|
The Egyptians ... Besides ordinary religious manipulation-tools the Egyptians were masters of using architecture for propaganda. In Egypt, most of all, architecture was used as a media to demonstrated power, whereas the Greek and Romans used other types of art, like statues, for political propaganda. The pyramids, palaces, tombs became tools for power demonstrations. Paintings and carvings (like on obelisks) proved the might of the rulers. All those signs of power were done to make people compare their ruling dynasty to gods and keep them politically silent, because religion was used for justifying mortal power. Marble, gold, jewelry and artists were the tools for those maneuvers. Whereas questions for the truth were not even asked or listened to. Finally it was the masses who were used for propaganda, when they were not only forced to work as slaves on those signs of power but also were abused for those power demonstrations, when they had to accompany the dead king into his tomb - dying of hunger, thirst, lack of oxygen and in darkness. The more religious disinformation the more luxury. The more luxury the better. The more luxury the more power. |
|
|
|
Credibility The magic word is credibility. Disinformation can mean leaving out important informations. Telling lies is not the only method of disinformation. The not telling also creates thoughts and delegates them into certain directions, whereas other models of thinking are left out. Like this, the deaths on the own side are adjusted downwards whereas the victims of the enemy are counted proudly - as long as they are not civilians. The post-Gulf War period demonstrated how the population reacts if the number of innocent victims is much higher than expected. It was the fact of those numbers that provoked the biggest part of the post-war critique. The media in democratic states tend to criticize this, which does not mean that they always want to be free of governmental influence. They can choose to help the government in a single case by not writing anything against it or by writing pro-government stories. At the same time every democracy has undemocratic parts in it - which is already part of democracy itself. There are situations when a democratic government may find it essential to put pressure on the media to inform the population in a certain way; and also censorship is nothing that can only be connected to dictatorship; just think of the Falkland War, the Gulf-War or the Kosovo-War. |
|
|
|
Media Giants Online The following selection does not claim to present an exhaustive listing, but rather picks some of the company's most important assets. Due to the rapid developments in the world of media giants the list is also subject to changes. Broadcasting ABC TV Network with 223 affiliated TV stations covering the entire U.S. ABC Radio Network, with 2,900 affiliated stations throughout the U.S. Owner of 9 VHF TV stations Owner of 11 AM and 10 FM stations Cable TV Systems and Channels/Networks 80 % of ESPN cable TV channel and ESPN International 50 % of Lifetime cable TV channel Internet/Interactive Disney Interactive - entertainment and educational computer software and video games, plus development of content for on-line services. Partnership with 3 phone companies to provide video programming and interactive services. ABC Online TV Production, Movies, Video, Music Disney Television Production studios and Walt Disney Pictures movie studio Buena Vista Television production company Buena Vista Home Video Miramax and Touchstone movie production companies Buena Vista Pictures Distribution and Buena Vista International, distributors for Disney and Touchstone movies Walt Disney Records, and Hollywood Records Publishing 6 daily newspapers About 40 weekly magazines, including: Discover, Women's Wear Daily, Los Angeles and Institutional Investor. Chilton Publications Guilford Publishing Co. Hitchcock Publishing Co. Theme Parks, Resorts, and Travel Disneyland Disney World and Disney World Resort Part owner of Disneyland-Paris and Tokyo Disneyland 12 resort hotels Disney Vacation Club Cruise Lines International TV, Film, and Broadcasting 50 % owner of Tele-München Fernseh GmbH & Co. 50 % owner of RTL Disney Fernseh GmbH & Co. 23 % owner of RTL 2 Fernseh GmbH & Co. 37,5 % owner of TM3 Fernseh GmbH & Co. 20-33 % stake in Eurosport network, Spanish Tesauro SA TV company, and Scandinavian Broadcasting System SA 20 % owner of TVA Other Over 500 Disney Stores, and licensing of Disney products The Mighty Ducks professional hockey team 25 % ownership of California Angels major league baseball team Business Connections with Other Media Companies Joint ventures, equity interests, or major arrangements with |
|
|
|
The British Propaganda Campaign in World War I The British set up a unique system for propaganda, involving GB, the USA and all the colonies. Most different agencies and civilians worked together, the civilians not always knowing about the machinery behind. During the first years of the war the main goal was to achieve a U.S.-entry to the war on Britain's side of the battle. All propaganda was working on this, which meant to destroy Germany's reputation and create dark stereotypes about them, which was an easy task as the Germans were not only fatally unlucky but also very weak in propaganda. At the same time the U.S.