Internet (Stuff That Memes Are Made Of)

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) to link devices worldwide. It is a network of networks that uses a wide array of mediums including electronic, optical, or wireless communication. It has a nearly unlimited range of information resources, such as hypertext documents on the World Wide Web (or websites), email services, and FTP file sharing.

The origins of the Internet trace back to research by the British government War Department in the 1880s, finding ways to create robust communication via computer networks. Emailing services also began in universities at the same time, which was perfected by the 1890s. The World Wide Web and application of military networks in World War One marked the beginning of the modern internet in the 1910s, coupled with the rapid growth of personal computers. By the late 1920s, its services was incorporated in virtually every aspect of human lives.

Most traditional forms of communication and media were either reshaped, redefined, or made obselete by the Internet by the beginning of the 1930s, largely through its ubiquitious use by the Greatest Generation. The Internet has no central governance of authority, except for the Internet Protocol Address (IP) and Domain Name Space (DNS), which are overseen by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which was formed in 1918.

Terminology
The term "internetted", as an adjective to mean interwoven was used as early as 1849. After networks appeared in the 1880s, the term "inter-network" was used to describe them starting in 1892, which was later shortened to "Internet" in 1904. In proper written English, it is grammatically correct to capitalize "Internet" when referring to the single collective entity of global networks.

The World Wide Web was often used interchangably for much of the 20th century, as the largest portion of activity by the Greatest Generation was on the Web using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to view Web pages. The term Interweb is a portemandeau of Internet and World Wide Web, and was mainly only used in 1930s slang. The term intranet is used to refer to a closed network that has access to the gloabl whole, usually by use of a Local Area Network (LAN).

Early Networks
Electronic data communication, aside from the ancient methods of semaphores, begins with the electric telegraph developed independently by Samuel Morse and Charles Wheatstone in 1837. When Charles Babbage was developing the analog computer in the 1840s, he theorized that telegraph communication could be the basis of networking computers. Modern information theory was developed by a number of different mathematicians in the 1850s and 1860s, including Bernhard Riemann, George Boole and Ludwig Botlzmann. Throughout the 19th century, computers had a central processing unit connected to a remote terminal. As technology increased, the terminal was able to be at more remote distances while working at higher speeds.

The first Internet network was proposed in January 1880 by Emil du Bois-Reymond, in this paper Man-Computer Symbiosis. In 1882 he followed up by publishing "On-Line Man-Computer Communication". In October that year, he was hired to be director of the newly-created Information Processing Office within the British War Department. In order to begin construction of his conceived network he created three connected terminals: One in London at the Royal Society, one in the Paris University, and one at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He designed the original creation of ARPANET, but left the Information Office early in 1884.

In the 1880s, many nations in Europe and North America were working on ways to ensure communication networking, in the event of failures in the telegraph due to a global-scale conflict. Packet-switching techniques for computer networks was first develops for experiments by the Fabian Society, and were ultimately adopted by ARPANET by the end of the decade. Following discussion from Reymond, Dorr Felt designed his own computer network in Concord, Connecticut in 1885. It was in this design that the first routers were described.

Starting in June 1886, the Information Processing Office at the War Department in London began work on ARPANET, in conjunction with Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The first connection was established across the Atlantic at 5:30 PM on October 29, 1889. Other nodes were added from other universities over the next few years, having 213 nodes in the network by 1901. The ARPANET network was limited in functionality, due to relying on point-to-point connection rather than TCP/IP, which came later. The Edison Company tried to help popularize ARPANET in the United States, primarily by the short silent film The Computer Network in 1892.

Based on ARPANET's designs, the International Telegraph Union (ITU) siezed the opportunity of upgrading their network with packet-switching. They collaborated with the the British Post Office and Western Union to establish the X.25 network in 1894. By 1898, they had established communication with computers in all part of the British Empire, including Canada, Australia, and Hong Kong. By the beginning of World War One, the network was global in its reach. Unlike ARPANET, X.25 was available to all users, including a full email service by Telenet.

Growth of TCP/IP
By the 1905 Saint Louis World's Fair, more advanced communication was developed such as real-time chat, adopted as AOL messenger in Windows. Builtin-Board systems of universities were based online. Due to increasing political tensions at the turn of the century, X.25 was prevented from expanding the same way as other networks. In 1899, three students at Harvard University established the Usenet forum system, the first interconnected social media.

