Harley's+time+line+page+2

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, PLO Leader Yasser Arafat, and Phillipine President Fidel Ramos meet for ten minutes in an online interactive chat session on 17 January. The controversial US Communications Decency Act (CDA) becomes law in the US in order to prohibit distribution of indecent materials over the Net. A few months later a three-judge panel imposes an injunction against its enforcement. Supreme Court unanimously rules most of it unconstitutional in 1997. 9,272 organizations find themselves unlisted after the InterNIC drops their name service as a result of not having paid their domain name fee Various ISPs suffer extended service outages, bringing into question whether they will be able to handle the growing number of users. AOL (19 hours), Netcom (13 hours), AT&T WorldNet (28 hours - email only) Domain name tv.com sold to CNET for US$15,000 New York's Public Access Networks Corp (PANIX) is shut down after repeated SYN attacks by a cracker using methods outlined in a hacker magazine ([|2600]) MCI upgrades Internet backbone adding ~13,000 ports, bringing the effective speed from 155Mbps to 622Mbps. The [|Internet Ad Hoc Committee] announces plans to add 7 new generic Top Level Domains (gTLD): .firm, .store, .web, .arts, .rec, .info, .nom. The IAHC plan also calls for a competing group of domain registrars worldwide. A malicious cancelbot is released on USENET wiping out more than 25,000 messages The WWW browser war, fought primarily between Netscape and Microsoft, has rushed in a new age in software development, whereby new releases are made quarterly with the help of Internet users eager to test upcoming (beta) versions. RFC 1925: [|The Twelve Networking Truths] Restrictions on Internet use around the world: Country domains registered: Qatar (QA), Central African Republic (CF), Oman (OM), Norfolk Island (NF), Tuvalu (TV), French Polynesia (PF), Syria (SY), Aruba (AW), Cambodia (KH), French Guiana (GF), Eritrea (ER), Cape Verde (CV), Burundi (BI), Benin (BJ) Bosnia-Herzegovina (BA), Andorra (AD), Guadeloupe (GP), Guernsey (GG), Isle of Man (IM), Jersey (JE), Lao (LA), Maldives (MV), Marshall Islands (MH), Mauritania (MR), Northern Mariana Islands (MP), Rwanda (RW), Togo (TG), Yemen (YE), Zaire (ZR) Top 10 Domains by Host #: com, edu, net, uk, de, jp, us, mil, ca, au //Hacks of the Year:// US Dept of Justice (17 Aug), CIA (19 Sep), Air Force (29 Dec), UK Labour Party (6 Dec), NASA DDCSOL - USAFE - US Air Force (30 Dec) //Technologies of the Year:// Search engines, JAVA, Internet Phone //Emerging Technologies:// Virtual environments (VRML), Collaborative tools, Internet appliance (Network Computer) 71,618 mailing lists registered at Liszt, a mailing list directory The [|American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)] is established to handle administration and registration of IP numbers to the geographical areas currently handled by Network Solutions (InterNIC), starting March 1998. CA*net II launched in June to provide Canada's next generation Internet using ATM/SONET In protest of the DNS monopoly, AlterNIC's owner, Eugene Kashpureff, hacks DNS so users going to www.internic.net end up at www.alternic.net Domain name business.com sold for US$150,000 Early in the morning of 17 July, human error at Network Solutions causes the DNS table for .com and .net domains to become corrupted, making millions of systems unreachable. Longest hostname registered with InterNIC: CHALLENGER.MED.SYNAPSE.UAH.UALBERTA.CA 101,803 Name Servers in whois database RFC 2100: [|The Naming of Hosts] Country domains registered: Falkland Islands (FK), East Timor (TP), R of Congo (CG), Christmas Island (CX), Gambia (GM), Guinea-Bissau (GW), Haiti (HT), Iraq (IQ), Libya (LY), Malawi (MW), Martinique (MQ), Montserrat (MS), Myanmar (MM), French Reunion Island (RE), Seychelles (SC), Sierra Leone (SL), Somalia (SO), Sudan (SD), Tajikistan (TJ), Turkmenistan (TM), Turks and Caicos Islands (TC), British Virgin Islands (VG), Heard and McDonald Islands (HM), French Southern Territories (TF), British Indian Ocean Territory (IO), Svalbard and Jan Mayen Islands (SJ), St Pierre and Miquelon (PM), St Helena (SH), South Georgia/Sandwich Islands (GS), Sao Tome and Principe (ST), Ascension Island (AC), US Minor Outlying Islands (UM), Mayotte (YT), Wallis and Futuna Islands (WF), Tokelau Islands (TK), Chad Republic (TD), Afghanistan (AF), Cocos Island (CC), Bouvet Island (BV), Liberia (LR), American Samoa (AS), Niue (NU), Equatorial New Guinea (GQ), Bhutan (BT), Pitcairn Island (PN), Palau (PW), DR of Congo (CD) Top 10 Domains by Host #: com, edu, net, jp, uk, de, us, au, ca, mil //Hacks of the Year:// Indonesian Govt (19 Jan, 10 Feb, 24 Apr, 30 Jun, 22 Nov), NASA (5 Mar), UK Conservative Party (27 Apr), Spice Girls (14 Nov) //Technologies of the Year:// Push, Multicasting //Emerging Technologies:// Push US Depart of Commerce (DoC) releases the [|Green Paper] outlining its plan to privatize DNS on 30 January. This is followed up by a [|White Paper] on June 5 [|La Fête de l'Internet], a country-wide Internet fest, is held in France 20-21 March Web size estimates range between 275 (Digital) and 320 (NEC) million pages for 1Q Companies flock to the Turkmenistan NIC in order to register their name under the .tm domain, the English abbreviation for trademark Internet users get to be judges in a performance by 12 world champion ice skaters on 27 March, marking the first time a television sport show's outcome is determined by its viewers. Network Solutions registers its 2 millionth domain on 4 May Electronic postal stamps become a reality, with the [|US Postal Service] allowing stamps to be purchased and downloaded for printing from the Web. Canada kicks off CA*net 3, the first national optical internet Compaq pays US$3.3million for altavista.com CDA II and a ban on Net taxes are signed into US law (21 October) ABCNews.com accidentally posts test US election returns one day early (2 November) Indian ISP market is deregulated in November causing a rush for ISP operation licenses US DoC enters into an [|agreement] with the [|Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers (ICANN)] to establish a process for transitioning DNS from US Government management to industry (25 November) San Francisco sites without off-city mirrors go offline as the city blacks out on 8 December Chinese government puts Lin Hai on trial for "inciting the overthrow of state power" for providing 30,000 email addresses to a US Internet magazine (December) [ He is later sentenced to two years in jail ] French Internet users give up their access on 13 December to boycott France Telecom's local phone charges (which are in addition to the ISP charge) Open source software comes of age RFC 2321: [|RITA -- The Reliable Internetwork Troubleshooting Agent] RFC 2322: [|Management of IP numbers by peg-dhcp] RFC 2323: [|IETF Identification and Security Guidelines] RFC 2324: [|Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0)] Country domains registered: Nauru (NR), Comoros (KM) //Bandwidth Generators:// Winter Olympics (Feb), World Cup (Jun-Jul), Starr Report (11 Sep), Glenn space launch Top 10 Domains by Host #: com, net, edu, mil, jp, us, uk ,de, ca, au //Hacks of the Year:// US Dept of Commerce (20 Feb), New York Times (13 Sep), China Society for Human Rights Studies (26 Oct), UNICEF (7 Jan) //Technologies of the Year:// E-Commerce, E-Auctions, Portals //Emerging Technologies:// E-Trade, XML, Intrusion Detection vBNS sets up an OC48 link between CalREN South and North using Juniper M40 routers [|First Internet Bank of Indiana], the first full-service bank available only on the Net, opens for business on 22 February IBM becomes the first Corporate partner to be approved for Internet2 access European Parliament proposes banning the caching of Web pages by ISPs The Internet Fiesta kicks off in March across Europe, building on the success of La Fête de l'Internet held in 1998 US State Court rules that domain names are property that may be garnished MCI/Worldcom, the vBNS provider for NSF, begins upgrading the US backbone to 2.5Gbps A forged Web page made to look like a Bloomberg financial news story raised shares of a small technology company by 31% on 7 April. ICANN announces the five testbed registrars for the competitive Shared Registry System on 21 April: AOL, CORE, France Telecom/Oléane, Melbourne IT, Register.com. 29 additional post-testbed registrars are also selected on 21 April, followed by 8 on 25 May, 15 on 6 July, and so on for a total of 98 by year's end. The testbed, originally scheduled to last until 24 June, is extended until 10 September, and then 30 November. The first registrar to come online is Register.com on 7 June First large-scale Cyberwar takes place simultaneously with the war in Serbia/Kosovo Abilene, the Internet2 network, reaches across the Atlantic and connects to NORDUnet and SURFnet The Web becomes the focal point of British politics as a list of MI6 agents is released on a UK Web site. Though forced to remove the list from the site, it was too late as the list had already been