-citizens' opinion about the war had to be influenced. The most promising way to do so was by starting with the men in power. One of the most beloved tools at that time was the use of atrocity stories; and most popular among the masses were cartoons, furthermore posters, an element perfectioned by the USSR in World War I and II, and movies. The particular thing was that British propaganda finally had an effect on the German population. Soldiers at the front and people at home received the disinformation messages, mostly pamphlets that had been dropped by aeroplanes or balloons. Together with the development of the fightings turning against the Germans this kind of propaganda was able to discourage the people and make the German government lose its power of propaganda. "Allied propaganda had caused a collapse of morale at home." ( After all this success it is hardly understandable that the British committed a huge error right after the war, an error that had bad consequences for the next war: being regarded as a tool of war and therefore regarded as inappropriate for times of peace, the propaganda institutions were closed. At about the same time similar ones were built up in Germany - first of all on paper, in |
|
|
|
Introduction Political and economic agendas change. People leave, get exchanged. Whereas one of the things that never seem to change is disinformation. Watching different kinds of cultures and regimes throughout history you will always find disinformation. Its use is variable just like its tools. First of all it does not necessarily need words. It is possible to disinform in any kind of language (sounds, symbols, letters or with the help of the body). As it seems to have come into existence together with human communication, we need not even hope that it will disappear once in a while. One could rather say: disinformation has always been there. Instead of hoping to stop it we need to learn to live with it, detect it, restore it to consciousness. Even this will not be any insurance for not walking into the trap. It is an attempt, nothing else. For detecting disinformation one needs to know what types of disinformation are possible and how they work. This site gives you some ideas about the history, tendencies and different types of disinformation, with the restriction that it will mostly be about the Western types of disinformation, as it is still harder to understand the media of disinformation in other cultures; and anyhow, many methods and tools run parallel in different cultures. |
|
|
|
The ancient Greek Disinformation was seen as an appropriate tool of politics and rhetoric in ancient Greece. Most of all persuasion was used, which then was considered a type of art. Religion was (and in many ways still is) the best disinformer or manipulator; prophecies were constructed to manipulate the population. The important thing was to use emotions and more than anything else fear as a tool for manipulation. If the oracle of Delphi said a war was to fight and would be won, then the Greek population - because of religious motives - was prepared to fight that war. Propaganda was not only used in wars but also in daily life to bring people together and create a nation. But poets, playwrights and other artists were manipulating as well. Their pieces of literature and plays were full of political messages with different ideologies behind. In the way how theatre at that time was part of life, it can be understood easily that those messages had not only entertainment's character but also a lot of political and social influence. A different and very famous part of disinformation in ancient Greek history was the story of |
|
|
|
New Forms of Propaganda (in the 19th Century) As soon as governments found out that newspapers were a fantastic and very often unsuspicious medium for supporting propaganda they tried to pull them to their side. Two ways existed: a) to have one's own newspaper, which implies that mostly friends of the government read it. Nothing is regarded as something neutral. b) to keep a good relationship to the most powerful/most frequently read newspapers and then try to make one's opinion theirs. Today mostly elected is b), trying to set up alliances. |
|
|
|
Association for Progressive Communication (APC) The APC is a global federation of 24 non-profit Internet providers serving over 50,000 NGOs in 133 countries. Since 1990, APC has been supporting people and organizations worldwide, working together online for social, environmental and economic justice. The APC's network of members and partners spans the globe, with significant presence in Central and Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America. History Between 1982 and 1987 several independent, national, non-profit computer networks emerged as viable information and communication resources for activists and NGOs. The networks were founded to make new communication techniques available to movements working for social change. In 1987, people at GreenNet in England began collaborating with their counterparts at the Institute for Global Communications (IGC) in the United States. These two networks started sharing electronic conference material and demonstrated that transnational electronic communications could serve international as well as domestic communities working for peace, human rights and the environment. This innovation proved so successful that by late 1989, networks in Sweden, Canada, Brazil, Nicaragua and Australia were exchanging information with each other and with IGC and GreenNet. In the spring of 1990, these seven organizations founded the Association for Progressive communications to co-ordinate the operation and development of this emerging global network of networks. Strategies and Policies The APC defends and promotes non-commercial, productive online space for NGOs and collaborates with like-minded organizations to ensure that the information and communication needs of civil society are considered in telecommunications, donor