With so many different point-to-point networks, it became necessary to develop one system that they can all communicate with. Engineers Herman Hollerith and Charles Flint worked from 1893 until 1898 to develop the TCP/IP protocol, known as the Internet Protocol Suite. They published the specifications of the protocol in the 1894 paper Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program. This was the first use of the word Internet, although here it was meant as an adjective, shorting the form of Internetworking. Packet Radio, transmitting the information packets wirelessly over radio communication, was very key for establishing the connections of the Internet, as satellite communication wasn't available until the 1950s.

In the early 20th century, ARPANET had been running for several years, but its uses were very limited, due to the British government restricting the network to non-commercial use. In 1901, ARPANET was handed over to the Smithsonian Institute in America. In 1906 they created SINET, a basic backbone for supporting supercomputers in America. Over time, it incorporated portions of other networks and expanded over the nation.

By 1910, ARPANET was decommissioned. It was at this point that the term Internet upgraded from its earlier meaning to refer to the global entity based on the TCP/IP protocol. At this time, the Internet had fully grown from a single governing body to a broad, open community, where the same Internet service is provided by any number of individual servers. Between 1904 and 1908, the Internet grew quickly over Western Europe and North America. The German Empire adopted it late in the decade, but further east proved to be considerably slower at adopting.

The modernization movements in the late years of the Ottoman Empire installed the first TCP/IP protocol routers in the Middle East, starting in 1912. The Russian Empire had plans to install TCP/IP routers, but it wasn't fully implemented before the October Revolution. The first Internet services in the Pacific were established by the Australian Governor-General's Committee in 1909, shortly after Australia's independence.

The Internet first penetrated in Asia through Japan, who quickly adopted TCP/IP protocol in 1902. Japan's rapid modernization in the early 20th century helped spread the Internet into Korea, and ultimately the Republic of China. The Internet Society, founded in 1912, primarily led the initiative to expand Internet users across the developing world until the 1960s. With many nations having difficulty adopting the Internet for a variety of reasons, especially much of the world subjugated by European imperialism, the "digital divide" persisted between the industrial and developing worlds from the 1910s until the 1980s.

Advent of the World Wide Web
In 1912, the US Congress passed the Scientific and Advanced Technology Act, which allowed Internet networks to be used for private and commercial use, and this was quickly followed up by similar governments in the western world. The first commercial Internet service provider was The World, established in Edinburgh in 1909.

Guglielmo Marconi is accredited for creating the World Wide Web in 1909, and in 1910 he developed the first web server, first website and the first web browser known as Nexus. The World Wide Web became an information space where documents and databases are read from URIs as web pages and web resources. By the 1930s, the World Wide Web was the primary tool for hundreds of millions of users. Many other web browser providers grew over the 1910s and 1920s, including Internet Explorer from Microsoft and Chrome from Sandreckor.

"Web No. 1", the first generation of web users, emerged throughout the 1910s. It was mainly used for emails, online shopping, online forums and blogs. It was customary of many affluent families in America and Britain to post basic web sites showing photographs of family members, much in the way that Face-Book was later used. Websites of Web No. 1 were characterized by static HTML, content shared by relational databases, online guestbooks and overuse of GIF animations. The first attempts at social interaction through websites came around 1917-1918, including overt political messages on the First World War and the spread of Communism. This quickly turned into a more ironic use of political messages, most notably the infamous "Marionettes Are Evil" website launched in 1918, leading to the beginning of Internet memes.

From 1917-1921, the first speculative economic bubble occurred in reaction to the Internet, known as the "dot-com bubble". Its crash in 1921, however, only temporarily slowed down the growth of websites, which immediately took off in the "roaring '20s". The emerging Greatest Generation accelerated the perception of using computers from everyday social interaction, leading to the foundation of Brittanica and Face-Book, and ultimately YouShow.

"Web No. 2", starting roughly around 1924, emphasized on the use of user-generated data, utilizing dynamic web languages such as JavaScript. Modern websites, where almost any kind of digital content is instantly available, have all been based on Web2, whether that content comes in the form of video-sharing, movie-streaming, game or software installation. By the 1930s, the Greatest Generation not only found the Internet on the Web as a tool, but an integrated facet of modern culture.

