Portal:Internet/Selected article

Instructions

The layout design for these subpages is at Portal:Internet/Selected article/Layout.

1. Add a new Selected article to the next available subpage.
   • Only articles that have been given a WP:GA or WP:FA rating should be added.
   • Biographical articles should be placed in "Selected biography".
2. The "blurb" for all selected articles should be approximately 10 lines, for appropriate formatting in the portal main page.
3. Update "max=" to new total for its {{Random portal component}} on the main page.

Selected articles list

Selected article 1

Portal:Internet/Selected article/1

Phishing is a form of social engineering and a scam where attackers deceive people into revealing sensitive information or installing malware such as viruses, worms, adware, or ransomware. Phishing attacks have become increasingly sophisticated and often transparently mirror the site being targeted, allowing the attacker to observe everything while the victim navigates the site, and transverses any additional security boundaries with the victim. As of 2020, it is the most common type of cybercrime, with the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reporting more incidents of phishing than any other type of cybercrime.

The term "phishing" was first recorded in 1995 in the cracking toolkit AOHell, but may have been used earlier in the hacker magazine 2600. It is a variation of fishing and refers to the use of lures to "fish" for sensitive information.

Measures to prevent or reduce the impact of phishing attacks include legislation, user education, public awareness, and technical security measures. The importance of phishing awareness has increased in both personal and professional settings, with phishing attacks among businesses rising from 72% in 2017 to 86% in 2020. (Full article...)

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The history of the Internet dates back to the early development of communication networks. In the 1950s and early 1960s, prior to the widespread inter-networking that led to the Internet, most communication networks were limited by their nature to only allow communications between the stations on the network. Some networks had gateways or bridges between them, but these bridges were often limited or built specifically for a single use. One prevalent computer networking method was based on the central mainframe method, simply allowing its terminals to be connected via long leased lines. This method was used in the 1950s by Project RAND to support researchers such as Herbert A. Simon, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, when collaborating across the continent with researchers in Santa Monica, California, on automated theorem proving and artificial intelligence.

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YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. YouTube was created in mid-February 2005 by three former PayPal employees. The San Bruno-based service uses Adobe Flash technology to display a wide variety of video content, including movie clips, TV clips and music videos, as well as amateur content such as videoblogging and short original videos. In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had reached a deal to acquire the company for US$1.65 billion in Google stock. The deal closed on November 13, 2006. Unregistered users can watch most videos on the site, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos. Some videos are available only to users of age 18 or older (e.g. videos containing potentially offensive content). The uploading of pornography or videos containing nudity is prohibited. Related videos, determined by title and tags, appear onscreen to the right of a given video. In YouTube's second year, functions were added to enhance user ability to post video 'responses' and subscribe to content feeds. Few statistics are publicly available regarding the number of videos on YouTube. However, in July 2006 the company revealed that more than 100 million videos were being watched every day, and 2.5 billion videos were watched in June 2006.

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An HTTP cookie is a parcel of textual information sent by a server to a World Wide Web browser and then sent back by the browser each time it accesses that server. HTTP cookies are used for user authentication, user tracking, and maintaining user-specific information such as site preferences and electronic shopping carts. Cookies have been of concern for Internet privacy, since they can be used for tracking the browsing of a user. As a result, they have been subject to legislation in various countries such as the United States, as well as the European Union. Cookies have also been criticised because the identification of users they provide is not always accurate and because they can be used for network attacks. Some alternatives to cookies exist, but have their own drawbacks. On the other hand, cookies have been subject to a number of misconceptions, mostly based on the erroneous notion that they are computer programs. Most modern browsers allow users to decide whether to accept cookies, but rejection makes some Web sites unusable.

Selected article 5

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Mozilla Firefox is a web browser project descended from the Mozilla application suite, managed by the Mozilla Corporation. Firefox had 16.01% of the recorded market share in Web browsers as of November 2007, making it the second-most-popular browser in current use worldwide. Firefox uses the open-source Gecko layout engine, which implements current Web standards plus a few features which are intended to anticipate likely additions to the standards. Firefox includes tabbed browsing, a spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, and a search system that includes Google. Functions can be added through more than 2,000 add-ons created by third party developers; the most popular include FoxyTunes (controls music players), Adblock Plus (ad blocker), StumbleUpon (website discovery), DownThemAll! (download functions) and Web Developer (web tools). Firefox runs on various versions of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Its current stable release is version 2.0.0.11, released on 30 November 2007. Firefox's source code is under the terms of the Mozilla tri-license as free and open source software.

