School - I026: II - 2 examples of IT history which started before 1990 - one still existing, one dead.

This time the school session focuses on the internet history, where it started and where it has ended up to by now. We need to gather two examples of the internet history before 1990 and describe which one lives also today and which one has gone extinct.

Internet in early days

In the 1970 there where at many of different internet networks available: ARPANet, PRNET, Ethernet, AlohaNET, and according to name, my favorite, SatNET. Most of them where started and controlled by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), agency which was created after Soviets launched Sputnik.

There was a successful TCP protocol test over those networks on 1977.

ARPANet

As you know then ARPANet is basically today's internet forefather. All what we are using now for World Wide Web has evolved from this. There is not much to talk about it or speculate around it. It is constantly improving and evolving. Besides of traditional visible internet we have a lot of invisible internet and black internet.

Visible is all what we see when we enter some URL on the address bar. Web browser renders us a page and there we have it, some media, some text, some links, all for information. Invisible is the rest of it, all what you cannot see and it contains most of it. That is also not interesting, this can be read upon Wikipedia and rest of places. The interesting part which came from ARPANet is actually DarkWeb (dark net, deep web). A place where the actual life begins. Trades with crypto currency and kind of illegal services has made a perfect combination for criminals and people with shady deals. 

Anonymous Web

I believe that this is what is real future for ARPANet, moving to deep web. Future where we can claim back  anonymity of our identities, trade goods with people you don't know, have currency which is not under any government control, be a single nation in this world, not just people in some country. I am counting on that future.

SkyNet SatNet

Coming back to SatNet, then actually I kind of hope that it was bases of the Terminator and SkyNet story. Sounds about similar. Communication network which uses satellites to translate data between computers. The Terminator, movie from the 1984, where there was a self conscious neural network which found out that humanity is the greatest threat for the existence and  started to produce terminators to wipe out whom ever was left over from the nuclear attack. Awesome movie franchise. 

But talking about SatNet, it really didn't get the attention it could have got, I believe that there were a lot of technical issues to provide it word wide, starting from the maintenance fees of the satellites ending from latency issues which it would take to broadcast a signal to the space and back to the server and round tripping the data back. Unfortunately there isn't a lot of data available about it, at least I didn't find it in the future ARPANet, but if you have something, please post some links into comments.

Summary

Ah, yes, regarding to topic, summary: ARPANet -> Internet; SatNet ->Didn't end up being SkyNet, so for me, it is dead (although it can be operational for very limited brand of people).

School - I026: I - 3 unsuccessful projects in the history of IT

It's been a while when I posted here, didn't have any good challenges to write about, but I guess I've taken up one of the major one now - started school again. Target - get into Tallinn University of Technology masters program and learn cyber security. Before this I need to finalize my bachelors degree.

We have one topic called I026 which translates into Social, Ethical and Professional Issues in IT. In here we need to publish posts every week about different topics. Today's topic is to write down, in my opinion, 3 unsuccessful projects in the history of IT.

#1 Downfall of Nokia N9

I think that the major failure was discontinuing Nokia N9 mobile phone. This phone had everything what a proper smartphone needs: Slim design, custom built operating system (MeeGo OS, v1.2 Harmattan), OLED display which reduced power consumption, quite open platform with big online forum support. The team behind it started their own company called Jolla and the operating system Sailfish. This company hasn't really kicked off in the scale as I have hoped, but that is another topic.

Coming back to Nokia N9 and MeeGo OS then it was truly good achievement, the platform was quite open and perfect tool to play around. People even hacked Debian to be ran there in virtual machine. I also made it to work in my N9. After that things got really interesting when, following many tutorials, I installed 6 different operating systems. My phone had hexaboot. Nokia made a big mistake for killing this project. I really hope that they are coming back to senses and reboot the efforts. World needs another good mobile operating system, which can also handle natively different mobile platform applications. Sailfish is trying but they don't have hardware to support the efforts.

#2 Nasa Challenger Disaster

What can be worse - exploding space shuttle with astronauts on live TV. The reasons why it happened is actually not very IT related, rather than mathematics and physics, but I believe that with proper analysis tools and computing power, it could have been prevented. Namely, nobody thought that weather on that day is colder than in the days when they did test runs. I even don't know if people today calculate weather factors in complex mathematical and physical models. I mean, we have the power to calculate, we have computers linked in to major GRID system we have the possibility to harvest community and get the calculations done, but why not? It is costly and somebody needs to drive it.

Imagine if we could give to community that please review our materials, review our mathematical models, we pay you when you find out what can be wrong, what may fail and prove it. Simple as that. I bet if they could have done it in 1986 then most likely somebody had come to that that O-rings  may fail due misuse of the materials. What prevented them? I could think only the cold war. Fear of sharing knowledge to the world. FEAR costed 7 lives, impacted thousands, or even millions. Why are we scared to share secrets?

#3 Car tax policies

Governments are looking different ways how to get more taxes from people and they have implemented in many places car taxes, either from emitted carbon dioxide or what is worse - power of the car. If you have more KW that some X amount, you need to pay higher tax to the government. Reason is simple - you use more fuel, you pollute the environment more, you pay for the luxury.

What actually happens is that car producers will not limit the KW with engine build, but they are doing it via programming car chip to give less fuel to the pistons. Engine is the same, pollution levels are higher. Is the environment really cleaner? I don't think so, we only fake it to cut down the costs of making cars and still sell it. Car tax policy in the name of cleaner environment has failed big time, since we have smarter cars than few decades ago and we can use programmatic way to show the numbers which are required to avoid unnecessary taxes.