It's hard to pinpoint exactly when the Internet was lost to the swarms of technological neophytes to emerge later as the "web". It was probably at the exact point when pornography proliferation was at its highest, drawing in the worst and most uneducated swine onto this advanced communication tool to help shape it into quagmire that it is today.

Normally I'm happy to let the peons go about their business, making themselves available to predators on MySpace and getting all their data mined on Facebook. I'm even ok when idiotic posts like "root kits in Bioshock" make it up onto what used to be a reputable tech news source, Slashdot. Just so long as they keep it out of my private space.

Having run out of reading material for the can, I had picked up a copy of the latest Wired magazine to see what kind of editorial butchery they had employed in their article on Halo 3 and for emergency toilet paper. As I was flipping through, carefully averting my eyes to make sure I didn’t lose too many brain cells, I came upon a big 2 page spread that drew my eye.

WW1

I giggled in delight at the prospect of reading an article on World War 1 written by someone who shits their pants in fear when they receive a suspicious attachment in their email. But as my eyes slowly moved over the glossy page I spotted something that made my blood run cold.

Web War 1: How Europe's Most Wired Country Beat the Botnets

Now, I knew they were idiots over there, but you’d think that someone there would have somewhat of a clue… maybe the guy who installs the workstations. But no, now they’ve gone and infected the public with yet another excuse to spread ignorance around the world. When I was a little boy I remember looking forward, wondering when the days of downloading a 4 part jpeg from a BBS on my 2400 baud modem would be done. When I could no longer just send text messages, but could publish things, search things on a sort of a global BBS.

I guess someone was listening to me, because then the Web started evolving. This new shiny experience called the World Wide Web was a wonder for many people, sitting on top of the Internet using HTTP protocols to display and share information. Slowly, other forms of Internet protocols started losing popularity, like newsgroups, finger and the Web started filling some of these roles. Underneath the Web still lies a uh… uh… web of lower level protocols which enable the core and business functions of the Internet and allow the Web to run.

I think I might be starting to make myself a little clear, but let me spell it out. The Internet is not the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is but a fraction of the Internet. If we’re going to call things by the name of their largest component, we should have just called the whole thing Porn.

I’m baffled at the idea of running a DOS attack on the HTTP protocol; maybe they were flooding the systems with SOAP requests or sending massive XML documents through POST requests. If this were the case, and the hackers were as nubly as the writers and editors for Wired, well we’d have a very safe world indeed. We could just throw both groups in a pit and fill it in with back issues of wired… slowly. Unfortunately the attackers were a little smarter, using botnets and other hijacked systems to attack their target with more low-level and powerful protocols.

I don’t know why I feel the need to punch someone in the tongue whenever they try and blur that distinction between the Web and the Internet, but that’s just the way they built me. Technology is a tool, and people generally don’t use a band saw if they think it’s called a jackhammer. Understanding of technology is what empowers us to make it better and more useful to us; instead of blindly flailing about with our iphones in our hands riding our Segways, perhaps we should look a little closer at the technology which allows us to do more and more powerful things every day and try to understand it.

And by the way, you can’t Google the Internet, not only does it sound dirty, but it’s a proper name, not a verb. You can, however, search the Internet with Google. Unfortunately I think we’ve already lost that linguistic battle, maybe it’s all the porn on Google.