Selected article 6

Portal:Internet/Selected article/6 Megatokyo is an English-language webcomic created by Fred Gallagher and Rodney Caston, debuting on August 14, 2000, and then written and illustrated solely by Gallagher as of July 17, 2002. The style of its writing and illustrations is heavily influenced by Japanese manga. Megatokyo is freely available on its official website, with updates on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It is among the most popular webcomics, and is published in print by CMX. Sales of the comic's print editions rank it as the best selling original English-language manga. Set in a fictional version of Tokyo, Megatokyo portrays the adventures of Piro, a young fan of anime and manga, and his friend Largo, a video game enthusiast. The comic often parodies and comments on the archetypes and clichés of anime, manga, dating simulations and video games, occasionally making direct references to real-world works. Megatokyo was originally presented in the gag-a-day format, with continuity of the story a subsidiary concern. Over time, it focused more on developing a complex plot and the personalities of its characters. This transition was due primarily to Gallagher's increasing control over the comic, which led to Caston's controversial removal from the project. Megatokyo has received praise from such sources as The New York Times, while negative criticism of Gallagher's changes to the comic has been given by sources including Websnark.

Selected article 7

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GameFAQs is a website that hosts FAQs and walkthroughs for video games. It was created in November 1995 by Jeff "CJayC" Veasey and has been owned by CNET Networks since May 2003. The site has a large database of video game information and has been called a place where readers "can get almost any information" regarding game strategies. The systems covered range from the 8-bit Atari platform to the consoles of today, including computer games. The FAQs, cheat codes, reviews, game saves, and credits are submitted by volunteer gamers, and contributions are reviewed by the site's two editors, Jeff Veasey and Allen Tyner. The site hosts a large and active message board community. Every game listed on the site has a board for discussion or gameplay help. Many of the boards are shared between GameFAQs and GameSpot, another CNET website. The site also features a daily opinion poll and related tournament contests. GameFAQs is consistently cited by The Guardian as one of the top gaming sites on the Web, and the site has been positively reviewed by Entertainment Weekly. Additionally, GameFAQs.com is one of the 200 highest-trafficked websites according to Alexa.

Selected article 8

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"The Bus Uncle" is a Cantonese video clip of an argument between two men aboard a bus in Hong Kong on April 27, 2006. While the older man, nicknamed the Bus Uncle, scolded the person behind him, a nearby passenger used his camera phone to record the entire incident to provide evidence for the police in the event of a fight. However, the resulting six-minute video was uploaded to the HK Golden Forum, YouTube, and Google Video. The clip became YouTube's most viewed video in May 2006, attracting viewers with its rhetorical outbursts and copious use of profanity by the older man, receiving 1.7 million hits in the first 3 weeks of that month. The video became a cultural sensation in Hong Kong, inspiring vigorous debate and discussion on lifestyle, etiquette, civic awareness and media ethics within the city, eventually attracting the attention of the media around the world.

Selected article 9

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Opera is a web browser and Internet suite developed by the Opera Software company. Opera handles common Internet-related tasks such as displaying web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, IRC online chatting, downloading files via BitTorrent, and reading web feeds. Opera is offered free of charge for personal computers and mobile phones, but for other devices it must be paid for. Features of Opera include high performance, tabbed browsing, page zooming, mouse gestures, and an integrated download manager. Its security features include built-in phishing protection, strong encryption when browsing secure web sites, and the ability to delete private data such as cookies and browsing history by clicking a button. Opera runs on a variety of personal computer operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris. Although evaluations of Opera have been largely positive, Opera has had limited success on personal computers. It is currently the fourth most widely used web browser for personal computers, behind Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari. Opera has a stronger market share, however, on mobile devices such as mobile phones, smartphones, and personal digital assistants.

