Portal:Internet

More information Extended content ...

The Internet Portal

The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that comprises private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information services and resources, such as the interlinked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, discussion groups, internet telephony, streaming media and file sharing.

Most traditional communication media, including telephone, radio, television, paper mail, newspapers, and print publishing, have been transformed by the Internet, giving rise to new media such as email, online music, digital newspapers, news aggregators, and audio and video streaming websites. The Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of personal interaction through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking services. Online shopping has also grown to occupy a significant market across industries, enabling firms to extend brick and mortar presences to serve larger markets. Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across entire industries. (Full article...)

Refresh with new selections below (purge)

edit

Selected article

Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age is a non-fiction book about cyberlaw, written by free speech lawyer Mike Godwin. It was first published in 1998 by Times Books. It was republished in 2003 as a revised edition by The MIT Press. Godwin graduated from the University of Texas School of Law in 1990 and was the first staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Written with a first-person perspective, Cyber Rights offers a background in the legal issues and history pertaining to free speech on the Internet. It documents the author's experiences in defending free speech online, and puts forth the thesis that "the remedy for the abuse of free speech is more speech". Godwin emphasizes that decisions made about the expression of ideas on the Internet affect freedom of speech in other media as well, as granted by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The book was received favorably by Library Journal, where it was "Recommended for anyone concerned about expression on the Internet and democratic society." Publishers Weekly noted Godwin's "unusually broad view of free speech", and criticized the author for viewing issues "filtered through rose-colored screens". The Philadelphia Inquirer highlighted Cyber Rights among "1998's Best Reading". (Full article...)

More selected articles

Read more

edit

Selected picture

Credit: Rodzilla

The term Web server can mean one of two things: A computer program that is responsible for accepting HTTP requests from clients, which are known as web browsers, and serving them HTTP responses along with optional data contents, which usually are web pages such as HTML documents and linked objects (images, etc.). A computer that runs a computer program as described above.

More selected pictures

Read more

Good Articles - load new article

15.ai was a free non-commercial web application and research project that uses artificial intelligence to generate text-to-speech voices of fictional characters from popular media. Created by a pseudonymous artificial intelligence researcher known as 15, who began developing the technology as a freshman during their undergraduate research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the application allows users to make characters from video games, television shows, and movies speak custom text with emotional inflections. The platform is able to generate convincing voice output using minimal training data; the name "15.ai" references the creator's statement that a voice can be cloned with just 15 seconds of audio. It was an early example of an application of generative artificial intelligence during the initial stages of the AI boom.

Launched in March 2020, 15.ai became an Internet phenomenon in early 2021 when content utilizing it went viral on social media and quickly gained widespread use among Internet fandoms, such as the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Team Fortress 2, and SpongeBob SquarePants fandoms. The service featured emotional context through emojis, precise pronunciation control, and multi-speaker capabilities. Critics praised 15.ai's accessibility and emotional control but criticized its technical limitations in prosody options and non-English language support, with mixed results depending on character complexity. 15.ai is credited as the first platform to popularize AI voice cloning in memes and content creation.

Voice actors and industry professionals debated 15.ai's implications, raising concerns about employment impacts, voice-related fraud, and potential misuse. In January 2022, it was discovered that a company called Voiceverse had generated voice lines using 15.ai without attribution, promoted them as the byproduct of their own technology, and sold them as non-fungible tokens (NFT) without permission. News publications universally characterized this incident as the company having "stolen" from 15.ai. The service went offline in September 2022 due to legal issues surrounding artificial intelligence and copyright. Its shutdown was followed by the emergence of commercial alternatives whose founders have acknowledged 15.ai's pioneering influence in the field of deep learning speech synthesis. On May 18, 2025, 15 launched 15.dev as the sequel to 15.ai. (Full article...)

edit

WikiProjects

Main project: WikiProject Internet
Related WikiProjects: Blogging • Websites • Early Web History • Internet culture

Did you know (auto-generated) - load new batch

... that the Star Wars line "these aren't the droids you're looking for" became a popular Internet meme?
... that the YouTuber behind Stop Killing Games compared video-game publishers shutting down online-only games to silent-era film studios "burning their own films ... to recover the silver content"?
... that "the Boshfather" was deported from Australia in October 2025?
... that AiScReam's recent debut song "Ai Scream!" went viral on social media?
... that gymnast McKayla Maroney caused an Internet phenomenon with her "not impressed" facial expression?
... that German social media personality Maya Leinenbach became vegan after completing a school project on the influence of nutrition and consumption on the environment?

edit

Selected biography

Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (March 11, 1915 – June 26, 1990), known simply as J.C.R. or "Lick" was an American computer scientist, considered one of the most important figures in computer science and general computing history. After early work in psychoacoustics, he became interested in information technology early in his career. Much like Vannevar Bush, J.C.R. Licklider's contribution to the development of the Internet consists of ideas, not inventions. He foresaw the need for networked computers with easy user interfaces. His ideas foretold of graphical computing, point-and-click interfaces, digital libraries, e-commerce, online banking, and software that would exist on a network and migrate wherever it was needed. Licklider was instrumental in conceiving, funding and managing the research that led to modern personal computers and the Internet. His seminal paper on Man-Computer Symbiosis foreshadowed interactive computing, and he went on to fund early efforts in time-sharing and application development, most notably the work of Douglas Engelbart, who founded the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute and created the famous On-Line System. He played a similar role in conceiving of and funding early networking research, most notably the ARPAnet.

