Internet IT and Internet Tech

Internet IT and Internet Tech

The internet offers a huge wealth of information both good and bad, unfortunately the very nature of the internet makes policing this new domain practically impossible. The internet began as a small university network in the United States and has blossomed into a vast telecommunications network spanning the globe. Today the internet is ruled by no governing body and it is an open society for ideas to be developed and shared in. Unfortunately every society has its seedy underside and the internet is no exception. To fully understand the many layers to this problem, an understanding of net history is required. Some thirty years ago the RAND corporation, Americas first and foremost Cold War think-tank faced a strange strategic problem. The cold war had spawned technologies that allowed countries with nuclear capability to target multiple cities with one missile fired from the other side of the world. Post-nuclear America would need a command and control network, linked from city to city, state to state and base to base. No matter how thoroughly that network was armored or protected, its switches and wiring would always be vulnerable to the impact of atomic bombs. A nuclear bombardment would reduce any network to tatters. Any central authority would be an obvious and immediate target for enemy missiles. The center of a network would be the first place to go. So RAND mulled over this puzzle in deep military secrecy and arrived at their solution. In 1964 their proposed ideas became public. Their network would have no central authority, and it would be designed from the beginning to operate while in tatters. All the nodes in the network would be equal in status to all other nodes, each node having its own authority to originate, pass and receive messages. The messages themselves would be divided into packets, each packet separately addressed. Each packet would begin at some specified source node and end at some other specified destination node. The particular route that the packet took would be unimportant, only the final results counted. Each packet would be tossed around like a hot potato from node to node, more or less in the direction of its destination, until it ended up in the proper place. If big chunks of the network were blown away, which wouldn't matter, the packets would still stay airborne, moving across the field by whatever nodes happened to survive. This system was efficient in any means (especially when compared to the phone system), but it was extremely tough. In the 1960's this concept was thrown around by RAND, MIT and UCLA. In 1969 the first such node was installed in UCLA. By December of 69, there were four nodes on the network, which was called ARPANET, after its Pentagon sponsor. The nodes of the network were high-speed supercomputers. (supercomputers at the time, desktop machines now) Thanks to APRANET scientists and researchers could share one another's computer facilities over long-distances. By the second year of its operation however, APRANET's users had warped the high cost, computer sharing network into a dedicated, high-speed, federally subsidized electronic post office. The main bulk of traffic on ARPANET was not long-distance computing, it was news and personal messages. The incredibly expensive network using the fastest computers on the planet was a message base for gossip and schmooze. Throughout the 70s this very fact made the network grow, its software allowed many different types of computers to become part of the network. Since the network was decentralized it was difficult to stop people from barging in and linking up. In fact nobody wanted to stop them from joining up and this branching complex of networks came to be known as the internet. In 1984 the National Science Foundation got into the act, and the new NSFNET set a blistering pace for technical advancement, linking newer, faster, shinier supercomputers through thicker, faster links. ARPANET formally expired in 1989, a victim of its own success, but its users scarcely noticed as ARPANET's functions not only continued but improved. In 1971 only four nodes existed, today tens of thousands of nodes make up the network and 35 million of users make up the internet community. The internet is and institution that resists institutionalization. The internet community, belonging to everyone yet no-one, resembles our own community in many ways, and is susceptible to many of the same pressures. Business people want the internet put on sounder financial footing. Government people want the Internet more fully regulated. Academics want it dedicated exclusively to scholarly research. Military people want it spyproof and secure. All these sources of conflict remain in a stumbling balance and so far the internet remains in a thrivingly anarchical condition. This however is a mixed blessing. Today people pay ISP's or Internet Service Providers for internet access. ISP's usually have fast computers with dedicated connections to the internet. ISP's now more than ever are becoming the backbone of the internet. The average netcitizen uses their computer to call and ISP, and the netcitizens computer temporarily becomes a part of the internet. The user is free to browse or transfer information with others. Most ISP's even allow their users to set up permanent homepages on the ISP's computer for the whole internet community to view. This is where many ethical and moral questions arise regarding the internet. Not every user wants his homepage to deal with the spin rates of atoms or the airspeed of South African swallows. Some users wish to display "objectionable" material on their homepages. This may have started out as a prank to some, but now net- porn is an offshoot industry on the information superhighway. Companies like Playboy and Hustler run their own servers that are permanent parts of the internet, and on their pages they charge user to view Playboy and Hustler type material. What makes matters worse is evolution of the internet newsgroup system. USENET in its infancy was ARPANET's news and message component. Today USENET is a huge database with thousands of newsgroups that all internet users have access to. Millions use groups like alt. comp. discussion. games to share ideas, and millions use groups like alt. binaries. pictures. erotica. teen to share ideas and pictures that are less family oriented. Average users can also set up homepages on ISP's. In fact, most packages ISP's offer usually include space for your own