Selected article 10

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Windows Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer abbreviated MSIE), commonly abbreviated to IE, is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems starting in 1995. It has been the most widely used web browser since 1999, attaining a peak of about 95% usage share during 2002 and 2003 and steadily declining since. After the first release for Windows 95, additional versions of Internet Explorer were developed for other operating systems: Internet Explorer for Mac and Internet Explorer for UNIX (the latter for use through the X Window System on Solaris and HP-UX), and versions for older versions of Windows. Only the Windows version remains in active development; the Mac OS X and UNIX version are no longer supported. Internet Explorer was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95. Later versions are available as free downloads and are also included in the OEM service releases of Windows 95 and in later versions of Windows. The most recent release is version 7.0, which is available as a free update for Windows XP with Service Pack 2, and Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 or later, and is included with Windows Vista. An embedded OEM version called Internet Explorer for Windows CE (IE CE) is also available for WinCE based platforms and is currently based on IE6.

Selected article 11

Portal:Internet/Selected article/11 Google Inc. is an American public corporation, specializing in Internet search and online advertising. The company is based in Mountain View, California, and has 15,916 full-time employees (as of September 30, 2007). Google was co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University and the company was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 7, 1998. Google's initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004, raising US$1.67 billion, making it worth US$23 billion. Through a series of new product developments, acquisitions and partnerships, the company has expanded its initial search and advertising business into other areas, including web-based email, online mapping, office productivity, and video sharing, among others. In 2006, "google" came in second on Merriam-Webster's Words of the Year. Google has more products than any one employee can tell you. They also have a full warehouse of servers.

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Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it "ranks," the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. As a marketing strategy for increasing a site's relevancy, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site's coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts may include adding unique content to a site, and making sure that the content is easily indexed by search engines and also appeals to human visitors. The acronym "SEO" can also refer to "search engine optimizers," a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house.

Selected article 13

Portal:Internet/Selected article/13 "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" is an adage which began as the caption of a famous cartoon published by The New Yorker on 5 July 1993, and authored by Peter Steiner. The cartoon shows two dogs: One sitting on a chair in front of a computer, speaking the caption to a second dog sitting on the floor. As of 2000, the panel was the most reproduced cartoon from The New Yorker, and Steiner had earned over $50,000 (USD) from the reprinting of the cartoon.

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Portal:Internet/Selected article/14 Red vs. Blue is a science fiction comedy series created by Rooster Teeth Productions. The series is produced primarily by using the machinima technique of synchronizing video footage from computer and video games to pre-recorded dialogue and other audio. Footage is taken mostly from the multiplayer modes of the first-person shooter (FPS) video games Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 on the Xbox video game console. Chronicling the story of two opposing teams of soldiers fighting a civil war in the middle of a desolate box canyon, the series is an absurdist parody of FPS games, military life, and other science fiction films. Begun in 2003 and having concluded its fourth season, Red vs. Blue has won four awards from the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences. The series is generally praised for its originality, and has been credited with bringing new popularity to machinima, helping it to gain more mainstream exposure, and attracting more people to the art form.

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Exploding whales have been documented on two notable occasions, as well as several lesser-known ones. The most famous explosion occurred in the United States at Florence, Oregon, in 1970, when a dead sperm whale (originally reported as a gray whale) was blown up by the Oregon Highway Division in an attempt to dispose of its rotting carcass. This incident became famous in the U.S. when American humorist Dave Barry wrote about it in his newspaper column after viewing a videotape of television footage of the explosion. It later became well-known internationally when the same footage circulated on the Internet. There have also been spontaneous explosions. The other best-reported case of an exploding whale was in Taiwan in 2004, when a buildup of gas inside a decomposing sperm whale caused it to explode while it was being transported for a post-mortem examination. As exploding whales are an interesting and absurd topic, they have been written about by several authors.

