Whether it disrupts access at work or makes your favorite show buffer at its most suspenseful moment, the inconvenience of an unreliable internet connection is something we've all experienced. Large-scale outages over the years have served as reminders that the internet can also face more widespread issues and bring everyday tasks to a halt. But would it ever be possible for the entire internet, all across the world, to go down?

The internet is often called a "network of networks," including those linking devices across homes, businesses, public spaces and more. For the entire internet to go down, therefore, many pieces of infrastructure would need to be impacted within a short time.

"It is possible but would require significant resources and/or huge coincidences which makes it a highly unlikely, but possible, event," George Cybenko, a professor of engineering who specializes in information systems and theory at Dartmouth College, told Live Science in an email.

Quite a bit of "heterogeneity, randomness and distributed asynchronicity" were built into the internet from the start, so a whole-system failure is very unlikely and would be extremely difficult to cause, Cybenko said. "We have local networks as well, say within a home or a business, that could continue to function even if the global nature of the internet has failed," he explained.

When information is shared over the internet — for example, as a text message is sent from one smartphone to another — it is broken into small packets of information, each of which is routed through the quickest available path through the network. That means that, even if one of these routes is compromised, the message can still travel because it has a long list of alternatives, according to The Open University.

This design consideration alone protects the entire network from completely failing due to either physical damage — for example, if an undersea cable were cut or a large internet hub lost power — or software damage, whether caused by systems issues or hackers. Even when a large infrastructure provider, like Cloudflare, goes down, the disruption may last only a few hours and cannot spread to other providers or systems.

If a larger outage were to occur — for instance, from a powerful and unexpected solar storm — repairs could take time to resolve. However, many governments and large companies have plans for how to recover from a large internet outage and resume operations as quickly as possible, which often include tools like cloud storage systems and backup power generators, Cybenko said.

Conversely, some governments have shut off the internet in times of massive protests. This is accomplished by dismantling or destroying internet infrastructure like power grids and fiber optic cables, or throttling — intentionally limiting the processing speed of an internet connection via broadband providers, according to the World Economic Forum. But even those intentional outages can be resolved relatively quickly.

"It is surprising how rapidly people can recover [the internet] — it continues to befuddle people how resilient the internet is," William Dutton, a senior fellow and advisory board member at the Oxford Internet Institute and the University of Oxford's first professor of internet studies, told Live Science.

In the meantime, though, the impacts of such an outage could go much further than inconvenience. Critical infrastructure, such as hospital IT systems, often depend on the internet, and essential services, like power grids and traffic management, could be shut off indefinitely.

"The more central the internet becomes to so many different functions, from health care to even warfare, the more critical it is that it be secure and that it be reliable," Dutton said. "These kinds of outages and so forth are obviously concerning, even for short periods of time."

Since the internet's invention, fears have circulated that as it continues to expand, its foundations run the risk of being strained or overloaded. But Dutton said this is a common misconception.

"The more you add nodes and so forth, the internet actually becomes more resilient — growth actually makes it stronger rather than weaker," Dutton said. "It's certainly possible, but I doubt that it will collapse at all."

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has permeated our lives in ways that go beyond virtual assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa. Generative AI is not only disrupting how digital content is created but it's starting to influence how the internet serves us.

Greater access to large language models (LLMs) and AI tools has further fueled the dead internet conspiracy theory. This idea, posited in the early 2020s, suggested that the internet is actually dominated by AIs talking to and producing content for other AIs — with human-made and disseminated information a rarity.

When Live Science explored the theory, we concluded that this phenomenon has yet to emerge in the real world. But people now increasingly intermingle with bots — and one can never assume an online interaction is with another human.

Beyond this, low-quality content — ranging from articles and images, to videos and social media posts created by tools like Sora, ChatGPT and others — is leading to a rise in "AI slop." It can range from Instagram Reels showing videos of cats playing instruments or using weapons, to fake or fictional information being presented as news or fact. This has been fueled, in part, by a desire for more online content to drive clicks, draw attention to websites and raise their visibility in search engines.

"The challenge is that a combination of the drive towards search engine optimization [SEO] and playing to social media algorithms has led towards more content and less quality content. Content that's placed to leverage our attention economy (serving ads, etc.) has become the primary way information is served up," Adam Nemeroff, assistant provost for Innovations in Learning, Teaching, and Technology at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, told Live Science. "AI slop and other AI-generated content is often filling those spaces now."

Mistrust of information on the internet is nothing new, with many false claims made by people with particular agendas, or simply a desire to cause disruption or outrage. But AI tools have accelerated the speed at which machine-generated information, images or data can spread.

SEO firm Graphite found in November 2024 that the number of AI-generated articles being published had surpassed the number of human-written articles. Although 86% of articles ranking in Google Search were still written by people, versus 14% by AI (with a similar split found in the information a chatbot served up), it still points to a rise in AI-made content. Citing a report that one in 10 of the fastest-growing YouTube channels shows AI-generated content only, Nemeroff added that AI slop is starting to negatively affect us.

"AI slop is actively displacing creators who make their livelihood from online content," he explained. "Publications like Clarkesworld magazine had to stop taking submissions entirely due to the flood of AI-generated writing, and even Wikipedia is dealing with AI-generated content that strains its community moderation system, putting a key information resource at risk."

While an increase in AI content gives people more to consume, it also erodes trust in information, especially as generative AI gets better at serving up images and videos that look real or information that seems human-made. As such, there could be a situation where a deeper mistrust in information, especially in media brands and news, leads to human-made content being seen as fake and AI-made.

"I always recommend assuming content is AI-generated and looking for evidence that it's not. It's also a great moment to pay for the media we expect and to support creators and outlets that have clear editorial and creative guidelines," said Nemeroff.

Trust versus the attention economy

There are two sides to AI-generated content when it comes to the lens of trust.

The first is AI spreading convincing information that requires an element of savvy thinking to check and not take at face value. But the open nature of the web means it’s always been easy for incorrect information to spread, whether accidentally or intentionally, and there’s long been a need to have a healthy scepticism or desire to cross-reference information before jumping to conclusions.

"Information literacy has always been core to the experience of using the web, and it's all the more important and nuanced now with the introduction of AI content and other misinformation," said Nemeroff.

The other side of AI-generated content is when it's deliberately used to suck in attention, even if its viewers can easily tell it’s fabricated. One example, as flagged by Nemeroff, is of images of a displaced child with a puppy in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, which was used to spread political misinformation.

Although the images were quickly flagged as AI-made, they still provoked reactions, therefore fueling their impact. Even obviously AI-made content can be either weaponized for political motivations or used to capture the precious attention of people on the open web or within social media platforms.

"AI content that is brighter, louder and more engaging than reality, and which sucks in human attention like a vortex … creates a "Siren" effect where AI companions or entertainment feeds are more seductive than messy, friction-filled, and sometimes disappointing human interactions." Nell Watson, an IEEE member and AI ethics engineer at Singularity University, told Live Science.

While some AI content might look slick and engaging, it might represent a net negative for the way we use the internet, forcing us to question if what’s being viewed is real, and to deal with a flood of cheap, synthetic content.

"AI slop is the digital equivalent of plastic pollution in the ocean. It clogs the ecosystem, making it harder to navigate and degrading the experience for everyone. The immediate effect is authenticity fatigue," Watson explained. "Trust is fast becoming the most expensive currency online."

There’s a flipside to this. The rise of inauthentic content could be counterbalanced by people being drawn to content that’s explicitly human-made; we could see better-verified information and "artisanal" content created by real people. Whether that’s delivered by some form of watermark or locked off behind paywalls and in gated communities on Discord or other forums, has yet to be seen. It's down to how people react to AI slop, and their growing awareness of such content, that will determine the shape of content in the future and how it ultimately affects people, Nemeroff said.

"If people find slop and communicate that slop isn't acceptable, people's consumer behaviors will also change with that," he said. "This, combined with our broader media diet, will hopefully lead people to make changes to the nutrition of what they consume and how they approach it."

Less surfing, more sifting the web

AI-made content is only one part of how AI is changing the way that we use the internet. LLM-based agents already come built into the latest smartphones, for example. You'd also be hard-pressed to find anyone who hasn’t indirectly experienced generative AI, whether it was serving up information suggestions or offering the option to rework an email, generating an emoji or automatically editing a photo.

While Live Science’s publisher has strict rules on AI use (it certainly can't be used for writing or editing articles), some AI tools can help with mundane image-editing tasks, such as putting images on new backgrounds.

AI use, in other words, is inescapable in 2025. Depending on how we use it, it can influence how we communicate and socialize online — but more pertinently, it’s affecting how we seek and absorb information.

Google Search, for example, now has an AI overview serving up aggregated and disseminated information before external search results — something which a recently introduced AI Mode builds upon.

“We primarily used the internet via web addresses and search up to this moment. AI is the first innovation to disrupt that part of the cycle," Nemeroff adds. "AI chat tools are increasingly taking up internet queries that previously directed people to websites. Search engines that once handled questions and answers are now sharing that space with search-enabled chatbots and, more recently, AI agent browsers like Comet, Atlas, Dia, and others.”

On a surface level, this is changing the way people search and consume information. Even if someone types a query into a traditional search bar, it’s increasingly common that an AI-made summary will pop up rather than a list of websites from trusted sources.

"We are transitioning from an internet designed for human eyeballs to an internet designed for AI agents," Watson said. "There is a shift toward "Agentic workflows." Soon, you generally won't surf the web to book a flight or research a product yourself; your personal AI agent will negotiate with travel sites or summarize reviews for you. The web becomes a database for machines rather than a library for people."

There are two likely effects of this. The first is less human traffic to websites like Live Science, as AI agents scrape the information they feel a user wants — disrupting the advertising-led funding model of many websites.

"If an AI reads the website for you, you don't see the ads, which forces publishers to put up paywalls or block AI scrapers entirely, further fracturing the information ecosystem," said Watson. This fracturing could even see websites shutting down, given the already turbulent state of online media, further leading to a reduction in trusted sources of information.

The second is a situation where AI agents end up searching, ingesting and learning from AI-generated content.

"As the web fills with synthetic content — AI slop — future models train on that synthetic data, leading to a degradation of quality and a detachment from reality," Watson said. Slop or solid information, this all plays into the dead internet theory of machines interacting with other machines, rather than humans.

"Socially, this risks isolating us," Watson added. "If an AI companion is always available, always agrees with you, and never has a bad day, real human relationships feel exhausting by comparison. Information-seeking will shift from ’Googling’ — which relies on the user to filter truth from fiction — to relying on trusted AI curators. However, this centralises power; we are handing our critical thinking over to the algorithms that summarise the world for us."

It’s the end of the internet as we know it… and AI feels fine

Undoubtedly, the ways in which humans are using the internet, and the World Wide Web it supports, have been changed by AI. AI has affected every aspect of internet use in 2025, from how we search for information, to how content is generated and how we are served the information we asked for. Even if you choose to search the web without any AI tools, the information you see could have been produced or handled by some form of AI.

As we’re currently in the midst of this change, it’s hard to be clear on what exactly the internet will look like as the trend continues. When asked about whether AI could turn the internet into a "ghost town," Watson countered: "It won’t be so much a ghost town as a zombie apocalypse."

It’s hard not to be concerned by this damning assessment, whether you're a content creator directly affected by AI or simply an end user who’s getting tired of questioning information.

However, Nemeroff highlighted that we can learn from the rise of social media and its impact on the internet in the late 2000s. It serves as an example of the disruption and challenges that such platforms faced when it comes to the use and spread of information.

"Taking a few pages out of what we learned about social media, these technologies were not without harms, and we also did not anticipate a number of the issues that emerged at the beginning," he said. "There is a role for responsible regulation as part of that, which requires lawmakers to have an interest in regulating these tools and knowing how to regulate in an ongoing way."

When it comes to any new technology — self-driving cars being one example — regulation and lawmaking are often several steps behind the breakthroughs and adoption.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that while AI poses a challenge, the agentic tools it offers can also better surface information that might otherwise remain buried deep in search results or online archives — thereby helping uncover information from sources that might not have thrived in the age of SEO.

The way humans react to AI content on the internet will likely govern how it evolves, potentially bursting an AI bubble by retreating to human-only enclaves on the web or requiring a higher level of trust signals from both human- and AI-made content.

"We find ourselves in a really challenging moment with this," concluded Nemeroff. "Being familiar with the environment and knowing its presence there is a key point to both changing the incentives around this as well as communicating what we value to the platforms that distribute it. I think we will start to see more examples of showing the provenance of higher quality content and people investing in that."

Late one evening, UCLA graduate student Charley Kline sat in front of a refrigerator-sized computer and sent the message "lo" to a rack of computers operated by systems engineer Bill Duvall at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), hundreds of miles away.

This message itself was nothing special; it was meant to be the word "login," but the system crashed before it could be completed. However, the transmission was revolutionary, because it formed the foundation for the internet.

The two computers were part of a four-computer network that made up the first Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET).

The notion of computers communicating was part of a grand vision to "augment human intellect," but ARPANET was ultimately funded for a more practical purpose: to enable the U.S. government to communicate in the wake of a nuclear attack. Although telephone lines would likely be intact in that case, the major switching centers could be destroyed, the military worried.

In 1964, RAND Corp. scientists Paul Baran and Sharla Boehm sent a memo proposing a solution: a "distributed network" that involved "hot potato" switching so that no single node would be crucial to the system's functioning.

From there, the military agency funded a project to create such a network. For the system to work, it needed a way to break up messages from a sender into smaller portions that were then reassembled at the destination. Boehm and Baran simulated this process, which would eventually become known as packet switching, using a program written in the computer language Fortran.

Even before ARPANET was realized, however, the scientists involved in the project clearly saw the potential of the concept. Baran, for instance, envisioned that by the year 2000, people would be able to do their shopping from home using a TV.

In 1968, ARPANET was approved, and by the summer, scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara; SRI; UCLA; and the University of Utah began building the infrastructure to allow their computers to communicate using these packets.

For the first transmission, each computer at these locations had a separate, "mini-computer" called an interface message processor (IMP), which would evolve into the routers of today. The IMPs were meant to break up the messages into smaller chunks and send them to the IMP at the receiving end, which would then reassemble them and echo them to the receiving terminal.

On the storied evening the message was sent, Kline and Duvall were on the phone with each other, confirming when each letter arrived. But the system crashed because the Stanford computer was expecting the data to be transmitted at 10 characters per second, while ARPANET had an unprecedented speed of 5,000 characters per second. This overloaded the "buffer" in the Stanford computer, according to BBC Future.

"It was like filling a glass with a fire hose," Duvall told BBC Future.

Duvall identified the problem and got the system up and running an hour later.

Almost immediately, researchers realized the potential of the system.

"As of now, computer networks are still in their infancy, but as they grow up and become more sophisticated, we will probably see the spread of 'computer utilities,' which, like present electric and telephone utilities, will service individual homes and offices across the country," Leonard Kleinrock, a computer science professor who was in charge of that UCLA node, said in a statement at the time.

ARPANET would be tied to its military roots until 1981, when the military spun off its own MILNET. And while the term "internetwork" was coined in a 1970s paper to describe a standardized protocol for transmitting and receiving data, the internet itself technically wasn't born until 1983, when ARPANET switched over to that protocol.

Scientists have sent quantum signals over standard fiber-optic cables using the same connectivity that powers today’s web, in what could be a major step towards a working quantum internet.

In a study published Aug. 28 in the journal Science, researchers used a custom-built quantum chip to package quantum data alongside a standard optical signal and transmit them over commercial infrastructure.

The breakthrough marks the first time quantum data has been sent using Internet Protocol (IP), the same communications standard that underpins today's broadband networks. The results suggest that quantum communications could run on networks already in use, rather than needing dedicated infrastructure.

"Unlike earlier experiments that required isolated, lab-based setups or specialized infrastructure, this approach integrates quantum communication into real-world networks for the first time," senior study author Liang Feng, professor of materials science and electrical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, told Live Science in an email.

"Our Q‑Chip enables control of quantum signals and classical signals, so they travel together over the same fiber‑optic cables, using standard internet protocols."

Why can't the internet send quantum data?

Quantum data is carried by qubits — the basic units of quantum information. Unlike classical computer bits, which are represented as either 0 or 1, qubits can exist in a superposition of both states.

Related: Scientists use quantum machine learning to create semiconductors for the first time – and it could transform how chips are made

Qubits can also become entangled, meaning the state of one is symbiotically linked to the state of another, no matter how far apart they are. These properties enable quantum computers to perform calculations far beyond the reach of conventional computers — in parallel rather than in sequence.

However, these same properties also make quantum data notoriously fragile. Quantum states collapse when they're observed or measured, making quantum information extremely difficult to work with. In classical internet, traffic is directed by routers that read and interpret information as it moves through the network. This can't be done with quantum particles without destroying the very data being transmitted,because the superposition collapses as soon as it is observed.

How the Q-Chip works

The Q‑Chip, which stands for "quantum-classical hybrid internet by photonics", tackles this challenge by pairing each quantum signal with a classical "header" — a data packet containing routing and timing information that’s encoded into a fiber-optic laser pulse.

As this information travels through the network, it’s inspected by routers — devices that direct internet traffic by reading packet information and forwarding it to the correct destination. Routers use the header to determine where the data should go and how to get it there.

By timing the classical and quantum signals to travel together in a synchronized pulse, the chip enables routers to read the header's navigation information without interacting with or disrupting the quantum signal. This enables both to travel together via standard IP protocols.

While researchers have previously demonstrated that quantum data can be transmitted over standard fiber-optic cables, including alongside classical data in the same wavelength band, this latest study marks the first time that quantum signals have been transmitted using standard IP on live, real-world infrastructure.

This is crucial because it avoids the need for a separate quantum-only network, significantly lowering the barrier to deploying and scaling a quantum internet, said Feng.

"Using standard IP protocols means the Q‑Chip allows quantum communication to be managed like regular internet traffic with the already-developed tools for routing, addressing and coordination," he told Live Science.

"By attaching classical 'headers'" to quantum data, the Q‑Chip can route and manage quantum signals using the developed classical photonic devices, systems and infrastructure without disturbing the delicate quantum states, making this the first practical demonstration of quantum communication that fits within existing internet architecture."

To test the system, the team built a simple connection between a server and a receiver node, using a 1-kilometer (0.6 miles) stretch of commercial fiber operated by telecommunications company Verizon.

Because the classical header and quantum signal respond to interference from the environment in similar ways, the team could use the classical signal to correct for noise without disturbing the quantum state. This ensured the data reached its destination intact.

While the pilot setup was small, the researchers believe it marks a foundational step toward a full-scale quantum internet that could link quantum devices — particularly as the Q-Chip is made of silicon and fabricated using existing processes, meaning it can be mass-produced.

"In the next 5-10 years, the early stages of a quantum internet will likely focus on local networks and/or metro-scale quantum internet," Feng told Live Science. "Applications [could include] secure communication, interconnecting quantum computers and distributed quantum sensing such as ultra-precise navigation or timing."

Many years ago, long before the internet or artificial intelligence, an American engineer called Vannevar Bush was trying to solve a problem. He could see how difficult it had become for professionals to research anything, and saw the potential for a better way.

This was in the 1940s, when anyone looking for articles, books or other scientific records had to go to a library and search through an index. This meant drawers upon drawers filled with index cards, typically sorted by author, title or subject.

When you had found what you were looking for, creating copies or excerpts was a tedious, manual task. You would have to be very organized in keeping your own records. And woe betide anyone who was working across more than one discipline. Since every book could physically only be in one place, they all had to be filed solely under a primary subject. So an article on cave art couldn't be in both art and archaeology, and researchers would often waste extra time trying to find the right location.

This had always been a challenge, but an explosion in research publications in that era had made it far worse than before. As Bush wrote in an influential essay, As We May Think, in The Atlantic in July 1945:

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers — conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear.

Bush was dean of the school of engineering at MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and president of the Carnegie Institute. During the second world war, he had been the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, coordinating the activities of some 6,000 scientists working relentlessly to give their country a technological advantage. He could see that science was being drastically slowed down by the research process, and proposed a solution that he called the "memex".

Related: Would outsourcing everything to AI cost us our ability to think for ourselves?

The memex was to be a personal device built into a desk that required little physical space. It would rely heavily on microfilm for data storage, a new technology at the time. The memex would use this to store large numbers of documents in a greatly compressed format that could be projected onto translucent screens.

Most importantly, Bush's memex was to include a form of associative indexing for tying two items together. The user would be able to use a keyboard to click on a code number alongside a document to jump to an associated document or view them simultaneously — without needing to sift through an index.

Bush acknowledged in his essay that this kind of keyboard click-through wasn't yet technologically feasible. Yet he believed it would be soon, pointing to existing systems for handling data such as punched cards as potential forerunners.

He envisaged that a user would create the connections between items as they developed their personal research library, creating chains of microfilm frames in which the same document or extract could be part of multiple trails at the same time.

New additions could be inserted either by photographing them on to microfilm or by purchasing a microfilm of an existing document. Indeed, a user would be able to augment their memex with vast reference texts. "New forms of encyclopedias will appear," said Bush, "ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex". Fascinatingly, this isn't far from today's Wikipedia.

Where it led

Bush thought the memex would help researchers to think in a more natural, associative way that would be reflected in their records. He is thought to have inspired the American inventors Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart, who in the 1960s independently developed hypertext systems, in which documents contained hyperlinks that could directly access other documents. These became the foundation of the world wide web as we know it.

Beyond the practicalities of having easy access to so much information, Bush believed that the added value in the memex lay in making it easier for users to manipulate ideas and spark new ones. His essay drew a distinction between repetitive and creative thought, and foresaw that there would soon be new "powerful mechanical aids" to help with the repetitive variety.

He was perhaps mostly thinking about mathematics, but he left the door open to other thought processes. And 80 years later, with AI in our pockets, we're automating far more thinking than was ever possible with a calculator.

If this sounds like a happy ending, Bush did not sound overly optimistic when he revisited his own vision in his 1970 book Pieces of the Action. In the intervening 25 years, he had witnessed technological advances in areas like computing that were bringing the memex closer to reality.

Yet Bush felt that the technology had largely missed the philosophical intent of his vision — to enhance human reasoning and creativity:

In 1945, I dreamed of machines that would think with us. Now, I see machines that think for us — or worse, control us.

Bush would die just four years later at the age of 84, but these concerns still feel strikingly relevant today. While it's great that we do not need to search for a book by flipping through index cards in chests of drawers, we might feel more uneasy about machines doing most of the thinking for us.

Is this technology enhancing and sharpening our skills, or is it making us lazy? No doubt everyone is different, but the danger is that whatever skills we leave to the machines, we eventually lose, and younger generations may not even get the opportunity to learn them in the first place.

The lesson from As We May Think is that a purely technical solution like the memex is not enough. Technology still needs to be human-centred, underpinned by a philosophical vision. As we contemplate a great automation in human thinking in the years ahead, the challenge is to somehow protect our creativity and reasoning at the same time.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Researchers in Japan say they have set a new world record for the fastest internet speed, transmitting over 125,000 gigabytes of data per second over 1,120 miles (1,802 kilometers).

That's about 4 million times the average internet speed in the U.S. and would allow you to download the entire Internet Archive in less than four minutes, according to some rough estimates. This is also more than twice the previous world record of 50,250 GB/s, previously set by a different team of scientists in 2024.

To achieve this new speed — which has not been independently verified — the team developed a new form of optical fiber to send information at groundbreaking speeds over roughly the distance between New York and Florida.

Details about this achievement were presented April 3 at the 48th Optical Fiber Communication Conference in San Francisco, according to a statement from Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology.

1,120 miles of travel

The new type of optical fiber is equivalent to 19 standard optical fibers in its data transmission capacity. The new optical fiber is better suited to long-haul transmission than existing cables because the centers of all 19 fibers interact with light in the same way, so they encounter less light fluctuation, which results in less data loss.