homepage. They are easy to create and the ISP's maintain them for free so the entire online community can see what you have to say. Unfortunately not everyone wants to set up homepages dealing with the spin rates of atoms or the airspeeds of South American swallows. Most ISP's are more than willing to set up homepages dealing with the most gratuitous of acts aimed at very specialized audiences. This is where the problem of net censorship arises. It is true that there is a wealth of pornography and other indecent material online for all to see. All that a person has to do is to type in an "indecent" word and modern search engines will point to sites where the word crops up. Typing in a popular for letter expletive into two of the most popular search engines yielded 17224 hits for Lycos and 40000 for AltaVista, the worlds biggest search engine. However both of these engines have over 60 million cataloged web pages. Although this material makes up less that 1% of all messages on USENET or pages on the world-wide-web, that is still a staggering number as there are millions of messages and web-pages on the internet. Most of this material is extremely hard to access as advanced knowledge of computers is required, however it is the youth in most families that know how to use the computer best. Problems arise when minors left alone on the computer are free to browse some of the most graphic pictures ever taken, or to learn the easy way to make a pipe bomb from house-hold ingredients. The media has a tendency to magnify certain aspects of reality while completely forgetting about others. The mass media so far has not been too kind to the internet. Mainly because television and print magazines view it as a long-term threat encroaching in on their market. The July 3 1995 article of Time magazine featured a cover story labeled "CYBERPORN". Spanning eight pages the article tries to expose the "red light district" of the information superhighway. It was the publishing of this article in a high- profile magazine that sparked the whole cyberporn debate. When Time published a cover story on Internet pornography a certain amount of controversy was to be expected. Computer porn, after all, is a subject that stirs strong passions. So does the question of whether free speech on the Internet should be sharply curtailed, as some Senators and Member of Congress have proposed. But the "flame war" that ensued on the computer networks when the story was published soon gave way to a full-blown and highly political conflagration. The main focus of discontent was a new study, "Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway", purportedly by a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, which was a centerpiece of Time's story. In the course of the debate, serious questions have been raised regarding the study's methodology, the ethics by which its data were gathered and even its true authorship. Marty Rimm, who wrote it while an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon, grossly exaggerated the extent of pornography on the Internet by conflating findings from private adult-bulletin-board systems that require credit cards for payments (and are off limits to minors) with those from the public networks (which are not). Many of Rimm's statistics, are either misleading or meaningless; for example, the study's now frequently cited claim that 83.5 percent of the images stored on the USENET newsgroups are pornographic. A more telling statistic is that pornographic files represent less than one- half of 1 percent of all messages posted on the Internet. Other critics point out that it is impossible to count the number of times those files are downloaded; the network measures only how many people are presented with the opportunity to download, not how many actually do. Rimm has developed his own credibility problems. When interviewed by Time for the cover story, he refused to answer questions about his life on the grounds that it would shift attention away from his findings. But quite a bit of detail has emerged, much of it gathered by computer users on the Internet. It turns out that Rimm is no stranger to controversy. In 1981, as a 16-year-old junior at Atlantic City High School, he conducted a survey that purported to show that 64 percent of his school's students had illicitly gambled at the city's casinos. Widely publicized (and strongly criticized by the casinos as inaccurate), the survey inspired the New Jersey legislature to raise the gambling age in casinos from 18 to 21. According to the Press of Atlantic City, his classmates in 1982 voted Rimm most likely to be elected President of the U.S. The next year, perhaps presciently, they voted him most likely to overthrow the government. More damaging to Rimm are two books that he wrote, excerpts of which have begun to circulate on the Internet. One is a salacious privately published novel, An American Playground, based on his experience with casinos. The other, also privately published, is titled "The Pornographer's Handbook: How to Exploit Women, Dupe Men & Make Lots of Money". Rimm says it's a satire; others saw it offering practical advice to adult-bulletin-board operators about how to market pornographic images effectively. Neither Carnegie Mellon nor the Georgetown Law Journal has officially backed away from the study (although the university is forming a committee to look into it). Rimm's faculty adviser, Marvin Sirbu, a professor of engineering and public policy, continues to support him, saying the research has been deliberately mischaracterized by people with a political agenda. But Sirbu himself has been attacked by Carnegie Mellon colleagues for not properly supervising his student and for helping him secretly gather data about the pornography-viewing habits of the university's students. Meanwhile, some of the researchers listed as part of Rimm's "team" now say their involvement was minimal; at least one of them had asked Rimm to remove his name. Brian Reid Ph.D who is the director of the Network System Laboratory at Digital Equipment Corporation is the author of the network measurement software tools that Rimm used to compile his statistics. He had this to say about the Rimm study: "I have read a preprint of the Rimm study of pornography and I am so distressed by its lack scientific credibility that I don't even know where to begin critiquing it." As a rule, computer-wise citizens of cyberspace tend to be strong civil libertarians and First Amendment absolutists. Some clearly believe that Time, by