Weapon of Mass Destruction for the Masses

The internet is such a valuable tool that has grown exponentially in terms of usability and technologically in the past 5 years and it doesn’t look like it’s going to slow down anytime soon. Not surprisingly, the Defense Department was the one who developed the computer system in which the internet evolved from. The ability to keep academic and military researchers in contact really helps to speed up the time it takes to develop something. Without it, imagine having to write a story with somebody by mail correspondence only…that would take much longer then if you had your friend right next to you.


That development led to the internet, which, according to the article, only had 25 million daily computer users in 2005. That number really shows how much the internet has grown, as facebook, arguably the most popular of the social networking sites, just recently passed its 500 million user mark. Also showing the internet’s growth is its development of software to combat some of the perils of the internet. The article begins with an example of how spam e-mails negatively affect the internet, but my initial reaction was, “what about spam and pop-up blockers? From what I remember, spam blockers and pop-up blockers were really just initially being implemented.

Although spam and pop-up blockers are now used in full force, the internet’s growth has not been all positive. The internet is an open forum for anybody to write and produce whatever they want. Recently, many classified documents from the war in Afghanistan were illegally posted on a website called “wiki-leaks.” You can imagine the operational security risks that documents like that can present and the potential danger it can have on our military overseas. .