The new cable squeezes 19 separate fibers into a diameter of five-thousandths of an inch (0.127 millimeters), which is the same thickness as most existing single-fiber cables already in use. This effort means the new cable can transmit more data using existing infrastructure.

Related: Internet history timeline: ARPANET to the World Wide Web

In March 2023, the same team reached similar transmission speeds but across less than a third of the distance covered in the new achievement. The biggest hurdles to increasing the range were further reducing data loss, which can happen over long distances, and figuring out how to amplify the data, according to the statement.

Solving these challenges led to increased signal strength, which allowed the data to travel a longer distance.

For this demonstration, the data ran through a transmission system 21 times, finally reaching a data receiver after traveling the equivalent of 1,120 miles.

This record shows technological progress toward developing long-distance, high-capacity, scalable optical communication systems, which could address the increasing global demand for data, the statement suggests.

Data traffic volume worldwide is expected to increase significantly in the near future, so new communications infrastructure may be necessary, the statement suggests. Next, the team hopes to explore practical applications in the telecommunications sphere.

Scientists have developed a new type of laser amplifier that can transmit information 10 times faster than current technology.

Laser amplifiers boost the intensity of light beams. This particular amplifier achieves a tenfold increase in transmission speed by expanding the bandwidth, or wavelengths of light, at which the lasers can transmit information.

The amount of information we generate and transmit is growing every day. Due to the proliferation of streaming services, smart devices and generative AI, Nokia Bell Labs predicted in their Global Network Traffic Report that the amount of data traffic will double by 2030.

Current optical-based telecommunication systems transmit information by sending pulses of laser light through fiber-optic cables, which are thin strands of glass. The capacity — the amount of information that can be transmitted — is determined by the amplifier’s bandwidth (the wavelengths of light that it can amplify). As data traffic increases, bandwidth therefore becomes crucial.

Most lasers used for modern telecommunications, such as internet communications, require an amplifier. These work by a process called stimulated emission, which uses an incoming photon to stimulate the release of another photon with the same energy and direction.

Scientists have now designed a new type of laser technology that can transmit information using a technology called high-efficiency optical amplification. The researchers published their findings April 9 in the journal Nature.

"The amplifiers currently used in optical communication systems have a bandwidth of approximately 30 nanometers," lead author Peter Andrekson, a professor of photonics at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, said in a statement. "Our amplifier, however, boasts a bandwidth of 300 nanometers, enabling it to transmit ten times more data per second than those of existing systems."

The new amplifier is made of silicon nitride, a hardened ceramic material that is resistant to high temperatures. The amplifier uses spiral-shaped waveguides to efficiently direct the laser pulses to remove anomalies from the signal. The technology has also been miniaturized so that multiple amplifiers can fit onto a small chip.

Related: Next-gen quantum computers could be powered using chip with high-energy lasers made 10,000 times smaller

The researchers chose spiral waveguides over other waveguide types because they enable longer optical paths to be created within a small area. This enhances useful effects such as four-wave mixing, which occurs when two or more optical frequencies are combined together to amplify the output with minimal noise (external interference that can disrupt the quality of the signal).

Because the speed of light is constant, the laser light itself does not travel any faster than that from conventional lasers. However, the larger bandwidth enables the new amplifier to transmit 10 times more data than conventional lasers can.

The amplifier currently functions in a wavelength range of light 1,400 to 1,700 nanometers, which is within the short-wave infrared range. The next stage in the research will be to see how it operates over other wavelengths, such as those for visible light (400 to 700 nanometers) and a broader range of infrared light (2,000 to 4,000 nanometers).

The new amplifier has multiple potential applications, including medical imaging, holography, spectroscopy and microscopy, according to the statement. The miniaturization of the technology could also make lasers for light-based applications smaller and more affordable.

"Minor adjustments to the design would enable the amplification of visible and infrared light as well," Andrekson said. "This means the amplifier could be utilised in laser systems for medical diagnostics, analysis, and treatment. A large bandwidth allows for more precise analyses and imaging of tissues and organs, facilitating earlier detection of diseases."

Scientists have used AI to discover an easier method to form quantum entanglement between subatomic particles, paving the way for simpler quantum technologies.

When particles such as photons become entangled, they can share quantum properties — including information — regardless of the distance between them. This phenomenon is important in quantum physics and is one of the features that makes quantum computers so powerful.

But the bonds of quantum entanglement have typically proven challenging for scientists to form. This is because it requires the preparation of two separate entangled pairs, then measuring the strength of entanglement — called a Bell-state measurement — on a photon from each of the pairs.

These measurements cause the quantum system to collapse and leave the two unmeasured photons entangled, despite them never having directly interacted with one another. This process of “entanglement swapping” could be used for quantum teleportation.

In a new study, published Dec. 2, 2024 in the journal Physical Review Letters, scientists used PyTheus, an AI tool that has been specifically created for designing quantum-optic experiments. The authors of the paper initially set out to reproduce established protocols for entanglement swapping in quantum communications. However, the AI tool kept producing a much simpler method to achieve quantum entanglement of photons.

Related: Quantum data beamed alongside 'classical data' in the same fiber-optic connection for the 1st time

"The authors were able to train a neural network on a set of complex data that describes how you set up this kind of experiment in many different conditions, and the network actually learned the physics behind it," Sofia Vallecorsa, a research physicist for the quantum technology initiative at CERN, who was not involved in the new research, told Live Science.

Tapping into AI to simplify quantum entanglement

The AI tool proposed that entanglement could emerge because the path of photons were indistinguishable: when there are several possible sources the photons could have come from, and if their origins become indistinguishable from one another, then entanglement can be produced between them when none existed before.

Although the scientists were initially skeptical of the results, the tool kept returning the same solution so they tested the theory. By adjusting the photon sources and ensuring they were indistinguishable, the physicists created conditions where detecting photons at certain paths guaranteed that two others emerged entangled.

This breakthrough in quantum physics has simplified the process by which quantum entanglement can be formed. In future, it could have implications for the quantum networks used for secure messaging, making these technologies much more feasible.

"The more we can rely on simple technology, the more we can increase the range of applications," Vallecorsa said. "The possibility to build more complex networks, that could branch out in different geometries, could have a big impact with respect to the single end-to-end case."

Whether it is practical to scale the technology into a commercially viable process remains to be seen, however, as environmental noise and device imperfections could cause instability in the quantum system.

The new study has also provided a convincing argument for the use of AI as a research tool by physicists. "We are looking more into introducing AI, but there is still a little bit of scepticism, mostly due to what the role of the physicist is going to be once we start going that way," Vallecorsa said. "It is an opportunity for getting a very interesting result and shows in a very compelling way how this can be a tool that physicists use."

More often than not, conspiracy theories become so far-fetched that they are both ridiculous and hard to fully disprove to die-hard believers. But the dead internet theory is one conspiracy that could hold more water than others thanks to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots and agents.

This theory first appeared to surface on the Agora Road's Macintosh Cafe forum in 2021, when a user by the name of "IlluminatiPirate" started a thread called "Dead Internet Theory: Most Of The Internet Is Fake." Citing posts from major online discussion forums like 4Chan, the theory posits that non-human bots are responsible for the majority of online activity and content creation.

What does the dead internet theory propose?

At a top level, the concept is that bots automatically and rapidly craft things like social media posts that are algorithmically tuned for engagement — effectively farming clicks, comments and likes on platforms like Facebook and TikTok. This is because more interactions and engagement can lead to more advertising revenue.

But beneath the surface lies the more insidious notion that the accounts engaging with such content are also bots and AI agents — meaning that all this activity is happening between machines alone, with no human interaction. An even deeper layer to the theory suggests government organizations are even using bots to manipulate human opinions.

This created the idea of a "dead internet," with said death supposedly having happened around 2016 or 2017. This whole theorem was given more traction in an article titled "Maybe You Missed It, but the Internet 'Died' Five Years Ago" in The Atlantic.

How much truth is there to the dead internet theory?

It's difficult to pinpoint how much of the web is populated by machines — with various studies suggesting contradictory information. Research by the cyber security company Imperva found that bots account for around half of all internet traffic. This traffic tends to be from bots used to generate fake advertising revenue; YouTube among other sites has fallen foul of this, with bots wielded to artificially inflate engagement.

Another pre-print study published by AWS on 5 June 2024 reported that 57.1% of all sentences on the web are machine-generated translations. As for how many websites were found to be hosting AI-generated content, this stands at 13.1% — according to an ongoing study by Originality.ai.

The prevalence of bots, and other tools like online translators, has been a known phenomenon for years — but it doesn't necessarily mean that the internet is "dead." Equally, while generative AI — from large language models like ChatGPT and Google's Gemini to dedicated image creation tools — can automate content creation, it’s arguably not advanced enough to pass human scrutiny. AI-generated content often contains misinformation such as "add glue to a pizza sauce," or is full of poor grammar and spelling that will alert humans to its AI-made nature.

But there’s scope for concern thanks to the rapid evolution of this technology. As AI evolves to create agents that can act independently of specific human instructions, it’s possible to foresee such agents interacting with each other and favoring AI-made content and structured information over that created by humans. This could lead to a situation whereby internet content is tailored to appeal to AI agents rather than other humans, in a bid to market products and farm engagement. We have seen the signs of this new economy already following the first cryptocurrency transaction between AI agents — with no human involvement.

Where this may end up is speculative for now, however. A deeper concern is the use of AI by humans to rapidly generate poor-quality content to feed content-hungry platforms and search engines. Given the lack of finesse to many generative AI models, and their inability to grasp human nuance, leaning on AI to make content could foster an internet flooded with low-quality information, articles, art and more, all designed for "engagement" and little more.

Is the internet a graveyard? Far from it

What might seem like a disturbing theory currently has no compelling evidence to support it. The nature of content-sharing and things going "viral" means the same posts can keep resurfacing; one could say the same about songs popularized a decade ago still appearing in adverts despite the musicians being far from the zeitgeist.

Equally, the somewhat insipid nature of search engine optimization (SEO) is compelling humans to create content in such a methodical way it can feel like a robot created it. The sad truth? It may just be a young writer trying to meet a quota or hit certain key phrases, inserting a number of links and following countless other processes and procedures that the likes of Google Search favor at any given time.

Related: AI models trained on 'synthetic data' could break down and regurgitate unintelligible nonsense, scientists warn

This does not mean that the majority of the internet is now plagued by bots. This very article is optimized to some degree. Live Science’s publisher Future Publishing also has a dedicated division established to support its publications’ web pages to rank higher in search engines.

However, where some of this could be automated, Google — with its leading search engine — has been dogmatic about penalizing articles that try to game its Search algorithm. Furthermore, with publications that provide articles offering advice, especially buying advice, Google chases after content that proves a human has used a service or product being recommended. This can range from citing real-life examples of, say, a phone’s battery life, to having original photos that show a device in use. So the current SEO guidance is effectively pushing for more human-made and human-centric content.

Be careful what you read — especially on social media

When it comes to social media platforms — including X, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram — the waters around dead internet theory get muddied. While there’s no doubt that millions of people use such platforms — the ability to set up bots to post based on keywords lends weight to the idea that the internet is festooned with smart agents rather than humans.

Thanks to generative AI, plenty of AI-generated Instagram models and influencers now lurk online rendering seemingly perfect renditions of often scantily clad people.

Of course, the rise of influencers and social media stars and the myriad of filters — plus the idea that one’s life isn’t accurately represented in social media — already lends a veneer of fakery to participating online.

Despite the evolution of social media to feel like an advertisement tool at times, it still holds a huge influence over millions. The Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 have been partially credited to a movement built on Facebook. More recently, riots spearheaded by right-wing activists in the UK erupted from misinformation spreading on social media.

With that in mind, there’s potential for AI agents to promote false information and interact with each other to boost engagement, thus fanning future flames. A historic study published in Nature found that from 14 million messages spreading 400,000 articles on Twitter (now known as X) in 10 months over 2016 and 2017, "social bots" disproportionately played a role in spreading articles from "low-credibility sources." This led to the amplification of content — what we would term "going viral."

This does leave room for concern. Given that the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism Digital News Report 2024 found that social media was a source of news for 48% of Americans, there’s still a huge number of people who are ripe targets for influence by bot-propagated misinformation.

The dead internet conspiracy theory doesn't actually mean that all your online interactions are with bots, wrote AI researchers Jake Renzella and Vlada Rozova in a blog post for the University of New South Wales, Sydney. But it is a reminder that one should be skeptical of public social media interactions. Furthermore, the idea that the internet comprises human-made content consumed by other humans is an assumption we can no longer make.

Humans and bots surfing the web together

The pursuit of SEO to capture human attention has already led to somewhat similar articles muddying search results — some more useful than others. This also served as the inspiration for a humorous, satirical article about the "best printer 2024".

One could even argue this article itself is fuelling the problem by reacting to interest in a developing conspiracy theory, although Live Science has endeavored to bring research and insight into the topic — and a human’s perspective. With that in mind, AI could be the next step along, leading to an internet that feels dead due to a lack of notably original content and articles that lack a human-touch – be that a viewpoint, experience or simply dry wit.

One glimmer of hope here is that Google and other online giants have been taking action to curtail bot use, or so they say. Such measures are in great part due to advertisers becoming more savvy regarding what constitutes real human views versus bot-generated ones. And as someone with a career in online journalism and publishing — I’m acutely aware of Google’s preference for human-made articles that exhibit expertise, authority and trust. Added to that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is using AI to help detect misinformation rather than spread it; there’s an argument that Facebook’s own news algorithms ironically fuel this fire, one example being how the platform was used to incite genocide in Myanmar with algorithms accelerating the spread of unmoderated, harmful anti-Rohingya content, according to Amnesty.

More people are also joining private online communities and websites that seek funding through subscriptions and membership in return for content curated specifically for them — rather than relying on appealing to often inscrutable search engines. Private online platforms such as Discord and WhatsApp also act as communities where data cannot be farmed and engagement-seeking bots have yet to infiltrate.

So, no, the internet is not dead. At least not yet. But we do have to accept that humans share online spaces with a growing proportion of bots and AI agents. As information spreads faster than ever across digital platforms, caution is advised: never assume it's actually a human you’re interacting with on the other side of your screen.

We love outlandish ideas and companies that take risks — that, after all, is how science and technology progress. But with every success comes a dozen failures and that’s what this list celebrates.

These are some ideas that could have been the next big thing: concepts that got backing but ultimately failed to take flight. Some were unlucky with timing. Some appeared to forget entirely to consider what consumers might actually want. And some, a handful, may yet have their moment of success.

So here’s a love letter to the Betamaxes and robot butlers of this world — not that either of those made the cut. To the technologies that could have made it, were it not for that most fickle of mistresses: us, the buying public.

Bluetooth face masks

CES, the world’s biggest consumer technology show, takes place in Las Vegas every January. In 2022, you couldn’t walk through its halls without seeing tech aimed at reducing the spread of viruses. Several companies decided that Bluetooth face masks were the future, allowing people to take calls, listen to music and stay safe from infection. Razer’s Zephyr is perhaps the most famous example, complete with RGB lights, speakers and replaceable filters, all for $99. But like every other Bluetooth face mask, it’s long since disappeared from sale. 

Hoverboards

It’s not that hoverboards can’t be made. The picture here is real, taken at a Formula 1 race in 2022, and around a decade ago you could even buy hoverboards from ARCA Space and Hendo. But then, much like a Live Science writer if they ever tried to ride one, came the crash. People love the idea of a true hoverboard — especially anyone who grew up watching Back To The Future — but when the reality is a few minutes of flight time and an outlay measured in five figures, hoverboards remain more McGrounded than McFly. 

Steam Machines

Back in 2013, Valve — the company behind the Steam gaming platform — thought it had spotted a gap in the console market. Rather than play a limited number of expensive games on the Xbox and PlayStation, it would give gamers an open platform to play any Steam-purchased game. But it took two years to get from announcement to hardware, and even with big-name backing from Alienware and Gigabyte, total sales of Steam Machines never even reached a million. To put that into perspective, Sony shipped 87 million PlayStation 3 units. 

Cat translators

Back in 2003, a Japanese firm launched Meowlingual, a cat-translation device. Point it at your cat’s face, let it listen to the sounds he or she was making, and it would reveal your pet’s current mood via an on-screen display and a short phrase (think "I’m hungry"). And here’s the science bit: the device used "voiceprint analysis technology developed at Tokyo’s distinguished Japan Acoustic Laboratory," according to an article in The Guardian. Meowlingual went on sale in the U.S. and Japan for around $75, but we’re sorry to say it’s no longer available. 

Monowheels

Why sit on a wheel when you can sit inside one? And then use an engine — similar to a motorbike’s — that can revolve the wheel around you, to carry you along at speeds of up to 61 miles (98 kilometers) per hour, the current world record? One good reason is that steering and braking are a challenge, with riders often using their feet, but ever since the first design in 1869 the idea has consistently caught people’s imagination. Albeit more for fun and exhibitionism than as a viable means of transport. 

Robotic sheep shearers

Australia dreams of electronically sheared sheep. With a collective flock numbering 75 million, its universities and industry bodies have been investigating ways to automate the process since the mid-1980s. There’s even a YouTube video showing one such prototype, from the University of Western Australia, in action. But we warn you, it looks pretty disturbing compared to manual sheep shearing. Robotic sheep shearers are still being worked on, but the old way continues to dominate — and likely will for decades to come. 

AR glasses

A clarification: we’re not putting smart glasses on this list. We actually like the recent designs from Ray-Ban and Amazon. Instead, we’re talking about true augmented reality glasses that want to overlay images across your vision, perhaps to give you directions or tell you all about the tourist attraction you’re gazing at. Because as Google Glass’s infamous demise showed, the public don’t like cameras staring at them — and glasses wearers don’t like terrible battery life coupled with bulky, ugly design. 

HD DVDs

Remember round two of Betamax versus VHS? This time it was Toshiba rather than JVC that took on Sony, with both proposing high-res replacements for DVDs in 2005. Toshiba’s HD DVDs initially tripled capacity to 15GB, but with the promise that discs would still work on older DVD players. Despite Toshiba’s collaboration with the movie industry, Sony’s Blu-ray swept to victory thanks to a larger capacity at launch and because the popular PlayStation 3 included a Blu-ray player as standard. To get the full benefit of HD DVDs, you had to buy an expensive HD DVD player. By 2008 it was game over. 

Radio newspapers

We endlessly scroll through information on our phones today, but back in the 1930s some lucky Americans could scroll through a radio-delivered newspaper each morning. This used radio stations to beam information to local homes overnight, where it would be printed out at an excruciating 15 minutes per page. The idea became commercial reality thanks to William Finch and his $125 receivers, but thanks to information loss due to static, annoying paper jams and the sheer expense involved, the dream came to an end in 1952 when Finch’s company went bankrupt. 

Smelly movies

When TVs started arriving in American homes, movie studios realized they needed to take action to revive plummeting theater-attendance numbers. One answer: smelly films! The core idea was for an odor to drift through the cinema, propelled via fans, to match the on-screen action. When Smell-O-Vision debuted in the 1960 movie "Scent of Mystery," filmgoers were subjected to 30 such smells that also served as clues (spoiler: the killer used a distinctive cologne). But it was expensive to add the system to cinemas, the technology was unreliable and the smells lingered long after the action. 

3D TVs

A prime example of a technology desperately searching for a market rather than solving a problem, 3D TVs were loved by manufacturers but met with apathy by buyers. Why? Because the number of great 3D movies can be counted on one finger, and because people watch TV to relax rather than wonder if that’s a headache building behind their eyes. The tech is there — John Logie Baird first demonstrated stereoscopic TVs back in 1928 — but even when LG, Samsung and Sony flooded tech show CES with 3D TVs in 2010, sales flopped. It’s time to accept that 3D TVs will never have their day. 

The Net PC

Back in the mid-1990s, Intel and Microsoft cooked up an idea. They could save businesses money by providing stripped-down PCs that were managed by IT teams and geared towards basic office tasks. Users couldn’t install any extras: the Net PC was a simple, closed beige box locked down by the business they worked for. Despite the backing of Acer, Dell, HP and many other big names, the idea flopped. The price was simply too high — often more than "real" PCs — and while IT managers may have loved the idea of simple network boxes, users most certainly did not. 

Modular phones

Remember Project Ara? This was Google’s attempt to create a phone assembled from blocks that could be easily replaced over time — buy the original phone then upgrade the processor, memory, camera or whatever as you desired. It also looked funky. Sadly, Project Ara never moved out of concept and into reality, just like the Modu phone before it. There are success stories — the Fairphone has many fans, as does the German Shiftphone — but we’re keeping modular phones in this list until they break into the true mass market. 

Gesture control for computers

To us, the fact we aren’t all using voice recognition and hand gestures to control our computers — an idea that dates back to the 1970s — emphasizes just how good keyboards and mice are. Despite huge improvements in gesture control over the past two decades, with great work by UltraLeap for instance, the traditional input methods remain the most accurate and intuitive. While the Apple Vision Pro has given hand gestures another spike of interest, it’s no surprise that one of people’s biggest complaints about the headset is when trying to enter text. 

Wearable computers

You could argue that wearable computers have happened. We have phones in our pockets and sensor-packed smart watches on our wrists. But that’s not the concept sold by Xybernaut, which sold several thousand wearable PCs between 1995 and its 2005 demise. Its Mobile Assistant series packed the computing device into a plastic box worn on the waist, while users strapped a QWERTY keyboard to their wrist and used a one-inch head-mounted display to see what was going on. Xybernaut only sold a few thousand models before it — and the idea — melted into obscurity. 

Microsoft Bob

In the mid-1990s, many struggled to get to grips with Windows. Microsoft’s solution: Bob. Rather than a flat desktop, users would enter a 3D room where they could click on a calendar, an address book, a typewriter, a checkbook and more. But not only did users find it patronizing, Bob was far too demanding for the hardware of the time, and was discontinued within a year. Still, without Bob, there would be no Comic Sans: designer Vincent Connare created it for the speech bubbles, and while the font wasn’t finished in time for Bob’s release, it still lives on today. 

DivX

Why rent a fading VHS video when you could buy a crisp DivX disc with the same film, in DVD quality, for $4.50? No need to return it: once activated, you had two days to watch the movie and then the disc would be unreadable. Just get rid of it! American electronics retailer Circuit City put its weight behind the idea in 1998, and was backed by the major studios, who loved the strict piracy controls. Sadly, users didn’t like the expensive players or that the player had to "phone home" to authenticate. The possible environmental impact, too, was significant. And they won: the format was discontinued in June 1999. 

Flying saucers

Science fiction has long inspired real-world technology, and it’s easy to see what kind of movies British designer John West grew up on. In 1975, he created a real flying saucer, with helium to add lift and a set of propellers to push his invention in the right direction. Sadly, West never got funding to turn his 30-foot (9 meters) diameter, radio-controlled prototype into the 200-foot (61 meters) production model that he believed would be capable of carrying 10-ton (9 metric tons) payloads for 1,000 miles (1,600 km) at 100 miles per hour (160 kilometers per hour), but you can view the prototype in action on YouTube. 

HUDs in motorbike helmets

It seems so obvious: integrate a heads-up display into a motorbike helmet to show directions and speed so that riders need never take their eyes off the road. Indiegogo campaigns raised over $2.5 million for Skully Helmets by 2015, and Intel injected a further $1 million, but few helmets ever shipped. Meanwhile, BMW’s attempt never made it out of the concept stage. Instead, it now sells its ConnectedRide smart glasses for $750 while Nuviz offers a $699 standalone HUD. True HUDs in motorbike helmets seem destined to never happen. 