publicizing the Rimm study, was contributing to a mood of popular hysteria, sparked by the Christian Coalition and other radical-right groups, that might lead to a crackdown. It would be a shame, however, if the damaging flaws in Rimm's study obscured the larger and more important debate about hard-core porn on the Internet. So as a response to the hysteria wide-sweeping legislational machinery was put into motion and Senators Exon and Coats drafted up the infamous Communications Decency Act. Section 502: "Whoever ... uses any interactive computer service to display in a manner available to a person under 18 years of age, any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs... shall be fined under Title 1, United States Code, or imprisoned not more than two years...." This act outlaws any material deemed "obscene" and imposes fines up to $100 000 and prison terms up to two years on anyone who knowingly makes "indecent" material available to children under 18, as directly quoted from section 502. The measure had problems from the start. The key issue to senators like Exon is whether to classify the internet as a print medium like newspapers, or a broadcast medium like television. Unfortunately it is a communications medium and should be treated as such. If such legislation was passed to control telephone conversations, many teenagers would get the electric chair at age fifteen. The Communications Decency Act never passed, but a line in the telecommunications bill that did pass denounces anything "indecent" being transmitted. The legal ramifications are still being fought over in government as the vague nature of the clause leaves it open to multiple interpretations. As the issue stands now, there are only two real solutions. One would be the adoption of government controls that would infringe on peoples rights to free speech, but also make the net a safe place to be. The other would for parents to use filtering software to control what their computer is receiving.

The history of the Internet traces its roots to the United States government. The original use of the information system was to maintain communication during the cold war, with the Soviet Union in 1969, by the Department of Defense, incase of a nuclear attack or a major catastrophe. The National Science foundation created the Internet based on the ARPAnet. The first mass connection was between the University of California Santa Barbara, Stanford Research Institute, the University of Utah and the University of California Los Angeles.Ray Tomlinson develops E-mail in 1972.The ARPAnet became obsolete in 1982, but the basis for the program is still used at the present time. The Web began in 1989;it wasn't released to the world till the early 90's that's when it became the World Wide Web. In 1993 Marc Andressen created software for the Internet to publish text, images and sound. Andressen also introduced the first graphical Web browser, called Mosaic, still in use today. The United States runs most of the access to the Internet with 62% of all the routers, next closest is the United Kingdom with 5.2%. That is just an example of what America controls much on the Internet. 70% of the writing on the Internet is in English, next is Japanese. Statistics say 1 in 3 people use the Internet for E- Mail, 1 in 6 use it because they want to find out how it works, 1 in 8 want business information and 1 in 2 go to the Internet for education, hobbies, job listings, and entertainment. In 1993 less than 1% of users paid for use of the Internet. By 1995, it rose to over 200% due to the profits companies made from the providing this service. This became a common change that businesses have made since the beginning of the information highway. It was then clear that the Internet wasn't going anywhere anytime soon. This stared a trend, which is still being felt today and into the near future. Because of the demand for the Internet around the World, and the amount of capital a business could make that provides this service, is astounding, a good example of this is Cisco, a once Silicon Valley based business, which is now a Internet technology provider, reaped in $10 billion in 1986 without an IPO (initial public offering), and this is 14 years before the Internet became what it is today. In 1999 they became the third company in history to surpass $300 billion in market capitalization, second is Microsoft, and first is General Electric. Out of 150 million people who have access to the Internet 80 million of them are looking for opportunities to make a profit on the Internet. The entrepreneurs, small business owners, and large corporations are changing the Internet. Some of the information that use to be free is now being held for a price to subscribe to a companies web site. This is mainly because of the money involved in the E-commerce businesses and the amount of information acquired everyday in the use of the Internet, whether it's a question about a service or a complaint about a product. Internet based businesses have went from poor to rich overnight, this is the reason most people are in search of the goldmine of answers and money the Internet provides to the public through business on the Internet. Internet based businesses have went from poor to rich overnight and have a market full of consumers that are financially stable and are in demand of services and information from the Internet, this is the reason most businesses are in search of the goldmine the Internet provides. I.The three main reasons for people using the Internet. A. Communication 1.lower long distance charges than the telephone 2.technology being developed to make long distance phone calls free 3.E-mail 4.less expensive than postage stamps and paper 5.is less time consuming 6.availbe 24 hours a day 7 days a week 7.unlimited boundaries B. Business 1.80 million out of 150 million are on Internet for business opportunities 2. No geographic boundaries 3.access to more consumers 4.150 businesses join the Internet every day 5. Open 24 hours a day 6. Less labor force needed 7.able to answer question 24 hours a day 8.a bigger and cheaper way to advertise C. Education 1.more than 51% of instructional rooms had Internet access in 1998. 2.Classes and Seminars over Internet can be taken 3.virtualy all schools in the US are connected to the Internet and hookups in classrooms have increased 20 fold-since 1994 4.convienience, now people can learn at home 5.Internet based training has become a common business tool used to obtain advancements in job level. 