Digital Revolution

We're living in amazing times. Information has never been so free and so easy to acquire as it is today. It's easy to take this for granted until you sit down and think about it. The last time something like this happened, the world was re-invented and Mr. Gutenburg went down in history for his moveable metal type addition to the printing press.

Before then, the Catholic Church had a huge amount of power over the civilized world because they controlled the flow of information. Books had to be hand copied one at a time. They could release what they wanted and destroy anything else and guide the thinking of people as they saw. Controlling information is a major factor in maintaining power over a mass public. The effect that Gutenburg had was making information much more accessible because books didn't have to be hand copied, were cheaper, and could be made in mass. This opened up new schools of thought, scientific and philosophical revolutions, and truly put the world on the path that would lead mankind to where it is today. Just from books.

Enter the Inter-net. Now, you don't even have to pay for information. It's, for the most part, free. You don't have to wait days for it, just seconds or less. Anything that you want or need to know is at your fingertips right now. Content can be published, for free and reach millions of people. You don't even need a printing press. The entire world is connected. You can talk to someone in every country in the world immediately. Have a conversation in real time across an ocean that once took people months to cross. It's truly amazing when you compare it to where we were only a few hundres years ago.

It's almost too free however and much of what is going on now will soon come to a stop. Right now, copyright issues are being brought to the forefront of new internet laws. How great is YouTube? You can catch just about any media you want on it, much like you can read about anything you want by Googling. The problem is much of this material is copyrighted. The thing is, you don't just get written/typed info. for free, you can get software, music, video etc all for free. The same material that is sitting right down he street in a store. I've read it somewhere and I completely agree, we are in the "Wild West" era of the internet. Laws are loose right now. There aren't many (at least not many that are effectively enforceable) in action right now. That's all going to change one day and that day might not be too far away. Companies are beginning to get pissed as this thing snowballs. Just recently Google bought YouTube and now that deep pockets are connected to the company, they are facing many lawsuits over copyrighted content. We're moving towards more laws and tighter control over what is going on in the internet today.

Control. I'm not going to be some Fight the Machine ranter about this. It's scary when anyone can learn how to build a bomb with just a few minutes of work. There's a lot of predators out there using the net as their playground. Internet terrorism is on the horizon. Not too long ago a hacker was upset over a company using something called BlueFrog which would send an email back to the spammer everytime one of BlueFrog's clients was spammed. We're talking thousands of emails. Most spammers backed down but one fought back and used thousands and thousands of bots to barrage their servers. Over a couple weeks and a hard fight, the hacker won and the company was forced offline. It was said some have a large enough networks to crash Google if they wanted. The scary thing is....it might not be a untrue.

Because of the strength of people like that and they're ability to affect millions unlike ever before (you'd almost have to be the leader of a small country to affect as many in the past; with the net, any 20 yr old with a PC can possibly do it), the online predators, and snowballing release of copyright material, people are working everyday to find ways to tighten up control over the net. While many of this may be good, it will effect those of us that have nothing to do with any of that. Splash damage. Big Brother. The future of the moving around the net will be the equivalent of walking around town with a camera strapped to your shoulder, connected to your thoughts, following you everywhere with the men in Blue watching.

Already, people are able to read your emails, IM's, even what you search in Google. Google saves every search query you make from the first time you use it to the last. A precedent was recently set when a guy was prosecuted using evidence of a Google search he made months before killing his wife. Emails are kept on file from servers like Yahoo for months after you delete them. Anywhere you go, anything you type is fair game. Don't expect the future of the net to be so free and open as it is today once procedures and new laws are in place to more effectively track down that copyrighted material you downloaded or watched, that thing you typed that you didn't want anyone to know about, or what you were reading.

We don't have it now because the net and its millions of users is a big place, but the enforcement technology will catch up, especially now with big corporations funding it. As the article said, we're moving from the Wild West era to the more modern era. Enjoy it all while you can. What you watch, read, and see today may not be as readily available tomarrow.

That's all I have to say on that subject at the moment. On a more positive note, check out this new technology. It's a video of a couple of women creating furniture by drawing it in thin air. After it's drawn, a laser hardens the object within liquid plastic. This is real folks. I feel like I'm watching the future when I see it. The applications for something like this could be amazing. One in every home! Enjoy.