VR movies

VR movies were once the Next Big Thing, with viewers fully immersed in the action when watching on their VR headsets. California tech startup Jaunt raised around $100 million from investors by 2015, with its 24-lens orb camera capturing the action from gigs and sporting events, and filmmakers also able to create their own movies. Disney even created a VR version of Coco. But not enough people bought VR headsets, and not enough of those people wanted to watch films on them — leading Jaunt to declare bankruptcy and take the nascent VR movie industry with it. 

Internet fridges

We are willing to admit that robot butlers may never appear, but when manufacturers promised us dream homes where fridges would automatically order food as required, the idea felt genuinely plausible. Sadly, the reality is rather more mundane. While all the big companies sell smart fridges that monitor temperatures and have holiday modes to save energy — and some offer touch screens that can display recipes and show you what’s inside the fridge without you opening the door — we remain a long way from living the fully automated life of The Jetsons. 

Space elevators

The idea of a structure stretching out into space dates to 1895, when Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky speculated that this could be the way to launch items into space. The concept edged closer to reality when, in 2000, a NASA report set out details of a structure using "high-strength carbon nanotube materials" that would be tethered from geostationary Earth orbit (an altitude of around 22,000 miles, or 36,000 km), with crawlers that would put payloads such as satellites into orbit. While research continues, slowly, we await the key breakthrough that might one day make the technology a reality. 

LaserDiscs

Who remembers watching Jaws on a LaserDisc in 1978? Long before Sony and Toshiba came along with CDs and DVDs, well-heeled Americans could buy a 12-inch disc (initially called DiscoVision) with data stored on both sides. It’s thought that one million U.S. homes included LaserDisc players by 1990. The format proved even more popular in Japan, but ultimately its high cost and the inexorable rise of DVD proved LaserDisc’s undoing. In 2009, Pioneer, the long-time backer of LaserDisc, announced it would no longer be making players. 

Teasmades

We will happily admit that the teasmade is stretching the modern definition of a "technology," but this quintessentially British invention — a bedside clock (and light!) that can make you a freshly brewed cup of tea ready for when you wake up — never quite escaped the British isles. Teasmades were incredibly popular in the U.K. in the 1950s and 1960s, and a handful of models are still available for sale today. We say: don’t write them off just yet. Switch to coffee, get Starbucks to invest and worldwide domination will soon follow. 

Windows RT

Imagine a version of Windows with no security problems, an intuitive touch interface and a rich selection of apps to match the iPad. Well, 12 years after the launch of Windows RT and we’re still imagining, with the operating system long since retired. Three problems killed it. First, software developers didn’t share Microsoft’s vision, leaving its app store barren. Second, many users despised the tile-based interface. And third, it lacked the great selling point of Windows: universal compatibility with software. 

Li-Fi

Where Wi-Fi uses radio signals to transmit data, Li-Fi uses LED light: a receiver in a phone or laptop detects the intensity from an LED bulb, which can be modulated billions of times per second, and turns that information into data. One advantage over Wi-Fi is that light doesn’t leak out of a room, so it’s far more secure, which is one reason the U,S. army likes it. But Li-Fi has never broken out of its niche — or at least not yet, with British manufacturer pureLiFi claiming that the technology is “poised to redefine connectivity” at MWC 2024. 

Paper clothing

The idea of paper clothing stretches from second-century China to Japanese kamikos, which were popular from the tenth century right through to the nineteenth. But it was swinging 60s America that rebooted the concept, reaching a peak with the Warhol-inspired Souper Dress in 1967. Paper clothing even hit British TV screens in 1965, with science program Tomorrow’s World telling its viewers that "tomorrow’s girl" would wear a paper shirt "ideal for jotting down numbers." Why the idea went up in smoke is a mystery. 

Internet tablets

Long before the iPad stormed into being, the likes of Nokia and Microsoft kept on trying to sell the concept of internet tablets. These were primarily designed to be windows onto the web, but were then stuffed with extra software — think Flash, RSS readers, Skype and internet radio players, to name but a few. The only trouble being that internet tablets were rubbish. They were slow, ugly and plagued with terrible interfaces, as manufacturers seemed to favor long tick boxes of features rather than what people actually wanted: usability. 

Video phones

From Fritz Lang's 1927 masterpiece "Metropolis" to the first (and best) "Blade Runner" film, video phones were a staple of science fiction in movies for half a century. Of course everyone in the future would chat via video phones dedicated to that one purpose! It made sense: if we all have audio phones now, we’ll have video phones in the future, right? But long before video phones as a dedicated device could take off, along came smartphones — which simply do everything. The closest we now come to video phones is being stuck in endless meetings on Zoom. 

Handheld PCs

For a while, it seemed that handheld PCs would be a huge hit. Atari and HP both launched handheld devices in 1989, complete with tiny screens and a keyboard. They flopped. History repeated when Microsoft and Intel failed to sell the world on the idea of their "ultra mobile PC" form factor in 2006. OQO, a U.S. computer company dedicated to handheld computers, flirted with success but ultimately sank into obscurity. Recent handheld gaming PCs such as the Asus ROG Ally keep the idea alive, but users are never quite as keen as the manufacturers. 

Luggable computers

In the early 1980s, traveling executives dreamed of "luggable" computers that could fit inside a suitcase. All they would need to do was plug it in once they got to their destination. The Osborne 1 was the archetypal luggable, with a five-inch (13 centimeters) display and full-sized keyboard, and the 24-pound (11 kilograms) machine was a bestseller in 1981. But then along came laptops, replete with batteries and LCD screens, and the luggable became history. HP tried to breathe new life into the idea with the Envy Move all-in-one in 2023, but alas, sales seem rather slow. 

Airships

Airships, including German Zeppelins, once battled it out with airplanes for supremacy. Unlike early planes, they could cross oceans without stopping for fuel, while passengers enjoyed a gentle, almost noiseless flight. Unfortunately, as most airships used hydrogen rather than the far less common helium, they had a tendency to go up in flames — most infamously shown by the Hindenburg disaster in 1937. Airships still exist, including their lesser cousins blimps, but good luck catching one from New York to London. 

We're now one step closer to a "quantum internet" — an interconnected web of quantum computers — after scientists built a network of "quantum memories" at room temperature for the first time.

In their experiments, the scientists stored and retrieved two photonic qubits — qubits made from photons (or light particles) — at the quantum level, according to their paper published on Jan. 15 in the Nature journal, Quantum Information. 

The breakthrough is significant because quantum memory is a foundational technology that will be a precursor to a quantum internet – the next generation of the World Wide Web. 

Quantum memory is the quantum version of binary computing memory. While data in classical computing is encoded in binary states of 1 or 0, quantum memory stores data as a quantum bit, or qubit, which can also be a superposition of 1 and 0. If observed, the superposition collapses and the qubit is as useful as a conventional bit. 

Quantum computers with millions of qubits are expected to be vastly more powerful than today's fastest supercomputers — because entangled qubits (intrinsically linked over space and time) can make many more calculations simultaneously. 

Related: How could this new type of room-temperature qubit usher in the next phase of quantum computing?

As the name implies, the quantum internet is an internet infrastructure that relies on the laws of quantum mechanics to transmit data between quantum computers. But we need quantum memory for a quantum network to function. Because qubits adopt a superposition of 1 and 0, rather than either binary state as in classical computing, they can store and transmit more information with far greater density than conventional networks.

“To get these fleets of quantum memories to work together at a quantum level, and in a room temperature state, is something that is essential for any quantum internet on any scale. To our knowledge, this feat has not been demonstrated before, and we expect to build on this research,” said lead author Eden Figueroa, professor of physics and astronomy at Stony Brook University, in a statement. 

Building a network for quantum computing

Quantum networks built in recent years have needed to be cooled to absolute zero to operate, which limits their usefulness. But scientists from Stony Brook University developed a method to store two separate photons and – most importantly – successfully retrieve their quantum signature. They achieved this at room temperature by storing photons in a rubidium gas. 

This makes it more viable than previous experiments in designing and deploying a quantum internet in the future. However, they could only store the photons in this experiment for a fraction of a second, while storing qubits at cryogenic temperatures normally means they can last for more than an hour.

“The actual selling point of this was that they were able to take two independently stored photons, retrieve them at the same time, and interfere them,” Daniel Oi, a professor in quantum physics at the University of Strathclyde, told Live Science. “You get what’s called a HOM dip, or a Hong-Ou-Mandel dip, which is a characteristic quantum signature indicating that these two photons were identical.”

As well as being faster, quantum communications are inherently secure — while classical communications can be intercepted or manipulated. This is because any attempts to intercept and read information transmitted across the quantum network equates to observation — which would collapse the superposition of the qubits moving through the circuit.

This is an active field of research and a race is underway to develop the technologies that will help us build a quantum internet. In 2022, researchers in Switzerland stored a single photon using a similar method. That same year, China transmitted signals using quantum entanglement between two memory devices located 12.5 kilometers apart. 

The next stage is to develop a method for detecting when a quantum signal is ready to be retrieved, without destroying the properties of the signal through direct observation. Achieving this would pave the way for quantum repeaters, which are devices that can extend the range of a quantum signal. This would be a key precursor to a large-scale quantum internet.

“One of the holy grails of quantum memories is ‘How do you detect that you’ve actually stored a photon, without destroying the quantum properties of that photon, and do it in a way that is efficient and reliable?’,” said Oi.

Scientists have developed a new type of visible light communication (VLC) technology that can transmit data using conventional lighting fixtures used in homes and offices. The technology could one day usurp Wi-Fi as the go-to tool for wireless communication.

Unlike wireless-fidelity (Wi-Fi) technology, which uses electromagnetic radio waves to transmit data, light-fidelity (Li-Fi) uses sources of light and can theoretically reach speeds over 100 times faster. While Li-Fi is a fully networked system and can incorporate infrared or ultraviolet light, VLC is unidirectional and only taps into the visible light spectrum. Some scientists also say Li-Fi is the incorporation of Wi-Fi and VLC, according to the Institute of Physics.

VLC is not widely used because the light source would have to be on all the time, it requires a direct line of sight with a receiver and it cannot be used outdoors. Deploying a VLC system using generic white light also reduces stability and accuracy in the transmission of data due to the interference. 

But now, researchers have mimicked white light by creating a tri-color VLC system — using red, blue and green light — emitted from an organic light-emitting diode (OLED) array, and have reduced interference in the process. They also set up an organic photodiode (OPD) array as a receiver. They described their work in a study published Oct. 19 2023 in the journal Advanced Materials.

Related: Wireless tech could replace Bluetooth at short distances and boost battery life 5-fold

"Our light source, which blends three wavelengths, circumvents interference thereby enhancing stability and accuracy in data transmission," Dae Sung Chung, professor of chemical engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea, said in a statement. "We foresee this technology as a potentially beneficial tool for diverse industries, serving as a next-generation wireless communication solution that utilizes conventional lighting systems."

OLEDs use an organic layer to generate light and are commonly used in the display screens of many modern TVs, smartphones and laptops. Compared with LEDs, OLEDs are better for the environment, are more cost-effective and have a more lightweight design. OLEDs are also more suited to being fitted into receivers because they provide greater sensitivity at specific wavelengths.

OPDs operate inversely to OLEDs, utilizing the organic semiconductor element to absorb light and convert it to electric current -– similar to photovoltaic cells in solar panels.

In the new study, the researchers configured OPDs to use a Fabry-Pérot interferometer, which consists of two curved mirrors facing one another. When aligned in such a way, the OPDs detected specific wavelengths of light transmitted from the OLED array.

By sending data from the transmitter to the receiver, the researchers demonstrated that even indoor lighting fixtures could be fitted with the light source to transfer data in a Li-Fi system. Their composite light source also had a lower bit error rate compared with conventional lighting, as it suppressed interference.

The scientists tested this technology in specific laboratory conditions designed to minimize interference and ensure the accuracy of data. But they're aiming to test it in real-world conditions to better understand how the system works in practice. Here, there will be interference from the local environment such as other sources of light and dust, the researchers noted in the paper. They also want to test whether the Li-Fi system works with a moving receiver, rather than a stationary one.

In the future, a near-infrared (NIR) channel could also further reduce interference issues, which would allow VLC transmitters to extend their operational range. They also want to test whether they can resolve physical barriers, like walls in a house, by using power-line communications.

Amazon's upcoming satellite broadband network, dubbed "Project Kuiper," just passed a key test test that paves the way for a 2024 launch. 

Similar to SpaceX's Starlink, Project Kuiper is Amazon's plan to provide high-speed internet by launching and connecting 3,236 satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO). The firm launched two prototype satellites in October and began testing the systems required for the network to operate. One key test was validating the optical inter-satellite link (OISL) technology, which uses infrared lasers to send data between the spacecraft. 

Now, Amazon says the prototypes have passed this important hurdle. In testing, the two prototype satellites maintained a stable connection speed of 100 gigabits per second. 

OISL has long been used to maintain connections between satellites further away from Earth. But earlier generations could only link two satellites together. Beyond verifying the two satellites could maintain a high-speed link, additional data suggested Amazon's version of OISL should be able to connect its entire constellation of 3,000-plus satellites together to create a mesh network. 

Related: SpaceX launch of Starship a 'success', despite explosion minutes after takeoff

Currently, Earthbound optical fiber cables power high-speed internet services by using light to transmit data over great distances. Project Kuiper, however, transmits light in space, which travels 30% faster than light racing through cables on Earth, according to Amazon. With OISL, Project Kuiper will be able to move data throughout the network, meaning it can receive data from anywhere on Earth and route it efficiently based on factors such as network traffic. 

It has always been tricky to maintain OISL links between satellites in LEO because they require an extremely narrow beam to be maintained over distances of up to 1,600 miles (2,600 kilometers) and between satellites moving at speeds up to 15,000 mph (25,000 km/h). But the company claimed its optics and control system have overcome these challenges.

Amazon aims to deploy enough satellites to begin customer pilots by mid-2024. Amazon plans for Project Kuiper to offer speeds of up to 400 megabits per second for most consumers when fully deployed in 2029. That's approximately twice the average U.S. broadband speed, according to Speedtest. Some organizations may also be able to tap into speeds of up to 1,000 megabits per second, according to the company. Whether the network will actually reach such speeds when the system is fully operational in a real-world — and off-world — environment remains to be seen.

In Becky Chambers' 2019 novella "To Be Taught, If Fortunate," a massive solar storm wipes out Earth's internet, leaving a group of astronauts stranded in space with no way to phone home. It's a terrifying prospect, but could a solar storm knock out the internet in real life? And if so, how likely is that to happen?

Yes, it could happen, but it would take a giant solar storm, Mathew Owens, a solar physicist at the University of Reading in the U.K., told Live Science. "You would really need some huge event to do that, which is not impossible," Owens said. "But I would think that knocking out power grids is more likely." In fact, this phenomenon has already happened on a small scale.

Solar storms, also known as space weather, occur when the sun releases an intense burst of electromagnetic radiation. This disturbance throws off waves of energy that travel outward, impacting other bodies in the solar system, including Earth. When the wayward electromagnetic waves interact with Earth's own magnetic field, they have a couple of effects. 

Related: What's the maximum number of planets that could orbit the sun? 

The first is that they cause electric currents to flow in Earth's upper atmosphere, heating the air "just like how your electric blanket works," Owens said. These geomagnetic storms can create beautiful auroras to appear over polar regions, but they can also disrupt radio signals and GPS. What's more, as the atmosphere heats, it puffs up like a marshmallow, adding extra drag to satellites in low Earth orbit and knocking smaller pieces of space junk off course.

Space weather's other impact is more terrestrial. As powerful electric currents flow through our planet's upper atmosphere, they induce powerful currents that flow through the crust as well. This can interfere with electrical conductors sitting on top of the crust, such as power grids — the network of transmission lines that carry electricity from generating stations to homes and buildings. The result is localized power outages that can be difficult to fix; one such event struck Quebec on March 13, 1989, resulting in a 12-hour blackout, according to NASA. More recently, a solar flare knocked out 40 Starlink satellites when SpaceX failed to check the space weather forecast, Live Science previously reported.

Luckily, taking out a few Starlink satellites isn't enough to mess up global internet access. In order to take down the internet entirely, a solar storm would need to interfere with the ultra-long fiber optic cables that stretch beneath the oceans and link continents. Every 30 to 90 miles (50 to 145 kilometers), these cables are equipped with repeaters that help boost their signal as it travels. While the cables themselves aren't vulnerable to geomagnetic storms, the repeaters are. And if one repeater goes out, it could be enough to take down the entire cable, and if enough cables went offline, it could cause an "internet apocalypse," Live Science previously reported.

A global internet blackout would be potentially catastrophic — it would disrupt everything from the supply chain to the medical system to the stock market to individual people's basic ability to work and communicate.

There are a few ways to protect the internet against the next mega solar storm. The first is to shore up power grids, satellites and undersea cables against being overloaded by the influx of current, including failsafes to strategically shut off grids during the solar storm surge. 

The second, less expensive way is to work out a better method of predicting solar storms in the long term.

Can we predict solar storms?

Solar storms are also notoriously tricky to predict. In part, they can be "very difficult to pin down," Owens said. "Because while space weather has been going on for thousands of years, the technology that is affected by it has only been around for a few decades." 

Current technology can predict solar storms up to two days before they strike Earth based on the activity of sunspots, black patches on the sun's surface that indicate areas of high plasma activity. But scientists cannot track solar storms the way they follow hurricanes. Instead, they turn to other clues, such as where the sun is in its current solar cycle. NASA and the European Space Agency are currently researching ways to make such forecasts using a combination of historical data and more recent observations. 

The sun goes through approximately 11-year cycles of higher or lower activity, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NASA previously predicted that the sun's next peak of activity, known as the solar maximum, should hit around 2025. However, recent observations of sunspots and solar weather indicate that the next solar maximum will come much sooner, and hit much harder, the NASA's estimates. The upcoming peak, which could begin as soon as late 2023, will likely be more severe than the last few solar maximums, which were relatively mild. 

"The sun has been fairly quiet since the 90s," said Owens. The last worldwide geomagnetic storm (at least on record) is the so-called "Carrington Event" of 1859, during which auroras were observed as far south as Cuba and Honolulu, Hawaii. Had the internet existed during this event, there's a chance it would have been seriously disrupted.

Hopefully, scientists will be able to find a way to predict or minimize the impact of the next Carrington Event before we find ourselves in an internet-less future… although, considering the terrible depths of social media, maybe there are worse fates.

In internet history, credit for the initial concept that developed into the World Wide Web is typically given to Leonard Kleinrock. In 1961, he wrote about ARPANET, the predecessor of the internet, in a paper entitled "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets." 

According to the journal Management and Business Review (MBR), Kleinrock, along with other innovators such as J.C.R. Licklider, the first director of the Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO), provided the backbone for the ubiquitous stream of emails, media, Facebook postings and tweets that are now shared online every day.

The precursor to the internet was jumpstarted in the early days of the history of computers , in 1969 with the U.S. Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), according to the journal American Scientist. ARPA-funded researchers developed many of the protocols used for internet communication today. This timeline offers a brief history of the internet’s evolution:

Internet timeline: 1960s

1965: Two computers at MIT Lincoln Lab communicate with one another using packet-switching technology.

1968: Beranek and Newman, Inc. (BBN) unveils the final version of the Interface Message Processor (IMP) specifications. BBN wins ARPANET contract.

1969: On Oct. 29, UCLA’s Network Measurement Center, Stanford Research Institute (SRI), University of California-Santa Barbara and University of Utah install nodes. The first message is "LO," which was an attempt by student Charles Kline to "LOGIN" to the SRI computer from the university. However, the message was unable to be completed because the SRI system crashed.

1970–1980

1972: BBN’s Ray Tomlinson introduces network email. The Internet Working Group (INWG) forms to address need for establishing standard protocols.

1973: Global networking becomes a reality as the University College of London (England) and Royal Radar Establishment (Norway) connect to ARPANET. The term internet is born.

1974: The first Internet Service Provider (ISP) is born with the introduction of a commercial version of ARPANET, known as Telenet.

1974: Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn (the duo said by many to be the Fathers of the Internet) publish "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection," which details the design of TCP.

1976: Queen Elizabeth II hits the “send button” on her first email.

1979: USENET forms to host news and discussion groups.

1980–1990

1981: The National Science Foundation (NSF) provided a grant to establish the Computer Science Network (CSNET) to provide networking services to university computer scientists.

1982: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), as the protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, emerge as the protocol for ARPANET. This results in the fledgling definition of the internet as connected TCP/IP internets. TCP/IP remains the standard protocol for the internet.

1983: The Domain Name System (DNS) establishes the familiar .edu, .gov, .com, .mil, .org, .net, and .int system for naming websites. This is easier to remember than the previous designation for websites, such as 123.456.789.10.

1984: William Gibson, author of "Neuromancer," is the first to use the term "cyberspace."

1985: Symbolics.com, the website for Symbolics Computer Corp. in Massachusetts, becomes the first registered domain.

1986: The National Science Foundation’s NSFNET goes online to connected supercomputer centers at 56,000 bits per second — the speed of a typical dial-up computer modem. Over time the network speeds up and regional research and education networks, supported in part by NSF, are connected to the NSFNET backbone — effectively expanding the Internet throughout the United States. The NSFNET was essentially a network of networks that connected academic users along with the ARPANET.

1987: The number of hosts on the internet exceeds 20,000. Cisco ships its first router.

1989: World.std.com becomes the first commercial provider of dial-up access to the internet.

1990–2000

1990: Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, develops HyperText Markup Language (HTML). This technology continues to have a large impact on how we navigate and view the internet today.

1991: CERN introduces the World Wide Web to the public.

1992: The first audio and video are distributed over the internet. The phrase "surfing the internet" is popularized.

1993: The number of websites reaches 600 and the White House and United Nations go online. Marc Andreesen develops the Mosaic Web browser at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. The number of computers connected to NSFNET grows from 2,000 in 1985 to more than 2 million in 1993. The National Science Foundation leads an effort to outline a new internet architecture that would support the burgeoning commercial use of the network.

1994: Netscape Communications is born. Microsoft creates a Web browser for Windows 95.

1994: Yahoo! is created by Jerry Yang and David Filo, two electrical engineering graduate students at Stanford University. The site was originally called "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web." The company was later incorporated in March 1995.

1995: Compuserve, America Online and Prodigy begin to provide internet access. Amazon.com, Craigslist and eBay go live. The original NSFNET backbone is decommissioned as the internet’s transformation to a commercial enterprise is largely completed.

1995: The first online dating site, Match.com, launches.

1996: The browser war, primarily between the two major players Microsoft and Netscape, heats up. CNET buys tv.com for $15,000.

1996: A 3D animation dubbed "The Dancing Baby" becomes one of the first viral videos.

1997: Netflix is founded by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph as a company that sends users DVDs by mail.

1997: PC makers can remove or hide Microsoft’s internet software on new versions of Windows 95, thanks to a settlement with the Justice Department. Netscape announces that its browser will be free.

1998: The Google search engine is born, changing the way users engage with the internet.

1998: The Internet Protocol version 6 introduced, to allow for future growth of Internet Addresses. The current most widely used protocol is version 4. IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses allowing for 4.3 billion unique addresses; IPv6, with 128-bit addresses, will allow 3.4 x 1038 unique addresses, or 340 trillion trillion trillion.

1999: AOL buys Netscape. Peer-to-peer file sharing becomes a reality as Napster arrives on the Internet, much to the displeasure of the music industry.

2000–2010

2000: The dot-com bubble bursts. Websites such as Yahoo! and eBay are hit by a large-scale denial of service attack, highlighting the vulnerability of the Internet. AOL merges with Time Warner

2001: A federal judge shuts down Napster, ruling that it must find a way to stop users from sharing copyrighted material before it can go back online.

2003: The SQL Slammer worm spread worldwide in just 10 minutes. Myspace, Skype and the Safari Web browser debut.

2003: The blog publishing platform WordPress is launched.

2004: Facebook goes online and the era of social networking begins. Mozilla unveils the Mozilla Firefox browser.