6.new updates on material learned available daily 7.tutoring over the Internet is available II. Why Business makes up a major part of the Internet A. Entrepreneur 1.a independently owned business can start up with under $1500. 2.small labor needed if any. 3.no need for warehouse the, Internet provides a business were you can sell their products from your home or office. 4.advertising cost are lower because of E-mail and Internet business Web page communities. B. Small businesses 1. 40% of small businesses have their own web site. 2. small businesses owned by women are more likely to have access to the Internet than males that's 67% vs. 63%. 3.minority owned business buy goods and services from the Internet more than other at 53% vs. 37%. 4.more than 600,000 small businesses were selling their products and service via e-commerce sites in 1999 with valued transactions at $25 billion. 5.of 7.5 million small businesses 11% were engaged in e-commerce activity. 6.71% used E-mail in 1999. 7.58% conduct business research on the Internet. C.Corporations 1.B2C (Business to consumer) sales just over the Internet will grow from an estimated $25 billion in 1999 to over $152 billion by 2002. 2.In Internet advertising, opposite of television advertising, the top 10 Internet corporations spent only $367 million which is on an average $36.7 million a piece which is fairly low to advertise your corporation to the world everyday in a month. 3.The nations largest ISP (Internet service provider) reaches nearly 50.3 million consumers. 4. Categories leading online spending were consumer-related (31 percent), financial services (17 percent), computing (16 percent), new media (12 percent) and business services (7 percent). III. Why business are doing so well on the Internet A. Buyer Demographics 1.two thirds of those who shop the Internet at least three times a week are women, 32% of these women have incomes of over $75,000 a year . 2.the biggest gap in Internet shoppers exist between the rich and poor not between ethnic groups. 3. 70% attend college, and 65% have white-collar jobs. 4.users that have been on the Internet 3 years or longer are reported to spend an average of $266, compared to newcomers with an average of purchase of $109 every three months. 5.teens spent $161 million online in 1999, that's only 1% of the total US online spending. Estimated to go over $1.4 billion by 2002. 6.Internet users increase by 10% every day. IV. Conclusion Business on the Internet has no signs of disappearing or getting smaller. With over 150 businesses joining daily, plus research has also been done and its is estimated that by the year 2004, if not sooner, there will be 90 million consumers on the Internet. With the technology advancing, to where you can access the Internet from a cellular phone, your car, even your TV, plus MP3 which downloads music from the Internet and can hold over 1000 songs, the Internet is becoming a way of life for some people and for businesses a very profitable outlook in the future. The Internet has changed a number of areas in society, especially the business world, in the past 20 years. In the last 40 years the Internet has went from a method of defense communication for the government, to a business venture for an entrepreneur or a fortune 500-company .The Internet is away for gaining consumers, products and capital for a business.

Access to the Internet is rapidly becoming a necessity in today's business environment. Internet access at my business enables workers to perform a wide variety of tasks, from seeing what the competition is doing to formalizing procedures and finding solutions from others who have experienced the same technical problems. The benefits of Internet access is limitless. Employees can be actively involved in their tasks at hand while waiting for an e-mail response to an important question or section of an important joint task. E-mail is used extensively and has become such an important tool that it is in many cases replacing the Postal System. Why pay such high prices, and then wait for several days for the information, presentation or important documentation that you need when you can have it instantly. This new electronic means of communication has had a definite negative impact on the Postal Systems profits, but it has boosted the speed by which we conduct business to match the tempo of today's business world. Another benefit of the Internet is FTP, or File Transfer Protocol. FTP refers to one of the protocols within the protocol suite used on the Internet. The File Transfer Protocol makes it possible to transfer files from one computer (called the “host” ) on the Internet to another. A user of an FTP program must log in to both hosts in order to transfer a file from one to the other. It is common for a user with files on more than one host to use the FTP program to transfer files from one host to another. In this case, the user has an account on both hosts involved, so he has passwords for both hosts. An additional benefit of Internet access is Offline web browsing. This software is loaded on your computer and allows you to download sites to your hard drive for local viewing. The benefits are obvious, the first being speed. Many sites on the web containing large graphic files that are slow to download and actually waste time because your computer is rendered useless while you wait for them. There are also image maps, audio, video and other multimedia objects that take forever to reach your computer. This is where the advantages of Off-line browsing come into play. You can easily share web based information with your coworkers without waiting for pages to download. The concept is ideal for corporate presentations - all the pages you need to demonstrate are stored locally for instant access. The most obvious benefit is that you don't need to be connected to the Internet in order to browse your favorite sites. If you happen to have an internet service plan that charges by the hour, you can download a site very quickly, then peruse it offline at your own leisurely pace. In conclusion, Internet access in my business is a required tool that is utilized to continually provide better service to our clients. The Internet allows us to immediately obtain and trade information that is of mutual benefit to both individual tasks and corporate ventures. The internet has become an integral part of our daily business life. Should we loose this capability, our success and marketability would immediately suffer because we would loose our market edge.

