30 Facts About Internet

1. The internet speed on the International Space Station is faster than the average internet speed in Australia.

2. Canada is deemed “Third World” in Broadband Internet rating by Netflix.

3. There’s a bigger part of the Internet, which is not linked with the common internet we use. It’s called ‘The Deep Web,’ which is at least 500 times larger than the common Internet and the sites in there are completely anonymous and you can surf them anonymously.

4. In 1995, Newsweek published an article scoffing the future of the internet. It laughed at the idea that people would get news, learn, or buy airline tickets online. It is still available on their website.

5. In 2006, AT&T installed a fiber optic splitter at its facility at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco that makes copies of all emails, web browsing, and other Internet traffic to and from AT&T customers (including data from iPhones and iPads), and provides those copies to the NSA.

6. In 2011, a 75 year-old woman in Georgia (country in Asia) accidentally cut the fiber optic cable that provided internet to 90% of Armenia.

7. An Institute in Colorado created a clock so accurate that it would not lose or gain a second in 20 million years. This is the clock that is used for internet time.

8. One of the first recognized instances of internet democracy was seen in 1998 when Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf, a regular on Howard Stern, was voted #1 as a write in for People’s “50 Most Beautiful People.” He beat out Leondardo Dicaprio by over 215K votes.

9. 19 states in America have laws in place to discourage building of local or community Internet services because big ISPs lobby against it.

10. AOL still brings in $600 million a year from dial up Internet subscriptions.

11. There’s a whole demographic of “Homeless” Japanese youth, who live and sleep solely in Internet Cafés.

12. Latvia has the 4th fastest average internet speeds. The US is in 14th place.

13. The website hampsterdance.com was created in 1998 as a result of a competition between two Canadian sisters to see who could generate the most traffic and is one of the earliest examples of an internet meme.

14. Carrier pigeons beat internet upload speed as late as in 2010. They actually sent pigeons over with USB sticks the same time they started uploading a video over broadband and the pigeons won.

15. When Montenegro became independent from Yugoslavia, its Internet domain name went from being .yu to .me.

16. There is 3G cell service and internet capabilities at the peak of Mt. Everest.

17. Robert Metcalfe predicted in 1995 that the internet would collapse in 1996, and “eat his words” if it did not. In 1997, he blended a printed copy of that speech with liquid and drank the mixture.

18. A 75-year-old Swedish woman has the world’s fastest Internet connection at 40 Gigabits/second.

19. About 5.5 Gb of useless background noise is transmitted every second through the Internet as of 2010.

20. Saint Isidore of Seville is considered to be the Patron Saint of the Internet.

21. The Nigerian email scam is the modern version of a con called the Spanish Prisoner, which dates back to long before the Internet was invented.

22. All prisoners in Norway have internet in their cells.

23. In 1995, the University of South California built a robotic garden that was open to anyone on the internet. Anyone with an internet connection could control, water, plant seeds in. About 10,000 people participated in this project.

24. The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.

25. The internet took a total of 4 years to reach an audience of 50 million; it took radio 38 years, and television 13 years.

26. 200,000 users signed up for AOL Dial-up internet access in 2011.

27. Humans are only responsible for 49% of all internet traffic.

28. A British TV show intercepted TV and Internet feeds, creating weeks of fake stories and programs from trusted sources, and staged a zombie apocalypse using hundreds of actors, just to convince one person the world was ending.

29. In South Korea, one can use only Internet Explorer 6 for e-commerce because of a decade old government mandate.

30. Google, as of 2010, had only indexed only 0.004% of all data on the Internet.