2005: YouTube.com launches. The social news site Reddit is also founded. 

2006: AOL changes its business model, offering most services for free and relying on advertising to generate revenue. The Internet Governance Forum meets for the first time.

2006: Twitter launches. The company's founder, Jack Dorsey, sends out the very first tweet: "just setting up my twttr."

2009: The internet marks its 40th anniversary.

2010–2020

2010: Facebook reaches 400 million active users.

2010: The social media sites Pinterest and Instagram are launched.

2011: Twitter and Facebook play a large role in the Middle East revolts.

2012: President Barack Obama's administration announces its opposition to major parts of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, which would have enacted broad new rules requiring internet service providers to police copyrighted content. The successful push to stop the bill, involving technology companies such as Google and nonprofit organizations including Wikipedia and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is considered a victory for sites such as YouTube that depend on user-generated content, as well as "fair use" on the internet.

2013: Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee and National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, reveals that the NSA had in place a monitoring program capable of tapping the communications of thousands of people, including U.S. citizens.

2013: Fifty-one percent of U.S. adults report that they bank online, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center.

2015: Instagram, the photo-sharing site, reaches 400 million users, outpacing Twitter, which would go on to reach 316 million users by the middle of the same year.

2016: Google unveils Google Assistant, a voice-activated personal assistant program, marking the entry of the internet giant into the "smart" computerized assistant marketplace. Google joins Amazon's Alexa, Siri from Apple, and Cortana from Microsoft.

2018: There is a significant rise in internet-enabled devices. An increase in the Internet of Things (IoT) sees around seven billion devices by the end of the year.  

2019: Fifth–generation (5G) networks are launched, enabling speedier internet connection on some wireless devices. 

2020–2022

2021: By January 2021, there are 4.66 billion people connected to the internet. This is more than half of the global population. 

2022: Low–Earth orbit satellite internet is closer to reality. By early January 2022, SpaceX launches more than 1,900 Starlink satellites overall. The constellation is now providing broadband service in select areas around the world. 

Additional resources

To find out more about the SpaceX satellite internet project, you can watch this video about the mission. Additionally, to read an interview with Leonard Kleinrock, visit the Communications of the ACM website.

Bibliography

• "Leonard Kleinrock Internet Pioneer". Management and Business Review (2022). 
• "The Science of Computing: The ARPANET after Twenty Years". American Scientist (1989). 
• "A brief history of the internet". Association for Computing Machinery (AGM) (2009). 
• "Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6) Specification". S. Deering, R. Hinden (1998). 
• "Distributed denial of service attacks". IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (2000). 
• "Statistics and Social Network of YouTube Videos". 2008 16th Interntional Workshop on Quality of Service (2008). 
• "Social Media and Crisis Communication".  (Routledge, 2017). 

Internet Protocol (IP) and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) are the languages computers use to communicate with one another, and they out the rules of the internet.

TCP/IP makes the internet work a bit like a postal system. There is an address book that contains the identity of every device on the network, and a set of standard envelopes for packaging up data. The envelopes must carry the address of the sender, the address of the recipient, and details about the information packed inside.

The IP explains how the address system works, while TCP explains how to package and send the data.

All computers get an IP address when they connect to the internet, according to PC magazine, and they’re all unique. You can find out yours by typing "what’s my IP" into Google. You’ll notice that it’s not very human-friendly. It either contains four numbers between 0 and 255, separated by full stops, or eight four-digit sequences separated by colons. 

You might also notice that your IP address doesn’t stay the same. At home, you get your IP address from your internet service provider but, when you’re out and about, it might come from the wi-fi you've connected to in a coffee shop, or from your company network, according to Business Insider. 

How TCP/IP works

To load a website, your machine needs to know the IP address of the web server that contains the data. This is also a long string of letters and numbers, and it might change unexpectedly too.

Luckily, there’s a second address system that helps you to guide your computer to the right place. Known as the Domain Name System, or DNS for short, it gives servers human-friendly names called domains, according to Cloudflare. Your web browser can look them up to find out which IP address to use.

Your computer can then make a connection to the server using a three-way handshake, according to the CISSP Study Guide. First, it sends a message to the server asking if it is ready to talk. It does this by sending an empty envelope with the word "synchronize?" written on the front. 

If the server is ready, it writes "acknowledge" on a new envelope and sends it back. Finally, your computer completes the connection by sending a third envelope that also says "acknowledge".

Now, you’re ready to start exchanging data. 

To do this, the server chops the content of the website into small pieces and wraps each one in its own envelope. On the outside, it writes its own IP address, your IP address, and a sequence number, according to Cloudflare. That number tells your computer how to put the pieces back together.

When your computer receives one of the envelopes, it checks it and sends a message back saying: "acknowledge". This means, "I have received the data, and everything looks fine." 

If the server doesn’t get an acknowledgement back after a set amount of time has passed, it assumes the envelope got lost or damaged, and it sends it again, according to IR Technologies. 

Once all the data is safely on your computer, the only thing left to do is close the connection. This involves another three-way handshake. One computer sends an envelope that says: "finish". The other sends back: "acknowledge". The first one replies with: "acknowledge", and the connection closes.

Additional resources

For more information about how the internet functions, check out the many resources at the Internet Society and "Introduction to Networking: How the Internet Works" by DR. Charles R Severance. 

Bibliography

• Eric Conrad, et al, "CISSP Study Guide (Second Edition)", Syngress, 2012. 
• IR Media, "What Is Network Packet Loss?", accessed April 2022. 
• Cloudflare, "What is DNS? | How DNS works", accessed April 2022. 
• Cloudflare, "What is TCP/IP?", accessed April 2022. 
• Dave Johnson, "How to change your IP address to troubleshoot your internet connection or protect your privacy" Business Insider, May 2021. 

Latency is the technical word that describes how long it takes data to get from one place to another. You can measure it with a ping. Your computer sends a small packet of data to a server, the server sends it back again, and you time how long it takes. 

Latency varies depending on three things: how fast data can physically travel through the network, which route it takes, and whether it has to queue, according to the computer hardware manufacturer Apposite Technologies.

Measuring latency

Measured in milliseconds, latency is often expressed in terms of its "round trip time" (RTT), according to Frontier.  RTT is the time taken for a data packet to get from one network destination to another. An alternative and less common phrase used to express latency is "time to first byte" (abbreviated to TTFB). TTFB refers to the time passed between the first part of a data packet leaving a point in the network and reaching its destination. 

Related: Quantum computing: Definition, facts & uses

Speed through the network is a significant problem for satellite internet. Most communication satellites are in geostationary orbit, 22,300 miles (35,900 km) above the Earth, according to Space.com. To get from your computer to a server and back again, data has to make that long trip four times. 

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk announced a concept called Starlink in January 2015, explaining that the company intended to launch only about 4,000 broadband satellites into low-Earth orbit to provide low–cost internet. For perspective, there are only about 2,000 operational satellites in orbit today, and humanity has launched only around 9,000 craft into space in all of history.

In relation to latency, Starlink is aiming to greatly reduce the RTT of data packets, cutting latency right down. This should make high-speed activities, like streaming and gaming, possible almost anywhere in the world.

Reducing data speeds

The idea of a network of geographically distant computers was originally proposed in the 1960s by MIT computer researcher JCR Licklider, in his theoretical piece on real–time interactive computing, Man–Computer Symbiosis. 

According to Scientific American, the earliest form, ARPANET, was limited to just a few nodes in the U.S., but the development of packet switching and TCP/IP protocols (internet communication languages) in the 1970s unlocked the network's potential for expansion around the world.

Related: Firewall: Definition, technology and facts

Email was being used by the 1980s, but it wasn't until Tim Berners–Lee introduced the World Wide Web in the early 1990s that the internet began to spread beyond research and government institutions. Since then, improvements in data transmission speeds have allowed individuals and organizations to store and access ever-increasing amounts of data and send big files at faster speeds from anywhere.

Currently, fast internet access is only available in places with fiber optic cables, with fiber optic internet being 20 times faster than cable internet, according to software and computer manufacturer HP. In remote locations, communications satellites provide links to the internet, but the connections are notoriously slow.  

Testing latency

Anybody can carry out a ping test on their computer to test latency. All computers that are connected to a network will have a latency testing tool built in. Web infrastructure company Cloudfare also run this test on their website. This can be used to carry out a quick data speed check, without needing to install extra software. 

The process involves sending a default of 32 bytes of data to a set destination and measuring the time taken for data to be returned to the computer, according to web hosting company Ionos. The time is shown in milliseconds. 

The RTT is calculated for each test carried out and the user is provided with a summary of the results. As well as data speed, any lost data packets will be reported in this summary. At the end of the test, an average time taken between the data being sent and received again is calculated. 

Additional resources

You can find out how to improve latency for activities such as gaming by reading this article from computer software company, Norton. Alternatively, to learn about how 5G impacts latency, listen to this video from telecommunications company AT&T. 

Bibliography

• "What is Latency in Networking?". Apposite Technologies.
• "What is network latency and how do I fix latency issues?". Frontier. 
• "Man-Computer Symbiosis". IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics (1960).
•  "Early sketch of ARPANET's first four nodes". Scientific American (2009).
•  "Top 10 Advantages of Fiber Optic Internet Connections". HP (2020). 
• "How to use the ping command in Windows". Ionos Digital Guide (2020). 

Before the invention of the World Wide Web (WWW), the earliest internet users were mainly researchers and military personnel. The network was complicated and, although it was possible to share files and messages, the interface was not user-friendly. 

In 1993, a researcher at CERN called Tim Berners-Lee started building a layer on top of the internet to make it easier to access, according to the World Wide Web Foundation. 

Berners-Lee's idea was to make information available as pages, written in a shared language called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). This eventually became the World Wide Web, which is the platform used by billions of internet users around the world.

Creating the World Wide Web

After completing his first-class degree in physics at Oxford University, Berners-Lee moved on to become a scientist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in 1989, according to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). 

That same year, Berners-Lee published a paper titled "Information Management: A Proposal", in which he suggested the combination of hypertext and the internet for an information management system.

In this initial proposal for the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee described the shortcomings of the then-current system at CERN in allowing scientists access to their information and documentation. Though the internet had been around for a decade, the information had limited accessibility. 

Berners-Lee set out to connect both the internet and a web-structured platform to revolutionise data sharing. To achieve this he created the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and Hypertext Makeup Language (HTML), the building blocks for internet browsing that remain in use today, according to CERN.

Created to better serve CERN scientists and assist those across the globe with their research, Berners-Lee launched the first website, http:// info.cern.ch, in 1990. This new way to obtain information was something Berners-Lee wanted the entire world to have access to. He decided to make the World Wide Web an open and royalty- free software, allowing it to grow beyond academia. 

By 1994 there were around 3,000 websites in existence, according to the World Economic Forum. After such a roaring success, Berners-Lee created W3C, a web standards organisation that also develops web specifications, guidelines, software and tools. With the continued success of the iconic ‘www.’, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Foundation in 2009, an organisation working to deliver digital equality to the world.

The development of the world wide web has meant that anyone can add to the internet, creating their own pages and sharing their own content. No-one owns the internet, according to the journal Educational Technology, although big tech companies wield a lot of its power. 

It is simply a collection of interlinked networks managed by companies, governments, research organizations, and individuals. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and others have changed the way it works, but so too have amateurs creating content from their homes.

After the invention of the world wide web, users continued to expand the internet, sharing bigger and more complicated content. In 1993, there were fewer than 150 websites on the internet, now there are almost two billion, according to Internet Live Stats. This ever-growing web of connections has completely changed the way that people live, work, and interact.

Additional resources

For more information about the invention of the World Wide Web check out "Weaving the Web: The Past, Present and Future of the World Wide Web by its Inventor", by Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Bibliography

• "World Wide Web", accessed March 2022. 
• CERN, "The birth of the web", accessed March 2022. 
• World Wide Web Foundation, "History of the Web", accessed March 2022. 
• Jeremy Galbreath, "The Internet: Past, Present, and Future", Educational Technology, Volume 37, 1997. 
• World Wide Web Consortium, "Longer Biography", accessed March 2022. 
• "Internet Live Stats, "Total number of websites", accessed March 2022.  

In 2019, SpaceX launched the first 60 satellites of Starlink. Since then, over 2,000 have reaches orbit, set to become part of a constellation of more than 12,000. Known as Starlink, the project aims to bring high-speed internet to every corner of the planet.

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk announced the Starlink concept in Jan. 2015, explaining the company intended to launch only about 4,000 broadband satellites into low-Earth orbit to provide low-cost internet. For perspective, there were only about 2,000 operational satellites in orbit before Starlink, and humanity have launched only around 9,000 craft into space in all of history.

Currently, fast internet access is only available in places with fibre optic cables. In remote locations, communications satellites provide links to the internet, but the connections are notoriously slow. 

Satellite positioning

These satellites sit in geostationary orbit, meaning they travel  at the same speed as Earth's rotation and therefore remain positioned above the same point on the ground, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). This makes it easy for receiving satellite dishes to connect with them, but  the downside is that transferring data in this way takes time. 

SpaceX aims to change that by surrounding Earth with low-orbiting satellites, according to Starlink.com. Individually they won’t cover as much of Earth's surface, and they won’t be geostationary, so there will need to be thousands of them to ensure complete coverage of the globe. But, because they fly low, it will cut the time it takes for a signal to travel from the ground to space and back again.

Achieving this is no mean feat. The closer a satellite is to Earth, the more drag it will experience from the edges of the atmosphere. To get around this, SpaceX has designed the satellites to look like vertical shark–fins, according to their website, with a knife-like edge that cuts through the wind. 

Each one weighs just 550 pounds (250 kilograms), and it works a bit like a router. Its job is simply to receive signals, work out where they're going, and pass them on. On the ground, users will have special dishes that lock on to whichever satellite is closest.

How does it work?

Starlink controversy

The project is not without controversy. Each satellite has a solar array that sticks out like a wing. At sunrise and sunset, it catches the light, making it glint like a shooting star. As the constellation moves overhead, it leaves streaks on telescope images, obscuring the stars and planets behind. Space X has been working with astronomers to minimize the impact by shading and tilting the satellites to reduce the light reflected back towards Earth, according to Space.com.

The high-profile project most likely to be affected is the Vera Rubin Observatory, scheduled to come online in October 2023 in the Chilean Andes, according to Space.com. This will be impacted by bright satellite trails because of its wide field of view and high sensitivity.

The satellites also pose a potential threat to other orbiting objects, Live Science previously reported. They are already responsible for over half of close encounters in Earth’s orbit, and that proportion is only set to rise, Live Science previously reported. 

In December 2021, the Chinese government lodged a formal complaint with the United Nations after two near-misses with the China Space Station, Space.com reported. And, with at least 11 other companies already entering the satellite constellation race, space is likely to get more complicated and more crowded in years to come. 

Additional resources

To learn more about the goals of Starlink internet, you can visit the satellite page at Starlink.com. Additionally, you can read more details about the Starlink internet speed and coverage at Tom's Guide. 

Bibliography

• "Types of orbits". The European Space Agency (2020).
• "World's most advanced broadband internet system". Starlink (2022). 
• "Astronomy discussion with National Academy of Sciences". SpaceX (2020). 

The Internet is one of the greatest inventions in human history, revolutionizing communication and changing the world forever. This vast network connects computers across the world via more than 750,000 miles of cables running under land and sea. It’s our fastest method of communication, making it possible to send a message from London, UK, to Sydney, Australia, in just 250 milliseconds. 

Constructing and maintaining this global link has been a monumental feat of ingenuity. Maybe you were born this side of the new millennium, or maybe you’re old enough to remember a time when you had to go to the library to get more information on a subject, step outside your house to go shopping or phone a friend to stay in touch. In any case, today the Internet is a staple for most of us, every bit as essential a utility to modern living and working as electricity. 

We take for granted the fact that we can pick up our phones or use a PC to access a cornucopia of data and services, but most of us don’t understand how it all works. In the latest issue of How It Works magazine, you will discover how miles of cables, millions of computers and sophisticated software programs and protocols come together to connect you to an online world.

Related: Read a free issue of How It Works here

Also this issue, discover why ostriches are unable to fly, how diamonds are mined, cut, polished and even made, see inside a bionic eye and discover how this technology is becoming a viable cure for some forms of blindness. You can make your own thunderstorm in a tank in our practical How To..., see how modern car central locking works, what the Romans taught us (hint: a lot) and, could we build Star Trek's USS Enterprise?

Read on to find out more about issue 161's biggest features.

How to make a diamond

A diamond is essentially just carbon, one of the most common elements. But we usually find carbon compounded with other elements, and when pure carbon does occur on the Earth’s surface it takes the form of graphite. Making diamond requires much higher temperatures and pressures — those found inside the Earth’s mantle at depths of a hundred miles or more. There may be lots of diamonds there, perhaps as much as a quadrillion tonnes, but they’re totally inaccessible to us.

But there’s nothing mystical or supernatural about diamonds: they’re simply the form that carbon takes under certain conditions of temperature and pressure. Natural diamonds were formed where these conditions exist inside the Earth, but it’s also possible to create the necessary conditions artificially. 

This has been done on a commercial scale to make synthetic diamonds since the 1950s. One approach — called the high-pressure, high-temperature (HPHT) technique — attempts to mimic the natural process as closely as possible. An alternative, called chemical vapour deposition (CVD), requires less extreme temperatures and pressures. At first synthetic diamonds were poor in quality and only suitable for industrial purposes, but today they can be made attractive enough to use in jewellery. See how diamonds are made, mined, cut and polished, in How It Works 161. 

Could we build the USS Enterprise?

The USS Enterprise is the iconic flagship from Star Trek and an impressive work of science fiction. But that's all it is, right, it's just sci-fi? 

At the moment it is, but engineers and scientists still have 233 years to achieve Roddenberry’s vision for space exploration, and several scientific breakthroughs suggest that we might be heading towards a spaceship that’s reminiscent of the Enterprise. 

As a Constitution-class Starfleet Federation starship, the main role of the Enterprise is to venture on intergalactic exploration and diplomatic missions. To assist the crew on their journeys of discovery, the ship is equipped with an array of advanced scanners and sensors: just flip a few switches and a planet can be scanned for signs of life — and scientists are one step closer to making this technology a reality. 

One of the most iconic abilities of the USS Enterprise is its ability to zip from one end of the galaxy to the other in mere moments using its fictitious warp drive. Human technology is currently nowhere near advanced enough to replicate the Enterprise’s warp drive. However, the theory behind building one has been around since the early 1990s. To achieve speeds faster than the speed of light, physics’ natural speed limit, theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed that we must bend the fabric of space-time.

In How It Works 161, we explore the many rudimentary technologies we have today that could lead to a spacefaring future that isn't light years away from Roddenberry’s vision.

The sun is always showering Earth with a mist of magnetized particles known as solar wind. For the most part, our planet's magnetic shield blocks this electric wind from doing any real damage to Earth or its inhabitants, instead sending those particles skittering toward the poles and leaving behind a pleasant aurora in their wake.

But sometimes, every century or so, that wind escalates into a full-blown solar storm — and, as new research presented at the SIGCOMM 2021 data communication conference warns, the results of such extreme space weather could be catastrophic to our modern way of life.

In short, a severe solar storm could plunge the world into an "internet apocalypse" that keeps large swaths of society offline for weeks or months at a time, Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine, wrote in the new research paper. (The paper has yet to appear in a peer-reviewed journal).

"What really got me thinking about this is that with the pandemic we saw how unprepared the world was. There was no protocol to deal with it effectively, and it's the same with internet resilience," Abdu Jyothi told WIRED. "Our infrastructure is not prepared for a large-scale solar event."

Part of the problem is that extreme solar storms (also called coronal mass ejections) are relatively rare; scientists estimate the probability of an extreme space weather directly impacting Earth to be between 1.6% to 12% per decade, according to Abdu Jyothi's paper.

In recent history, only two such storms have been recorded — one in 1859 and the other in 1921. The earlier incident, known as the Carrington Event, created such a severe geomagnetic disturbance on Earth that telegraph wires burst into flame, and auroras — usually only visible near the planet's poles — were spotted near equatorial Colombia. Smaller storms can also pack a punch; one in March 1989 blacked out the entire Canadian province of Quebec for nine hours.

Since then, human civilization has become much more reliant on the global internet, and the potential impacts of a massive geomagnetic storm on that new infrastructure remain largely unstudied, Abdu Jyothi said. In her new paper, she tried to pinpoint the greatest vulnerabilities in that infrastructure.

The good news is, local and regional internet connections are likely at low risk of being damaged because fiber-optic cables themselves aren't affected by geomagnetically induced currents, according to the paper. 

However, the long undersea internet cables that connect continents are a different story. These cables are equipped with repeaters to boost the optical signal, spaced at intervals of roughly 30 to 90 miles (50 to 150 kilometers). These repeaters are vulnerable to geomagnetic currents, and entire cables could be made useless if even one repeater goes offline, according to the paper.

If enough undersea cables fail in a particular region, then entire continents could be cut off from one another, Abdu Jyothi wrote. What's more, nations at high latitudes — such as the U.S. and the U.K. — are far more susceptible to solar weather than nations at lower latitudes. In the event of a catastrophic geomagnetic storm, it's those high-latitude nations that are most likely to be cut off from the network first. It's hard to predict how long it would take to repair underwater infrastructure, but Abdu Jyothi suggests that large-scale internet outages that last weeks or months are possible.

In the meantime, millions of people could lose their livelihoods.

"The economic impact of an Internet disruption for a day in the US is estimated to be over $7 billion," Abdu Jyothi wrote in her paper. "What if the network remains non-functional for days or even months?"

If we don't want to find out, then grid operators need to start taking the threat of extreme solar weather seriously as global internet infrastructure inevitably expands. Laying more cables at lower latitudes is a good start, Abdu Jyothi said, as is developing resilience tests that focus on the effects of large-scale network failures. 

When the next big solar storm does blast out of our star, people on Earth will have about 13 hours to prepare for its arrival, she added. Let's hope we're ready to make the most of that time when it inevitably arrives.

Originally published on Live Science.

Scientists have gotten one step closer to a quantum internet by creating the world's first multinode quantum network. 

Researchers at the QuTech research center in the Netherlands created the system, which is made up of three quantum nodes entangled by the spooky laws of quantum mechanics that govern subatomic particles. It is the first time that more than two quantum bits, or "qubits," that do the calculations in quantum computing have been linked together as "nodes," or network endpoints. 

Researchers expect the first quantum networks to unlock a wealth of computing applications that can't be performed by existing classical devices — such as faster computation and improved cryptography.

Related: 12 stunning quantum physics experiments 

"It will allow us to connect quantum computers for more computing power, create unhackable networks and connect atomic clocks and telescopes together with unprecedented levels of coordination," Matteo Pompili, a member of the QuTech research team that created the network at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, told Live Science. "There are also loads of applications that we can't really foresee. One could be to create an algorithm that will run elections in a secure way, for instance." 

In much the same way that the traditional computer bit is the basic unit of digital information, the qubit is the basic unit of quantum information. Like the bit, the qubit can be either a 1 or a 0, which represent two possible positions in a two-state system. 

But that's just about where the similarities end. Thanks to the bizarre laws of the quantum world, the qubit can exist in a superposition of both the 1 and 0 states until the moment it is measured, when it will randomly collapse into either a 1 or a 0. This strange behavior is the key to the power of quantum computing, as it allows a qubit to perform multiple calculations simultaneously. 

Related: The 18 biggest unsolved mysteries in physics

The biggest challenge in linking those qubits together into a quantum network is in establishing and maintaining a process called entanglement, or what Albert Einstein dubbed "spooky action at a distance." This is when two qubits become coupled, linking their properties so that any change in one particle will cause a change in the other, even if they are separated by vast distances. 