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The AACS encryption key controversy, also known as the AACS cryptographic key controversy, arose in April 2007 when the Motion Picture Association of America and the Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator, LLC (AACS LA) began issuing demand letters to websites publishing a 128-bit number, represented in hexadecimal as 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 (commonly referred to as 09 F9), which is one of the cryptographic keys for HD DVDs and Blu-ray Discs. The letters demanded the immediate removal of the key and any links to it, citing the anti-circumvention provisions of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). In response to widespread internet postings of the key, the AACS LA issued various press statements, praising those websites that complied with their requests as acting in a "responsible manner", warning that "legal and technical tools" were adapting to the situation. The controversy was further escalated in early May 2007, when aggregate news site Digg received a DMCA cease and desist notice and then removed numerous articles on the matter and banned users reposting the information. This sparked what some describe as a digital revolt, or "cyber-riot", in which users posted and spread the key throughout the internet en masse. The AACS LA described this situation as an "interesting new twist".

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Portal:Internet/Selected article/17 "Bale Out: RevoLucian's Christian Bale Remix!" is a satirical dance remix by American composer Lucian Piane, also known as RevoLucian, released on February 2, 2009, to YouTube and Myspace. The piece utilizes audio from a July 2008 rant made by actor Christian Bale on the set of Terminator Salvation. Various other elements are used in the remix, including pulsating dance track beats and clips of Barbra Streisand from a 2006 exchange with a supporter of then-President George W. Bush, creating the impression of Streisand arguing with Bale.

The day after its release, the YouTube page for the song had been viewed over 200,000 times, and over a million times by February 5, 2009. The Associated Press called it a "hypnotic dance track", and United Press International noted it was "catchy", characterizing it as a "YouTube sensation". Gil Kaufman of MTV.com described the piece as "a techno-ripping, demonic dance party". Time magazine's website called the track "hilarious", and Nine News characterized it as a "raging online success". The director of Terminator Salvation McG liked the remix and put a copy of it on his iPod, and Bale said he had heard the remix and thought "they did a good job".

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Portal:Internet/Selected article/18 Homestar Runner is a Flash animated Internet cartoon. It mixes surreal humor with references to 1980s and 1990s pop culture, notably video games, classic television and popular music. Originally conceived as a parody of what the authors considered to be the surplus of low-quality picture books written for children, the site mostly caters towards young adults. Most of the site's traffic comes from the United States; events in the cartoon itself usually take place in Free Country, USA. The cartoons are nominally centered on Homestar Runner. However, the series entitled Strong Bad Email, in which another main character, Strong Bad, answers emails from viewers, is the most popular and prominent feature of the site. While Homestar and Strong Bad are the main characters, the site has grown to encompass dozens of other characters over the years. The site is one of the most popular Flash cartoons on the Internet and is notable for its refusal to sell advertising space (the creators pay for everything through merchandise sales, which includes a line of T-shirts). It grew in popularity largely through word of mouth.

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ScienTOMogy was a parody web site lampooning Tom Cruise's involvement with Scientology, initially hosted at the domain name scientomogy.info. The site was created in 2005 after increased media publicity surrounding Cruise's appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show and The Today Show. ScienTOMogy gained press attention after it was contacted by the Church of Scientology with a cease and desist letter, alleging copyright infringement over use of the word "Scientomogy", claiming that it was too close to the word "Scientology". The proprietor of the site initially agreed to relent to the Church's demands, but after consulting attorneys, instead decided to keep the site. Internet traffic to the site later increased dramatically as a result of the media and press attention surrounding the Church of Scientology's alleged copyright infringement claims.

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Wikipedia is a multilingual, open content, free encyclopedia project operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a type of collaborative website) and encyclopedia. Launched in 2001, it is the largest, fastest growing and most popular general reference work currently available on the Internet. As of December 2007, Wikipedia had approximately 9 ¼ million articles in 253 languages, comprising a combined total of over 1.41 billion words for all Wikipedias. The English Wikipedia edition passed the 2,000,000 article mark on September 9, 2007. Wikipedia's articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world and the vast majority of them can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet. Critics have questioned Wikipedia's reliability and accuracy, citing its open nature. The criticism is centered on its susceptibility to vandalism, such as the insertion of profanities or random letters into articles, and the addition of spurious or unverified information; uneven quality, systemic bias and inconsistencies; and for favoring consensus over credentials in its editorial process. Scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived. When Time Magazine recognized "You" as their Person of the Year 2006, Wikipedia was the first particular "Web 2.0" service mentioned, followed by YouTube and MySpace.

