Cyber Crime

For which kind of crime is it impossible to use computers: blackmailing, forgery, smuggling, plagiarizing, stealing, robbering, burgling?

Internet Watchdog Could Stop Collegiate Copycats (3)

Academic thieves beware. While the Internet has placed a wealth of research papers at the fingertips of students, a new Web site could help professors catch plagiarizers red-handed.

Some students actually research and write their term-papers the old-fashioned way. Others, however, just copy fake ones off the Internet and turn them in as their work.

To prevent collegiate copycats, two graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley have devised a program that compares a student's submission with every other term- paper on the Web.

"We essentially search a hundred million Web pages on the Internet, interfacing with the top 20 search engines," said John Barrie, of www.plagiarism.com. "We also compare that with our local data base of term papers."

Teachers who sign up can send their students' papers to the Web site. The originality of the work, or lack thereof, becomes painfully clear within 24 hours.

"We code every sentence that was a word-for-word match with another sentence, either contained on the Internet or within our database," Barrie said.

David Presti, a U.C. Berkeley professor who teaches neurobiology, told his class he would use the program. Undaunted, numerous students plagiarized anyway.

"We ran all 300 papers through the program and found 45 of them, or 15 percent of students, had cut and pasted significant amounts of material from various World Wide Web sites without citations," Presti said.

Students falsely accused can have the opportunity to defend themselves. They can show the instructors "that indeed they haven't got their material from the Internet or some other source," Barrie said.

Competition is tough at prestigious universities like U.C. Berkeley. Some students welcome the Internet research watchdog, considering it a way to level the academic playing field. "I think it's justified academically. Plagiarizing is wrong," one said.

Who Invented the Internet? (3)

The answer to the question of 'who invented the internet' is not a single man or company, but instead the involvement of many experts from various fields pooling their knowledge towards a common goal.

The conceptual foundation for creation of the Internet was largely created by three individuals, each of which changed the way we thought about technology by accurately predicting its future:

Vannevar Bush wrote the first visionary description of the potential uses for information technology with his description of the "memex" automated library system. Norbert Wiener invented the field of Cybernetics, inspiring future researchers to Marshall McLuhan made the idea of a global village interconnected by an electronic nervous system part of our popular culture. The catalyst for the burst of innovation that would ultimately create the internet was the launch of the Soviet Union's first satellite in 1957. The thought of Sputnik I hovering over US airspace was enough to alarm President Eisenhower to plough funds into developing the US's technical capability.

The task was of creating a communication network that could survive a nuclear attack, and enable the US to launch their own counter strike. This meant a network which could rapidly exchange data between locations spread all other the country.

The communication network was designed to utilise the principle of 'packet switching' data technology, published in a paper by Leonard Kleinrock in 1961. Packet switching meant that millions of data messages could be routed along the same physical line from one place to another. Previously, data transfer systems had relied on a single connection between two points, such as those created by telephone exchanges, for rerouting every message in a 'circuit switching' system.

The advances in data transfer technology enabled the creation of a functioning long distance computer network. Larry Roberts could be labelled as one of the people who invented the internet because he built its first links: between the University of California and Stanford Research Institute in 1969. Known as ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Networks), the network was gradually expanded to link military, scientific and educational institutions all over the country.

In 1972, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf invented the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to allow diverse computer networks to interconnect and communicate. Scientists, the military and researchers could now collaborate and share information with colleagues from all over America on the rapidly growing internet network.

The internet started to spread globally in 1976 when the network became linked to Europe. The internet's capabilities as a communication tool were further enhanced three years later when IBM introduced a 'store and forward' network, now known as email.

It wasn't until 1990 that the internet became available for public usage and stopped being the preserve of the government and research institutions. The development of HTML during this year meant that graphical websites started appearing and the world-wide-web started taking form into how we know it today.

So, the person who invented the internet wasn't a single individual but a whole community of scientists, physicists and the brightest minds in the country. They were motivated not only to provide the military with a decentralised control system, but to create a communication network enabling people to collaborate and share information with others all over the world.