The Internet is a method of communication and a source of information that is becoming more popular among those who are interested in, and have the time to surf the information superhighway. The problem with this much information being accessible to this many people is that some of it is deemed inappropriate for minors. The government wants censorship, but a segment of the population does not. Legislative regulation of the Internet would be an appropriate function of the government. The Communications Decency Act is an amendment which prevents the information superhighway from becoming a computer "red light district." On June 14, 1995, by a vote of 84-16, the United States Senate passed the amendment. It is now being brought through the House of Representatives. 1 The Internet is owned and operated by the government, which gives them the obligation to restrict the materials available through it. Though it appears to have sprung up overnight, the inspiration of free-spirited hackers, it in fact was born in Defense Department Cold War projects of the 1950s.2 The United States Government owns the Internet and has the responsibility to determine who uses it and how it is used. The government must control what information is accessible from its agencies. This material is not lawfully available through the mail or over the telephone, there is no valid reason these perverts should be allowed unimpeded on the Internet. Since our initiative, the industry has commendably advanced some blocking devices, but they are not a substitute for well-reasoned law. 4 Because the Internet has become one of the biggest sources of information in this world, legislative safeguards are imperative. The government gives citizens the privilege of using the Internet, but it has never given them the right to use it. They seem to rationalize that the framers of the constitution planned & plotted at great length to make certain that above all else, the profiteering pornographer, the pervert and the pedophile must be free to practice their pursuits in the presence of children on a taxpayer created and subsidized computer network.3 People like this are the ones in the wrong. Taxpayer's dollars are being spent bringing obscene text and graphics into the homes of people all over the world. The government must take control to prevent pornographers from using the Internet however they see fit because they are breaking laws that have existed for years. Cyberpunks, those most popularly associated with the Internet, are members of a rebellious society that are polluting these networks with information containing pornography, racism, and other forms of explicit information. When they start rooting around for a crime, new cybercops are entering a pretty unfriendly environment. Cyberspace, especially the Internet, is full of those who embrace a frontier culture that is222 hostile to authority and fearful that any intrusions of police or government will destroy their self-regulating world.5 The self-regulating environment desired by the cyberpunks is an opportunity to do whatever they want. The Communications Decency Act is an attempt on part of the government to control their "free attitude" displayed in homepages such as "Sex, Adult Pictures, X-Rated Porn", "Hot Sleazy Pictures (Cum again + again)" and "sex, sex, sex. heck, it's better even better than real sex"6. "What we are doing is simply making the same laws, held constitutional time and time again by the courts with regard to obscenity and indecency through the mail and telephones, applicable to the Internet."7 To keep these kinds of pictures off home computers, the government must control information on the Internet, just as it controls obscenity through the mail or on the phone. Legislative regulations must be made to control information on the Internet because the displaying or distribution of obscene material is illegal. The courts have generally held that obscenity is illegal under all circumstances for all ages, while "indecency" is generally allowable to adults, but that laws protecting children from this "lesser" form are acceptable. It's called protecting those among us who are children from the vagrancies of adults.8 The constitution of the United States has set regulations to determine what is categorized as obscenity and what is not. In Miller vs. California, 413 U.S. at 24-25, the court announced its "Miller Test" and held, at 29, that its three part test constituted "concrete guidelines to isolate 'hard core' pornography from expression protected by the First Amendment.9 By laws previously set by the government, obscene pornography should not be accessible on the Internet. The government must police the Internet because people are breaking laws. "Right now, cyberspace is like a neighborhood without a police department."10 Currently anyone can put anything he wants on the Internet with no penalties. "The Communications Decency Act gives law enforcement new tools to prosecute those who would use a computer to make the equivalent of obscene telephone calls, to prosecute 'electronic stalkers' who terrorize their victims, to clamp down on electronic distributors of obscene materials, and to enhance the chances of prosecution of those who would provide pornography to children via a computer." The government must regulate the flow of information on the Internet because some of the commercial blocking devices used to filter this information are insufficient. "Cybercops especially worry that outlaws are now able to use powerful cryptography to send and receive uncrackable secret communications and are also aided by anonymous re-mailers."11 By using features like these it is impossible to use blocking devices to stop children from accessing this information. Devices set up to detect specified strings of characters will not filter those that it cannot read. The government has to stop obscene materials from being transferred via the Internet because it violates laws dealing with interstate commerce. It is not a valid argument that "consenting adults" should be allowed to use the computer BBS and "Internet" systems to receive whatever they want. If the materials are obscene, the law can forbid the use of means and facilities of interstate commerce and common carriers to ship or disseminate the obscenity.12 When supplies and information are passed over state or national boundaries, they are subject to the laws governing interstate and intrastate commerce. When information is passed between two computers, it is subjected to the same standards. The government having the power to regulate the information being put on the Internet is a proper extension of its powers. With an information based system such as the Internet there is bound to be material that is not appropriate for minors to see. In passing of an amendment like the Communications Decency Act, the government would be given the power to regulate that material.