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Portal:Internet/Selected article/21 Delrina was a Canadian software company based in Toronto, that existed between 1988 and 1995, prior to being bought by the American software firm Symantec. Delrina started out by producing a set of electronic form products known as PerForm and later, FormFlow. However, the company was best known for its WinFax software package of the early- to mid-1990s, which enabled computers equipped with fax-modems to communicate faxes to stand-alone fax machines or other similarly-equipped computers. Delrina also produced a set of popular screensavers, including one that resulted in the well-publicized "flying toasters" lawsuit for copyright and trademark infringement (Berkeley Systems Inc. v. Delrina); the case set a precedent in American law that satiric commercial software products were not subject to the same First Amendment exemptions as parodic cartoons or literature. After the buyout by Symantec in 1995, parts of the firm were sold off, while Symantec continues to sell the WinFax product to this day. In its wake, several of Delrina's former executives founded venture capital firms that continue to have a lasting impact on the Canadian software industry.

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Cyberpunk is a genre of science fiction that focuses on computers or information technology, usually coupled with some degree of breakdown in social order. The plot of cyberpunk writing often centers on a conflict among hackers, artificial intelligences, and mega corporations, tending to be set within a near-future dystopian Earth, rather than the "outer space" locales prevalent at the time of cyberpunk's inception. Much of the genre's "atmosphere" echoes film noir, and written works in the genre often use techniques from detective fiction. While this gritty, hard-hitting style was hailed as revolutionary during cyberpunk's early days, later observers concluded that in terms of literature, most cyberpunk narrative techniques were less innovative than those of the New Wave, twenty years earlier. Primary exponents of the cyberpunk field include William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, John Shirley and Rudy Rucker. The term became widespread in the 1980s and remains current today.

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4chan is an English-language imageboard website based on the Japanese-language Futaba Channel. Launched on October 1, 2003 by "moot" ("Christopher Poole"), its boards are based primarily around the posting of pictures and discussion of Japanese comics and television shows. Users generally post anonymously, and the site has been linked to "Anonymous" culture and Project Chanology. 4chan's "/b/" board, dedicated to random postings, is the most active and is notorious on the Internet. The site has generated significant media attention, and its members have been responsible for the formation and popularization of several Internet memes such as lolcats, rickrolling, and the popularity of the Tay Zonday song "Chocolate Rain". It has also received media attention for its attacks against other websites and Internet users, and for the threats of real world violence that have been posted on it.

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Portal:Internet/Selected article/24 The iLoo (short for Internet loo) was a cancelled Microsoft project to develop a Wi-Fi Internet-enabled portable toilet. The iLoo, which was to debut at British summer festivals, was described as being a portable toilet with wireless broadband Internet, an adjustable plasma screen, a membrane wireless keyboard, a six-channel speaker system, and toilet paper embossed with popular web site addresses. The iLoo was also to have an extra screen and keyboard on the outside, and was to be guarded. It was intended as the next in a series of successful initiatives by MSN UK which sought to introduce the internet in unusual locations, including MSN Street, MSN Park Bench and MSN Deckchair.

The project was announced by MSN UK on April 30, 2003, and was widely ridiculed before being declared a hoax by Microsoft on May 12. On May 13, another Microsoft press release stated that although the project had not been a hoax, it had been cancelled because it would do little to promote the MSN brand. There has since been speculation as to whether the project was cancelled for fear of being sued by Andrew Cubitt, who had invented the similarly named product "i-Loo". The iLoo was described as a public relations "debacle" by Online Journalism Review.

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Portal:Internet/Selected article/25 The Million Dollar Homepage is a website conceived in 2005 by Alex Tew, a student from Wiltshire, England, to raise money for his university education. The home page consists of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks. The purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a URL to which the images were linked, and a slogan to be displayed when hovering a cursor over the link. The aim of the website was to sell all the pixels in the image, thus generating a million dollars of income for the creator. The Wall Street Journal has commented that the site inspired other websites that sell pixels.

Launched on 26 August 2005, the website became an Internet phenomenon, with copycat websites emerging in response. The Alexa ranking of web traffic peaked at around 127; As of 9 May 2009, it was 40,044. On 1 January 2006, the final 1,000 pixels were put up for auction on eBay. The auction closed on 11 January with a winning bid of $38,100 that brought the final tally to $1,037,100 in gross. (Full article...)