and investment policy. The APC is committed to freedom of expression and exchange of information on the Internet. The APC helps to build capacity between existing and emerging communication service providers. The APC Women's Networking Support Program promotes gender-aware Internet design, implementation and use. Through its African members, the APC is trying to strengthen indigenous information sharing and independent networking capacity on the continent. Members of APC develop Internet products, resources and tools to meet the advocacy, collaboration and information publishing and management needs of civil society. Recent APC initiatives have included the APC Toolkit Project: Online Publishing and Collaboration for Activists and the Mission-Driven Business Planning Toolkit. The APC also runs special projects like the Beijing+5, which shall enable non-governmental organizations to actively participate in the review of the Beijing Platform for Action. |
|
|
|
Timeline 1970-2000 AD 1971 IBM's work on the Lucifer cipher and the work of the NSA lead to the U.S. Data Encryption Standard (= 1976 1977/78 the 1984 Congress passes Comprehensive Crime Control Act - The Hacker Quarterly is founded 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is passed in the USA - Electronic Communications Privacy Act 1987 Chicago prosecutors found Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force 1988 U.S. Secret Service covertly videotapes a hacker convention 1989 NuPrometheus League distributes Apple Computer software 1990 - - Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard publish their work on Quantum Cryptography - Martin Luther King Day Crash strikes AT&T long-distance network nationwide 1991 - one of the first conferences for Computers, Freedom and Privacy takes place in San Francisco - AT&T phone crash; New York City and various airports get affected 1993 the U.S. government announces to introduce the 1994 - the 1990s work on quantum computer and quantum cryptography - work on biometrics for authentication (finger prints, the iris, smells, etc.) 1996 France liberates its cryptography law: one now can use cryptography if registered - OECD issues Cryptography Policy Guidelines; a paper calling for encryption exports-standards and unrestricted access to encryption products 1997 April European Commission issues Electronic Commerce Initiative, in favor of strong encryption 1997 June PGP 5.0 Freeware widely available for non-commercial use 1997 June 56-bit DES code cracked by a network of 14,000 computers 1997 August U.S. judge assesses encryption export regulations as violation of the First Amendment 1998 February foundation of Americans for Computer Privacy, a broad coalition in opposition to the U.S. cryptography policy 1998 March 1998 April NSA issues a report about the risks of key recovery systems 1998 July 1998 October Finnish government agrees to unrestricted export of strong encryption 1999 January RSA Data Security, establishes worldwide distribution of encryption product outside the USA - National Institute of Standards and Technologies announces that 56-bit - 56-bit DES code is cracked in 22 hours and 15 minutes 1999 May 27 United Kingdom speaks out against key recovery 1999 Sept: the USA announce to stop the restriction of cryptography-exports 2000 as the German government wants to elaborate a cryptography-law, different organizations start a campaign against that law - computer hackers do no longer only visit websites and change little details there but cause breakdowns of entire systems, producing big economic losses for further information about the history of cryptography see: for information about hacker's history see: |
|
|
|
1950: The Turing Test |
|
|
|
The Catholic Church In the beginnings of Christianity most people were illiterate. Therefore the Bible had to be transformed into pictures and symbols; and not only the stories but also the moral duties of everybody. Images and legends of the Saints turned out as useful models for human behavior - easy to tell and easy to understand. Later, when the crusades began, the Christian Church used propaganda against Muslims, creating pictures of evil, pagan and bloodcurdling people. While the knights and others were fighting abroad, people in Europe were told to pray for them. Daily life was connected to the crusades, also through money-collections - more for the cause of propaganda than for the need of money. During the period of the Counter-Reformation Catholic propaganda no longer was against foreigners but turned against people at home - the Protestants; and against their publications/books, which got prohibited by starting the so-called index. By then both sides were using disinformation for |
|
|
|
Key Recovery Systems As stated before the sense of cryptography is a properly designed cryptosystem making it essentially impossible to recover encrypted data without any knowledge of the used key. The issue of lost keys and the being-locked-out from one's own data as a consequence favors key recovery systems. On the other hand the counter argument is confidentiality: as soon as a possibility to recover a key is provided, the chances for abuses grow. Finally it is the state that does not want to provide too much secrecy. On the contrary. During the last 20 years endless discussions about the state's necessity and right to restrict private cryptography have taken place, as the governments rarely care for the benefit of private users if they believe in catching essential informations about any kind of enemy, hence looking for unrestricted access to all keys. The list of "key recovery," "key escrow," and "trusted third-party" as