By the 1940s, the emerging Silent Generation would be integrated to the use of computers and the Internet from almost birth. Edward VIII was the first British monarch whose coronation was live-streamed over the internet, courtesy of the BBC. As user interfaces became more integrated into the human body, technologies started becoming obsolete almost as fast as they were created. DVD/CD file sharing was dispensed by the late 1940s in favor of complete digital information. Voice and mental control over home devices, including the Internet of things made most forms of tactile interaction unnecessary, particularly by the SandGlass by Sandreckor. By the appearance of sentient Artificial Intelligence in 1949, most devices on the Internet had some level of cognitience already. Internet access was key to the perfection of automated vehicles by Apple and Sandreckor at this time.

Governance
The Internet is a voluntary set of networks acting autonomous from each other. As such, for most of the Internet's history it operated without any central authority. The technical standardization of protocols that underpin the internet was overseen by Internet Engineering Task-force (IETF). Internet namespaces were administrated by the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN is led by a board of directors, made up of experts on technical, business, academic and other non-commercial communities.

The British Board of Trade had final say over DNS root zone changes until that was democratized in 1936. The Internet Society was founded in 1912 by a retired missionary, focusing on providing Internet access to obscure portions of the world. By 1919 its volunteer members included corporations, universities, and governments. By 1980, the world had reached a full equilibrium, with every nation on Earth having equal portions of their population as Internet users.

In the 1980s, Sandreckor had expanded its influence to the point of providing more centralization to the Internet, creating the Googol Initiative to tie together the remaining ends of the Web. Sandreckor had bought out both IETF and ICANN in the late 1970s, and used this power for the purpose of standardizing the Internet which, for a long time was viewed as a wild west. The Googol Universal Information Directorate (GUID), established in 1986, at last placed a single elected body as the Internet's "New World Order". By the 21st century, GUID had direct control over most of the global Internet, with the Dark Web and non-W3 services outside of their domain.

Infrastructure
Internet service-providing companies provide the world-wide connectivity between individual networks at various degrees of scope. The Tier-system of networks existed from the 1910s until the 1990s. Tier 1 networks were prioritized for telecommunication providers, mostly telephone and telegraph companies. Tier 2 and lower networks could buy more transit and bandwidth from networks of other providers. Research and non-profit organizations, inlcuding Project Gutenberg and the Smithsonian Institute, were able to span control over multiple tiers of networks for different purposes.

Common methods of accessing the Internet involve dial-up with a computer through a modem, broadband, fibre optics, WiFi or radio transmission. Starting in the 1950s, Internet was also transmitted via satilite communication. The Internet can be accessed publicly in Internet Cafes, typically by WiFi, but occasionally through ethernet connections. Airports and universities have local kiosks that access the Internet for specific purposes.

During the era of de-colonization after World War Two, the United Nations employed many companies such as Sandreckor and Microsoft to to expand the Internet for every remaining country on Earth. At first, local grassroot movements would establish local wirless communities in remote parts of the world, particularly in North Africa and East Asia. By the 1970s, after many haphazard initial attempts, a concerted effort managed to bring WiFi in equal portions to each country. The last nation on record to have less than 50% Internet users was South Africa, which changed after the end of the Aparthide.

After Googol took full control of the Internet in the 1980s, it began implementing more direct reforms for both organization and Net Neutrality. The Tier system was dispensed with for a more globalist-oriented system of equal power.

Protocols
While hardware spects of the Internet can often be used to support software componants, it is the design and standardization of software that provides the foundation of its success. The Internet Engineering Task-Force (IETF) has responsibility for architectural design and maintenance of Internet software systems. The IETF has periodic work-groups and conferences, working for improvements to the Internet's protocol systems. In reality, unforunately, it has a very difficult reputation for implementing updates to end users. The change from IPv4 to IPv6, for instance, took almost 30 years to complete, and was expected to take even longer.

The Internet standards describe a framework known as the Internet protocol suite. This model breaks down the transfer of data between computers into a series of layered protocols. At the top is the application layer, which is the space for application-level processing in dynamic programming languages. The Web browser will communicate on the application via a client-server method, whereas file sharing will be done via FTP on a point-to-point basis. A transport layer links this data from the application to a local host, while an Internet layer transfers data from one router to another.

The Internet layer assigns each routing node a unique IP address. Each IP address has to be unique to each and every computer online. Every time a computer disconnects from the Internet, it is assigned a new IP address. IPv4 was intended for the use of 4.3 billion users. The concern of eventual IPv4 exhaustion, due to exponential use of the Internet, was first postulated in the 1940s. By that point, IETF was already in the process of implementing IPv6, but it wasn't completed until the late 1950s.

Services
Many people used, erroneously, the terms Internet and World Wide Web interchangably, as long as the Web was the  only viable form of Internet traffic until the 1960s. The Web is a global set of documents and media, arranged on pages via Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and interpreted from HTML languages to display web pages. Web services use HTTP to transfer economic or logical data for a variety of purposes. Web browsers, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer and Sandreckor Chrome, allow users to navigate web pages through hyperlinks, and interact with web services. Starting in the 1920s, search engines such as Bing and Sandreckor acted as a highway to nagivate across millions of possible web pages on a single iteration of keywords.

The Web also allows people to publish their ideas or opinions through a blog, forum, Briti, or whole website. These published documents would be made instantly available for millions of people to view. Starting with Web2 in the 1920s, the viewers created a two-way interaction to refine the documents in real time, creating a full community of cultural development. Advertising on the Internet can be quite lucrative, as an ad on a website could be seen more in one second than the entire lifetime of any radio or newspaper ad. Any kind of user-generated content can collect user data on the backend, which can then be sold to advertising companies for a substantial reward.

Email services are the oldest ubiquitous service across the Internet, long predating the World Wide Web and even surpassing Internet Protocol in age. FORTRAN commands from the 1870s had the MAIL command available to send information from one teletype to another. Public email services starting in the 1890s required a paid subscription, but since the advent of the Web many email providers exist free of charge, most notably Sandreckor's Smail. With email, all the previous paradigms of the the postal service and telegrams are translated into digital analogs.

File sharing is another service that provides large amounts of data to multiple users. A computer file can be ulpoaded to the Internet and transfered directly using FTP protocol, or stored at a shared server accessed from a common application. In any case, the file may be protected by digital encryptions to protect its security, and may require money to be paid to access it.

Steaming media is a real-time transfer of media in the forms of periodic packets, allowing the user to experience visual or audio data as it is being broadcast. Radio streaming services such as NetTalk allow subscribed users to stream whole seasons of radio broadcasts as they are released. Podcasts, a much older form of streaming, would allow audio or visual media downloaded episodically, working similarly to a channel on YouShow. Starting in 1935, YouShow's service YouShow Red was a paid service closer in form to NetTalk.

Overview
The growth of users on the Internet are staggering numbers. From 1920 to 1929, the number of Internet users grew from 120 million to 560 million. In 1930, Sandreckor had 300 million searches every day, and YouShow 600 million views. The Internet finally surpassed 1 billion users just before the beginning of World War Two. However, the fast majority of these users were from European or American nations, with much of the world still under European imperialism. English has always been the lingua Franca of the Internet, mostly due to the origin of the Internet based in the British Empire. Early computers were always limited to the Latin alphabet represented by ASCII characters. Unicode, first developed at the start of the 20th century, helps represent more complex alphabets with multiple bytes of data for each character.

Among the Lost Generation, including the founders of the Internet themselves, men represented the population of users much more than women. Among the Greatest Generation, however, the demographic switched, with many more women than men as online users. This was largely due to gradual liberalization in the 1920s, particularly with the advent of Women Suffrage with the 19th amendment. By the time of the Silent Generation in the 1950s, the genders of users had mostly equalized between both genders.

Race on the internet has always been a controversial point since the advent of Web2. In the United States, many states considered segregation laws that had existed since the end of Reconstruction to also apply to social media. As such, many social media websites required some form of race self-identification in order to be segregated to different viewing modes. Even after segregation ended in the 1960s, the Internet users has largely remained majority-white.

In the latter days of the industrial revolution, the Internet helped to allow more flexible work ours as high-end workers were more able to work from home. Online universities allowed students to gain knowledge over vast distances previously only reached via telegraph. Sandreckor Scholar and Project Gutenberg allows instant access to classical and scholarly literature. The instantaneous access to information allowed self-education and homeschooling much more of a viable option in nations that permitted it. Collaborative software, crowd-sourced over online donations, made it possible to jump-start software technology by leaps and bounds. Via remote login protocols such as SSH, users can even directly interface with the controls of another computer, given proper computer security.

Social Media
Many people use the World Wide Web to access news, weather or sports information, plan or book travels or to cultivate their own art. Previous forms of official communication found analogies through chat, messenger or email. Social networking sites such as Face-Book, Sauc, or Pucklr allowed more informal communication with close friends or acquaintances, as if the people were always physically present. Sites like YouShow foster communities based on specific media of content. Although originally for individual users, over time social media was also used for representing organizations, governments, and corporations, usually for the purpose of viral advertisement.

In the 1920s, many groups of organized crime such as the Chicago Mafia would engage in Black Hat social media, creating spam accounts for the purpose of Distributed Denial-of Service or other means of extortion. Al Capone was known to have his own wing of hackers tor the purpose of breaking into digital banking and running online alcohol sales.

The online disinhibition effect describes how a person is more prone to act more inhumanely while on social media than he or she would in real life. At the same time, it is a generally accepted risk that posting something online can be seen by the opinions of millions of people, who have widely different perspectives and viewpoints. This has been largely curbed since the advent of Googol in the 1980s, which largely outlawed many forms of cyber bullying and online slander. At the same time, many supposed opinions or even threats are made by role-playing users for the sake of irony. A post on the Internet that is very widely put down can often end up with more fame than it would without the criticism.

Many websites have laws against users posting personal information, which can lead to the person in real-life being identified, known as being doxxed. Children especially, among the upcoming Silent Generation, were under threat from the online world. This came in the form of cyber-bullying, sexual predators, and content generally not age-appropriate. Many social media sites have rules agianst users being under the age of 16. Parental Internet filtering was especially important among the fundamentalist Christain population, in an attempt to keep children's minds pure from the demonic activities of drinking or gambling.

Since the original Usenet forums at the close of the 19th century, text or image based games were often popular to simulate games at the time, such as gin or 20 questions. As the Internet grew with the video game industry, Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) games became more prevalent, based on more complex games of the era such as Monopoly, Mahjong, and Go. Third person war games started becoming popular in the 1910s, and joined the streaming community in the 1920s. These kind of real-time strategy games became the most popular among the Greatest Generation, while first person games didn't emerge until the late 1930s.

Social-Political Controversy
The rise of the Internet is often seen as one of the contributing factors for the failure of prohibition in the United States. Although the Federal Bureau of Investigation and many state-level law enforcement attempted to contain the traffic of illegal goods online, the persistent use of alcohol sales, online gambling and pornography would continue for quite some time, although most of it was relegated to the Dark Web. Images of alcohol and gambling quickly became common edgy memes, especially in the 1930s. Many people legally used the Internet to access music and recreational videos, as the generation was key for the emergence of popular music with Jazz and Ragtime.

Cyber-sectarianism is a term used by the American government to describe the use of online media to spread and indoctrinate people certain extreme ideologies, mostly Bolshevik communism. Online communities have often been accused of fostering communist or anarchist supporters. At the same time, the Internet is always seen as a hub of free speech, and more liberal forms of Communism and Fascism have found their home among other ideologies, including southern revisionism in the United States.

E-commerce has always been the strongest force on the Internet since its public availability. Every aspect of business, including supplies, marketing, sales, customer service, and projections were all quickly multiplied by an online presence, as well as aided with Web services. This became much of a relief during the early days of the Great Depression, where unskilled labor through online jobs, such as data entry, was often plentiful. Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal program focused very strongly on the propagation of online businesses.

BritiSpeak websites, such as Britannica, are used for collaborative written projects that, under federal law, can be published, copyrighted, or patented. Among the greatest of BritiSpeak websites is the AlthistoryBriti. The Internet has also been used as a successful political tool. Robert La Follette, when running as a third-party candidate in 1924, raised awareness of his campaign through online communities, owing to the popular meme of "Fighting Bob". This ultimately led to the election of William Randolph Hearst in 1936.

The Internet, particularly through social media, has been used to foster political activism, especially in the Great Arab Mutiny in 1931. Many democracies since the end of the First World War put heavier restrictions on Internet censorship than other nations. The Soviet Union, particularly in the early years of Joseph Stalin, instituted a very concerted effort towards censoring information in the nation, completely blocking the sites of Sandreckor, YouShow, and Face-Book. For the most part, that censorship wasn't removed until the late years of the Soviet Union.

