Jon's History 390 Blog

“Post the poem on your course website and that attorney can find the violation in two seconds.”

I found this quote interesting because I personally feel that it is contradictory to what the reality of the web is or at least to the way that I perceive it. While all the various material on the web is copyright protected the adaptability and openness of the web makes it nearly impossible to control your intellectual property 100%. I can do a google search for a PDF version of a book I want to read and with some digging usually find a copy and download it without paying. Taking an image from a web page is stupidly easy as well as pirating music.

With higher profile sites I have noticed that videos, music, books, and images will get taken down from time to time due to legal action by the Intellectual Property’s (IP) owner. Like I said you can just dig deeper to find what your looking for and no lawyer team will be able to reach all corners of the internet. Thats why I find this statement so contradictory to the fact because I feel as though some small random website designed to be for a semester-long course that posts a picture is not something that lawyers are going to be looking at to slam with a lawsuit. Also, if you are not allowed to post it on your website, why not just put the link in for the site that does have the permission to print it? Some of this stuff just seems silly to me but I can understand the necessity of it when some people make their living off of IP.

http://search.proquest.com.mutex.gmu.edu/docview/214814054/fulltextPDF/13937CFE1423FC83447/2?accountid=14541

Study that attempts to survey the internets size and composition in its infancy in 1995. Mainly looks at the number of users in the US who had internet access at that time. A good look at where the internet began and what it looked like almost 20 years ago.

http://search.proquest.com.mutex.gmu.edu/docview/194538913/fulltextPDF/13937D4626D26DE8EE9/2?accountid=14541

Forecasts the growth of the internet in 2003 right at the outset of the high speed era when web communication really took off.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Total_data_consumed_by_Opera_Mini_users_worldwide_(TB).png

Not from a database but I wasn’t finding any images that visually captured the rate at which the internet is growing. This graph is showing users using Opera Mini, a mobile phone browser and how their numbers have grown in the past few years. Mobile phones and tablets are how most of us are going to access the web in the future so I thought examining that growth would be very important.

“…if they are evidence, don’t we have to know that the evidence is reliable, that it can be trusted?”?”

I thought this question was interesting because I felt it was something that as a student and a historian I shouldnt be asking. Truthfully I don’t think any intelligent person who reads the news should have to ask this question. The only reason I think the author is asking it is because he doesn’t know if he can trust them anymore.

Since their invention photos have been a reliable source from which we can gather information because until now it has been much harder to alter them or create falsified pictures. With Photoshop and digital photos anyone with a computer and spare time can make a photo to fool the world. The Iranian missiles isn’t the first time this has happened and won’t be the last. All of this relates to the question of whether or not the digital age is good for history or is going to destroy it. At least we still have historians and just average people who can fact check everything that the internet spits out so this kind of stuff never becomes fact.

What factors have contributed to the significant rise in data requirements across the web  in the past 10 years?

“Data transfer of 50 GB in a single month is roughly equivalent to a twenty-page site with small images and no multimedia being thoroughly examined by 50,000 visitors.”

I found this statistic incredibly insightful into the amount of data that is transmitted across the internet daily. If this is the average for a small site that can be run from a home sever I can’t even comprehend the amount of  raw data that Facebook, YouTube, or Reddit’s servers have to handle on a daily basis. This Infographic was one of the first things that showed up on a google search for “amount of data generated daily” and compares it to physical terms that are easier to comprehend.

Data tracking is a large part of our daily lives with download speed, cellphone data plans, and the hard drive space on our personal computers. I find it interesting that we always clamor for more storage space or brag about the size of our iTunes library that is all a fraction of a decimal place compared to the amount of data that just Facebook processes on a daily basis. Its also shocking to me how rapidly the amount of storage space and data we transmit has increased exponentially in just the past 5 years with the saturation of smartphones and high speed wireless networks.