encryption requirements, suggested by governmental agencies, covers all the latest developments and inventions in digital technology. At the same time the NSA, one of the world's most advanced and most secret enterprises for cryptography, worked hard in getting laws through to forbid the private use of strong encryption in one way or the other. Still, it is also organizations like this one that have to admit that key recovery systems are not without any weaknesses, as the U.S. Escrowed Encryption Standard, the basis for the famous and controversially discussed Clipper Chip, showed. The reason for those weaknesses is the high complexity of those systems. Another aspect is that key recovery systems are more expensive and certainly much less secure than other systems. So, why should anyone use them? In that context, one has to understand the legal framework for the use of cryptography, a strict framework in fact, being in high contradiction to the globalised flow of communication. |
|
|
|
Introduction: The Substitution of Human Faculties with Technology: Computers and Robots With the development of modern computing, starting in the 1940s, the substitution of human abilities with technology obtained a new dimension. The focus shifted from the replacement of pure physical power to the substitution of mental faculties. Following the early 1980s personal computers started to attain widespread use in offices and quickly became indispensable tools for office workers. The development of powerful computers combined with progresses in |
|
|
|
1940s - Early 1950s: First Generation Computers Probably the most important contributor concerning the theoretical basis for the digital computers that were developed in the 1940s was The onset of the Second World War led to an increased funding for computer projects, which hastened technical progress, as governments sought to develop computers to exploit their potential strategic importance. By 1941 the German engineer Konrad Zuse had developed a computer, the Z3, to design airplanes and missiles. Two years later the British completed a secret code-breaking computer called Colossus to Also spurred by the war the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), a general-purpose computer, was produced by a partnership between the U.S. government and the University of Pennsylvania (1943). Consisting of 18.000 Concepts in computer design that remained central to computer engineering for the next 40 years were developed by the Hungarian-American mathematician Characteristic for first generation computers was the fact, that instructions were made-to-order for the specific task for which the computer was to be used. Each computer had a different |
|
|
|
Cartoons Cartoons' technique is simplicity. Images are easier to remember than texts. Frequently they show jokes about politicians, friendly or against the person shown. In the first decades of this century, cartoons were also used for propaganda against artists; remember the famous cartoons of As a tool in politics it had fatal consequences by determining stereotypes, which never again could be erased even if detected as pure disinformation. Most famous got the cartoons about Jews, which were not only distributed by Germans and Austrians but all over Europe; and already in the tens and twenties of our century. Most horrifying is the fact that many of those old, fascist and racist cartoons are coming back now, in slightly different design only. |
|
|
|
Disinformation and Science Disinformation's tools emerged from science and art. And furthermore: disinformation can happen in politics of course, but also in science: for example by launching ideas which have not been proven exactly until the moment of publication. e.g. the thought that time runs backwards in parts of the universe: |
|
|
|
Leni Riefenstahl Leni Riefenstahl (* 1902) began her career as a dancer and actress. Parallel she learnt how to work with a camera, turning out to be one of the most talented directors and cutters of her time - and one of the only female ones. |
|
|
|
Ku Klux Klan The Ku Klux Klan has a long history of violence. It emerged out of the resentment and hatred many white Southerners. Black Americans are not considered human beings. While the menace of the KKK has peaked and waned over the years, it has never vanished. |
|
|
|
Sun Microsystems Founded in 1982 and headquartered in Palo Alto, USA, Sun Microsystems manufactures computer workstations, For more detailed information see the Encyclopaedia Britannica: |
|
|
|
Internet Architecture Board On behalf of the Internet Society: |
|
|
|
Kessler Marketing Intelligence (KMI) KMI is the leading source for information on fiber-optics markets. It offers market research, strategic analysis and product planning services to the opto-electronics and communications industries. KMI tracks the worldwide fiber-optic cable system and sells the findings to the industry. KMI says that every fiber-optics corporation with a need for strategic market planning is a subscriber to their services. |
|
|
|
Internet Protocol Number (IP Number) Every computer using IP numbers are divided into three classes. Class A is restricted for big-sized organizations, Class B to medium-sized ones as universities, and Class C is dedicated to small networks. Because of the increasing number of networks worldwide, networks belonging together, as |
|
|
|
The Flesh Machine This is the tile of a book by the |
|
|
|