I recently took a workshop on how to use the Internet. I thought that writing an essay on “how to use the Internet” would help me to remember what I learned and already knew previous to the workshop. When you go on the Internet, you may have a specific destination in mind or you may wish to browse through the Web, the way you would browse through a library or a book, looking for topics or things that interest you. This browsing is often called “Surfing the Net”. There are several ways to get around on the Web. (1) Using Web addresses; To get to a special destination, such as the search engine “Yahoo” you'll type in its Internet address (e.g.. www.yahoo.com) in the space provided on the Web browser. This space looks like a long narrow box at the top of your computer screen. Web addresses, sometimes referred to as uniform resource locators (URL), begin with http://, which stands for hypertext transfer protocol. After you type in the Web address, it may take awhile for the site's home page to appear on the screen, especially if it includes numerous pictures. Once it does, you'll probably see several choices you can click your mouse on to take you further into the site. If you type in an address incorrectly, or too many people are trying to use a site at once, you'll get an error message on your computer screen (e.g. just try again). (2) How to follow links you may find on various web pages; Many sites include hypertext links to other sites with related content. When you click on one of these highlighted areas, your computer will connect to another Web site without your having to know or type its address. (3) How to use different types of search engines; Search engines are programs that you can select from your Web browser to let you to search the Internet by keywords or topics. Lets say you want to know more about Vice President Al Gore, for example, you can click on a search engine, enter his name, then pull up several Web sites for further research. (4) How to use the Internet to do a Research Paper; The assignment is to write a two to three page essay on the life of Vice President Al Gore. You should include facts about his life, his greatest accomplishments, and why you believe he may deserve to be the next President of the United States. (5) To find this information you sign onto the Internet; Once connected, click the mouse on the search key. From the menu, select a search engine based on your topic. I suggest using Yahoo. At the subject box, type in Vice President Al Gore and click on the search key. Now review the search results: "Found 1 category and 19 site matches for Vice President Al Gore”. Select one or all site matches with the click of your mouse (all sites are underlined). Each site has additional sites for more information. Just like you would do research from a book, take the appropriate information you want and write your essay from it. After practicing for a while, I have found the Internet to be easy to use. It can provide helpful and interesting information for just about anything you could imagine it to.

The internet can be a huge and scary informational jungle for a non-expert. Given the enormous amount of information that the internet contains, this is no surprise. There are things that one can do though, to make their quest for knowledge easier. When looking for a specific item in this cyberactive library it is easier to have a plan, and then focus on a particular subject. Most likely, using a search tool will be your first means of finding what it is that you need. When using a search tool for the first time it is best to develop a general understanding of it. First, get to know how it works, and the type of language used when dealing with it. For example, each search tool usually has its own unique criteria, thus making the search for information that much more difficult. Responses to a particular query can vary greatly from search tool to search tool. Also the same query sent by the same inspection tool may come up with various responses from day to day, because web pages are constantly being added, removed, and updated. You will find, if you consistently use the internet, that things will become much less difficult for you as your experience broadens. The very first time I used the internet I was very intimidated, and thought that anyone who could use such an elaborate thing must be a genius. The many search tools and the complexities of their use baffled me. Now, I zip around the information highway like a whiz kid, and I have come to view the whole thing as one huge library. To speed up your searches, bookmark your favorite search tools for future use. You can also bookmark certain helpful sites while you are searching, so that you can come back to them later without wasting time by searching for them again. By bookmarking sites you eliminate the risk of typing errors when the address or URL is long and complicated. When you are in a hurry and you come across long articles it is helpful to copy the article on the clipboard and then paste it to the word processing window to read or print at a later time. When you are not rushed you may come back to the article and decide which parts, if any, you wish to keep for future reference. Some, like my father, say that the internet is the doorway to the devil. Others say it is an impossible, confusing, and frustrating piece of trash, but I say that when used properly it is a great tool for learning. Many times it has been a lifesaver when I needed information quickly, and did not have the time to go to the library. Yes, it is confusing for people who do not understand it, but like learning to ride a bike the more you try the better you become. Suddenly the jungle can become your backyard, and the novice can become a wizard.

