Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants

Two of the biggest names in the history of the Internet are Vinton Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee. This blog would be invisible if not for these two brilliant men. Thanks to Cerf, we have e-mail and thanks to Berners-Lee we have Web pages/sites (like this blog). On the downside, Cerf also gave us spam and Berners-Lee also gave us this (fair & balanced) blog. Talk about mixed blessings! As this blog celebrates its 10-thousandth visitor, blame Vinton Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee if you don't like what you see. If this is a (fair & balanced) development with both advantages and disadvantages, so be it.

[x Time]
The Internet's Big Bang
By Vinton Cerf

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browser called cern chapter committed community computer content created develop documents emerge engines evoke give google history hypertext imagery information information-creation interact internet invention language locating marc modest mosaic open pages passion retrieving search semantic significant stored story system technology tim tools universe users vinton virtually web wide world worldwideweb

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Sir Tim Berners-Lee at MIT.

I grew up reading Tom Swift Jr. stories. Looking back at the story of the Web makes me think it should be titled something like Tim Berners-Lee and his World Wide Web Machine. When Tim began his work with Robert Cailliau in 1989 at CERN, Europe's particle-physics lab in Geneva, the Internet was just beginning to emerge as a commercially available service. But it lacked standardized systems for formatting, storing, locating and retrieving information. Tim solved these problems by writing Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), a computer language for communicating documents over the Internet, and by designing a system to give documents addresses. He also created the first browser — calling it the WorldWideWeb — as well as a language (Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML) for creating Web pages and the first server software allowing those pages to be stored and accessed by others.

Like many people, I was completely unaware at the time of these historic developments. The Web first came to my attention in early 1993 when Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina released their graphical browser called Mosaic. It is hard to evoke the stunning impact Mosaic had on the community of Internauts who until that time were accustomed to text-based tools and keyboard navigation for retrieving content. The addition of imagery and magazine-like layout transformed the Internet into a gigantic publishing vehicle, an information-creation engine. It was as if a new guild based on new technology had been created in the Middle Ages; virtually every medium that had been invented in the past could now be presented through the Internet and users could interact with this information in ways no book, radio, television or newspaper could offer. The tsunami that flowed into the Internet via the World Wide Web also created the need for tools to find specific content in an ocean full of information. Thus were born a series of search engines and the giant companies such as Google and Yahoo! associated with them.

As with many inventions, once the conditions for their invention have been satisfied, many variations on a theme will emerge to interact, compete and evolve in a new universe. And like many other inventors I have known, Tim (now Sir Tim), is modest, passionate and committed to the further evolution of this universe. As the head of the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT, he continues to develop new capabilities for the Web. His passion these days is to find a way to reveal the content of huge databases on the Internet that are otherwise not visible to the search engines of today. This search for the Semantic Web has the potential to be even more significant than his invention of the World Wide Web. His success could open a new chapter in the history of information technology. Ω


[Vinton Cerf's first job after obtaining his B.S. in Mathematics from Stanford University was at IBM, where he worked for less than two years as a systems engineer supporting QUIKTRAN. He left IBM to attend graduate school at UCLA where he earned his master's degree in 1970 and his PhD degree in 1972. After a career in the information technology industry, Cerf joined the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in 1999, and served until the end of 2007. Currently, Cerf serves as the "chief Internet evangelist" at Google.]

Copyright © 2009 Time, Inc.

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Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Angry Bob Speaks Truth To Power

In the midst of traveling toward home, this blogger overlooked an important column by Angry Bob in the NY Fishwrap a couple of days ago. Angry Bob speaks truth to power again and again; he took on corrupt police and sheriffs in the Texas Panhandle after a rogue "undercover agent" wrongly accused the small population of African American adults in Tulia, TX of being "big-time drug dealers." The outcry against the injustice prompted the Clinton DOJ to investigate and uncover the hideous and cynical abuse of power in Swisher County. Now, Angry Bob speaks to the outrageous statements by the POTUS (44) that the "dangerous prisoners" in Gitmo can be held in "preventative detention" if the DOJ cannot prosecute them in a court of law. Angry Bob asks "Who Are We?" as we maintain a Gulag off the coast of the United States. Who are we when we acknowledge that torture and war crimes occurred after September 11, 2001, but argue that we must look forward and forget the past? Police agencies in the Land O'The Free and the Home O'The Brave routinely pursue justice in "cold cases" that occurred years and years earlier. The torture and war crimes that occurred after 9/11 are not "cold cases." Try them all: the poor wretches in Gitmo and the perpetrators of torture and war crimes from the POTUS (43) to the last CIA torturerer, whether government employee or private contractor hired by the Agency. If this is (fair & balanced) intolerance of evil, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Who Are We?
By Bob Herbert

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abuses account administration americans approach bush charge civil committed constitutional court danger detainees detention effect egregious evidence excessive guant imprisoning interrogation justice lawyers liberties matter mistake month moral mr national obama offend people photos policies president prevent real released rendition rights secrecy security state-secrets techniques torture ve worst wrong years

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Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House.