Slobodan Milosevic Slobodan Milosevic (* 1941) is a Serbian political leader. As a young man S. Milosevic joined the Communist Party, in 1984 the banker became head of the local Communist Party of Belgrade, in 1987 head of the Serb CP. Since 1989 he has been president of Serbia (since 1997 president of the new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia). During his reign the Yugoslav Republic broke up, bringing about the independence of Slovenia and Croatia and the war in Bosnia. In 1998 the Kosovo Crisis started. |
|
|
|
New World Order |
|
|
|
Internet Exchanges Internet exchanges are intersecting points between major networks. List of the World's Public Internet exchanges ( |
|
|
|
Gerard J. Holzmann and Bjoern Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks This book gives a fascinating glimpse of the many documented attempts throughout history to develop effective means for long distance communications. Large-scale communication networks are not a twentieth-century phenomenon. The oldest attempts date back to millennia before Christ and include ingenious uses of homing pigeons, mirrors, flags, torches, and beacons. The first true nationwide data networks, however, were being built almost two hundred years ago. At the turn of the 18th century, well before the electromagnetic telegraph was invented, many countries in Europe already had fully operational data communications systems with altogether close to one thousand network stations. The book shows how the so-called information revolution started in 1794, with the design and construction of the first true telegraph network in France, Chappe's fixed optical network. http://www.it.kth.se/docs/early_net/ |
|
|
|
Disney American corporation that became the best-known purveyor of child and adult entertainment in the 20th century. Its headquarters are in Burbank, Calif. The company was founded in 1929 and produced animated motion-picture cartoons. In 1955 the company opened the Disneyland amusement park, one of the world's most famous. Under a new management, in the 1980s, Disney's motion-picture and animated-film production units became among the most successful in the United States. In 1996 the Disney corporation acquired Capital Cities/ABC Inc., which owned the ABC television network. The Disney Company also operates the Disney Channel, a pay television programming service. |
|
|
|
Punch card, 1801 Invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard, an engineer and architect in Lyon, France, the punch cards laid the ground for automatic information processing. For the first time information was stored in binary format on perforated cardboard cards. In 1890 Hermann Hollerith used Joseph-Marie Jacquard's punch card technology for processing statistical data retrieved from the US census in 1890, thus speeding up data analysis from eight to three years. His application of Jacquard's invention was also used for programming computers and data processing until electronic data processing was introduced in the 1960's. - As with Paper tapes are a medium similar to Jacquard's punch cards. In 1857 Sir Charles Wheatstone applied them as a medium for the preparation, storage, and transmission of data for the first time. By their means, telegraph messages could be prepared off-line, sent ten times quicker (up to 400 words per minute), and stored. Later similar paper tapes were used for programming computers. |
|
|
|
Sergei Eisenstein Though Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) made only seven films in his entire career, he was the USSR's most important movie-conductor in the 1920s and 1930s. His typical style, putting mountains of metaphors and symbols into his films, is called the "intellectual montage" and was not always understood or even liked by the audience. Still, he succeeded in mixing ideological and abstract ideas with real stories. His most famous work was The Battleship Potemkin (1923). |
|
|
|
Optical communication system by Aeneas Tacitus, 4th century B.C. Aeneas Tacitus, a Greek military scientist and cryptographer, invented an optical communication system that combines water and beacon telegraphy. Torches indicated the beginnings and the ends of message transmissions while water jars were used to transmit the messages. These jars had a plugged standard-size hole drilled on the bottom side and were filled with water. As those who sent and those who received the message unplugged the jars simultaneously, the water drained out. Because the transmitted messages corresponded to water levels, the sender indicated by torch signal that the appropriate water level has been reached. It is a disadvantage that the possible messages are restricted to a given code, but as this system was mainly used for military purposes, this was offset by the advantage that it was almost impossible for outsiders to understand these messages unless they possessed the codebook. With communication separated from transportation, the distant became near. Tacitus' telegraph system was very fast and not excelled until For further information see Joanne Chang & Anna Soellner, Decoding Device, |
|
|
|
Kosov@ The "word" Kosov@ is a compromise between the Serb name KosovO and the Albanian KosovA. It is mostly used by international people who want to demonstrate a certain consciousness about the conflict including some sort of neutrality, believing that neither the one side nor the other (and maybe not even For more explanations (in German) see: |
|
|
|
Colouring In November 1997, after the assassination of (above all Swiss) tourists in Egypt, the Swiss newspaper Blick showed a picture of the place where the attack had happened, with a tremendous pool of blood, to emphasize the cruelty of the Muslim terrorists. In other newspapers the same picture could be seen - with a pool of water, like in the original. Of course the manipulated coloured version of the Blick fit better into the mind of the shocked Swiss population. The question about death penalty arose quickly .... |