More selected biographies

Read more

General images - load new batch

The following are images from various internet-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1info.cern.ch, the first website, in 2025 (from History of the World Wide Web)
Image 2Satellite Internet access via VSAT in Ghana (from Internet access)
Image 3
Internet users in 2023 as a percentage of a country's population
Source: International Telecommunication Union. (from History of the Internet)
Image 4T3 NSFNET Backbone, c. 1992 (from History of the Internet)
Image 5The NeXT Computer used by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN became the first Web server. (from History of the World Wide Web)
Image 6BBN Technologies TCP/IP Internet map of early 1986 (from History of the Internet)
Image 7
Fixed broadband Internet subscriptions in 2012
as a percentage of a country's population
Source: International Telecommunication Union. (from Internet access)
Image 8Map of the TCP/IP test network in February 1982 (from History of the Internet)
Image 9The corridor where the World Wide Web was born, on the ground floor of building No. 1 at CERN (from History of the World Wide Web)
Image 10
Fixed broadband Internet subscriptions in 2012
as a percentage of a country's population
Source: International Telecommunication Union. (from History of the Internet)
Image 11
Number of Internet hosts worldwide: 1969–2019
Source: Internet Systems Consortium. (from History of the Internet)
Image 121997 advertisement in State Magazine by the US State Department Library for sessions introducing the then-unfamiliar Web (from History of the World Wide Web)
Image 13The digital divide measured in terms of bandwidth is not closing, but fluctuating up and down. Gini coefficients for telecommunication capacity (in kbit/s) among individuals worldwide (from Internet access)
Image 14
Broadband affordability in 2011
This map presents an overview of broadband affordability, as the relationship between average yearly income per capita and the cost of a broadband subscription (data referring to 2011). Source: Information Geographies at the Oxford Internet Institute. (from Internet access)
Image 15
Mobile broadband Internet subscriptions in 2012
as a percentage of a country's population
Source: International Telecommunication Union. (from Internet access)
Image 16
Mobile broadband Internet subscriptions in 2012
as a percentage of a country's population
Source: International Telecommunication Union. (from History of the Internet)
Image 17Robert Cailliau, Jean-François Abramatic, and Tim Berners-Lee at the tenth anniversary of the World Wide Web Consortium (from History of the World Wide Web)
Image 18Wi-Fi range diagram (from Internet access)
Image 19Postage stamp of Azerbaijan (2004): 35 Years of the Internet, 1969–2004 (from History of the Internet)
Image 20Internet Connectivity Access layer (from Internet access)
Image 21Stamped envelope of Russian Post issued in 1993 with stamp and graphics dedicated to first Russian underwater digital optic cable laid in 1993 by Rostelecom from Kingisepp to Copenhagen (see also: Internet in Russia) (from History of the Internet)
Image 22Where the WEB was born (from History of the World Wide Web)
Image 23Wi-Fi logo (from Internet access)
Image 24First Internet demonstration, linking the ARPANET, PRNET, and SATNET on November 22, 1977 (from History of the Internet)
Image 25The "message block", designed by Paul Baran in 1962 and refined in 1964, is the first proposal of a data packet. (from History of the Internet)
Image 26
Internet users in 2023 as a percentage of a country's population
Source: International Telecommunication Union. (from Internet access)

edit

Selected quote

All forms of government ultimately are not going to succeed in trying to control or censor the Internet.

— Rupert Murdoch, 2006

More selected quotes

More at Wikiquote

edit

Main topics

Internet

Articles: Application layer; ARPANET; Blog; Browsers; CERN; Collaborative software; Computer file; Computer network; Computer networking; DARPA; Data (computing); Electronic commerce; E-mail; English on the Internet; FidoNet; File sharing; History of the Internet; HTML; HyperCard; Hyperlink; ICANN; Instant messaging; Internet access; Internet capitalization conventions; Internet censorship; Internet Control Message Protocol; Internet democracy; Internet Exchange Point; Internet Governance Forum; Internet privacy; Internet Protocol; Internet protocols; Internet research; Internetworking; Massively multiplayer online role-playing game; Mosaic (web browser); National Center for Supercomputing Applications; Net neutrality; Online chat; Peering; Remote access; Transmission Control Protocol; Scale-free network; Search engine; Security; Social network service; Unicode; Uniform resource locator; User agent; User Datagram Protocol; ViolaWWW; Virtual private network; VoIP; Web browser; Web resource; Web service; Wide area network; World Summit on the Information Society; World Wide Web

edit

Featured content

Extended content

This is a list of recognized content, updated weekly by JL-Bot (talk · contribs) (typically on Saturdays). There is no need to edit the list yourself. If an article is missing from the list, make sure it is tagged (e.g. {{WikiProject Internet}}) or categorized correctly and wait for the next update. See WP:RECOG for configuration options.