replicated across the Net. (15 May) Activists Net-wide target the world's financial centers on 18 June, timed to coincide with the G8 Summit. Little actual impact is reported. MCI/Worldcom launches vBNS+, a commercialized version of vBNS targeted at smaller educational and research institutions DoD issues a memo requiring all US military systems to connect via NIPRNET, and not directly to the Internet by 15 Dec 1999 (22 Aug) Somalia gets its first ISP - Olympic Computer (Sep) ISOC approves the formation of the Internet Societal Task Force (ISTF). Vint Cerf serves as first chair Free computers are all the rage (as long as you sign a long term contract for Net service) Country domains registered: Bangladesh (BD), Palestine (PS) vBNS reaches 101 connections business.com is sold for US$7.5million (it was purchased in 1997 for US$150,000 (30 Nov) RFC 2549: [|IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service] RFC 2550: [|Y10K and Beyond] RFC 2551: [|The Roman Standards Process -- Revision III] RFC 2555: [|30 Years of RFCs] RFC 2626: [|The Internet and the Millennium Problem (Year 2000)] Top 10 TLDs by Host #: com, net, edu, jp, uk, mil, us, de, ca, au //Hacks of the Year:// Star Wars (8 Jan), .tp (Jan), USIA (23 Jan), E-Bay (13 Mar), US Senate (27 May), NSI (2 Jul), Paraguay Gov't (20 Jul), AntiOnline (5 Aug), Microsoft (26 Oct), UK Railtrack (31 Dec) //Technologies of the Year:// E-Trade, Online Banking, MP3 //Emerging Technologies:// Net-Cell Phones, Thin Computing, Embedded Computing //Viruses of the Year:// [|Melissa] (March), [|ExploreZip] (June)
 * 1996**Internet phones catch the attention of US telecommunication companies who ask the US Congress to ban the technology (which has been around for years)
 * //China:// requires users and ISPs to register with the police
 * //Germany:// cuts off access to some newsgroups carried on CompuServe
 * //Saudi Arabia:// confines Internet access to universities and hospitals
 * //Singapore:// requires political and religious content providers to register with the state
 * //New Zealand//: classifies computer disks as "publications" that can be censored and seized
 * //source: Human Rights Watch//
 * 1997**[|2000th RFC]: "Internet Official Protocol Standards"
 * 1998**//Hobbes' Internet Timeline// is released as [|RFC 2235] & FYI 32
 * 1999**Internet access becomes available to the Saudi Arabian (.sa) public in January

A massive denial of service attack is launched against major web sites, including Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay in early February Web size estimates by NEC-RI and Inktomi surpass 1 billion indexable pages ICANN redelegates the .pn domain, returning it to the Pitcairn Island community (February) Internet2 backbone network deploys IPv6 (16 May) Various domain name hijackings took place in late May and early June, including internet.com, bali.com, and web.net A testbed allowing the registration of domain names in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean begins operation on 9 November. This testbed, created by VeriSign without IETF authorization, only allows the second-level domain to be non-English, still forcing use of .com, .net, .org. The Chinese government blocks internal registrations, stating that registrations in Chinese are its sovereignty right ICANN selects new TLDs: .aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .name, .pro (16 Nov)
 * 2000**The US timekeeper ([|USNO]) and a few other time services around the world report the new year as 19100 on 1 Jan

Mexico's connection to Internet2 becomes fully operational as the California research network (CalREN-2) is connected with Mexico's Corporación Universitaria para el Desarrollo de Internet (CUDI) network. Though connected in November, the link's inauguration by California's Governor and Mexico's President was not until March of 2001. After months of legal proceedings, the French court rules Yahoo! must block French users from accessing hate memorabilia in its auction site (Nov). Given its inability to provide such a block on the Internet, Yahoo! removes those auctions entirely (Jan 2001). The case is eventually thrown out (Feb 2003). The European Commission contracts with a consortium of 30 national research networks for the development of Géant, Europe's new gigabit research network meant to enhance the current capability provided by TEN-155 (6 Nov) Australian government endorses the transfer of authority for the .au domain to auDA (18 Dec). ICANN signs over control to auDA on 26 Oct 2001. RFC 2795: [|The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite] //Hacks of the Year:// RSA Security (Feb), Apache (May), Western Union (Sep), Microsoft (Oct) //Technologies of the Year:// ASP, Napster //Emerging Technologies:// Wireless devices, IPv6 //Viruses of the Year:// [|Love Letter] (May) //Lawsuits of the Year:// Napster, DeCSS VeriSign extends its multilingual domain testbed to encompass various European languages (26 Feb), and later the full Unicode character set (5 Apr) opening up most of the world's languages Forwarding email in Australia becomes illegal with the passing of the Digital Agenda Act, as it is seen as a technical infringement of personal copyright (4 Mar) Radio stations broadcasting over the Web go silent over actor royalty disputes (10 Apr) High schools in five states (Michigan, Missouri, Oregon, Virginia, and Washington) become the first to gain Internet2 access SETI@Home launches on 17 May and within four weeks its distributed Internet clients provide more computing power than the most powerful supercomputer of its time (:par:) US Dept of Commerce issues a notice of intent on 6 April to turn over management for the .edu domain from VeriSign to [|Educause]. Award agreement is reached on 29 October. Community colleges will finally be able to register under .edu Napster keeps finding itself embroiled in litigation and is eventually forced to suspend service; it comes back later in the year as a subscription service European Council finalizes an international cybercrime treaty on 22 June and adopts it on 9 November. This is the first treaty addressing criminal offenses committed over the Internet. .biz and .info are added to the root server on 27 June with registrations beginning in July. .biz domain go live on 7 Nov. Afghanistan's Taliban bans Internet access country-wide, including from Government offices, in an attempt to control content (13 Jul) Code Red worm and Sircam virus infiltrate thousands of web servers and email accounts, respectively, causing a spike in Internet bandwidth usage and security breaches (July) A fire in a train tunnel running through Baltimore, Maryland seriously damages various fiber-optic cable bundles used by backbone providers, disrupting Internet traffic in the Mid-Atlantic states and creating a ripple effect across the US (18 Jul) Brazil RNP2 is connected to Internet2's Abilene over 45Mbps line (21 Aug) [|GÉANT], the pan-European Gigabit Research and Education Network, becomes operational (23 Oct), replacing the TEN-155 network which was closed down (30 Nov) .museum begins resolving (Nov) First uncompressed real-time gigabit HDTV transmission across a wide-area IP network takes place on Internet2 (12 Nov). Dutch SURFnet and Internet2's Abilene connect via gigabit ethernet (15 Nov) .us domain operational responsibility assumed by NeuStar (20 Nov) RFC 3091: [|Pi Digit Generation Protocol] RFC 3092: [|Etymology of "Foo"] RFC 3093: [|Firewall Enhancement Protocol (FEP)] //Viruses of the Year:// Code Red (Jul), Nimda (Sep), SirCam (Jul), BadTrans (Apr, Nov) //Emerging Technologies:// Grid Computing, P2P .name begins resolving (15 Jan) .coop registrations begin (30 Jan) Global Terabit Research Network ([|GTRN]) is formed composed of two OC-48 2.4GB circuits connecting Internet2 Abiline, CANARIE CA*net3, and GÉANT (18 Feb) .aero registrations begin 18 March and beings resolving 2 September Federally recognized US Indian tribes become eligible to register under .gov (26 Apr) Hundreds of Internet radio stations observe a //Day of Silence// in protest of proposed song royalty rate increases (1 May) Abilene (Internet2) backbone deploys native IPv6 (5 Aug) The 69/8 IP range is allocated to ARIN in August after having been in the [|bogon] list; users and servers assigned a 69/8 address find themselves blocked from many Internet sites Internet2 now has 200 university, 60 corporate, and 40 affiliate members (2 Sep) Having your own Blog becomes hip Hundreds of Spain-based web sites take their content offline in protest of a new law that took effect on 12 Oct requiring all commercial Web sites to register with the government A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack struck the 13 DNS root servers knocking out all but 5 (21-23 Oct). Amidst national security concerns, VeriSign hastens a planned relocation of one of its two DNS root servers A new US law creates a kids-safe "dot-kids" domain (kids.us) to be implemented in 2003 (3 Dec) The FBI teams up with Terras Lycos to disseminate virtual wanted posts across the Web portal's properties (11 Dec) RFC 3251: [|Electricity over IP] RFC 3252: [|Binary Lexical Octet Ad-hoc Transport] The first official Swiss online election takes place in Anières (7 Jan) The registration for domain ogrish.com is deleted (11 Jan) by the German registrar Joker.com at the request of a German prosecutor claiming objectionable content; the site however is hosted in the United States and complies with US laws. The SQL Slammer worm causes one of the largest and fastest spreading DDoS attacks ever. Taking roughly 10 minutes to spread worldwide, the worm took down 5 of the 13 DNS root servers along with tens of thousands of other servers, and impacted a multitude of systems ranging from (bank) ATM systems to air traffic control to emergency (911) systems (25 Jan). This is followed in August by the Sobig.F virus (19 Aug), the fastest spreading virus ever, and the Blaster (MSBlast) worm (11 Aug), another one of the most destructive worms ever k.root-servers.net changes to using nsd vs. bind to increase diversity of software in the root name server system (19 Feb) [|.nl] registrations open up to anyone, including individuals and foreigners (29 Jan); [|.se] also opens up its registration in April. .af is [|redelegated] on 8 Jan and becomes live once again on 12 Feb with UNDP technical assistance. First domains are moc.gov.af and undp.org.af (15 Feb) .pro sunrise registration begins 23 Apr under .cpa.pro, .law.pro, .med.pro Flash mobs, organized over the Net, start in New York and quickly form in cities worlwide Taxes make headlines as: larger US Internet retailers begin collecting taxes on all purchases; some US states tax Internet bandwidth; and the EU requires all Internet companies to collect value added tax (VAT) on digital downloads starting 1 July The French Ministry of Culture bans the use of the word "e-mail" by government ministries, and adopts the use of the more French sounding "courriel" (Jul) KRNIC begins offering Hangeul.kr domains (19 Aug) .kids.us sunrise registration begins 17 June and public registration on 9 Sep The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sues 261 individuals on 8 Sep for allegedly distributing copyright music files over peer-to-peer networks VeriSign deploys a wildcard service (Site Finder) into the .com and .net TLDs causing much confusion as URLs with invalid domains are redirected to a VeriSign page (15 Sep). ICANN orders VeriSign to stop the service, which they comply with on 4 Oct Last Abilene segment upgraded to 10Gbps (5 Nov) National LambdaRail announced as a new US R&D networking infrastructure (16 Sep). The first connection takes place between Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) and Extensible Terascale Facility (ETF) in Chicago (18 Nov) [|Little GLORIAD] (Global Ring Network for Advanced Application Development) starts operations (22 Dec), consisting of a networked ring across the northern hemisphere with connections in Chicago, Amsterdam, Moscow, Novosibirsk, Zabajkal'sk, Manzhouli, Beijing, and Hong Kong. This is the first-ever fiber network connections across the Russia-China border RFC 3514: [|The Security Flag in the IPv4 Header] (The Evil Bit) Abiline, the Internet2 backbone, upgrade from 2.5Gbps to 10Gbps is completed (4 Feb) Network Solutions begins offering 100 year domain registration (24 Mar) One of the .ly nameservers stops responding (7 Apr) causing the other nameserver to go offline (9 Apr), making the domain inaccessible. Service is restored 13 Apr VeriSign Naming and Directory Service (VNDS) begins updating all 13 .com/.net authoritative name servers in near real-time vs. twice each day (8 Sep) Lycos Europe releases a screen saver to help fight spam by keeping spam servers busy with requests (1 Dec). The service is discontinued within a few days after backbone providers block access to the download site and the service causese some servers to crash. CERNET2, the first backbone IPv6 network in China, is launched by the China Education and Research Network (CERN) connecting 25 universities in 20 cities at speeds of 1-10Gbps (27 Dec)
 * 2001**The first live distributed musical -- //The Technophobe & The Madman// -- over Internet2 networks debuts on 20 Feb
 * 2002**US ISP Association (USISPA) is created from the former CIX (11 Jan)
 * 2003**Public Interest Registry (PIR) takes over as .org registry operator on 1 Jan. Transition is completed on 27 Jan. By giving up .org, VeriSign is able to retain control over .com domains
 * 2004**For the first time, there are more instances of DNS root servers outside the US with the launch of an anycast instance of the RIPE NCC operated [|K-root server]