1960s - 1970s: Increased Research in Artificial Intelligence (AI)

During the cold war the U.S. tried to ensure that it would stay ahead of the Soviet Union in technological advancements. Therefore in 1963 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) granted the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) U.S.$ 2.2 million for research in machine-aided cognition (artificial intelligence). The major effect of the project was an increase in the pace of AI research and a continuation of funding.

In the 1960s and 1970s a multitude of AI programs were developed, most notably SHRDLU. Headed by Marvin Minsky the MIT's research team showed, that when confined to a small subject matter, computer programs could solve spatial and logic problems. Other progresses in the field of AI at the time were: the proposal of new theories about machine vision by David Marr, Marvin Minsky's frame theory, the PROLOGUE language (1972) and the development of expert systems.

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1970s: Computer-Integrated Manufacturing (CIM)

Since the 1970s there had been a growing trend towards the use of computer programs in manufacturing companies. Especially functions related to design and production, but also business functions should be facilitated through the use of computers.

Accordingly the CAD/CAM technology, related to the use of computer systems for design and production, was developed. CAD (computer-aided design) was created to assist in the creation, modification, analysis, and optimization of design. CAM (computer-aided manufacturing) was designed to help with the planning, control, and management of production operations. CAD/CAM technology, since the 1970s, has been applied in many industries, including machined components, electronics products, equipment design and fabrication for chemical processing.

To enable a more comprehensive use of computers in firms the CIM (computer-integrated manufacturing) technology, which also includes applications concerning the business functions of companies, was created. CIM systems can handle order entry, cost accounting, customer billing and employee time records and payroll. The scope of CIM technology includes all activities that are concerned with production. Therefore in many ways CIM represents the highest level of automation in manufacturing.

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Commercial vs. Independent Content: Human and Financial Resources

Concerning their human and financial resources commercial media and independent content provider are an extremely unequal pair. While the 1998 revenues of the world's leading media conglomerates (AOL Time Warner, Disney, Bertelsmann, Viacom and the News Corporation) amounted to US$ 91,144,000,000 provider of independent content usually act on a non-profit basis and to a considerable extent depend on donations and contributions.

Also the human resources they have at their disposal quite differ. Viacom for example employs 112,000 people. Alternative media conversely are mostly run by a small group of activists, most of them volunteers. Moreover the majority of the commercial media giants has a multitude of subsidiaries (Bertelsmann for instance has operations in 53 countries), while independent content provider in some cases do not even have proper office spaces. Asked about their offices number of square meters Frank Guerrero from RTMark comments "We have no square meters at all, because we are only on the web. I guess if you add up all of our servers and computers we would take up about one or two square meters."

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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 (= DES)

1976 Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman publish their book New Directions in Cryptography, playing with the idea of public key cryptography

1977/78 the RSA algorithm is developed by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard M. Adleman and is published

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 - IDEA, using a 128-bit key, is supposed to replace DES

- 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 PGP (= Pretty Good Privacy) is released as freeware on the Internet, soon becoming worldwide state of the art; its creator is Phil Zimmermann

- 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 Clipper Chip, an idea that provokes many political discussions during the following years

1994 Ron Rivest releases another algorithm, the RC5, on the Internet

- the blowfish encryption algorithm, a 64-bit block cipher with a key-length up to 448 bits, is designed by Bruce Schneier

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 PGP announces plans to sell encryption products outside the USA

1998 April NSA issues a report about the risks of key recovery systems

1998 July DES code cracked in 56 hours by researchers in Silicon Valley

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 DES is not safe compared to Triple DES

- 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:
http://www.clark.net/pub/cme/html/timeline.html
http://www.math.nmsu.edu/~crypto/Timeline.html
http://fly.hiwaay.net/~paul/cryptology/history.html
http://www.achiever.com/freehmpg/cryptology/hocryp.html
http://all.net/books/ip/Chap2-1.html
http://cryptome.org/ukpk-alt.htm
http://www.iwm.org.uk/online/enigma/eni-intro.htm
http://www.achiever.com/freehmpg/cryptology/cryptofr.html
http://www.cdt.org/crypto/milestones.shtml

for information about hacker's history see:
http://www.farcaster.com/sterling/chronology.htm:

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biotechnology summary

The fusion of flesh and machine is trend which, although inscribed in the history of modern technology from its beginnings, has reached a unprecedented momentum in recent years as a result of crucial advances in information technology, biology, and the development of global networks. Consequently, doubts are emerging concerning the viability of a distinct and definable human nature. Historical and social theories and concepts are being unhinged by the spread hybrids and by new forms of artificial life which are likely to trigger social changes escaping the grip of calculation. Attempts to defend an essential human nature against technical hybridisation, rather than strengthening the human subject, may have further blurred the question of historical subjectivity. Large amounts of money are invested into research and development of artifical biology, making some of the predictions of AI and robotics experts about radical and far reaching changes a matter of time.

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Beautiful bodies

However, artificial beings need not be invisible or look like Arnold Schwarzenegger in "Terminator". "My dream would be to create an artificial man that does not look like a robot but like a beautiful, graceful human being. The artificial man should be beautiful". Nadia Thalman's hopes for beautiful robots may become reality in the work of MIRALab, a research laboratory attached to the University of Geneva dedicated to realistic modelling of human functionalities. The laboratory has produced an artificial Marylyn Monroe showing just how beautiful artificial creatures can be, and there is a biography featuring details of her career and her - however virtual - love life. Yet beautiful creatures have been made before, at leas on the movie screen. Frank-N-furter, the protagonist of the Rocky Horror picture show ("I've been making a man / with blond hair and a tan / and he is good for relieving my /tension) did set remakrable esthetic standards.

