The short lifetime of information
technology has seen humanity leap years forward into the future. With the help
of computer pioneers like Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Linux Torvalds, Bill
Gates, and Ian Murdock, computers have launched us into an age where the
rudimentary, repetitive, and mundane tasks can be automated with the power of
machines. As these computers became more advanced, they became exponentially
faster while simultaneously becoming physically smaller over time. Portable
laptops are now being surpassed in number by smartphones and tablets; Servers
can be out-performed by home-brew computer systems, and entire homes can be
remotely controlled with a $30 Raspberry Pi and a little creativity.
Once a humble link between two
college computers hundreds of miles apart, the internet is now a super-massive
network of veins and arteries that span the globe, pumping precious data
through the countless devices that dot its millions of branches and crossroads.
After fifty years since its birth,
the Internet is no longer limited to just datacenters forwarding traffic from
one place to another. It is now an Internet of Things. Every routing and
gateway device that exists has the ability to pass traffic to its intended
destination seamlessly in cooperation with its neighbors, and as the number of
devices grows, so do the speeds at which this information travels. To us, it is
indistinguishable from instantaneous.
This computer revolution has given
humanity a new means of communication and information sharing that has led to
an incredible understanding and a desire to cooperate with the world. Thanks to
the advent of social media and mobile applications powered by smartphones, information
and news is a mere click, tap and a swipe away. It has always been the
intention of free-thinkers and advocates of the open-source communities that
information, the internet, technology, and knowledge should always be easily
and readily accessible to everyone. Thanks to the Internet of Things, that time
is now.
What has become known in many circles
as “the hacker ethic” explains that people with knowledge and understanding of
technology have a responsibility to use their knowledge for the good of the
world. According to Steven Levy, it operates on its basic principles of information
sharing, openness, decentralization, free access to computers, and world
improvement. Linus Torvalds, who created the Linux kernel in 1991, dared to
think that all of this power deserved to be shared freely with the world. It is
rather poetic that the free and open internet uses Linux now more than any
other operating system in the world.
So much of the internet has come to
be dominated by the sheer number of things that exist on it. As it should be,
it is largely owned by the people who use it. Even in countries where internet
access is heavily censored, there is The Onion Router (TOR) to help their
citizens to break through that veil of censorship. TOR also operates in tandem
with the internet of things to tunnel traffic through many devices called ‘nodes’
that protect and anonymize the user to allow them to access the greater
internet, and not just what their government restricts them to.
The
internet of things has already done much to make the internet more free and
accessible to everyone. It has taken ownership of it from corporate
organizations and placed it in the hands of the world. It has freed us from
censorship. It delivers anything and everything we want to know instantly. Yet
for all it is now, it has only just begun.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer_Revolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux
http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet
http://www.netvalley.com/archives/mirrors/cerf-how-inet.html
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/