You can entangle quantum nodes in a lot of ways, but one common method works by first entangling the stationary qubits (which form the network's nodes) with photons, or light particles, before firing the photons at each other. When they meet, the two photons also become entangled, thereby entangling the qubits. This binds the two stationary nodes that are separated by a distance. Any change made to one is reflected by an instantaneous change to the other. 

"Spooky action at a distance" lets scientists change the state of a particle by altering the state of its distant entangled partner, effectively teleporting information across big gaps. But maintaining a state of entanglement is a tough task, especially as the entangled system is always at risk of interacting with the outside world and being destroyed by a process called decoherence. 

This means, first, that the quantum nodes have to be kept at extremely cold temperatures inside devices called cryostats to minimize the chances that the qubits will interfere with something outside the system. Second, the photons used in the entanglement can't travel very long distances before they are absorbed or scattered, — destroying the signal being sent between two nodes.

"The problem is, unlike classical networks, you cannot amplify quantum signals. If you try to copy the qubit, you destroy the original copy," Pompili said, referring to physics' "no-cloning theorem," which states that it is impossible to create an identical copy of an unknown quantum state. "This really limits the distances we can send quantum signals to the tens of hundreds of kilometers. If you want to set up quantum communication with someone on the other side of the world, you'll need relay nodes in between."

To solve the problem, the team created a network with three nodes, in which photons essentially "pass" the entanglement from a qubit at one of the outer nodes to one at the middle node. The middle node has two qubits — one to acquire an entangled state and one to store it. Once the entanglement between one outer node and the middle node is stored, the middle node entangles the other outer node with its spare qubit. With all of this done, the middle node entangles its two qubits, causing the qubits of the outer nodes to become entangled.

But designing this weird quantum mechanical spin on the classic "river crossing puzzle" was the least of the researchers' troubles — weird, for sure, but not too tricky an idea. To make the entangled photons and beam them to the nodes in the right way, the researchers had to use a complex system of mirrors and laser light. The really tough part was the technological challenge of reducing pesky noise in the system, as well as making sure all of the lasers used to produce the photons were perfectly synchronized.

"We're talking about having three to four lasers for every node, so you start to have 10 lasers and three cryostats that all need to work at the same time, along with all of the electronics and the synchronization," Pompili said. 

The three-node system is particularly useful as the memory qubit allows researchers to establish entanglement across the network node by node, rather than the more demanding requirement of doing it all at once. As soon as this is done, information can be beamed across the network.

Some of the researchers' next steps with their new network will be to attempt this information beaming, along with improving essential components of the network's computing abilities so that they can work like regular computer networks do. All of these things will set the scale that the new quantum network could reach.

They also want to see if their system will allow them to establish entanglement between Delft and The Hague, two Dutch cities that are roughly 6 miles (10 kilometers) apart.

"Right now, all of our nodes are within 10 to 20 meters [32 to 66 feet] of each other," Pompili said. "If you want something useful, you need to go to kilometers. This is going to be the first time that we're going to make a link between long distances."

The researchers published their findings April 16 in the journal Science.

Originally published on Live Science.

With sexually transmitted disease (STD) rates soaring across the nation, thousands of Reddit users now turn to each other for help in diagnosing bumps and rashes in their nether regions ⁠— rather than relying on a doctor's trained eye. 

Physicians observed the phenomenon in one corner of the internet that's definitely NSFW (not safe for work; potentially inappropriate content): the subreddit r/STD, wherein users can share stories, concerns and questions about "anything and everything STD-related." 

A new study published today (Nov. 5) in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that 58% of surveyed posts to r/STD specifically requested a diagnosis from the Reddit hive-mind. About a third of these posts included an attached image, so be wary if you visit the forum yourself. Reddit users appear eager to offer their medical assessments, as 87% of posts receive a reply, and 79% gain their first comment within 24 hours. But medical professionals warn that, though crowd diagnosis has its appeal, advice given by internet strangers may often be … well, just plain wrong. 

"It's self-evident that strangers on the internet aren't going to be the best physicians," co-author John Ayers, a computational epidemiologist at the University of California, San Diego, told Live Science. While the users offering advice lack medical expertise, he said, those sharing descriptions of their diseased genitals also don't provide adequate information. When Ayers and his co-authors reviewed posts on r/STD, they themselves often couldn't draw a definitive diagnosis from a given post. "If we can't do it," Ayers asked, how can the average Reddit user? 

Related: 51 Facts About Sex

During their deep-dive into the dark corners of the internet, Ayers and his colleagues analyzed a sample of 500 r/STD posts shared between November 2010 and February 2019. Over that time frame, users shared nearly 17,000 posts to the forum. The authors only noted the nature of the posts themselves and timing of the subsequent replies; in other words, they could not assess whether the original posters actually took the advice they received from other Reddit users, regardless of whether that advice was good or bad.

Although the authors cannot say whether anyone actually came to harm after visiting r/STD, about 20% percent of the sampled posts did highlight a disturbing trend: Many users came to the site seeking a "second opinion" after receiving an initial diagnosis from a medical professional. 

"We've seen this over and over again on the forum," Ayers said. Anecdotally, people often seek second opinions when they receive a diagnosis of herpes, a common viral condition that causes blisters to appear in the affected area, he said. But in one extreme case, the study authors noted that one user sought advice after being diagnosed with HIV, an infection that progresses into AIDS if left untreated. Although this user received prompt, anonymous assistance through the internet, in this case, the dangers of crowd diagnosis likely outweighed the convenience. 

"A misdiagnosis could result in the continued spread of the disease, but may also have a ripple effect for the millions who view the post and perceive they have a similar condition, which they then wrongly self-diagnose," co-author Alicia Nobles, a data scientist at UC San Diego, said in a statement. Misdiagnosis may be a worst-case scenario; the authors didn't note whether users ever encouraged each other to follow-up with a doctor after seeking a second opinion online. 

Though the new study focused on Reddit, crowd diagnosis takes places on every social media platform, Ayers said. As it exists, the widespread phenomenon is "a dangerous thing," but someday, online forums could help doctors deliver sound medical advice to more people who need it, he said. 

Ayers said  that the subreddit SuicideWatch stands as a positive example of crowd-sourcing. Moderators provide helpful resources for people struggling with suicidal thoughts, and keep the forum clear of toxic or misleading rhetoric. A similar infrastructure, moderated by medical experts, could serve to help people who are seeking information about STDs, and potentially refer them to local healthcare centers, if necessary. Healthcare institutions could partner with social media companies to establish such an infrastructure, Ayers added. 

But for now, the best information about STDs probably won't be found in the depths of Reddit — if you have a pressing question, check out the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website or see your local healthcare provider, instead. 

• 6 (Other) Great Things Sex Can Do For You 
• The 10 Most Surprising Sex Statistics 
• 27 Devastating Infectious Diseases 

Originally published on Live Science. 

With the help of an actor and some high-tech motion-capture techniques, computer scientists can now take a still photo of a person's face and animate it. The photos can be animated to express emotions such as happiness, anger or surprise. They can even include details such as teeth when the person in the photo had shown none.

The new photo-manipulation technique is the result of a collaboration between computer scientists at Facebook and Tel Aviv University. The research, published in the journal Associate for Computing Machinery on Nov. 20, provides what the scientists claim is the most realistic manipulations of a portrait or selfie to date. [Optical Illusions: A Gallery of Visual Tricks]

"The most difficult part is to make it look real, or natural looking," said lead author Hadar Averbuch-Elor, a doctoral candidate at Tel Aviv University. "People are extremely sensitive to the most subtle variations in face animation and it's challenging not to fall into the 'uncanny valley,'" she said.

The team starts out by mapping the facial features of someone looking at the camera in a photo. Then, they did the same facial-feature mapping to an actor expressing an emotion in a video, either shot in the lab or taken from a database. The facial movements from the video were then applied to the original photo, animating it into expressing an emotion, according to the research.

Once the researchers got the original photo moving, they fine-tuned the resulting video by smoothing out wrinkles and, if necessary, adding in the actor's teeth and tongue.

What they were left with was a short video of a person making an expression. Even if the person in the photo had never made that face in their entire life, the resulting product made it look as if they had.

To see if the videos were convincing, the researchers showed them to 30 people. They found that 58 percent of the participants thought that a video of someone smiling was real the first time they saw it, and 37 percent thought the same of a video of someone making a surprised expression. Overall, an average of 46 percent of the people said they thought the manipulated videos were real, compared with an average 87 percent of the people who thought the unedited videos were real, according to the paper. Thirteen percent thought that the real videos were fakes.

The animated faces aren't perfect, however. Many of the problems come from either the photo or the actor in the video looking off to the side, because it creates a bizarre contortion in which a part of the face pivots but the rest of the photo continues to look forward, the researchers said. Also, a photo of someone smiling with exposed teeth adds difficulty — if the actor creates an open-mouthed expression, the photo's teeth will stretch out instead of separating.

"Combining this tech with 3D would solve pose issues," Averbuch-Elor told Live Science, though projecting the photo into 3D might lower the image quality. "It would also be cool to combine it with VR to create an interactive avatar from just a single image," she said.

The team said that this technology could be used to animate profile photos on Facebook; clicking the "like" button could someday make your photo smile at the liker, or something to that effect.

It's possible that the technology could one day be used to manipulate photos into a deliberately misleading videos; however, that wasn't a current question for the researchers. But with technologies like this and others, including AI-generated photorealistic landscapes, it could be easier than ever to fake photos.

"When we were creating the technology, the goal was to push the boundaries of what's possible starting from just a single image," Averbuch-Elor said. "We didn't have production plans in mind and still don't — we wanted to create state-of-the-art research."

As face-manipulating technology becomes even more advanced, the line between real and fake could blur and become harder to find.

"We didn't really think about it while we were creating this technology," says Averbuch-Elor, "but like with many other examples, technology can be misused, and it's a scary thing."

Original article on Live Science .

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted last week to start dismantling 2015 rules that regulated internet service providers the same way as utilities. So what does that mean for your internet access?

The answer to that question will take months to hash out.  

The debate swirls around two related issues: whether the internet is a public utility, and how (or if) to ensure a concept known as net neutrality. Net neutrality is the framework for an internet in which all data is treated equally. For example, a provider such as Comcast can't throttle back Netflix's streaming speeds because Netflix's video content competes with its cable offerings. Nor can a company block legal websites or apps, or require them to pay extra for a broadband boost. [6 Politicians Who Got the Science Wrong]

Net neutrality advocates argue that the regulations on internet service providers (ISPs) enacted under President Barack Obama's administration are necessary to ensure that providers don't try any of these strategies. Meanwhile, advocates of Thursday's FCC decision — including FCC Director Ajit Pai — argue that market forces and alternative rules could keep the internet neutral, and that the current FCC regulations stifle innovation.

Here's how we got here.

How do you regulate the internet?

The net-neutrality debate is perhaps the biggest internet argument of all, and it's been going on since the late 1990s. In 1996, Congress passed the Telecom Act, leading the FCC to classify cable broadband providers as "information services" rather than "telecommunications services," which would have been subject to stricter regulation.

The FCC did, however, want to do some regulating. In 2010, it passed the Open Internet Order, which prohibited ISPs from blocking, throttling or offering paid prioritization. Blocking is cutting off access to legal websites, devices or apps; throttling is degrading the service to certain devices, websites or apps so as to render them unusable; and paid prioritization is offering sites, apps or device-makers the opportunity to pay for a speed boost for their traffic.

Net-neutrality advocates argue that without these rules, large, established companies will dominate the web, while startups without the cash to pay for access will struggle. Without regulation, ISPs could also block content from a particular political position or point of view, stymying free speech.

Unfortunately for the FCC, Comcast challenged the rules over whether the provider could slow down traffic through BitTorrent, peer-to-peer sharing software used to transfer large files like movies or audio clips.

In 2010, a federal appeals court ruled in that case that the FCC didn't have the authority to regulate ISPs such as Comcast. The FCC formalized the order as rules, but that workaround didn’t fly in court either: In 2014, a lawsuit by Verizon also ended with the court ruling that the agency had overstepped its boundaries by trying to regulate ISPs as if they were old-fashioned phone companies, or "common carriers."

That ruling set the stage for the last net-neutrality fight in 2015. At the time, the Obama White House came out strongly advocating for reclassifying ISPs as common carriers — essentially, as utilities. The FCC under then-Chairman Tom Wheeler ended up taking this route, reclassifying ISPs under the auspices of Title II of the Communications Act of 1934, which was originally designed to regulate radios, telegraphs and telephones.

Going another round

So far, the courts have given the Title II classification the nod. But now, with the FCC under new leadership, the debate is back.

On May 18, the FCC voted 2-1 to review the 2015 rules— the first step in the process of repealing and replacing them. Pai called the Obama-era regulations "a bureaucratic straitjacket," according to NPR.

What's not clear is what the replacement would be. There are several options, said Larry Downes, an internet industry analyst and co-author of "Big Bang Disruption: Strategy in the Age of Devastating Innovation" (Portfolio, 2014). The federal appeals court that previously struck down the FCC's non-Title II attempts to regulate ISPs suggested the agency try Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act, which focuses on broadband access but is not as comprehensive as Title II. That would be one option for removing the utility-like regulations but keeping net neutrality, Downes told Live Science.

However, many net-neutrality advocates think Section 706 isn't strong enough to ensure a neutral internet. [How Big Is the Internet, Really?]

"[S]ection 706 doesn't stand on the solid legal foundation of Title II when it comes to treating internet access providers as common carriers," Timothy Karr, a spokesman for the nonprofit Free Press, which advocates for net neutrality, wrote in an email to Live Science. "Title II has withstood several court challenges to that end. We don't believe section 706 would withstand such scrutiny."

Another possibility is that the FCC will revert back to the pre-2010 status quo, Downes said. Many advocates argue that this would be disastrous for the free flow of data online, but Downes disagrees. Between 1996 and 2015, there was only one court case over an alleged violation of net neutrality, Downes said. (That was the peer-to-peer file sharing Comcast case that killed the FCC's first attempt at regulation.)

"The reason it didn't happen was, the Federal Trade Commission was on the job," Downes said. "It's illegal to discriminate in terms of how we manage internet traffic if you are doing it for anti-competitive purposes."

If the FCC went back to pre-2010 regulations, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) would regain its status as the enforcer of those rules. But the FTC rules are not as strong as the FCC's. One Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals case  held that companies that provide internet and also provide a common carrier service (such as phone lines) were exempt from FTC regulation. That decision was recently vacated as the Ninth Circuit will rehear the case, and it is uncertain whether the FTC will ultimately hold on to that regulatory power.

A final option, Downes said, would be to cut off the endless FCC squabbling with congressional action. A new law could give the FCC clear regulatory control over net-neutrality issues without regulating ISPs as utilities, Downes said.

That would be a fight in its own right. Advocates of managing ISPs the same way as utilities argue that ISPs otherwise behave monopolistically, and that consumers end up with poorer, more expensive internet service.

"What really matters is whether, someday, we'll take on as a country the issue of the dismal state of high-speed internet access in America," Harvard Law professor Susan Crawford wrote on the tech site Backchannel. "If the Title II reclassification holds, it's more likely that we will take that step sooner."

Meanwhile, opponents of regulating ISPs the same way as utilities say the extra rules stifle investment and innovation.

"The kinds of things that they [utilities] work for don't really reflect the nature of broadband, which is competitive, which changes all the time, which is consumer-driven," Downes argued.

A congressional battle would probably bring these issues to the forefront. In February 2015, three House members — Reps. John Thune, R-South Dakota; Greg Walden, R-Oregon; and Fred Upton, R-Michigan — released a draft bill that would have enshrined net neutrality into law while otherwise limiting FCC regulation of broadband providers. The draft law never went anywhere. Now, Recode reports that congressional Democrats are planning to take a stand on regulating ISPs, which could be a stumbling block to a bill like the one proposed by Thune, Walden and Upton.

That means the public can expect a lot more uncertainty over internet regulations, no matter how the FCC handles net neutrality this time around. 

"Chairman Wheeler said Title II; Chairman Pai said not Title II," Downes said. "Guess what happens the next time a Democrat is the head of the FCC?"

Original article on Live Science. 

Darknets — the often seamy counterparts of the internet that are accessible only through special programs that help to ensure privacy and anonymity — may be far more resilient to attack than the internet, a new study finds.

Darknets are computer networks of hidden services. The most popular darknet, and the one that most people think of, is the Tor network. This network has become infamous for sordid activity such as drug sales and pedophile rings, although it does have more respectable applications too, such as protecting journalists from repressive regimes and helping police carry out sting operations.

Researchers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency originally developed the core principles of Tor in the 1990s. The aim of Tor was to protect government communications online, and the U.S. government and others continue to help fund Tor to this day. [How Big Is the Internet, Really?]

The often-illegal nature of activities on the Tor network has made sites on it targets of attacks to shut them down or compromise the anonymity of its users.In a new study, scientists in Spain wanted to learn more about how this key darknet worked and how resilient it was to attacks compared to the internet.

The researchers analyzed how about 5,000 to 6,000 nodes — essentially, Web pages — in the Tor network were linked by about 275,000 to 2 million connections between 2013 and 2015. Next, they compared these structures with how about 46,000 to 50,000 nodes in the internet were linked by about 195,000 to 221,000 connections during that same time.

The scientists noted that the internet has a backbone of hubs that are tightly connected to one another. This kind of collection of hubs is known as a "rich club" because it resembles groups such as Ivy League alumni organizations that help their members connect with one another. Previous research has found that similar "rich clubs" of neurons likely help the human brain orchestrate higher mental functions, and failures of such connections might lead to problems such as Alzheimer's disease.

In contrast, the Tor network lacked a rich club. Basically, the internet is a centralized network that makes it easy to run and search for online services, whereas Tor is a very decentralized network.

"The internet is designed to maximize speed and performance, whereas the darknet is designed to maximize anonymity," said study lead author Manlio De Domenico, a physicist at Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain.

However, the decentralized nature of the Tor network makes it far more resilient than the internet to targeted attacks and random failures, the researchers said. In contrast, taking down members of the rich club of the internet can destabilize the whole system. For instance, they noted that the internet needed about 90 percent of its nodes to keep operating, whereas the Tor network could still operate even if a random failure knocked out 40 percent of its nodes.

"This amount of robustness in the darknet is exciting because it is an emergent property of this system — it was not designed for this purpose," De Domenico told Live Science.

These findings suggest that even sophisticated attacks can only slowly dismantle a darknet, the researchers noted. "More research will be required to understand how to better attack this type of networked system," De Domenico said.

De Domenico and his colleague Alex Arenas, also ofRovira i Virgili University, detailed their findings online Feb. 27 in the journal Physical Review E.

Original article on Live Science.

After a long week, if there's not much on TV, you may spend some time on Facebook. Could this decision hurt your health?

A new study suggests it might, though the answer is complicated. Researchers found that "liking" people's posts and clicking links posted by friends was associated with worse reports of mental health, physical health and life satisfaction.

The new findings suggest there is likely some level of "social media activity and communication over social networking sites [that] is beneficial, but too much probably gets you in trouble," said Thomas Valente, a professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California who was not involved with the study. [Top 10 Golden Rules of Facebook]

The "sweet spot" for any person's social media use may depend on many factors, including personal traits like age, said Valente, who studies health-promotion programs but was not involved in the new study.

"I really applaud these authors for doing this work, [but] there's a lot of work [yet] to be done trying to understand the effects of social networking sites specifically and social media in general,” Valente told Live Science.

What's not to "like"?

In the new study, Holly Shakya, an assistant professor of global health at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine, and her collaborator Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, director of the Human Nature Lab at Yale University,analyzed data from about 5,200 people with an average age of 48 over three time periods. The study participants rated their mental and physical health on a scale of 1 to 4 and life satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10, and reported their body mass index (BMI) numbers. The participants also allowed the researchers to access to their Facebook data.

In addition to finding that people who gave out more "likes" had worse health, the researchers found that those who updated their Facebook status more often reported having worse mental health, on average, than those who updated their status less often.

Moreover, these links were shown to grow over time, suggesting both that people whose health is worse may turn to Facebook and that using Facebook may make things worse, the investigators said. The researchers also found that people with higher BMI may use Facebook more but not that Facebook leads to higher BMI, the scientists wrote in their study, which was published in January in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

Mixed messages

People's social media use is a complex topic, and studies don't agree on whether too much Facebook is harmful.

One study, published last year in the journal Psychology of Popular Media Culture, found that people who show off their romantic relationships on Facebook were more likely to report that higher quality relationships. But this was the case only if their affection was authentic, the researchers said. In the study, relationship authenticity was measured using questions such as, “I share my deepest thoughts with my partner even if there’s a chance that he or she won’t understand them,” and “I’d rather think the best of my partner than to know the whole truth about him or her.” [8 Myths That Could Kill Your Relationship]

Another paper published last year showed that accepting more friendships on Facebook was associated with living longer, but initiating friendships didn't confer the same benefit. All told, the people in the study who engaged in moderate levels of online socializing and high levels of offline socializing fared the best, the researchers reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Valente also vouched for the potential of social media and social networks to help people improve their health. He pointed to communities for people affected by rare diseases as a particularly bright spot, because these groups can provide access to information and support that many people are unable to receive offline.

On the flip side, research has also linked spending lots of time on social media with increased risk of depression and eating disorders, and has shown that giving it up for a week may make people happier. Without conclusive evidence for or against Facebook's health-improving abilities, the best route for now is probably moderation and self-awareness, Valente said. He also emphasized the importance of knowing when to take a break and the value of in-person interactions.

Originally published on Live Science.

If you were trying to catch up on the latest news or check out what was trending on Twitter this morning, you might have received a message that said that your browser couldn't connect to the server. Twitter, Reddit, Spotify and even news sites such as CNN experienced a widespread outage early today due to a so-called DDoS cyberattack that affected many users on the East Coast of the United States, according to several news outlets. How does this attack work, and what does it do?

The culprit behind the outage is what's known as a distributed denial-of-service attack, or DDoS, which was mounted against a company called Dyn DNS. It's one of the more common types of cyberattack, though today's incident was a bit more widespread than usual, because most attacks focus on one site. One of the largest DDoS attacks ever targeted the BBC sites and its on-demand media service, reported The Hacker News.

A DDoS attack works by essentially overloading the target server with requests to connect. This is not unlike overwhelming a receptionist at a big company with phone calls, bombarding the phone lines with calls. [The 8 Craziest Intelligence Leaks in US History]

Ordinarily, a phone call comes in, and it can be directed to the right person or extension. Sometimes, lots of calls come in and a secretary can put you on hold before eventually connecting the call. But now, imagine if the number of those incoming calls goes way up. The poor receptionist can't field all of the calls at the same time, so lots of people would end up on hold for longer periods of time, while other callers wouldn't be able to get through at all, because all the lines are busy.

With a DDoS attack, replace phone calls with requests to connect to a website via the internet. Essentially, the server gets overwhelmed. The "distributed" part of the acronym is because the requests can come from many places, and, as the name suggests, and can deny the website's service to others. DDoS attacks can take a number of forms, but the basic principle is the same: take up all the bandwidth with lots of traffic.

To mount a DDoS cyberattack, a hacker needs lots of machines that are set to make a request. One way to get lots of requests to a website is to send out a bot. A bot (short for "robot") is a program that will do things automatically, such as try to connect to a website, or carry out some computing tasks. Bots have a lot of legitimate uses in distributed computing, such as when there's a task that no one machine can handle on its own. But, bots have become more famous in recent years for their use in cyberattacks.

One way to distribute a bot to many computers is via a virus, or malware, according to Incapsula, one of many providers of Internet security and DDoS defense. Such malware can operate in the background and the infected computer user isn't even aware of what's happening.