While in Hindu mythology, avatars are bodies chosen by gods for their representation on earth, often animals such as swans or horses, the avatars populating cyberspace have a different function. The cyber bodies of real people, often 3 dimensional images of creatures whose aesthetics reflects both the tastes prevalent in the entertainment and advertising industries as the state of art in visual representation.

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The 17th Century: The Invention of the First "Computers"

The devices often considered the first "computers" in our understanding were rather calculators than the sophisticated combination of hard- and software we call computers today.

In 1642 Blaise Pascal, the son of a French tax collector, developed a device to perform additions. His numerical wheel calculator was a brass rectangular box and used eight movable dials to add sums up to eight figures long. Designed to help his father with his duties, the big disadvantage of the Pascaline was its limitation to addition.

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, a German mathematician and philosopher, in 1694 improved the Pascaline by creating a machine that could also multiply. As its predecessor Leibniz's mechanical multiplier likewise worked by a system of gears and dials. Leibniz also formulated a model that may be considered the theoretical ancestor of some modern computers. In De Arte Combinatoria (1666) Leibniz argued that all reasoning, all discover, verbal or not, is reducible to an ordered combination of elements, such as numbers, words, colors, or sounds.

Further improvements in the field of early computing devices were made by Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar, a Frenchmen. His arithometer could not only add and multiply, but perform the four basic arithmetic functions and was widely used up until the First World War.

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WIPO

The World Intellectual Property Organization is one of the specialized agencies of the United Nations (UN), which was designed to promote the worldwide protection of both industrial property (inventions, trademarks, and designs) and copyrighted materials (literary, musical, photographic, and other artistic works). It was established by a convention signed in Stockholm in 1967 and came into force in 1970. The aims of WIPO are threefold. Through international cooperation, WIPO promotes the protection of intellectual property. Secondly, the organization supervises administrative cooperation between the Paris, Berne, and other intellectual unions regarding agreements on trademarks, patents, and the protection of artistic and literary work and thirdly through its registration activities the WIPO provides direct services to applicants for, or owners of, industrial property rights.

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Ron Rivest

Ronald L. Rivest is Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in MIT's EECS Department. He was one of three persons in a team to invent the RSA public-key cryptosystem. The co-authors were Adi Shamir and Leonard M. Adleman.

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Internet Software Consortium

The Internet Software Consortium (ISC) is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to the production of high-quality reference implementations of Internet standards that meet production standards. Its goal is to ensure that those reference implementations are properly supported and made freely available to the Internet community.

http://www.isc.org

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World Wide Web (WWW)

Probably the most significant Internet service, the World Wide Web is not the essence of the Internet, but a subset of it. It is constituted by documents that are linked together in a way you can switch from one document to another by simply clicking on the link connecting these documents. This is made possible by the Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML), the authoring language used in creating World Wide Web-based documents. These so-called hypertexts can combine text documents, graphics, videos, sounds, and Java applets, so making multimedia content possible.

Especially on the World Wide Web, documents are often retrieved by entering keywords into so-called search engines, sets of programs that fetch documents from as many servers as possible and index the stored information. (For regularly updated lists of the 100 most popular words that people are entering into search engines, click here). No search engine can retrieve all information on the whole World Wide Web; every search engine covers just a small part of it.

Among other things that is the reason why the World Wide Web is not simply a very huge database, as is sometimes said, because it lacks consistency. There is virtually almost infinite storage capacity on the Internet, that is true, a capacity, which might become an almost everlasting too, a prospect, which is sometimes consoling, but threatening too.

According to the Internet domain survey of the Internet Software Consortium the number of Internet host computers is growing rapidly. In October 1969 the first two computers were connected; this number grows to 376.000 in January 1991 and 72,398.092 in January 2000.

World Wide Web History Project, http://www.webhistory.org/home.html

http://www.searchwords.com/
http://www.islandnet.com/deathnet/
http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/199...
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RSA

The best known of the two-key cryptosystems developed in the mid-1980s is the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) cryptoalgorithm, which was first published in April, 1977. Since that time, the algorithm has been employed in the most widely-used Internet electronic communications encryption program, Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). It is also employed in both the Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Explorer web browsing programs in their implementations of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), and by Mastercard and VISA in the Secure Electronic Transactions (SET) protocol for credit card transactions.

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Intellectual property

Intellectual property, very generally, relates to the output that result from intellectual activity in the industrial, scientific, literary and artistic fields. Traditionally intellectual property is divided into two branches: 1) industrial property (inventions, marks, industrial designs, unfair competition and geographical indications), and 2) copyright. The protection of intellectual property is guaranteed through a variety of laws, which grant the creators of intellectual goods, and services certain time-limited rights to control the use made of their products.

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Virtual Marylin Monroe

This is the story of the virtual Marylyn Monroe created by MRALab in Switzerland. The biography features her personal and professional stories. This being the biography of a virtual being, it does not end with the present and includes, instead, a chapter on her destiny.

http://www.miralab.unige.ch/MARILYN/VIRTUAL/virtual.html

http://www.miralab.unige.ch/MARILYN/VIRTUAL/v...
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