The Internet links people together via computer terminals and telephone lines (and in some cases wireless radio connections) in a web of networks and shared software. This allows users to communicate with one another wherever they are in the “net." This Internet link began as the United States military project Agency Network Advanced Research (ARPANET) during the Vietnam War in 1969. It was developed by the United States Department of Defense's (DOD) research people in conjunction with various contractors and universities to investigate the probability of a communication network that could survive a nuclear attack. For the first decade that the Internet was in existence, it was primarily used to facilitate electronic mail, support on line discussion groups, allow access to distant databases, and support the transfer of files between government agencies, companies and universities. Today over 15 million people in the United States and approximately 25 million people worldwide access the Internet regularly, including children. Many parents believe that depriving their children of the opportunity to learn computer skills and access the knowledge available on the Internet would give them a distinct technological disadvantage as they enter the twenty first century. Portelli and Mead state by the year 2002, the reported number of children who access the Internet from home is projected to increase from the current 10 million to 20 million (6). In addition to home access, Poretelli and Meads further stated that as of 1997 the percentage of United States schools that offered Internet access as a part of their regular curriculum was over sixty percent. There were over nine thousand public libraries across America in 1997, sixty percent of these offered on-line access to its users (7). In view of this information, one can concluded that the on-line percentage for both schools and libraries has increased notably since 1997 and the number continues to grow as more of these facilities “plug in and log on." Whether at home, at school, or at the public library, children are accessing the Internet. The word “children” is somewhat ambiguous considering the range of ages that it encompasses. For instance, eighteen is the normally accepted age at which a child reaches legal adulthood; therefore, “children” would refer to any age between birth and seventeen. Porterfield stated that a study conducted in 1997 by Gateway 2000, a leading computer manufacturer, concluded that most children Internet access and computer skills typically commence with their school work. Although in some cases it may be earlier and in some later, the typical age at which a child begins to learn computer skills are kindergarten age, or age five. For example at the Children Television Work Shop website, a young child can click on a query and in a few days an E-mail arrives. For the purpose of this analysis, the broad word “children” will be condensed to contain two age groups -- elementary level, ages' 5-12, and secondary level, ages' 13-18. At either level, the World Wide Web poses clear dangers to children. These children grow up enlightened with technology, which they take for granted and know exactly how to use it. Most parents are not conscious of what lies behind that innocuous screen. If you give one's child carte blanche use of a computer attached to a modem, it is as serious as handing a ten-year-old the car keys and telling them to have a good time. These “cyberchildren” are vulnerable to potential dangers as a result of Internet use. These perils include contact with dangerous individuals, exposure to sexually suggestive materials, exposure to explicit conversations and obscenity in chat rooms, and access to violent interactive games. One very dangerous downside to Internet communication is its potential for the telling of untruths. One can never be certain at any given time to whom one is talking or if the conversation is sincere and truthful. Clothier state that a recent issue of Yahoo! Internet Live reported that almost half of the Internet users they had questioned lied occasionally while on-line and ten percent were untruthful fifty percent of the time (2). Asch state that Gateway Global Research surveyed six hundred families in the spring of 1998. This research revealed that seventeen percent of elementary and middle school children lied about their age, or sex while chatting on-line (E1). This fibbing among peers is not where the danger lies. The real peril exists in those other, older individuals who purposefully lie with the intent to harm. Parents can no longer assume their children are safe because they are at home and the door is locked. Instead of hanging around the playgrounds looking for victims, these cyber-preadators are simply logging on their computers. Defined as “adults whose sexual fantasies and erotic imagery focuses on children as sexual partners," pedophiles have discovered a haven in cyberspace. These dangerous individuals often cruise the chat rooms dominated by teens and younger children, posing as a child of similar age. Often these individuals try to solicit the children's location and identity, with the intent to set-up an on-line meeting. Once the meeting place and time are established, the children become easy prey for these twisted individuals. Officials of law enforcement have pointed out an alarming fact concerning on-line pedophiles. Durkin says that an upward trend in this practice indicates the possibility that, due to the Internet, some of these individuals may now be acting on fantasies they otherwise might have never carried out (16). Reports have shown that these instances are becoming more numerous and warn that children should report any suspicious on-line behavior to parents. The parents are then urged to inform law enforcement officials. In view of the rules of on-line privacy and anonymity, law enforcement officers have found these criminals to be hard to detect and locate. There are millions of web pages dealing with a wide variety of subject matter available on the World Wide Web and more pages are being uploaded daily. Although only one percent of this