There are also voluntary DDoS attacks, such as what's known as a Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC), according to Radware. This is a simple program that's designed to flood servers with connection requests and it's often used to "stress test" networks. LOIC has also been used for more malicious means, including by the hackers group Anonymous when they used the program to attack the Recording Industry Association of America site in 2010. LOIC is considered to be a relatively primitive program now, because the kinds of attacks it mounts aren't always distributed and can thus be traced to a single IP address — in other words, a single computer. But, the principle is the same one that's used in more sophisticated hacks. [Best Hacks by the Hacktivist Group 'Anonymous']

In the case of today's DDoS attack, though, more than one website was affected. This is because instead of flooding a single site with connection requests, the attacker went after Dyn, which provides part of the Domain Name System, or DNS. The DNS is the directory that your computer connects with to match a website name — for instance, Google.com — to a string of numbers, which is the IP address (similar to the way you look up a phone number by name in a phone book).

An attacker flooded Dyn with traffic, which overwhelmed the company's ability to handle it. As such, whenever a user tried to connect to Twitter, for instance, he or she wasn't able to do it, even though Twitter itself was still operational. Another way to think about it is if you went to a library to look up a number in a phone book, but someone hired a bunch of people to grab all the copies before you could get there.

As of Friday afternoon it appears the attacks are ongoing, though the exact details have yet to be determined.

Original article on Live Science.

Researchers have created a computer model to figure out the savvy ways that the terrorist group called ISIS has managed to grow its members online. The results could help to thwart future attacks.

The researchers identified three behavioral patterns of online ISIS supporters that allowed the groups to adapt and evade moderators, leading to the unchecked growth of the organization.

"We were interested in how support for particular extreme ideas or extreme organizations develops online, and then if we could understand that, what the implications would be for then what happens in the real world," study researcher and physicist Neil Johnson of the University of Miami told Live Science.

In the new research, published today (June 16) in the journal Science, Johnson and his colleagues identified and studied 196 pro-ISIS aggregates, ad hoc online groups formed via linkage to a social media page. The groups were created through VK.com (originally VKontakte), the largest social networking service in Europe. [Science of Terrorism: 10 Effects of 9/11 Attacks]

The researchers found that though the pro-ISIS groups consisted of members who have likely never met and have no direct way of contacting one another, the aggregates were able to mutate and reincarnate to avoid detection.

These aggregates are careful in their adaptations, not taking too long to reappear and not changing their identity too drastically, the researchers said. They can change enough to evade "cyberpolice" — computer and human moderators seeking to shut the groups down — but not so much that the followers are lost.

"Individual aggregates are able to adapt and mutate in, we found, three ways — I'm sure there are more by now — in which they manage to evade [moderators] or at least prolong their lifetimes and also grow bigger, quicker," Johnson said.

The groups would adapt by changing their name. There was also visibility-to-invisibility kind of switching, changing the content from being open to any VK.com user to being open only to current followers of the aggregate. Reincarnation was the third adaptation tactic, where an aggregate disappears completely and then reemerges with a new identity but with most (>60%) of the same followers.

What is notable in these adaptions is that these are not coordinated changes, Johnson said. There is no post or phone call declaring the need to change, the time or place, or the new name.

"We found they play this clever kind of evolutionary game," said Johnson, who models human organization and conflict.

When the scientists looked at online groups of civil protestors, which the researchers used as sort of a control or baseline for comparisons, they didn't see this same adaptive ability. The researchers hypothesized that the pro-ISIS groups continuously changed because of pressures from moderators trying to shut them down.

Based on the research and models, mathematically, Johnson told Science magazine anti-ISIS organizations could take out large groups by targeting groups 10 percent of the larger group’s size.

Large pro-ISIS aggregates grow as the result of smaller groups coming together. If countermeasures of anti-ISIS agencies cannot stop this development, the study authors wrote in Science, "then pro-ISIS support will grow exponentially fast into one superaggregate."

Johnson said that in his group's research and modeling, the focus was not to just make predictions but to understand the pro-ISIS online world.

"In this kind of hidden inner core, people or followers attached in these aggregates are changing over time, but as they evolve, they're also sharing potentially important information, operational details," Johnson said. For instance, in one case, the followers were sharing images of drones to watch out for in case of drone strikes.

Since the study was completed last year, Johnson estimated that in the past six months many aggregates have had to adapt again, possibly away from VK.com and onto the dark net.

"It's a little bit like fish when they form shoals and the shoals merge and break up, and when a predator comes in they scatter and then they reform," Johnson said. "But they tend not to reform around where the predator was. They'll go off into different corners and gradually build up again.

"It's not too dissimilar," he added, "But, of course, now it's on the internet."

Original article on Live Science.

The Internet is a busy place. Every second, approximately 6,000 tweets are tweeted; more than 40,000 Google queries are searched; and more than 2 million emails are sent, according to Internet Live Stats, a website of the international Real Time Statistics Project.

But these statistics only hint at the size of the Web. As of September 2014, there were 1 billion websites on the Internet, a number that fluctuates by the minute as sites go defunct and others are born. And beneath this constantly changing (but sort of quantifiable) Internet that's familiar to most people lies the "Deep Web," which includes things Google and other search engines don't index. Deep Web content can be as innocuous as the results of a search of an online database or as secretive as black-market forums accessible only to those with special Tor software. (Though Tor isn't only for illegal activity, it's used wherever people might have reason to go anonymous online.)

Combine the constant change in the "surface" Web with the unquantifiability of the Deep Web, and it's easy to see why estimating the size of the Internet is a difficult task. However, analysts say the Web is big and getting bigger. [Internet History Timeline: ARPANET to the World Wide Web]

Data-driven

With about 1 billion websites, the Web is home to many more individual Web pages. One of these pages, www.worldwidewebsize.com, seeks to quantify the number using research by Internet consultant Maurice de Kunder. De Kunder and his colleagues published their methodology in February 2016 in the journal Scientometrics. To come to an estimate, the researchers sent a batch of 50 common words to be searched by Google and Bing. (Yahoo Search and Ask.com used to be included but are not anymore because they no longer show the total results.) The researchers knew how frequently these words have appeared in print in general, allowing them to extrapolate the total number of pages out there based on how many contain the reference words. Search engines overlap in the pages they index, so the method also requires estimating and subtracting the likely overlap. [Could the Internet Ever Be Destroyed?]

According to these calculations, there were at least 4.66 billion Web pages online as of mid-March 2016. This calculation covers only the searchable Web, however, not the Deep Web.

So how much information does the Internet hold? There are three ways to look at that question, said Martin Hilbert, a professor of communications at the University of California, Davis.

"The Internet stores information, the Internet communicates information and the Internet computes information," Hilbert told Live Science. The communication capacity of the Internet can be measured by how much information it can transfer, or how much information it does transfer at any given time, he said.

In 2014, researchers published a study in the journal Supercomputing Frontiers and Innovations estimating the storage capacity of the Internet at 10^²⁴ bytes, or 1 million exabytes. A byte is a data unit comprising 8 bits, and is equal to a single character in one of the words you're reading now. An exabyte is 1 billion billion bytes.

One way to estimate the communication capacity of the Internet is to measure the traffic moving through it. According to Cisco's Visual Networking Index initiative, the Internet is now in the "zettabyte era." A zettabyte equals 1 sextillion bytes, or 1,000 exabytes. By the end of 2016, global Internet traffic will reach 1.1 zettabytes per year, according to Cisco, and by 2019, global traffic is expected to hit 2 zettabytes per year.

One zettabyte is the equivalent of 36,000 years of high-definition video, which, in turn, is the equivalent of streaming Netflix's entire catalog 3,177 times, Thomas Barnett Jr., Cisco's director of thought leadership, wrote in a 2011 blog post about the company's findings.

In 2011, Hilbert and his colleagues published a paper in the journal Science estimating the communication capacity of the Internet at 3 x 10^¹² kilobits per second, a measure of bandwidth. This was based on hardware capacity, and not on how much information was actually being transferred at any moment.

In one particularly offbeat study, an anonymous hacker measured the size of the Internet by counting how many IPs (Internet Protocols) were in use. IPs are the wayposts of the Internet through which data travels, and each device online has at least one IP address. According to the hacker's estimate, there were 1.3 billion IP addresses used online in 2012.

The Internet has vastly altered the data landscape. In 2000, before Internet use became ubiquitous, telecommunications capacity was 2.2 optimally compressed exabytes, Hilbert and his colleagues found. In 2007, the number was 65. This capacity includes phone networks and voice calls as well as access to the enormous information reservoir that is the Internet. However, data traffic over mobile networks was already outpacing voice traffic in 2007, the researchers found. 

The physical Internet

If all of these bits and bytes feel a little abstract, don't worry: In 2015, researchers tried to put the Internet's size in physical terms. The researchers estimated that it would take 2 percent of the Amazon rainforest to make the paper to print out the entire Web (including the Dark Web), they reported in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Science Topics. For that study, they made some big assumptions about the amount of text online by estimating that an average Web page would require 30 pages of A4 paper (8.27 by 11.69 inches). With this assumption, the text on the Internet would require 1.36 x 10^¹¹ pages to print a hard copy. (A Washington Post reporter later aimed for a better estimate and determined that the average length of a Web page was closer to 6.5 printed pages, yielding an estimate of 305.5 billion pages to print the whole Internet.)

Of course, printing out the Internet in text form wouldn't include the massive amount of nontext data hosted online. According to Cisco's research, 8,000 petabytes per month of IP traffic was dedicated to video in 2015, compared with about 3,000 petabytes per month for Web, email and data transfer. (A petabyte is a million gigabytes or 2^⁵⁰ bytes.) All told, the company estimated that video accounted for most Internet traffic that year, at 34,000 petabytes. File sharing came in second, at 14,000 petabytes.

Hilbert and his colleagues took their own stab at visualizing the world's information. In their 2011 Science paper, they calculated that the information capacity of the world's analog and digital storage was 295 optimally compressed exabytes. To store 295 exabytes on CD-ROMS would require a stack of discs reaching to the moon (238,900 miles, or 384,400 kilometers), and then a quarter of the distance from the Earth to the moon again, the researchers wrote. That's a total distance of 298,625 miles (480,590 km). By 2007, 94 percent of information was digital, meaning that the world's digital information alone would overshoot the moon if stored on CD-ROM. It would stretch 280,707.5 miles (451,755 km).

The Internet's size is a moving target, Hilbert said, but it's growing by leaps and bounds. There's just one saving grace when it comes to this deluge of information: Our computing capacity is growing even faster than the amount of data we store.

While world storage capacity doubles every three years, world computing capacity doubles every year and a half, Hilbert said. In 2011, humanity could carry out 6.4 x 10^¹⁸ instructions per second with all of its computers — similar to the number of nerve impulses per second in the human brain. Five years later, computational power is up in the ballpark of about eight human brains. That doesn't mean, of course, that eight people in a room could outthink the world's computers. In many ways, artificial intelligence already outperforms human cognitive capacity (though A.I. is still far from mimicking general, humanlike intelligence). Online, artificial intelligence determines which Facebook posts you see, what comes up in a Google search and even 80 percent of stock market transactions. The expansion of computing power is the only thing making the explosion of data online useful, Hilbert said.

"We're going from an information age to a knowledge age," he said. 

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook& Google+.

Not sure what to be for Halloween? Google may be able to help.

A new Google Trends tool shows you what costumes are popular right now in your area and around the country, so you can be sure to wear something more original than, say, a Stormtrooper costume to this weekend's festivities.

Dubbed Frightgeist, the Google tool takes the 3 billion search queries typed into Google every day and filters out costume-related inquiries. Then, the tool maps the top 500 costume searches throughout the United States. You can use the tool to see what costumes are trending on the national level, or you can find out what costumes are hot right now, anywhere from San Francisco (anything Star Wars) to Scranton, Pennsylvania (Poison Ivy). [DIY Halloween Costumes: 7 Geeky Getups for Any Party]

But if you want to look like everyone else this Halloween, then go out and buy a Harley Quinn costume. Also known as Dr. Harleen Frances Quinzel, this supervillain is best-known as an adversary to Batman and a bosom buddy of the Joker. She'll make an appearance in the upcoming movie "Suicide Squad," and she will also most certainly be at any Halloween party you attend this weekend.

"Star Wars" takes second place on this year's most wanted costume list, but the movie characters you see trick-or-treating in your neighborhood will depend on where you live. If you call Monterey, California, home, you'll be sure to see a few Luke Skywalkers roaming the streets, and the force will also be strong in Louisiana, where Jedi searches abound. However, Darth Vader will be lurking in the colder northern states, most notably Michigan and Ohio.

While many of this year's most popular getups have their roots in Hollywood blockbusters or comic book sensations, there are also a number of more traditional costumes on Google's list. Hippies are all the rage in Colorado this year, for example. And in Honolulu, pirates are the costume of choice. Owls are a hit in Oklahoma.

Oh, and if you're afraid of clowns, steer clear of Portland, Maine.

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Email, Facebook, cat videos — these are just a few of the things that 15 percent of American adults are missing out on every day because they don't use the Internet.

However, that 15 percent is a huge reduction from the percentage of Americans who did not use the Internet in 2000, according to a new analysis of survey data by the Pew Research Center, a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C. In that year, almost half of all Americans (48 percent) said they didn't go online.

The number of people in the United States who use the Internet increased steadily from 2000 until 2012, when the percentage of offline adults fell to 15 percent. Since then, despite efforts by the government and social service organizations to encourage Americans to get online, that number hasn't budged, according to Pew. [10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life]

Why are some Americans so reluctant to sign on? A third of those surveyed who aren't online (34 percent) said they don't think the Internet is relevant to their lives, or that they're simply not interested in what the Web has to offer. Another 32 percent of people who don't use the Internet said the technology required to access the Internet is just too tough to get the hang of, and 8 percent said they were "too old to learn."

But some people said they don't use the Internet because they cannot afford to do so, according to Pew. The survey data showed that 19 percent of those not online cited the expense of Internet service or owning a computer as their reason for staying offline.

Certain groups are more likely than others to go without Internet, the Pew researchers found. Seniors are the most likely to say they don't go online — 39 percent of people age 65 and older don't use the Internet. In comparison, just 3 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds don't use the Internet.

One-third of American adults who have less than a high school education are also offline, and as a person's education level rises, so does the likelihood that he or she uses the Internet, according to Pew.

Where people live and how much they earn are also indicators of how likely they are to stay offline, the researchers found. Those living in rural areas are nearly twice as likely as city dwellers and suburbanites to say that they never use the Internet. And Americans in households earning less than $30,000 a year are about eight times more likely than the most affluent adults to say they don't go online.

Differences in Internet usage are also apparent across racial and ethnic lines. Fourteen percent of white people surveyed by Pew said they don't use the Internet, but 18 percent of Hispanics and 20 percent of black people in the U.S. don't use the Internet, the researchers found. The group least likely to go without Internet is English-speaking Asian Americans — only 5 percent of people in this group said they don't go online.

However, the researchers also said older adults are more likely to use the Internet than in 2000: In that year, 86 percent of those 65 and older said they didn't use the Internet, but today, that figure has been cut in half. Now that the Internet has been around for several decades, it's possible that many of today's seniors learned how to use this technology in their younger years and are simply continuing to use the Internet as they age.

And although 33 percent of Americans with less than a high school education still don't go online in 2015, there were far fewer Internet users among this group in 2000, when 81 percent of Americans without a high school diploma said they never went online.

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

The vast majority of teenagers — 84 percent — now surf the Internet when they want answers to questions about their health, according to a new nationwide study.

Among all types of media, the Internet is the primary source of health information for adolescents, surpassing books, television, radio, newspapers and magazines, the study found.

However, while most teens get health information online, they don't consider the Internet their most important source, the study showed. Parents remain the main source of health information. When asked about which sources they get "a lot" of health information from, more than half of the teens surveyed (55 percent) said their parents, while 32 percent said health classes at school, and 29 percent said medical providers. The Internet landed in fourth place, with 25 percent.

In the study, researchers surveyed 1,156 American teenagers from ages 13 to 18, during late 2014 and early 2015. The survey included both English- and Spanish-speaking teens.

More than half of the teens surveyed (53 percent) reported that they are more likely to use the Internet to maintain good health than to check symptoms or diagnoses (33 percent). Teens also said they go online to find information for friends or family members (27 percent). Only 13 percent said they went online to research topics that they were uncomfortable discussing with their parents.

About a third (32 percent) said they had changed their behavior, such as eating healthier or exercising more, as a result of health information they found online. [10 Facts Every Parent Should Know About Their Teen's Brain]

The top five topics researched by teens online are fitness and exercise (42 percent), diet and nutrition (36 percent), stress or anxiety (19 percent), STDs (18 percent), and puberty (18 percent).

The results of the study are being presented today (June 2) at a Northwestern Universitypolicy conference in Washington, D.C.

This is believed to be the first national study in nearly 15 years that examines how teenagers use the Internet to seek out health information, said the study's lead author Ellen Wartella, a communications professor at Northwestern University. It is also the only national study to document teens' use of newer technologies designed for health information, such as mobile apps, social networking sites, electronic games and wearable devices.

Although the results focus on a generation of adolescents who grew up with the Internet and are comfortable with technology, Wartella told Live Science that it's important for educators and other adults to help teens hone their digital literacy skills.

"Half the teens who use search engines to look for health information say they usually just click on the first site that comes up," she said. "We need to focus on improving their digital literacy skills so that they can sort through the abundance of information they come across online." She said she would also like to see some of the more popular health websites create sections that cater specifically to adolescents.

Wartella noted that the survey also revealed disparities, particularly the "digital divide" between teens from lower-income families and those from higher-income families.

"Teens from lower-income families have limited access to computers and mobile devices at home, and, therefore, to health information that could benefit them and their families," she said.

Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Originally published on LiveScience.

Forget fancy new tablets or cloud computing; the technologies that today's workers really need are more basic than that. The Internet and email are the tech tools that employees say they need to get through their workdays, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

For the survey, researchers asked more than 500 U.S. workers how important certain technologies were to doing their jobs. They found that 61 percent of American workers think that email is "very important." The second-most important technology for the modern worker is the Internet, with 54 percent of respondents listing it as essential to their job activities, the survey found.

The importance of these technologies in the American workplace hasn't changed much over the past decade or so. In 2002, when Pew first started surveying Americans about workplace technology, 61 percent of workers said they used email on the job. And, in 2008, a similar survey found that 62 percent of workers used either email or the Internet regularly at work. [10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life]

The new survey also suggests that most workers access the Web from computers, not cellphones. Only 24 percent of respondents said that smartphones or cellphones are very important to them for work. In fact, mobile phones were found to be less important to workers than traditional landline telephones, which 35 percent of survey respondents said were critical to their job activities.

At the very bottom of the list of important tech tools came social networking sites, such as Twitter and LinkedIn, which just 4 percent of workers listed as being very important to their job activities.

This low prevalence of social networking during office hours could have something to do with another survey finding: 46 percent of respondents said their employers blocked certain websites. The same percentage said that their employers have rules limiting what employees can post online.

This trend of monitoring employees' Internet activity has gained a lot of traction in the past few years, according to the researchers who analyzed the survey results. In 2006, one in five workers said their employers had policies about what they could and could not post online. By 2008, the number of employees aware of such policies had risen to one in four. This new survey brings that figure to nearly one in two employees.

Another trend that the survey picked up on is the increase in people working remotely. The survey found that one in five American adults frequently works outside of their workplace. And for these remote workers, certain technologies are indispensable. Fifty percent of remote workers said that the Internet and cellphones are very important for completing work activities. This percentage was even higher — 66 percent — for those working remotely in traditionally office-based professions, such as clerical work or entrepreneurship.

Other interesting statistics from the new Pew Research study include the following:

• 7 percent of workers said their productivity has declined because of the Internet, email and cellphones, while 46 percent said these technologies make them more productive.
• 39 percent of workers said that the Internet, email and cellphones allow them greater flexibility in their work hours.
• 35 percent said such technologies increase the number of hours they work.
• 51 percent of respondents said that these technologies expand the number of people they communicate with outside their company.

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

There's a tool that turns your Web browser into a time machine, and librarians at Stanford University have figured out how to use it.

In honor of the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web this year, Stanford created a digital archive of its bygone Web pages, some of which were among the earliest pages ever published on the Web. Known as the Stanford Wayback, the tool is a customized version of an open-source platform — the Wayback Machine — developed by the nonprofit group Internet Archive.

Among other sites, the new digital archive is home to the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory site, which was originally created in 1991 and is the earliest known website in the United States, according to Stanford. [Top 10 Inventions That Changed the World]

"Thankfully, a handful of staff at SLAC who worked on the early Web fortuitously saved the files, along with their time stamps, associated with the first and several subsequent versions of their website," Nicholas Taylor, a Web archiving service manager for Stanford Libraries, said in a statement.

The Stanford Wayback includes a set of featured archived sites, and users can see what SLAC's website looked like in 1995 compared with its updated (but still very '90s-style) home page in 1999. Users can also search through about 435 billion other archived Web pages that are on the original Wayback Machine.

While people could probably spend all day looking nostalgically at old websites and swooning over the early days of the Web, the Wayback Machine (both the original and Stanford's version) serve a greater purpose, as well. Stanford's digital archive is part of a larger, universitywide Web archiving initiative, which aims to preserve and provide access to Web content that's at risk of being updated, replaced or lost. The project focuses on archiving websites that could be used for research and as teaching resources in the future. This includes government websites from around the world, digital game sites and social media pages, according to Stanford.

"The early pages of the Web may seem rudimentary and visually dull to today's user; however, they offer great insight into Web history, functionality, changes and trends," Taylor said.

One of the projects currently underway as a part of this initiative is a comprehensive archive of all the websites for the 2014 congressional primary and general-election candidates. The Stanford Library is working on the project with Archive-It (a subscription digital archiving service) and Stanford's Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS).

The Stanford Library is also integrating its digital archive into its regular online catalog. This will enable students to search both current sites and those that have been archived.

"A good portion of today's information is being published online, as ephemeral Web pages. In order to fulfill our mission, it is imperative that we curate and make accessible for current and future generations Web-based content on topics that matter to our community," said Michael Keller, Stanford's university librarian.

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

This article was originally published on& The Conversation. The publication contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

In a post-Snowden world, anonymity is what people want online. Smartphone apps offering anonymous messaging are popping up everywhere – Secret, Whisper and now Yik Yak. The latest additions to privacy-protecting technology, they claim to provide anonymous, location-based confession, expression, and discussion platforms.

But there are two major issues with these apps: the false sense of anonymity security they provide, and their potential as platforms for bullying.

Coming back to bite you

Anonymising social media apps such as these are run from a platform that is immediately identifying: your personal smartphone. Significant amounts of data about your identity and location are often used by these apps, not only to geo-locate you for things that are location-sensitive, such as locally restricted posts, but to track you as a unique user by associating your posts and data with unique identifiers such as your device’s internet IP address, phone IMEI number, and usage patterns. These can be used to block abusive users, send push notifications, track software errors, show personalised adverts, or enable other features.

Not only does this mean that users are not actually anonymous, but that the company can be asked to hand over this data by law enforcement or government officials. In fact, each of these three “anonymous” apps include statements in their privacy policies to this effect.

This is dangerous when, for example, Whisper claims to be able to protect whistleblowers through the anonymity it provides – this is simply not true. Fortunately the other apps don’t make such strong claims, but can still lure you into a false sense of security that what you say won’t come back to bite you later.

If you wish to be anonymous online, apps like this won’t give it to you. In fact, no apps on smartphones really can. True anonymity consists in technical and identity anonymity. This means finding a way to prevent tracking through geo-location, IP address, phone identification or usage patterns. This requires more robust but more difficult to use technologies such as Tor, and the skill to use them properly. Until then, all you have is “pseudonymity”, and app-makers’ promises that they will “make it hard” for others to access your data.

Of course, anonymous apps' actual lack of anonymity can help with the second problem, that of their potential use for bullying. These apps are aimed at young people who are particularly vulnerable to online bullying. Yik Yak has attempted to address this, after much criticism for allowing bullying to take place by geofencing schools, prohibiting use of the app within a school area.

