It is Sunday 01 December 2019 as this is published and I am working on editing and writing more for my book and hope to have it in a good state to self publsh by by January 2020!
Updates of my book project are available from this page >> Book Updates << and once I have published it, this page will also have updates of new book projects and any giveaways associated wiht them.
Below is an excerpt of one of the chapters of my book "Unmasking the Hacker, Demystifing cybercrime", this one is on the world wide web.
“The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still
so much bigger than the past.” – Sir Tim Berners-Lee[i]
Cybercrime, hackers and the
dark web are often terms used together and, the idea of a part of the internet that is used for criminal activities by these
shadowy hackers sounds both horrifying and mysterious. The internet brings
information from all over the world, crossing geographical boundaries, to the
computers of individuals and businesses, and it also used to commit crimes and
drop malware. To help demystify cybercrime it helps to include a basic
explanation of the internet, including a brief history of the world wide web and then look at the differences between the dark,
deep and surface web.
Although the terms are
sometimes used interchangeably, the internet and the world wide web are not the same thing. The internet is the structure
in which the world wide web communication and retrieval framework exists. The
internet dates back to at least fifty years with the Advanced Research Projects
Agency Network (ARPANET)[ii]
when the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) researched ways for
computers to communicate with each other[iii].
The research was referred to as the internetting project which gradually evolved
into the term internet. Over the years the researchers developed a way for the
computers to transmit data via linked packet systems with the transmission
control protocol (TCP) and the internet protocol (IP).
The concept of the world
wide web was proposed in 1989 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee to establish a more efficient way to share
information between researchers and universities. By 1990, he and his
colleagues at CERN had developed a better way for the internet to be navigated,
with the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) that created a standardised internet
communication framework. The use of hypertext links, also known as hyperlinks,
however, dates back much further to the 1960s. The online system, that used
hypertext links, was known by the acronym NLS and was created by Douglas
Englebert and implemented by the Augmentation Research Centre (ARC)[iv].
As an aside this system was also known for its windowed screens and the use of
a mouse. Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP), also developed at CERN in work
initiated by Berners-Lee, is the framework in which computers transmit and
receive information over the internet. The first iteration of this protocol had
one method, called GET, to obtain a web page.
By 1991, the World Wide Web was open for anyone to use
and was, as we know, later keenly adopted.
[i] ilva, D. (2009, April 22). Internet
has only just begun, say founders. Retrieved from Phys Org:
https://phys.org/news/2009-04-internet-begun-founders.html
[ii] Leiner, B. M., Cerf,
V. G., Clark, D. D., Kahn, R. E., Kleinrock, L., Lynch, D. C., ... & Wolff,
S. S. (1997). The past and future history of the Internet. Communications
of the ACM, 40(2), 102-108.
[iii] Friedman, L. W., &
Friedman, H. H. (2015). Connectivity and convergence: A whimsical history of
Internet culture. Available at SSRN 2628901.
[iv] Press, L. (1986). The
ACM conference on the history of personal workstations. ACM SIGSMALL/PC
Notes, 12(4), 3-10.