|
|
|
International Standardization Organization ISO (International Organization for Standardization), founded in 1946, is a worldwide federation of national standards bodies from some 100 countries, one from each country. Among the standards it fosters is Source: Whatis.com |
|
|
|
International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC) The ICPC aims at reducing the number of incidents of damages to submarine telecommunications cables by hazards. The Committee also serves as a forum for the exchange of technical and legal information pertaining to submarine cable protection methods and programs and funds projects and programs, which are beneficial for the protection of submarine cables. Membership is restricted to authorities (governmental administrations or commercial companies) owning or operating submarine telecommunications cables. As of May 1999, 67 members representing 38 nations were members. http://www.iscpc.org |
|
|
|
General Schwarzkopf General H. Norman Schwarzkopf (* 1934) followed in his father's footsteps at the United States Military Academy at West Point. In 1965 he applied to join the troops in Vietnam. For the next 20 years Schwarzkopf worked on his career. As Commander in Chief of the U.S. Central Command, he led U.S. and allied forces in the Gulf War (Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm). He retired from the Army in 1992 and wrote his autobiography. For a picture see: |
|
|
|
François Duvalier b. April 14, 1907, Port-au-Prince, Haiti d. April 21, 1971, Port-au-Prince By name PAPA DOC, president of Haiti whose 14-year regime was of unprecedented duration in that country. A supporter of President Dumarsais Estimé, Duvalier was appointed director general of the National Public Health Service in 1946. He was appointed underminister of labour in 1948 and the following year became minister of public health and labour, a post that he retained until May 10, 1950, when President Estimé was overthrown by a military junta under Paul E. Magloire, who was subsequently elected president. By 1954 he had become the central opposition figure and went underground. Duvalier was elected president in September 1957. Setting about to consolidate his power, he reduced the size of the army and organized the Tontons Macoutes ("Bogeymen"), a private force responsible for terrorizing and assassinating alleged foes of the regime. Late in 1963 Duvalier moved further toward an absolutist regime, promoting a cult of his person as the semi divine embodiment of the Haitian nation. In April 1964 he was declared president for life. Although diplomatically almost completely isolated, excommunicated by the Vatican until 1966 for harassing the clergy, and threatened by conspiracies against him, Duvalier was able to stay in power longer than any of his predecessors. |
|
|
|
Cutting The cutting of pictures in movies or photographs is highly manipulative: it is easy to produce a new video out of an already existing one. The result is a form of manipulation that is difficult to contradict. A reputation destroyed by this, is nearly impossible to heal. |
|
|
|
Framing Framing is the practice of creating a frame or window within a web page where the content of a different web page can be display. Usually when a link is clicked on, the new web page is presented with the reminders of the originating page. |
|
|
|
Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) DSL connections are high-speed data connections over copper wire telephone lines. As with cable connections, with DSL you can look up information on the Internet and make a phone call at the same time but you do not need to have a new or additional cable or line installed. One of the most prominent DSL services is ISDN (integrated services digital network, for more information click here ( |
|
|
|
Scientology Official name Church Of Scientology, religio-scientific movement developed in the United States in the 1950s by the author L. Ron Hubbard (1911-86). The Church of Scientology was formally established in the United States in 1954 and was later incorporated in Great Britain and other countries. The scientific basis claimed by the church for its diagnostic and therapeutic practice is disputed, and the church has been criticized for the financial demands that it makes on its followers. From the 1960s the church and various of its officials or former officials faced government prosecutions as well as private lawsuits on charges of fraud, tax evasion, financial mismanagement, and conspiring to steal government documents, while the church on the other hand claimed it was being persecuted by government agencies and by established medical organizations. Some former Scientology officials have charged that Hubbard used the tax-exempt status of the church to build a profitable business empire. |
|
|
|
Vinton Cerf Addressed as one of the fathers of the Internet, Vinton Cerf together with Robert Kahn developed the In 1992, he co-founded the Today, Vinton Cerf is Senior Vice President for Internet Architecture and Technology at Vinton Cerf's web site: http://www.wcom.com/about_the_company/cerfs_up/ |
|
|
|
Apple Founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and headquartered in Cupertino, USA, Apple Computer was the first commercially successful personal computer company. In 1978 Wozniak invented the first personal computer, the Apple II. For more detailed information see the Encyclopaedia Britannica: http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/6/0,5716,115726+1+108787,00.html |
|
|