nominate all three for a Nobel award. Here is the list of Nobel Laureates in Physics 1901 - Present. If anyone knows how to do such a thing, please let me know and I'll do all that I can to help.
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THE NEW WORLD
Of Internet-connected television

Today the NY Times reports on how viewers will soon not have to worry about when a show is scheduled or from where it comes. They'll be able to download and store video for conventional television viewing.

Because most Internet connections do not yet reliably support data speeds needed to view television-quality video as it is streamed, a number of the Internet video services require that programs first be downloaded and stored on a hard drive before viewing.

Now, as broadband Internet becomes widely available in homes and new wireless video networks make it simpler to move video data and streams inside the home, bigger players are starting to emerge.

For example, Microsoft demonstrated a service called IPTV at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas this year. The company believes that it is possible to deliver television to rival today's cable programming by using commonly available standard telephone lines, as part of what are called digital subscriber line, or D.S.L., services. It is running two small trials of the technology in Canada and Switzerland, and sees a broad potential.

"We sort of expect that TV will shift to where everyone will watch what they want when they want," said Peter T. Barrett, chief technology officer for Microsoft TV.
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OODLES OF DOODLES
Google's historic online art

"We're the luckiest kids in the world. :)" writes Eric Case, of the Blogger team at Google, in his post on Danah Boyd's internship at Blogger.

Today, Eric posts this little gem:

"If any of y'all have ever been curious about Google's holiday & event logos, check out Dennis's latest post to the GoogleBlog:

"My name is Dennis, and I'm the guy who draws the Google doodles. But the doodle tradition started here before I did. The first doodle was produced by (who else?) Larry and Sergey, who, when they attended the Burning Man festival in summer 1999, put a little stick figure on the home page logo in case the site crashed and someone wanted to know why nobody was answering the phone."