As you write Mart, the internet really is a clever place. I was around when it all came about and understood it was a development by the Americans to ensure there would always be a way of communicating whatever happened in the world, especially in the ‘Cold War’ of those early days.
Then along came the worldwide web or www as most of us will know it nowadays. At that time due to a recession I was unemployed but thanks to a grant, from the EEC (now EU) of all places, I was able to learn how to build websites using HTML. That really was an eye-opener as to what could be achieved. HTML was developed further, the last one I knew about was XHTML I recall. A lot of this was then overtaken by software packages, Dreamweaver was one I recall, that used all the coding without the user having to type it all out. Interesting days those were.
Today the lengths technology has now gone to I find even more amazing. What can be achieved with today’s software developments is such a long, long way from those early days.
If anyone’s interested, below are links to websites giving information about this subject:
I wrote a site using something similar to Dreamweaver. It was called Namo WebEditor. I put a good number of pre-written Java applets in the site. Downloaded from a site that specialised in writing them. They could be worked into a page of HTML partly by copy/pasting them where needed and partly by adjusting position in the WYSYWIG interface on Namo. I fould I was writing some HTML code in the end.
Then I learned how people were mistrusting Java applets and support for them was being phased out in popular web browsers. I took out the applets and re-did the site in just HTML 4.01 and validated the code in W3C.org. Fonts were set by way of a stylesheet (.css file).
The site was hosted on the web space that a Virgin Media account holder could use. VM stopped that some years back and I never bothered to upload the site to anywhere else. All a bit dated now anyway.
For those who may be interested as to the reasons for yesterday’s failure of the internet for some websites in some instances:
[I]"A major internet blackout that hit many high-profile websites on Tuesday has been blamed on a software bug.
Fastly, the cloud-computing company responsible for the issues, said the bug had been triggered when one of its customers had changed their settings.
The outage has raised questions about relying on a handful of companies to run the vast infrastructure that underpins the internet."
[/I] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57413224
Not the customers fault from the sound of it but doing something that caused some of the Internet to shut down must have been quite embarrassing nonetheless.
I had internet problems from last night, but reset router this morning. I used my phone’s mobile internet to stay online, and did antivirus etc, love eset
No need to apologise mart, I go off on one myself sometimes, I just wish I could understand it, and I know some members will be able to make sense of it, and this is the Technology thread…
One thing a bit funny in the post is ‘WYSIWYG’ (pronounced ‘wizzywig’). It might be thought some highly technical term but it literally stands for: What You See Is What You Get, which isn’t a very technical term at all is it?
It means a site can be built not by writing background code but by building and typing it as it would be seen in the finished page (more or less).
I did wonder at that when reading the news item. However, it was relevant so I posted the link.
With many website settings I have access to, as a customer, I am always changing something or other. Often that is necessary with things changing so regularly, as they seem to these days.
One of those websites which did ‘go down’ that day was my Gmail, others were search engines and also a couple of news websites. I always understood the whole internet couldn’t go down as that would go against the reasons why the internet first came into being. See my post 10 on this thread for more information on this.
Quite coincidentally that was the second time since 28 May that I was without broadband. Then, yesterday once again no internet. This time, according to my ISP, it was a similar problem to the first one on 28 May when there were problems with the green BT cabinet in the village. So now three times in 14 days, no internet!
It’s time BT Openreach was taken to task over the appalling condition of the telephone / broadband network in this country. Yes, BT Openreach is putting in fibre, it’s here just the other side of the road outside, as usual though they want yet more money to connect me to it. Why? Because broadband speeds would be higher! I don’t want higher speeds, just a reliable, reasonable service for which I already pay!
No Tedc, not taken as a personal criticism at all. I just wonder these days about the truth of whatever we see or hear. There is just so much that’s not true out there, whether that is in the newspapers, on the news, on the internet, through our phones when it’s scammers etc., etc. Very difficult sometimes to tell the truth from fiction. It’s almost a ‘fake’ world we live in nowadays. Just who or what should we believe?
On checking through the news websites I came across the interesting and I thought informative, item about the recent internet outage. Worth a read I reckoned and as usual I did learn about things I previously had no knowledge of:
“Worst case, it’s going to be an attack on Cloudflare,” Merrill said. “The Russian government or the Chinese government is going to take down Cloudflare and it’s going to break the internet.”
As I suggested earlier, I still expect increasing suggestions of possible future “attacks” rather than simple User screw ups.
Wouldn’t want one of our Companies to be seen to have been negligent!
A bit outside my area of expertise…Well alright then, a lot outside my area of expertise, but I still think there will be a major interruption to the World wide web, if not total shutdown.
One area I think we should concentrate on is the censorship on the net. At the moment it allows groups with ‘not our best interests at heart’ to communicate and organise. Take the example of the BLM, Extinction Rebellion and Animal Rights to name just a few. I dare say many terrorist groups have coordinated their attacks using the web.
The governments of the world are not going to allow this to carry on much longer and I believe much more censorship, and even exclusion from using the internet is on the horizon. The shutdown of the internet might come from someone a bit nearer home…
Yes, it does seem that is one very weak point in the whole internet. That’s all it takes, find the weak point and exploit it, then whoever does this has ‘won the war’.
I guess though that now this has happened and has been pinned down to where and how it occurred measures can now be put in place to prevent, or do so as much as it’s possible, any recurrence.
The world has become far too reliant on the internet, that’s the truth of the matter. Everything depends on it, even more so during this pandemic. A query the other day, with a very big organisation, that I thought would take five or perhaps at the outside 10 minutes, even using the ‘modern’ online ‘chat’ that companies have, took over an hour. The ‘chat’ feature was not working so it was then the telephone. Most of the time was simply waiting on hold for someone to speak to in the end!
That’s the system whereby my data might well be stored, anywhere around the world, in some machine I’ve never seen or heard of.
Sure, it speeds things up, for the big user, as his storage will be chosen to be as close as possible to his systems.
But what happens in the event of political unrest, or whatever, I’m not too sure.
This is how the cloud is defined:-
“The definition for the cloud can seem murky, but essentially, it’s a term used to describe a global network of servers, each with a unique function. The cloud is not a physical entity, but instead is a vast network of remote servers around the globe which are linked together and meant to operate as a single ecosystem. These servers are designed to either store and manage data, run applications or deliver content or a service such as streaming videos, web email, office productivity software or social media. Instead of accessing files and data from a local or personal computer, you are accessing them online from any Internet-capable device – the information will be available wherever you go and whenever you need it.”
Thanks Ted, with my photos and files I just bung them on a memory stick and an old desktop computer that still runs Vista, it is incapable of connecting to the internet, but it’s good for storing stuff and doing electronics drawings on…