However, this doesn’t stop bullying away from schools. Yik Yak has tried to counter this by removing negatively rated posts, blocking users that frequently post negative content, introducing rules prohibiting bullying, and relying on peer review of posts to ensure problems are flagged up. But there’s still been significant problems with abuse.

Whisper also has moderators that respond to negative content, tracking problem users and banning them. Secret, which uses similar methods, including algorithmic detection of bullying, user flagging, and moderation, is reported to have problems countering bullies. So is it so bad that these apps aren’t truly anonymous? At least then bullies, which can cause so much grief, can be dissuaded from their activities or brought to justice. But there are situations where, as a society, anonymity is needed or desired for good reasons – in oppressive areas, to reach out to people for advice, to blow the whistle.

Society won’t allow anonymity

This illustrates the problems with anonymous smartphone apps to begin with – they can never be fully anonymous partly because society won’t let them. Society will want safeguards against bullies or threatening behaviour to be built into any easy-to-access social media technology that is used by children and young adults. Inevitably that requires removing much of any anonymising aspects. This sort of technology also never works well with the requirements of start-up companies, because at some point the start-up needs to make money, and that is often based on knowledge about their user base.

It is also a reminder that the technology we develop is never value-neutral. Society shapes technology, which in turn shapes society. Sometimes these values conflict, and it’s hard to know how to prioritise. Anonymity is a very difficult problem in itself: app developers shouldn’t muddy the waters offering anonymity when they can’t deliver, and they should also be very clear as to the reasons for not offering that anonymity.

Users who wish to remain anonymous should beware of “too easy to be true” offerings and stick to tried and tested methods, else what they say under the guise of “anonymity” might just come back to bite them.

Catherine Flick does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

What if the Internet were 100 times faster than it is today? How would this super-high-speed connectivity affect the economy, health care and education?

The Pew Research Center, a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C., recently posed these questions to experts in a range of Internet-related fields. Predictions about what the future Internet landscape could look like in the year 2025, with blazing-fast connectivity, ran the gamut from pragmatic to fantastical. While some experts envisioned a future in which business meetings take place via 3D hologram, another predicted the rise of immersive 3D pornography.    

"These experts generally believe that, if technological change advances as they expect, it will bring about the types of connectivity humans have been dreaming about for quite some time," said Janna Anderson, co-author of the new Pew report and director of the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University in North Carolina. [10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life]

Virtual world

The specific types of applications that might be possible with a faster Internet are really anyone's guess, but many of the more than 1,400 experts canvassed for the report had similar predictions for the future, Anderson told Live Science.

Many experts focused on the emergence of "telepresence," which could enable people to be together virtually even though they are physically far apart. Imagine playing in a virtual band with people from around the world, or having Thanksgiving dinner with family members who live on the other side of the country. These are a few of the ideas put forth in the report by Marti Hearst, a professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.

"These ideas aren't new, but they will finally work well enough if given high enough bandwidth," Hearst wrote in response to the researchers' question about future connectivity.

Another thing that could benefit from more bandwidth is augmented reality. Internet experts are enthusiastic about the possibility of a future filled with avatars, interactive gaming and holograms.

Of course, not everyone who responded to the researchers' queries focused on the opportunities for entertainment with faster Internet. Some, like Alison Alexander, a professor of communications at the University of Georgia, think better bandwidth could help solve practical real-world problems, such as alleviating inefficiencies inherent in bureaucracies.

Robotic revolution

Still other experts focused their responses on a different theme: how the increased speed of computing could bring humans and machines closer together.

"High-bandwidth and high-definition communication will allow the emergence of what we'll call emotional computing," wrote David Orban, CEO of the New York-based software company Dotsub. "Facial expressions, subtle changes in voice stresses, gestures, will all be part of how we will communicate among each other for work and fun across any distance, with computers and software platforms understanding these components and being able to adapt to them, facilitating the efficient reaching of goals and objectives." [Science Fact or Fiction? The Plausibility of 10 Sci-Fi Concepts]

Humans and machines will also be brought closer together by the so-called Internet of Things, some experts predicted. In a world with faster Internet, smart devices won't be trendy or superfluous; they'll be the norm, according to Hal Varian, chief economist at Google.

One industry that will see a huge impact if this prediction were to come true is health care, Varian said. Internet-enabled devices, for instance, could allow for continuous health monitoring outside of hospitals.

"You will be able to purchase health-monitoring systems just like you purchase home-security systems," Varian wrote in the report. "Indeed, the home-security system will include health monitoring as a matter of course. Robotic and remote surgery will become commonplace."

And Varian wasn't the only expert to discuss what a faster Internet could do for the health care industry. Judith Donath, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, predicts that in the future, chronically ill and elderly patients "will be released from hospitals with a kit of sensors that a home nurse can use." She also said that the reach of health care will expand into unexpected territories, with local drugstores carrying out simple surgeries and offering what she called "fast meds — analogous to fast foods."

Keeping up with the changes

Similar advancements might be made in the field of education, according to some of the survey respondents. Apps that track and aid in every learning ability or disability are likely in the future, wrote Breanne Thomlison, founder of BTx2 Communications, a marketing and strategies firm. In fact, the whole system of education in the United States, and elsewhere in the world, will likely have to change to keep up with these fast-paced technological advancements, some experts said.

"Time in school will need to radically change, since the talking-head, expert teacher is less and less valuable," wrote Ed Lyell, a professor of business and economics at Adams State University in Alamosa, Colorado. "The role of teacher-coach will be even more important yet require a different emotional and intellectual skill set than that which most educators now possess."

The Pew Research Center report also noted several other possible trends, such as the belief that superfast Internet service in some parts of the world, but not others, could generate a new digital divide.

"We should not expect these bandwidth increases to be evenly distributed, and many who cannot afford access to increased bandwidth will be left with low-bandwidth options," wrote Rex Troumbley, a graduate research assistant in the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. "We may see a new class divergence between those able to access immersive media, online telepathy, human consciousness uploads and remote computing, while the poor will be left with the low-bandwidth experiences we typically use today."

But experts say that such inequalities, as well as the exciting new applications inspired by superfast Internet, won't come about overnight. These developments will take time to emerge — perhaps longer than a decade, many experts said.

"If you held them to it, [the expert] would probably say they wouldn't bet any money on all of that being the reality in 2025, but they do imagine that we'll be closer to it because they are already witnessing early forms of such things," Anderson said.

The full report from the Pew Research Center was published online today (Oct. 9).

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Pierre Delforge, NRDC’s director of high tech energy efficiency, previously worked for 20 years in the IT industry in software development, hardware integration, and energy efficiency and climate programs. He contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. 

All online activity — from email and Internet use to social media and business — streams through nearly 3 million data centers across America, from small closets and large server rooms to mammoth "cloud" server farms. The centers' explosive growth is gulping huge amounts of energy, and despite some efficiency improvements, much of it is still wasted.

Although well-known Internet brands like Apple, Facebook, Google and others rightly pride themselves on the ultra-high efficiency of their immense data centers delivering search, social networking and other digital services to consumers and businesses alike, according to a new report from NRDC and Anthesis, these cloud-server farms are responsible for less than 5 percent of total data-center energy consumption in the nation, and are not representative of how the average U.S. data center operates.

Our study shows that many small, mid-size, corporate and multi-tenant data centers still waste much of the energy they use. Many of the roughly 12 million U.S. servers spend most of their time doing little or no work, but still drawing significant power — up to 30 percent of servers are "comatose" and no longer needed, while many others are grossly underutilized. However, opportunities abound to reduce energy waste in the data-center industry as a whole.  Technology that will improve efficiency exists, but systemic measures are needed to remove the barriers limiting its broad adoption across the industry. 

How much energy do data centers use?

The rapid growth of digital content, big data, e-commerce and Internet traffic more than offset energy-efficiency progress, making data centers one of the fastest-growing consumers of electricity in the U.S. economy, and a key driver in the construction of new power plants. If such data centers were a country, they would be the globe's 12th-largest consumer of electricity, ranking somewhere between Spain and Italy.

In 2013, U.S. data centers consumed an estimated 91 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity. That's the equivalent annual output of 34 large (500-megawatt) coal-fired power plants — enough electricity to power all the households in New York City, twice over, for a year. 

Meanwhile, our report projects data-center electricity consumption to increase to about 140 billion kilowatt-hours annually by 2020, requiring the equivalent annual output of 17 new power plants, costing American businesses $13 billion annually in electricity bills and emitting nearly 150 million metric tons of carbon pollution  annually.

Our last report, "Is Cloud Computing Always Greener?" found these smaller data centers have generally made much less progress than their hyper-scale cloud counterparts. Our latest analysis shows energy-efficiency advances are being hampered by persistent issues and market barriers, such as lack of metrics and transparency, and misalignment of incentives (i.e., the person who makes the decisions affecting efficiency is rarely the same person paying the energy bills).

Fixing the problem

While current technology can improve data center efficiency, we recommend systemic measures to create conditions for best-practices across the data center industry, including:

• Adoption of a simple, server-utilization metric. One of the biggest efficiency issues in data centers is underutilization of servers. Adoption of a simple metric, such as the average utilization of the server central processing units (CPUs), is a key step in resolving the energy-consumption issue. Measuring and reporting CPU utilization is a simple, affordable and adequate way of gauging data-center efficiency that could immediately drive greater IT energy savings. 

• Rewarding the right behaviors. Data center operators, service providers and multi-tenant customers should review their internal organizational structures and external contractual arrangements and ensure that incentives are aligned to provide financial rewards for efficiency best practices. Multi-tenant data center stakeholders — those served by a single facility where they lease space, power, Internet connectivity, etc. — should develop a "green lease" contract template to make it easier for all customers to establish contracts that incentivize, rather than stand in the way of, energy savings.

• Disclosure of data-center energy and carbon performance. Public disclosure is a powerful mechanism for demonstrating leadership and driving behavior change across an entire sector. In their corporate and social responsibility reports, industry leaders in data-center efficiency should voluntarily disclose operational performance metrics, such as fleetwide server utilization levels, and organizational performance (e.g., how they address split incentive issues internally and externally). 

If just half of the technical savings potential for data-center efficiency that we identify in our report is realized (taking into account market barriers), electricity consumption in U.S. data centers could be cut by as much as 40 percent. Today, that would represent a savings of 39 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually — equivalent to the annual electric consumption of nearly all the households in Michigan, improvements that would save U.S. businesses and their customers a whopping $3.8 billion a year.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

Having access to the Internet may affect what you find desirable in a partner, a new study suggests.

In the study, researchers visited El Salvador — a Central American country where 74 percent of the population lacks Web access — and found that, compared to people who had access to the Web, men with no Internet preferred fuller, more masculine facial features in women, and women favored more feminine facial characteristics in men.

The researchers questioned roughly 200 people ages 18 to 25 from two different towns in El Salvador — one with a high number of residents with Internet access, and one with a low number of residents with Internet access. Participants were asked which characteristics they found attractive in a face, focusing on masculinity and feminine features, and weight. The researchers used a combination of online surveys and in-person interviews in order to avoid the bias that might come with just using online surveys. (Past studies have relied on online questionnaires without taking into account that people who were able to take online surveys all came from a higher socioeconomic classes and, therefore, were not representative of a culture or population, said Carlota Batres, a psychology Ph.D. student at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and one of the researchers on the study.) [Internet Quiz: Do You Know the Web?]

The researchers found that more people with no Internet access reported they preferred more feminine men, masculine women and women with "higher adiposity" — or fat — than those with no Internet access.

They also found that people with no Internet access reported having fewer resources like running water — a finding that lends support to the theory that poorer environments can influence facial preference.

This "digital divide" could have two explanations, Batres said. Exposure to mainstream media — which often promotes beauty ideals of slimmer women and macho men — could affect what residents perceive as conventionally beautiful, the researchers said. Moreover, people who have Internet access are exposed to advertisements and websites that accentuate more masculine men and women with slimmer faces, Batres said.

But another explanation, which the researchers consider more plausible, is that poor environments with fewer resources — like running water and the Internet — make a person see other characteristics as a priority and, therefore, more desirable, Batres said.

"It's such a different reality to what [people in developed countries] live in, and it might be the harshness of this environment driving what they want in a partner," Batres said.  

One example of this would be weight. "Heavier women are better able to reproduce and survive in famine areas, where food is not easily available," Batres said. "So it makes evolutionary sense for men in harsh circumstances to be more attracted to heavier women who are able to reproduce."

Batres hypothesized that women without Internet access preferred more feminine faces in men because more masculine men are more likely to cheat, less likely to get married and more likely to get divorced. "So there is this idea in harsh environments, that you might want a really nice guy who will stick around and take care of your children," Batres said.

"Regardless of which interpretation is correct, the implications for us are that what we find attractive is influenced by outside factors, be it the media or our environment," Batres told Live Science. "Our surroundings dictate what we find most attractive in a partner."

The study was published July 9 in the journal PLOS ONE.

Follow Jillian Rose Lim @jillroselim & Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Original article on Live Science.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Yesterday the European Parliament had an historic vote on the issue of “net neutrality”, and became the largest bloc in the world to affirm this open internet principle.

This was part of a law on communications which also includes a ban on mobile roaming fees in the European Union.

So what is net neutrality?

Net neutrality is a principle posed for user access to the internet, which prevents internet service providers (ISPs) from discriminating between different types of internet traffic and from restricting (legal) content, sites or platforms.

This was the “default” position for the internet when it was first released to the public in the early 1990s, but due to changes in technology – particularly on-demand services available via broadband connections such as Netflix, the development of deep packet inspection (technology which allows examination of the content of information packets being sent over the internet) and the rise of content delivery networks – this is not the case anymore.

ISPs have the ability and incentive to prioritise certain traffic, speed up or slow down other traffic and possibly block some traffic outright.

The debate over net neutrality boils down to the extent to which ISPs can manage their own networks and what their customers can send and receive successfully, and raises concerns of competition, free expression and pluralism.

What did the European Parliament vote?

The Parliament adopted in its first reading the Regulation of the Single Telecoms Market and amended the text largely following proposals made by the Social Democrats, Greens, United Left and Liberals, backed by “a very strong citizen mobilisation”.

The text adopted by the Parliament creates two categories:

1. “internet access services” which are subject to a net neutrality principle
2. “specialised services with an enhanced quality of services” which are not subject to net neutrality.

The Parliament adopted an amendment which contains a strong definition of net neutrality. All internet traffic should be treated equally, without discrimination, restriction or interference and independent of its sender, receiver or type.

End-users will also have the right to access and distribute information and content and use applications, services and terminals of their choice.

While ISPs can limit data volumes or speeds for internet access, they are not allowed to block, slow down, degrade or discriminate against specific content, applications or services except in limited circumstances (such as temporary and exceptional network congestion).

The definition of “specialised services” was narrowed from the original proposal: they must be provided on “logically distinct capacity” and not be “marketed or usable as a substitute for internet access service”. This means that ISPs cannot suddenly decide that ABC iView, for instance, is no longer a normal internet service.

Also, ISPs can only offer these specialised services if they have enough network capacity to do so without interfering with the quality or availability of normal internet access services. They are also not to discriminate between “functionally equivalent services or applications”.

One important amendment that the Parliament did not adopt would have laid down “clear measures for implementation and enforcement” of net neutrality.

A win for European citizens

While, perhaps predictably, European ISPs are not happy about more regulation of their conduct, this is a win for normal European citizens, whether creators or consumers of internet content, applications and services.

It’s also a win for big content providers as well, as they can be reassured that ISPs cannot threaten to block their content reaching end-users if they do not pay the ISPs extra.

This also puts European citizens on a better footing than their counterparts in the US, where net neutrality rules were recently struck down and Netflix also caved into pressure to strike a deal with Comcast after consumers found access to Netflix was very slow.

In Australia, there are no net neutrality rules, so ISPs are free to manage traffic as they wish (subject to the competition and consumer protection rules).

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has been criticised, though, as not being a particularly pro-active regulator, so Australian consumers and businesses seem not to be strongly protected in this area.

Next steps

Net neutrality is not quite a done deal in Europe yet. The text adopted by the European Parliament also has to be agreed upon by the Council of the European Union.

Unfortunately, there are already suggestions that ISPs will be lobbying the Council fiercely to get a watered-down version of net neutrality passed in the end.

Angela Daly is a member of the United Nations' Internet Governance Forum Dynamic Coalition on Net Neutrality.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Humans, as a species, are around 200,000 years old. Compared to the age of the universe we’re clearly infants but compared to the internet, we’re pretty old and compared to social media, which is still in its infancy, we’re positively ancient.

We’re definitely quite experienced when it comes to human interactions, expressions and relations and have even come up with a field of study to describe, analyse and account for this experience in the form of the humanities. In the information age, humanities is turning into a whole new beast. It’s time to stop defending the field as though it needs our help and show the world that it really can’t live without us.

The box is open

Humanities is the study of the human condition and the way we interact with nature, technology, health, art, politics, religion, money and mystery. The internet is, in effect, the greatest cultural treasure chest ever created and is allowing us to expand our horizons like never before. It’s a constantly updated repository of the very human interactions and expressions we have always sought to explore in the humanities and, for better or worse, they are all stored on file. We can rifle through them using search engines, network analyzers and crowd opinion aggregators.

Leopold von Ranke, a German historian and the pioneer of modern source-based history, could not have asked for better conditions for conducting studies on the human condition. But von Ranke, who sought objectivity in historiography, would probably also be apprehensive about the ease with which information can be obtained these days. Not all information is good information. It can, if not properly acquired, formatted, handled and administered, derail reason and rationality and even threaten democracy.

Years after the age of von Ranke, Mitchell Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation, one of the most successful companies back in the early days of personal computers, warned of the dangers of getting information in abundance and using it uncritically when he said that “getting information off the internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.”

And that might be even more true when it comes to social media. Market strategist Jeffrey Kleintop, recently argued that while you might be able to get news first on Twitter, it might not be the full story and you should often wait for established news sources or do your own legwork before jumping to conclusions.

This legwork that Kleintop is referring to is essentially the search for objectivity that von Ranke prized so highly. It’s about source-based information rather than hearsay, reflective criticism, multiple source triangulation and many of the other methods of scientific inquiry taught in the humanities today.

Thus the common practices of the humanities – securing qualified deliberation, decision and action – are already in use out there as we face up to every day tasks, from economic decisions to which school to choose for our children.

Humanities on the defensive

There is a a pervasive narrative about the decline of the humanities. We’re told that jobs are scarce for graduates and the Daily Beast even declared recently that history, philosophy and English are some of the most useless majors.

Those who believe in the value of the humanities often point to successful business stories, innovators and luminaries with a background in these “useless” fields to back up their own arguments in this debate. They also point out that studying the humanities equips graduates with cross cultural understanding in a global world and analytical skills.

But these are defensive tactics that we might no longer really need. It might instead be more useful to offensively set new standards for the humanities in the information age. There is new territory here to conquer, analyse and understand and the humanities could and should be at the vanguard.

Look at the trend for outsourcing human interaction and communication to technology. BroApp, for example, is an automated messaging service, or “relationship wingman”, that sends romantic messages to your significant other so you don’t have to. What does that mean for the future of the human condition? And what about “social physics”? This new theory of social interaction spills over into “organizational management, urban planning, and digital privacy” among other things.

Then there are the bubbles in which we increasingly live. How do they affect our experience of the world and our relationships with others?

The very nature of transparency, security, democracy, knowledge and power is changing more rapidly than ever and the humanities shouldn’t just be contributing to the debate, it should be leading it.

Vincent F Hendricks does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Most people would agree with the principle that good foundations are essential to any structure that is intended to last. But what if when you started building, you didn’t envisage how large, complex or essential your structure would become? As we celebrate 25 years of the world wide web, the extraordinarily accurate science of hindsight brings to light just such a situation.

We have all become dependent on a network that was never intended to be as large or secure as it is now required to be. The big question is, do we go back and start again or do we simply accept history and ensure that our structure somehow compensates for its weaknesses?

Shaky foundations

To decide, we have to distinguish between two quite distinct entities: the internet, and the world wide web, which sits on top of it. It is the internet, in the form of its underlying network protocol known as IPv4, that provides the weak link being broken by some of the latest high profile cyber attacks.

When the first few computer networks were connected, it was to share resources. Spreading the load between machines meant that those with spare capacity could help out those that needed more.

By the time Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN came to think about networking, academics around the world were already using precursors of the internet to share data, from JANET, which still thrives today, to the stranger, more esoteric applications running on the internet such as the long forgotten GOPHER.

The brilliance of what Berners-Lee did was to come up with an extensible mark-up language known as Hypertext Mark-up Language, or HTML. This allowed us all to write pages that could be universally accessed. Crucially, HTML was made freely available so people started writing browsers that would enable you to read HTML based web pages.

And that, with the benefit of hindsight, was where the problem inherent in the internet was compounded. Neither IPv4 nor HTML were built with security in mind. The entire purpose of the web was to allow academics and other researchers to freely share their work. Indeed, the more people that accessed it and read your work the happier you would be.

It never entered anyone’s head that we might wish to restrict access or that we might one day pay for things online or use it to communicate our most intimate thoughts. The web was a victim of its own success. HTML unlocked the potential of connecting people, and since humans just love to share and chat, we all got hooked.

By the mid-1990s, businesses finally found the web and that’s when the floodgates opened. It was when money became involved that people really began to realise that security was an issue. Secure HTML emerged alongside other secure extensions to the original protocols which made it possible for us to interact over a public network in a secure manner.

Enter the baddies

For a while, these extra layers of security added on top of the web seemed to work well but the shaky foundations on which they were built soon began to cause problems.

As more and more commerce went on over the web, the criminally minded, who should never be underestimated for their ingenuity, began to look at how they could subvert the system. And as criminals always do, they went straight for the weakest link. In this case, that was the basic technology underpinning the web.

They began to impersonate users sometimes using IP “spoofing” to trick others into giving up information, and to mount distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. Initially these DDOS attacks were simplistic. Hacktivists would harness an army of supporters to all send simultaneous requests for the same web page at the same time. The site would be unable to cope with the number of requests and would become unavailable to valid users.

But then criminals, who had always had an eye on those ageing underlying technologies, realised that because IPv4 allowed you to spoof your address, you could ask a question but have the answer sent to someone else. Worse still, they realised that the domain name server (DNS) – the essential component that enables web addresses to be converted to internet addresses, meaning data can actually be routed around networks – could be used to amplify the data being directed at a victim.

Since using DNS in DDOS attacks, the internet’s other older protocols have been co-opted to mount similar DDOS attacks employing ever greater volumes of data, and increasingly by people with criminal intent rather than hacktivists. All of this is possible because of the technological foundations upon which the Web is built.

The next 25 years

There are those who suggest we should effectively start again but this is probably not practical. The web doesn’t run on some ethereal cloud but on real physical networks which have taken considerable investment to produce.

Others suggest that IPv4 should be abandoned and we should move onto the IPv6 – the most recent version of the internet protocol, which has the potential to be more secure because it has the potential to prevent spoofing of IP addresses and to guarantee the sender is who they cliam to be. IPv6 has added advantages such as the fact that IPv4 long since exhausted its addresses whereas IPv6 has no such limitation – yet another indication of how people drastically underestimated how much would eventually be attached to the web and would thus require an address. Despite this, network providers seem in no hurry to replace IPv4 as the de facto standard.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. The days of the web are not necessarily numbered. It has a way of evolving, almost organically, as threats emerge. We have solutions to many of the problems that threaten our safety online, particularly those that relate to spoofing IP addresses, and miusing tyhe older protocols, and will probably continue to produce more.

The irony is that in such a hyper-connected world we struggle to get the word out about these solutions. People can access the information they need to stay safe online but are not doing so. It is almost as if there is so much communication that important messages are being lost in what is perceived as background noise.

