The Internet and the Web It Weaves....

I am being tracked, followed, spied upon, and may even have a bit of a virus. And I don't even have a fever, am not contagious, and am not using kleenex (except, perhaps to wipe my emoticons off the computer screen ;)

Someone gave me a viral command that is turning all of my searches into advertisements for places to go and buy..... and not the places I want to go and just learn, and read up on, and window shop!

So far, I am removing LSO's (the acronym for 'Local Shared Object' known as super cookies) on a regular basis and each and every time I sign out which is every 10 minutes. And as much as I dearly love some of our big name dropper bloggers, their LSO's are wrecking havoc with each and every visit I make to their sites. You can 'catch' LSO's from any site that contains advertising.

{Update: The New York Times substantiated my own theory by writing :" There's been a recent rash of ads spreading malware on reputable sites as a result of ad networks farming out ads to third-parties." Remember: If you find yourself redirected to a suspicious site, close it out.}

Whether on a blog or a website if an ad is present or you are asked to check something out with a hyperlink (and it might only say...go 'here' or see 'fabric here') you have the chance to pick up a flashwave super cookie in the process. You will see a bright flash for a split second, almost as if it's under your computer page, out of the corner of your eye.

These unsuspecting bloggers and wonderful websites are not infecting us on purpose, they're just trying to earn money by placing 'adsense' or other ads on their pages. But they're being hijacked by others and we're being infected every time we go to read their posts and they don't even know it's happening and most of the time...neither do we.

The Internet may have turned 40 last week, but its advancements are aging me as we speak!

Few of us realized back on Sept. 2, 1969, that our world was about to dramatically change as 20 people gathered in a lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, to watch as two bulky computers passed meaningless test data through a 15-foot gray cable.

That was the beginning of the very first "Arpanet" network. Stanford Research Institute joined a month later, and UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah did by the year's end.The 1970s brought in the creation of e-mail and the TCP/IP communications protocols and the Internet was formed. The '80s gave birth to an addressing system with suffixes like ".com" and ".org" and then in the '90s, though, a British physicist, Tim Berners-Lee, invented the World Wide Web, a subset of the Internet that makes it easier to link resources across disparate locations.

The Internet blossomed, free from regulatory and commercial constraints, and greatly subsidized and encouraged by our own government, here in the U.S. which funded much of the Internet's early development. The Internet, then was a military project, and it was largely left alone, allowing its engineers to promote their ideal of an open network.

When Berners-Lee, working at a European physics lab, invented the Web in 1990, he could release it to the world without having to seek permission or contend with security firewalls.

"Allow that open access, and a thousand flowers bloom," said Kleinrock, a UCLA professor since 1963. "One thing about the Internet you can predict is you will be surprised by applications you did not expect."

That idealism is now eroding. Google and Apple are battling almost non-stop. Small companies that invented one tiny application for one program such as Word are now suing and demanding more money per app then the program even sells for. The iPhone restricts the software that can run on it. Only applications Apple has vetted are allowed.And Apple recently blocked the Google Voice communications application, saying it overrides the iPhone's built-in interface. Monopolies seek to take over and small start-ups are battling for a piece of the pie.

On desktop computers, some Internet access providers have erected barriers to curb bandwidth-gobbling file-sharing services used by their subscribers. Comcast Corp. got rebuked by Federal Communications Commission last year for blocking or delaying some forms of file-sharing.

The episode galvanized calls for the government to require "net neutrality," which essentially means that a service provider could not favor certain forms of data traffic over others.And while all of them are battling traffic controls and restrictions, as one tiny consumer, I sit at home and battle the benefits of technology and all that goes with it.

I just want to be able to get online, big boys. I just want to visit with friends and find new patterns to add to my virtual stash. I just want to share, and be, and do. Please don't let all of your in-fighting crash the Internet the same way that Madoff and the other wild dogs crashed Wallstreet.

Maybe today, they will stop fighting, stop being so commercialized and greedy. Maybe, all the nerds and geeks and hackers, and evil-doers will shape up and allow me to just come online without their ads crashing me, once again.

The Internet turned 40 this month...and I think her mid-life crisis has already begun...

To link to this, copy and paste: The Internet and the Web It Weaves

shown above:
my own surveillance system, known as K-e-r-m-i-t.

Kermit watches for spiders and trolls and using a super sharp attack system, decimates them into obliteration from her top-secret covert location. Also known for her 'spyware laundering', she spin cycles them into re-usable dryer sheets with a multitude of purposes and restores the quilted kingdom into peace, harmony and as the plaque reads "Home, Sweet, Home' once again.