One of the most disappointing aspects of the early months of the Obama administration has been its unwillingness to end many of the mind-numbing abuses linked to the so-called war on terror and to establish a legal and moral framework designed to prevent those abuses from ever occurring again.

The president deserves credit for unequivocally banning torture and some of the other brutal interrogation techniques that spread like a plague in the Bush administration’s lawless response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. But other policies that offend the conscience continue.

Americans should recoil as one against the idea of preventive detention, imprisoning people indefinitely, for years and perhaps for life, without charge and without giving them an opportunity to demonstrate their innocence.

And yet we’ve embraced it, asserting that there are people who are far too dangerous to even think about releasing but who cannot be put on trial because we have no real evidence that they have committed any crime, or because we’ve tortured them and therefore the evidence would not be admissible, or whatever. President Obama is O.K. with this (he calls it “prolonged detention”), but he wants to make sure it is carried out — here comes the oxymoron — fairly and nonabusively.

Proof of guilt? In 21st-century America, there is no longer any need for such annoyances.

Human rights? Ha-ha. That’s a good one.

Also distressing is the curtain of secrecy the Obama administration has kept drawn over shameful abuses that should be brought into the light of day. Back in April, the administration rightly released the “torture memos” detailing the gruesome interrogation techniques unleashed by the Bush crowd. But last month, Mr. Obama apparently tripped over his own instincts and reversed his initial decision to release photos of American soldiers engaged in the brutal abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We saw the profound effect of the disclosure of the photos from Abu Ghraib in 2004. Imagine if they had never been released. Now, in an affront to a society that is supposed to be intelligent and free, the Obama administration is trying to sit on photos that are just as important for Americans to see. The president’s argument for trying to block the court-ordered release of the photos is a demoralizing echo of the embarrassingly empty rhetoric of the Bush years:

“The most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in danger.”

The Obama administration is also continuing the Bush administration’s abuse of the state-secrets privilege. Lawyers from the Obama Justice Department have argued, as did lawyers from the Bush administration before them, that a lawsuit involving extraordinary rendition and allegations of extreme torture should be dismissed outright because discussions of such matters in court would harm national security.

In other words, the victims, no matter how strong their case might be, no matter how badly they might have been abused, could never have their day in court. Jane Mayer, writing in the June 22 New Yorker, said of the rendition program, in which suspects were swept up by Americans and spirited off to foreign countries for imprisonment and interrogation: “As many as seven detainees were misidentified and abducted by mistake.”

The Bush and Obama view of the state-secrets privilege effectively bars any real examination of such egregious mistakes.

It was thought by many that a President Obama would put a stop to the madness, put an end to the Bush administration’s nightmarish approach to national security. But Mr. Obama has shown no inclination to bring even the worst offenders of the Bush years to account, and seems perfectly willing to move ahead in lockstep with the excessive secrecy and some of the most egregious activities of the Bush era.

The new president’s excessively cautious approach to the national security and civil liberties outrages of the Bush administration are unacceptable, and the organizations and individuals committed to fairness, justice and the rule of law — the Center for Constitutional Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, and many others — should intensify their efforts to get the new administration to do the right thing.

More than 500 of the detainees incarcerated at one time or another at Guantánamo Bay have been released, and, except for a handful, no charges were filed against them. The idea that everyone held at Guantánamo was a terrorist — the worst of the worst — was always absurd.

Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, noted that Mr. Obama had promised to bring both transparency and accountability to matters of national security. It’s the only way to get our moral compass back. Ω

[Bob Herbert joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in 1993. His twice a week column comments on politics, urban affairs and social trends. Prior to joining The Times, Herbert was a national correspondent for NBC from 1991 to 1993, reporting regularly on "The Today Show" and "NBC Nightly News." He had worked as a reporter and editor at The Daily News from 1976 until 1985, when he became a columnist and member of its editorial board. Herbert received a B.S. degree in journalism from the State University of New York (Empire State College) in 1988. He has taught journalism at Brooklyn College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.]

Copyright © The New York Times Company

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Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves