The Pros and Cons of The Internet

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The origins of the internet can be traced back to J.C.R. Licklider of MIT, who wrote a series of memos in August of 1962. “He envisioned a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site.” (A Brief History of the Internet, 2000). Licklider became the first head of the computer research program at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), where the term ARPANET came to be known. The idea behind ARPANET was to connect universities together to be able to share information between them quickly.

In September of 1969, the first host computer was connected to ARPANET at UCLA and by the end of that year three other nodes were connected. This was the beginning of what we now know as the internet. In the early 1980s, commercialism saw where the internet could lead them and from there the World Wide Web was created. By the mid-1990s there were over 9.6 million hosts connected to the internet according to Internet Statistics (1996).

The internet makes shopping and banking a very easy task to perform. People can sit at home or work, visit an online store and browse everything available at that particular retailer. If they find an item they wish to purchase it’s a simple click and a little information, such as name, address, and credit card number from being shipped to their house. All that without the pains of having to go anywhere, waste gas or a lot more time in bumper to bumper traffic. While this seems to be a God-send for today’s time pressed population, it also opens the door for many of the industrious hackers of the world to steal someone’s identity. Identity theft has become the fastest growing financial crime in America as estimated by U.S. Department of Justice

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(March 2001). Someone may not even realize their identity has been stolen until they try purchase an automobile or house and then it may take months or even years to recover from having your identity stolen.

The internet has provided a means by which people can communicate inexpensively and with relative ease.

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