Alan Woodward does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

In the future, the Internet will be like electricity coursing through our everyday lives — more ubiquitous but also more invisible.

At least, that's the vision many experts gave to researchers in a recent survey by the Pew Research Center Internet Project. The survey, done on the 25th anniversary of the creation of the World Wide Web, asked 1,867 experts in privacy, technology and cybersecurity what the future of the Internet will look like in 2025.

Most experts agree the Internet will become seamlessly integrated into the background of day-to-day life and that wearable technologies will become the norm.  But many experts also see danger looming on the horizon. Some worry the digital divide will worsen inequality. Others believe privacy will become a luxury of the rich, and that governments and corporations will strengthen their use of surveillance and social control. [Super-Intelligent Machines: 7 Robotic Futures]

More consensus

The Pew Research Center conducts a survey on the future of the Internet every two years, although unlike this survey, those typically asked more directed, less open-ended questions. Compared with earlier surveys, results from the most recent one suggest much more widespread consensus on what the future will look like.

"It feels like there's even more certainty in the expert community about the direction of technology change," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center's Internet Project. "Almost everybody was operating under a cluster of similar assumptions about more artificial intelligence, more growth in the Internet of Things, more wearable devices."

At the same time, people see a potential dark side more clearly than they did in the past, Rainie said.

"There's this undercurrent in lots of these answers that things could go bad," Rainie told Live Science.

Seamless integration

Most experts agreed smart sensors, massive data centers and other innovations will integrate the Internet so thoroughly into life that it will become almost as routine as breathing, as one anonymous respondent told the surveyors.

"The Internet will shift from the place we find cat videos to a background capability that will be a seamless part of how we live our everyday lives," Joe Touch, director of the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute Postel Center, told the surveyors. "We won't think about going online or looking on the Internet for something — we'll just be online, and just look."

At the same time, the hyper-connectivity could help reduce global ignorance. Some even predicted the demise of state-based money systems in favor of a universal or digital currencies such as Bitcoin.

The experts also believed that wearable technologies, like Google Glass, will become part of daily life, with the strongest impact in monitoring and improving health, but also in other arenas.

"This will change a lot of social practices, such as dating, job interviewing and professional networking, and gaming, as well as policing and espionage," Daren C. Brabham, a journalist at the University of Southern California, predicted.

Inequality and incivility

On the other hand, the Internet-fueled future could also worsen inequality, experts predict.

"Significant numbers of people will become structurally unemployed because they were unwilling to keep up their skills with the changing technology or unwilling to accept the changing technology," Pietro Ciminelli, director of finance for the Boards of Cooperative Educational Services, predicted.

The elite may create a meta-community through the Internet and become even more detached from their local, less-connected neighbors.

Such divides could exacerbate disparities between rich and poor and between wealthy and developing nations, one anonymous researcher predicted.

The rise of the Internet could also fuel more cyberstalking, pornography, bullying groupthink and mob-behavior, researchers forecasted.

Government control

As more people become enmeshed in this ubiquitous Internet-fueled world, governments, hackers and corporations will become more skilled at espionage, censorship of free speech, surveillance and social control, several experts believe.

"It is likely that more people will be disadvantaged (arrested, compromised, blackmailed) due to the authorized and unauthorized use of monitored activity data," said Alan Clark, CEO of a software technology company, and active participant in Internet standards development.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter and Google+. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

About a quarter of Americans have used websites that rate physicians, and although some people said the sites helped them pick a doctor, others said they distrust the ratings, according to a new study.

Researchers surveyed more than 2,000 U.S. adults in 2012 about their knowledge and use of online physician ratings sites. The survey did not mention any sites specifically, but popular ones include healthgrades.com, ratemds.com and vitals.com.

About 65 percent of respondents said they were aware that such ratings sites existed. In contrast, about 87 percent said they were aware of online ratings for cars, and 81 percent said they were aware of online ratings for restaurants.

Overall, 23 percent of respondents said they'd used such ratings sites in the past year. Of those who did use the sites, 35 percent said they'd picked a doctor based on good ratings, and 37 percent said they'd avoided certain doctors because of bad ratings. [7 Medical Myths Even Doctors Believe]

Of those who did not use online physician ratings, 43 percent said they did not trust the information.

Nineteen percent of participants considered physician's ratings on websites to be "very important" when selecting a primary care doctor, compared with 46 percent who they considered a doctor's years of experience to be very important, and 89 percent who said they considered whether a doctor accepts their health insurance to be very important.

"Clearly some people don't trust the sites. But at the same time, we found a substantial percentage who had not only visited the sites but used them to make decisions," said study researcher Dr. David Hanauer, an associate professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Michigan Medical School.

"Consumers are used to looking up ratings, so it is not surprising that they would turn to this familiar online medium to also seek physician ratings," Hanauer said.

Still, there's been little research into whether the information on these sites is valid, and at least one study found that doctors sometimes write the ratings themselves.

"My personal opinion is that it is difficult to trust the sites partly because of a lack of transparency about who is leaving the ratings," Hanauer told Live Science. "It's a difficult problem to solve because some people might not want to leave ratings or comments if their identity were disclosed, but at the same time, anonymous feedback leaves sites open to misuse and abuse. Even if the ratings are all true, the small number of ratings for many physicians raises questions about how representative they are."

A better way to provide online physician reviews to the public may be needed, despite the fact that doctors are generally resistant to the idea, Hanauer said.

"The use of the sites does not seem to be decreasing, and therefore it might be time to come up with better approaches to provide what the public is looking for in a more open, transparent and trustworthy manner," Hanauer said.

The researchers noted that the new study analyzed a sample of participants that was representative of the United States, but because the survey was Internet-based, the respondents may have been more Web-savvy than the average health care consumer.

The study is published in the Feb. 19 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Follow Rachael Rettner @RachaelRettner. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Last October, scientists in California sequenced the DNA for the “type H” botulinum toxin. One gram of this toxin would be sufficient to kill half a billion people, making it the deadliest substance yet discovered – with no antidote. The DNA sequence was not placed on public databases, marking the first time genetic code has been withheld from the public over security concerns.

As biological discoveries accelerate, we may need to censor even more genetic data. The line between digital data and our physical world is not as clear cut as it once was, with the advent of 3D printing technologies and DNA synthesisers. Many people are familiar with the first printed gun, cited heavily by the media as a dangerous development. But many would probably be surprised to learn that analogous technology is used to print pathogens. For example, the polio virus was successfully recreated in 2002, and the 1918 flu virus was resurrected by a DNA synthesiser in 2005.

Pandora’s box 2.0

The machines that make this resurrection possible serve many legitimate research purposes. Instead of painstakingly manipulating DNA in a local lab, scientists can get made-to-order sequences from a variety of DNA synthesis companies from around the world. Alternatively, if they have some extra cash and desk space, they could get one of the machines right here on Ebay. Access to such a machine gives scientists a critical edge in many areas of genomics research.

But the increasing accessibility to this technology raises concerns about the “dual-use” nature of it as an unprecedented weapon. President Obama was worried enough to commission a report on the safety of synthetic biology, while volunteers have created software to detect malicious DNA sequences before an unsuspecting company prints them out.

Is ignorance bliss?

These are important first steps to more security, but they don’t take us far enough. Part of the reason is due to something we call an “information hazard.”

For the first time in human history, knowledge that is discovered has a reasonable chance of never being forgotten. And while this would normally be a great thing, it also creates a ratchet effect with dangerous information – once a bit of malicious code is online, the whole world can dissect and modify it.

We saw this with the infamous Stuxnet virus which appeared in 2010 – an elegantly created computer virus designed to hack Iranian nuclear labs and manipulate centrifuges to the point of breaking them. While this may have been a strategic boon for Israel and the United States, we now must contend with the availability of Stuxnet’s source code, which was later posted to Github. The genius mechanisms the virus used to bypass security systems are now available to the world for delivery of alternative cyber payloads.

If a similar dynamic emerged with biological code rather than computer code, the results could be catastrophic. About a century ago, 50m people died due to a particularly lethal strain of flu, the genome of which is available online. And it is estimated that if the same virus were to be released today, the initial death toll could top 80m. Any knowledge or technology that has the capability for such destruction ought to be handled with the same caution we give to nuclear secrets, even if it means slowing the advances in medical biotechnology.

International agreements

In 2004, George Church from Harvard Medical School argued in favour of a number of US regulations in his “Synthetic Biohazard Non-Proliferation Proposal.” First and foremost, he proposed that the DNA synthesis machines should be tracked and only available to licensed companies, nonprofits, or government entities. These licensed bodies should in turn be subject to strict regulations and frequent safety testing. But the stability of Church’s proposal is compromised from the difficulties of international enforcement – should any country reject these regulations, the danger still persists.

The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, which originally codified an international agreement against the development of biological weapons, should be revamped to be fully effective. Only a multilateral approach can fully solve the regulation problem associated with synthetic biology, since viruses can spread across international borders as quickly as the airplanes carrying them.

We also need to give some serious thought to how openly we want to develop biotechnology. As Nick Bostrom, founder of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, once said:

In the case of synthetic pathogens, our probing could indeed make things much worse if we’re not careful.

Andrew Snyder-Beattie is an Academic Project Manager at the Future of Humanity Institute. FHI's research includes analysing the extreme tail risks of technological development.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on LiveScience.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

How many of your cherished memories, and even important work documents, only exist online? Taken together, photo and video sharing sites, blogging and microblogging sites, as well as social media, have formed an online space that has changed the way people share information. But how much of the work we do, or the memories we have captured, will still be there in a few years?

Over the last quarter of a century, industry and academia alike have slowly come to the realisation that digital data is actually extremely fragile. Data corruption, hardware and software obsolescence and loss of metadata can easily make data inaccessible.

It would be complacent to suggest that the problems of digital preservation have been resolved, but at least the problem is now well recognised and factored in to the policies of major research funders and serious commercial enterprises.

Many of us got used to having our data under our own control. We worked in an era where digital infrastructure was under the direct control of the data generating organisations or individuals. This was a time when the work was being done on a university or business machine, using their networks, repositories and data stores.

The world no longer works this way. In the profoundly interconnected world of social media, cloud computing and the World Wide Web, data are not simply presented for passive consumption in the forms and structures that they have been for hundreds of years.

Paths to discovery, sharing, storage, reuse, enhancement and recombination have been hugely accelerated and simplified. This has occurred to such an extent that ways of communicating with friends, family and colleagues, undreamed of at the turn of the millennium, are now commonplace.

The impact of social media has changed the traditional network of relationships between people, their employers, their business and personal data. These changing relationships both reflect and effect broader social changes as digital technologies have evolved from being facilitators of social practice to become the dominant engine of change in that practice.

So what about the safety and long term availability of your data in this new world, the holiday photos, messages from loved ones or other important documents?

For the vast majority of everyday interaction via social media and other on-line tools, longevity is simply not an issue. In fact, special consideration needs to be given to the desirability of archiving any material from social media at all. The social media sphere is often considered an open and neutral space in which transient engagement takes place. Users may be actively reacting against traditional modes of discourse, and invoking the right to be forgotten.

However, if we assume that we do want to keep some of our data, the world of commercial social media, cloud and distributed computing brings a new set of vulnerabilities. Firstly, users are often not directly in control of their content. Their contract with the platform is unlikely to guarantee perpetual access and may even make claims on rights or ownership.

Data loss still occurs in a commercial context. For example, the catastrophic failure of the Ma.gnolia social bookmarking site shook many people’s faith in web-based storage.

Even Flickr has accidentally deleted users' images. In addition, access to a service can be unexpectedly curtailed, for example, the legal injunction over piracy at Megaupload resulted in large numbers of blameless users losing access to their data.

Other vulnerabilities include the introduction of charging for a previously free service, the introduction of new and unwelcome functionality, such as intrusive registration processes, advertising, or information-sharing regimes.

A service might be sold or blocked (or both; for example, Twapperkeeper). It may change its conditions of use (Facebook and Google). It may be disappear after being declared obsolete or not commercially viable (Geocities, Google Buzz). Or the service may simply go out of business (SixDegrees.com).

The issue of commercial viability raises a further complication. Social media platforms, while often “free”, almost universally require personal registration. The information gathered has real value; the registration is, in fact, a transaction even if there is no charge levied.

Personal information about users and the contacts and on-line behaviour of users within a social media environment is well recognised as having commercial value, even in an anonymous form. Through their use in advertising, these data are in fact one of the main planks in the business model of many ostensibly free sites.

So there are some senses in which the commercial social media sphere does actually constitute a semi-permanent record of your life and activities. Just not in the way you might have thought and one where the data is almost entirely out with your control.

In short, if you want to keep a digital artefact for a long time, be it a digital keepsake or a vital document, then it is up to you to ensure its safety. No one else is likely to. Those of us who might not feel interested in the digital artefacts of our own on-line life story just yet, should at least be aware that the people who own the media through which it is lived are very interested indeed.

Stuart Jeffrey does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on LiveScience.

There's Wi-Fi on the International Space Station, so why not at the bottom of the ocean? The problem: Radio waves, which carry wireless signals, are sluggish in water.

Now researchers from the University at Buffalo have a solution, and it's about to make the ocean a noisy place. Their wireless Internet prototype relies on sound waves.

The bulky underwater modems emit high-pitched chirps that can travel as far as about 0.6 miles (1 kilometer). The University at Buffalo team recently tested the system in Lake Erie, dropping two 40-pound (18 kilograms) sensors into the water and listening for chirps. The modems are as slow as dial-up phone systems from 30 years ago. However, the researchers hope one day a speedier wireless network could improve tsunami warning systems or help monitor oceans and climate.

The U.S. tsunami warning system currently relies on ocean-bottom sensors that send acoustic signals to surface buoys. The buoys transmit radio signals to a satellite, which alerts computers on land.

A seafloor wireless network could eliminate some of these communication steps, the researchers claim.

"A submerged wireless network will give us an unprecedented ability to collect and analyze data from our oceans in real-time," Tommaso Melodia, an electrical engineer at the University at Buffalo, said in a statement.

The team will present their latest results at the International Conference on Underwater Networks and Systems in Taiwan in November.

Email Becky Oskin or follow her @beckyoskin. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.

Jeff Nesbit was the director of public affairs for two prominent federal science agencies. This article was adapted from one that first appeared in U.S. News & World Report. Nesbit contributed the article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Before the traditional news, magazine and book publishing industries finally wither away and die in the post-print digital era, I hope they pay attention to Eric Bina. More importantly, I hope they find someone like him to lead them from the wilderness before it's too late.

Somehow, some way, the traditional industries built around the printed word need to find a way to make themselves viable (and profitable) in the world of the Internet — not necessarily the world of mobile devices, but the Internet itself where nearly anything is possible creatively.

For some unexplained reason, for instance, the book-publishing industry has bypassed the World Wide Web and is now competing for its life on mobile devices that mostly display text. The traditional news and magazine industries aren't far behind in this race to the bottom.

While it's obvious that books are going to be read on digital platforms — and that printed versions of them are dying as fast as music CDs once did — what isn't so obvious is why this transformation has to take place solely on mobile devices that mostly display text.

Movies and television content are, by themselves, visually appealing, so it's natural for them to migrate quickly to mobile devices — which is precisely what's happening. But industries built around the written word have to work much harder to be dynamic and relevant on a mobile platform.

Mobile devices, for now, have limited capacity to take advantage of the huge, awesome playground known as the World Wide Web. So if you are part of a traditional print industry like book publishing, newspapers or magazines, wouldn't you rather compete in a world where anything is possible artistically — and where highly creative people will fight to help your industries survive and prosper?

This is where guys like Eric Bina can help. For those who don't know — and most people don't — Bina actually wrote the initial HTML-based software code integrating cool pictures and graphics with text for the first iteration of the remarkable web browser Mosaic, a platform that exploded the popularity of the nascent World Wide Web just 20 years ago.

His partner in the effort at the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Marc Andreessen, became a billionaire because of those early efforts. Andreessen is credited as the co-author of Mosaic — the forerunner of all of the modern web browsers. He later went on to found Netscape, and now sits on the boards of Facebook, eBay and HP, among others.

But it was Bina who took a prototype of Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web concept and, in a couple of days, sketched out the revolutionary notion of dynamically integrating pictures and graphics with boring text in a visually appealing browser experience. Their beta versions of Mosaic changed everything for the Web, and popularized it.

I talked to Bina — one of the few interviews he's done about the pioneering days of the Internet and how they spelled doom in rapid fashion for industries built around the printed word — for a special report on the birth of the Internet when I was at the National Science Foundation. His discovery process is as relevant today — especially for the book publishing, newspaper and magazine industries — as it was 20 years ago.

The journey Andreessen and Bina travelled — which helped change the way billions of people process information today — began simply enough. Andreessen showed Bina something he'd gotten from Berners-Lee — a prototype of a browser called Midas, and wondered out loud what a future web could look like.

"Marc is very good at getting other people excited about something he's excited about," Bina said. "So I went off and threw something together in a quick demo to show him in a couple of days. And that's how the whole very first version of Mosaic came out. It all moved very fast, and it was a lot of fun. We didn't really think at the time that we were doing anything earth-shaking."

From there, Bina and Andreessen moved quickly to launch Mosaic to a world trapped in text. They taught other programmers how to dynamically create simple web pages that were visually appealing and displayed pictures and graphics integrated with text, which made the Web much more accessible to the public.

"It was fun for us to work on and, at the same time, it was going to be a really useful tool." Bina said. Computer scientists knew what the Internet was — but hardly anyone else did. "We were all really conversant with the Internet at that time — which many people didn't seem to know existed. Back before the Web, there was an Internet."

All of that changed almost overnight once the Internet became accessible to the public.

"Everything we have now through the Web, most of it existed back then through the Internet. You had to go through much more arcane methods to use it. We knew we were going to make all of that easier," Bina said. "And Marc, in particular, felt that if we made all of that easier, there would be a big change."

The real magic was moving beyond simple, boring text, Bina said. "I found out early on that, once we started adding images — there wasn't a lot out there that [combined] the images and text in the way that it had been done in paper media for years." The effort made web browsers popular for the public.

Interestingly, both Bina and Berners-Lee were initially opposed to moving beyond boring text to make web browsers exciting and easy for people to view. "Marc said that Tim was against it because…people were going to use it to display porn. And, of course, he was right," Bina said. "But, by that point, it was obvious that everyone loved mixing pictures with text."

Bina and Andreessen also weren't worried about failure. They knew they were onto something, and they raced as fast as they could to explore this brave, new world.

"We were one of the first to really pull it off well, and we're paying the penalty for it to this day — the idea of having your users be your beta testers," Bina said. "It used to be you released software when it worked. And unfortunately, we began the process of releasing software before it worked…we were putting new versions up on the website every day or two."

But what Bina really learned from those hectic days that changed everything almost overnight in the world of the printed word is something that every book publisher, magazine editor and newspaper executive should take to heart.

"It seems to me, from my perspective, that it's often just taking something — like we did — that already exists that they might even be comfortable and familiar with [and] making it easy enough…that everyone can use it without thinking about it, without having to work hard at it," Bina said.

"We made web pages really easy to create with early HTML — I mean, children could do it. We made the web browser really easy to use," he added. "So I think the idea is…to look at something that you think a lot of people are going to want to do — that we do now that's difficult — and make it easy."

There are a few experiments under way, like this eBook. The New York Times has experimented with creative web design around specific text-based projects. Google has, as well, with its Chrome Experiments site that encourages creative things with text and design elements. And the Mozilla Foundation has created an open-source operating system (Firefox OS) to build the web as the actual platform for mobile devices, which could help fuse design elements for coders for both web and mobile platforms.

But it may not come in time — for the Web or for industries built around the printed word. "The Web is in danger of becoming a second-class platform," a Harvard-educated-designer-turned-lawyer, Matthew Butterick, said recently at the TYPO conference. Why? Because creative designers are migrating to mobile platforms — even as they abandoned printed word platforms for the Web just 20 years ago.

It doesn't have to be this way, however. "I really think that reinventing the book is a hugely important project. And we're nowhere with it," Butterick said. "Books on the Web should be the best books we've ever had. I think if every author could make…money from it, then every author would be publishing on the Web. But they can't. So they don't. We're not there yet."

There's still time for the book, newspaper and magazine industries. But their future may still be right in front of them — on the World Wide Web where the seeds of their destruction were first sown not so very long ago. But, as Bina said, learning from his Mosaic web-browser creation, it might involve taking something that people want and making it easy, fun and visually appealing for them.

Interestingly, Bina said, neither he nor Andreessen had an inkling of the revolution they were starting that would wreak havoc for industries built around the printed word.

"We were sitting [at a coffee shop] talking about how this had really taken off," he said. "And one of us — I don't know if it was Marc or me — commented that, you know, we might actually get to be a footnote in a book someday, which we were very excited about at the time."

A version of this column appeared as "Can Industries Built Around the Printed Word Stage a Comeback?" in U.S. News & World Report. His most recent Op-Ed was "Ebola Treatment May Be On the Horizon" The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.

A Norwegian project aims to achieve the ambitious goal of bringing broadband to the Arctic.

A broadband network that could transmit large amounts of data over many channels would benefit the oil and gas industries, search-and-rescue operations and shipping traffic communications, among other things. The Norwegian Space Center Telenor and the Scandinavian company MARINTEK are proposing such a project to link up the far north.

Representatives from the space center and company met recently with potential Arctic broadband users to launch the project "ASK" (short for Arctic Satellite Communications, in Norwegian).

"The systems we operate with today work relatively well in latitudes up to 75 degrees North," Beate Kvamstad, a project manager and researcher at MARINTEK, said in a statement. "Farther north, we lack systems which are both stable and which can handle large volumes of data," Kvamstad said. [Satellites Gallery: Science from Above]

The Arctic broadband project would launch two new satellites that orbit over Earth's polar regions, Kvamstad told LiveScience. "The benefit of using such satellite orbits is they will give coverage in Arctic areas for longer times of the day," Kvamstad said. Telenor Satellite Broadcasting will launch a new satellite devoted completely to maritime activities, called THOR 7, in summer 2014.

Cost estimates for connecting up the Arctic range from $340 million to more than $500 million (2 billion to 3 billion Norwegian kroner). The estimates are based on conservative calculations that exclude more costly features, said Hege Lunde, Arctic broadband project manager for Telenor Satellite Broadcasting.

The broadband project is still in its early development phase, where system requirements are being evaluated. The next phase will entail developing system specifications, followed by finding potential suppliers for the project's infrastructure. These efforts will determine whether or not the project is feasible, but the proposed system could be available between 2018 and 2020, Kvamstad said.

Current technology

Right now, communication in the Arctic relies on radio and satellite systems, but the current systems have their limits. Radio systems are widely used for communicating at sea, but these often operate over short distances or lack sufficient digital capacity. Digital frequencies, mobile phones and other wireless systems have the capacity, but they are limited to being within line of sight of base stations on shore.

Geostationary satellites are the most widely used communication system at sea. However, these satellites orbit above the equator, so their coverage doesn't extend as far north as the Arctic. The theoretical limit for coverage is 81.3 degrees north, but the signals become unstable at latitudes as low as 70 degrees north.

Many things can interfere with satellite service. Rain and snow in the atmosphere can attenuate (weaken) or depolarize signals, especially in the high-frequency range. The farther the signal must travel through the atmosphere — as with very northern latitudes — the greater the signal attenuation. At lower frequencies, signal attenuation is caused by spatial variations in the ionosphere, a region of the upper atmosphere that is ionized by solar radiation.

Signals can be deflected by the sea and coastal land. Sea spray and snow can cover receiver/transmitter antennas with ice, and the movement of large ships can send the antennas off track. In addition, the lack of stations on Earth can cause delays in information transmission.

Broadband connectivity in the Arctic would avoid some of these problems, by providing additional satellite coverage over the Earth's poles.

Follow Tanya Lewis on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.