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Portal:Internet/Selected article/26 Factitious disorder imposed on self, also known as Munchausen syndrome, is a factitious disorder in which those affected feign or induce disease, illness, injury, abuse, or psychological trauma to draw attention, sympathy, or reassurance to themselves. Munchausen syndrome fits within the subclass of factitious disorder with predominantly physical signs and symptoms, but patients also have a history of recurrent hospitalization, travelling, and dramatic, extremely improbable tales of their past experiences. The term Munchausen syndrome derives its name from the fictional character Baron Munchausen.

Factitious disorder imposed on self is related to factitious disorder imposed on another, which refers to the abuse of another person, most often of a child and occasionally of another adult such as of a partner, in order to seek attention or sympathy for the abuser. This is considered "Munchausen by proxy", and the drive to create symptoms for the victim can result in unnecessary and costly diagnostic or corrective procedures. (Full article...)

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Norid AS is the registry for the Norwegian country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) .no (Norway), .sj (Svalbard and Jan Mayen) and .bv (Bouvet Island). By agreement with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, Norid is delegated the exclusive authority to assign, administer and register domain names under these three top-level domains. Of these three top-level domains, second-level domains may only be registered under .no, while use of .sj and .bv is presently reserved. (Full article...)

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Bomis, Inc. (/ˈbɒmɪs/, from Bitter Old Men in Suits; rhyming with "promise") was a dot-com company best known for supporting the creations of free-content online-encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Wikipedia. It was co-founded in 1996 by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell, and Michael Davis. By 2007, the company was inactive, with its Wikipedia-related resources transferred to the Wikimedia Foundation.

The company initially tried a number of ideas for content, including being a directory of information about Chicago. The site subsequently focused on content geared to a male audience, including information on sporting activities, automobiles, and women. Bomis became successful after focusing on pornography. "Bomis Babes" was devoted to erotic images; the "Bomis Babe Report" featured adult pictures. Bomis Premium, available for an additional fee, provided explicit material. "The Babe Engine" helped users find erotic content through a web search engine. The advertising director for Bomis noted that 99 percent of queries on the site were for nude women. (Full article...)

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Arena on www.gnu.org

The Arena browser (also known as the Arena WWW Browser) was one of the first web browsers for Unix. Originally begun by Dave Raggett in 1993, development continued at CERN and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and subsequently by Yggdrasil Computing. Arena was used in testing the implementations for HTML version 3.0, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Portable Network Graphics (PNG), and libwww. Arena was widely used and popular at the beginning of the World Wide Web.

Arena, which predated Netscape Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer, featured a number of innovations used later in commercial products. It was the first browser to support background images, tables, text flow around images, and inline mathematical expressions. (Full article...)

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The Signpost (formerly The Wikipedia Signpost) is the English Wikipedia's online newspaper. Managed by the volunteer community, it is published online with contributions from Wikimedia editors. The newspaper's scope includes the Wikimedia community and events related to Wikipedia, including Arbitration Committee rulings, Wikimedia Foundation issues, and other Wikipedia-related projects. It was founded in January 2005 by Wikipedian Michael Snow, who continued as a contributor until his February 2008 appointment to the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees.

Former editor-in-chief The ed17 noted that during his tenure, from 2012 to 2015, the publication expanded its scope to report on the wider Wikimedia movement in addition to Wikipedia and its community. After it reported on the changes to European freedom of panorama law in June 2015, a number of publications referred to The Signpost for further information. (Full article...)

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X homepage visited while logged out in November 2024

X, formerly known as Twitter before July 2023, is a social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media websites and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, images, and videos in short posts commonly known as "tweets" or "retweets" (officially "post" or "repost") and like other users' content. The platform also includes direct messaging, video and audio calling, bookmarks, lists, communities, a chatbot (Grok), job search and Spaces, a social audio feature. Users can vote on context added by approved users using the Community Notes feature.

Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams, and was launched in July of that year. Twitter grew quickly; by 2012 more than 100 million users produced 340 million tweets per day. Twitter, Inc., was based in San Francisco, California, and had more than 25 offices around the world. A signature characteristic of the service initially was that posts were required to be brief. Posts were initially limited to 140 characters, which was changed to 280 characters in 2017. The limitation was removed for subscribed accounts in 2023. The majority of tweets are produced by a minority of users. In 2020, it was estimated that approximately 48 million accounts (15% of all accounts) were run by internet bots rather than humans. (Full article...)

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Portal:Internet/Selected article/32 Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age is a non-fiction book about cyberlaw, written by free speech lawyer Mike Godwin. It was first published in 1998 by Times Books. It was republished in 2003 as a revised edition by The MIT Press. Godwin graduated from the University of Texas School of Law in 1990 and was the first staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Written with a first-person perspective, Cyber Rights offers a background in the legal issues and history pertaining to free speech on the Internet. It documents the author's experiences in defending free speech online, and puts forth the thesis that "the remedy for the abuse of free speech is more speech". Godwin emphasizes that decisions made about the expression of ideas on the Internet affect freedom of speech in other media as well, as granted by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The book was received favorably by Library Journal, where it was "Recommended for anyone concerned about expression on the Internet and democratic society." Publishers Weekly noted Godwin's "unusually broad view of free speech", and criticized the author for viewing issues "filtered through rose-colored screens". The Philadelphia Inquirer highlighted Cyber Rights among "1998's Best Reading". (Full article...)

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This is the reference image for Acid2. In the real test, the nose becomes blue while the cursor is hovering over the yellow part of the face.

Acid2 is a webpage that test web browsers' functionality in displaying aspects of HTML markup, CSS 2.1 styling, PNG images, and data URIs. The test page was released on 13 April 2005 by the Web Standards Project. The Acid2 test page will be displayed correctly in any application that follows the World Wide Web Consortium and Internet Engineering Task Force specifications for these technologies. These specifications are known as web standards because they describe how technologies used on the web are expected to function.

The Acid2 tests rendering flaws in web browsers and other applications that render HTML. Named after the acid test for gold, it was developed in the spirit of Acid1, a relatively narrow test of compliance with the Cascading Style Sheets 1.0 (CSS1) standard. As with Acid1, an application passes the test if the way it displays the test page matches a reference image. (Full article...)

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Portal:Internet/Selected article/34 A Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), formerly Universal Resource Identifier, is a unique sequence of characters that identifies an abstract or physical resource, such as resources on a webpage, mail address, phone number, books, real-world objects such as people and places, concepts. URIs are used to identify anything described using the Resource Description Framework (RDF), for example, concepts that are part of an ontology defined using the Web Ontology Language (OWL), and people who are described using the Friend of a Friend vocabulary would each have an individual URI.

URIs which provide a means of locating and retrieving information resources on a network (either on the Internet or on another private network, such as a computer filesystem or an Intranet) are Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). Therefore, URLs are a subset of URIs, ie. every URL is a URI (and not necessarily the other way around). Other URIs provide only a unique name, without a means of locating or retrieving the resource or information about it; these are Uniform Resource Names (URNs). The web technologies that use URIs are not limited to web browsers. (Full article...)

Selected article 35

Portal:Internet/Selected article/35

The logo of Wireless Minneapolis

The city of Minneapolis, Minnesota, is covered by a citywide broadband wireless internet network, sometimes called Wireless Minneapolis. The network was first proposed in 2003, at which point only a few other cities nationwide had such systems in place. Local firm US Internet beat out EarthLink to build and operate the network, with a guaranteed ten-year, multimillion-dollar contract from the city itself as the network's anchor tenant. Construction began on the project in 2006, but encountered several delays. Most of the city was covered by the network by 2010, and USI Wireless, the subsidiary of US Internet responsible for the system, set up numerous free internet access points at public locations around Minneapolis.

The network, which offers speeds of one to six megabits per second at a rate of about $20 per month, had about 20,000 residential subscribers by the end of 2010. Municipally, the network is used by city inspectors and employees, with plans in place for the police and fire departments to use it in the future. In 2007, when the I-35W Mississippi River bridge collapsed, the wireless system helped coordinate rescuers and emergency services. The city and USI Wireless have won praise for the network, which has been singled out for being one of the few successful municipal wireless ventures nationwide among a number of stalled or failed projects. (Full article...)

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