information could be called indecent, there is still the chance that a child might run across information that contains sexually explicit material. Although regulations have been placed on web sites that offer sexual content, most of these sites can still be accessed without a credit card. For instance, Madden says a visit on Netscape at the Yahoo search engine, one could only type in “men” and approximately 3,440 sites matching would appear. One of these sites was actually be labeled “sex”: lesbian, gay and bisexual. There would even be pictures; Images of men.” This site could be easily access by children. These children are subject to view butt shots of young boys. They could even preview several other shots that are designed to lure them into giving up a credit card number; however, there are various shots that could be access without a credit card. Portelli and Mead say the Supreme court in 1982 ruled the use of pornography involving children to be “harmful to the physiological, emotional, and mental health” of children and criminalized the practice, instigating strong enforcement and severe punishment for offenders (7). They further stated the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which strove to end the flood of pornography available on the Internet, was ruled to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court due to violation of the First Amendment (7). In other words, the issue of how to protect minor from Internet pornography without violating the right of free speech is under debate. The tendency of children to conjugate in on-line chat rooms is universal. It is hard to regulate the nature of these chats as it is to censure live conversations among groups of children. Groups sharing the same interests and the same age levels usually create these chat rooms. Access to these rooms is usually not coded or barred, so the presence of a pedophile or other type of sexually twisted individual is a real and distinct possibility. The usual tendency of these individuals is an attempt to direct the conversation to a sexual subject, often using explicit and indecent language. If found, it is easy for a child to enter a sexually explicit chat in progress. Since there is minimal monitoring of chat rooms, these are sometimes labeled in a manner that reveals the nature of the conversation going on within. For example pornography materials was just a click away from “Governor's kid page” (fun facts, coloring books, etc.). Grooves state that once the children access this web site, all they had to do was to click on “links." By their surprise, an adult chat room appeared with exchanges of sexually explicit messages within. The dangers of the Internet continue with a variety of interactive video games. These games are usually access through dial-up networks and through on-line services. Many of these games can be downloaded at no charge. These interactive games include arcade type games, classic puzzle games, and role-playing adventure games. Cummins state a recent survey of nine hundred students in the fourth through the eight grade revealed that nearly half of the children stated that violence and fantasy was involved in their favorite video games (1E). Considering this statement one can conclude that it is these violent fantasy games, these role-playing adventure games, that have recently been the focus attention. Following the recent tragedy at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, FBI agents have been taking a closer look at the Internet and the consequences of its role-playing games. Alderson says the gunmen involved at Columbine, Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, two Columbine seniors, were members of a dark on-line community calling itself the Trenchcoat Mafia (31A). In other words, this Internet world evolved from simple role-playing fantasy games to an on-line world filled with deep hatred and violent schemes. Robert Denerstein, staff writer of the Denver Rocky Mountain News, reported that the events at Columbine “Underscored changes that have already occurred” and “point to the hidden life of many youngsters” (31A). A pertinent fact that needs mentioning at this point is that Harris and Klebold, Columbine gunmen mentioned above, obtained the knowledge to build their pipe bombs from the Internet. This is not the first time the negative effect of interactive games and the Internet have been the center of tragedy and the subject of scrutiny. In 1997 Michael Carneal, age 14, brought a gun to his Paducah, Kentucky high school with the intent to harm. Michael began shooting at students involved in a prayer group. Parents of three of the victims brought lawsuits against various media companies on grounds that their products contributed to the violent episodes. Among the defendants were game manufacturers Nintendo and Sony, who produced games the young gunman was fond of playing -- violent games such as “Doom” and “Mortal Kombat." An Internet pornography site was also among the defendants. The parents of the gunman, as well as his teachers, school officials, and classmate, were also held partly responsible for the shooting. Cummins state that David Grossman, a United States Army retiree who now teaches psychology at Arkansas State University, says that some of these violent video games “are no different than military simulators...in some ways, worse” (1E). Considering this statement one can conclude that what the children of today are getting from these video games is military training, a process of continuous stimulus and response known as “operant conditioning”. A process in which the main objective is to teach to kill. The violence of these interactive games available through the Internet needs to be scrutinized. The key to sheilding children from negative influences on the World Wide Web lies in knowledge. Parents and other influential adults such as teachers and librarians need to get to know the Internet, to learn the World Wide Web and what it has offer. Douglas Ruhoff observed in a 1996 USA Weekend article that the children are “native” to the high tech world of today where the parents are `immigrants” (12).