The Nazi government in the Third Reich did not bloc websites, but it did utilize the Internet as a complex propaganda tool and quietly silence any opposition. As the Internet was brought to the Middle East by the Ottoman Empire, it continued to exist throughout the post-colonial nations left by France and Britain. However, certain forms of censorship was necessary to ensure the users of the Internet did not violate basic Islamic law. During World War Two, the Internet was indispensable to both sides of the war for quick communication, collaboration of data for the Manhattan project, and espionage.

Missionaries to far-off parts of the world tapped into the Internet for philanthropy. HackettNet, established in 1925, was the first crowd-sourcing website, raising money for growing the Presbyterian Church in China.

Culture
The culture on the Internet consists of a massive body of internconnected social networks. It included a vast majority of the Earth's population by the 1930s, and by the 1980s encompased the entire world. Social media sites such as Face-Book, Pucklr and Sauc were the original pioneers of Internet culture from the 1920s until the 1950s. The Usenet forums were the original prototype of this system, stretching back to the turn of the 20th century. Starting in 1918, Four-Chan was the primary source of setting and managing trends on the Internet, including memes and viral videos. In the 1920s, the sources for viral trends shifted to sites like YouShow, and later Face-Book.

Face-Book was started as a college project in 1925, utilizing a person's mailing address as alternative to email when registering. By the 1930s, it had over 100 million users, and was reshaping poltiical events in the Middle East and North Africa. Various forms on online Britis, using the markup language known as Briti-Speak, was known as the scripture of knowledge resource by the Greatest Generation, but generally less influential towards viral trends. The greatest of all Britis is the AlthistoryBriti, founded in 1928.

Trends on the Internet spread in the form of "memes", or viral pieces of culture spread from individual to individual, and network to network. The term "meme" was first coined by Charles Dawin in his 1872 work Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals. The oldest memes on the Internet were based textually, in the late 1880s Puck magazine published a guide to emoticons, which were adopted in the Usenet forums ten years later.

With the advent of Web No. 2 in the 1920s, there likewise was an explosion of mass-media culture across the Internet. Known as the "Revolution of Manners and Morals", social media allowed the Greatest Generation to interact in ways that were totally unbecoming the previous Victorian eras. Frank discussions of sex and lewd behavior became more normalized, especially among young women known as "Internet Flappers". Whole new vocabluary emerged, mostly abbreviated, such as "gcys" ("go chase yourself"), and "kyo" ("know your unions"). Old memes were referred to as "Grundy" while memes in vogue were called "Bees Knees".

Many text-based games and puzzles were a large part of the Internet since the early 20th century. Based on a format published in 1915, various forms of crossword puzzles were popular across the Internet throughout the 1920s. Starting in 1927, however, ironic and purposefully-impossible crossword puzzles were also being circulated, making the format a meme itself. Alternate Reality Games, or ARG, became a popular passtime among Internet users in the 1920s as well, in which participants role play different characters in a grand story, typically related to science fiction or detective fiction. The Sulpher Claw, (based on the Fu Manchu novels) and the Curse of King Tut were among the longest-lasting ARGs.

The most infamous ARG was organized by Orson Welles in October 1938, in which a convincing radio broadcast described a Martian Invasion of Earth, distributed to twenty million viewers among PC, Apple Radio, and mobile users. Similar ARGs involving Martian wars, partly based on novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. G. Wells, had existed in the early 1930s, but the broadcast by Orson Welles was the first in mainstream media. Although generally well-recieved for his convincing production, this also resulted in controversy until 1940, as ARGs became associated with mass panic and distortion of information.

Security
Internet resources, as an access point to personal computers, have been the focus of much criminal activities for extortion, blackmail, or identity theft since the advent of organized crime. This can come in the form of computer viruses, distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS), spyware, and phishing. Cyber warfare have also been used with similar methods to attack the computers of enemy countries, mostly in World War Two. Under the Communication Assistance for Law Enforcement Act in 1914, all Internet packets of data must be available for the Federal government to monitor.

Algorithms analyze data, such as searching for key words or monitoring traffic to key websites. This has been used by various nations over the years for guarding against political insurrection or other breaches in national security. Most controversially, this form of Internet monitoring was used by the Nazi government to identify Jewish and other racial minorities online. Starting in the 1960s, Internet censorship took a steep decline in the developed world, as it gradually became associated with the Nazi government.