- The most common uses of the internet vary across countries, but some trends remain consistent. Each country has unique digital habits shaped by culture, infrastructure, and economic factors.
For example, social media (especially WeChat), e-commerce, digital payments, and online gaming dominate internet usage in China; streaming services, social media, digital payments, and online education are widely used in India;
e-commerce, social networking, streaming entertainment, and online work are major internet activities in the United States;
social media, e-commerce, and mobile gaming are popular in Indonesia;
social networking, digital payments, and online education are growing trends in Pakistan, and streaming services, social media, and e-commerce are widely used in Brazil.
- The global number of Internet users has grown significantly over the years, reaching 5.3 billion by the end of 2023. The countries with the highest number of Internet users of all time are led by China, with 1.1 billion users,
followed by India with 881.3 million users, and the United States with 311.3 million users. Other countries with large digital populations include Indonesia (215.6 million), Pakistan (170 million), and Brazil (165.3 million).
- China has the largest digital population in the world, with 1.11 billion internet users as of 2024, and its Internet penetration rate is around 80%.
- Urban vs. Rural Divide: The urban-rural Internet divide in China has significant societal effects, influencing economic opportunities, education, healthcare, and social mobility.
While major cities like Beijing and Shanghai have high internet adoption rates, rural areas still lag behind, with an average internet access rate below 68%.
- Mobile Dominance: China had 1.76 billion cellular mobile connections in early 2024, exceeding its total population; China's mobile dominance is undeniable, with over 1.4 billion smartphone users and 95.8% of Internet users
accessing content via mobile devices. China has built a mobile-first ecosystem, where super apps like WeChat and Alipay integrate messaging, social media, shopping, and payments into a single platform.
- Social Media & E-commerce: China's digital landscape is deeply intertwined with social media and e-commerce, making it a global leader in online shopping and digital engagement; platforms like WeChat,
Douyin (TikTok’s Chinese version), and Alibaba dominate online activity.
- Censorship & Regulation: China has one of the world's most restrictive Internet environments, heavily regulating online content through what is known as the Great Firewall; this system blocks access to popular Western platforms
like Google, Facebook, X, and YouTube; the China government also monitors domestic internet activity to control information that could potentially incite social unrest.
- 5G Expansion: China is leading the global 5G expansion, with over 4.39 million 5G base stations deployed nationwide, reinforcing its dominance in next-generation connectivity.
- TikTok is a popular social media platform known for its short-form videos, and it's owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. As of early 2024, TikTok has around 170 million monthly active users in the United States,
especially among younger audiences. President Joe Biden in April 2024 signed a law that requires TikTok to either sell its U.S. operations to an American company or face a nationwide ban by January 19, 2025.
The law was enacted due to national security concerns, particularly the fear that TikTok's Chinese parent company, ByteDance, could be compelled to share user data with the Chinese government. TikTok and ByteDance have
resisted these efforts, arguing that a sale would be technologically impossible and that the law violates free speech rights.The recent
ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld this law,
stating that it is constitutional and necessary to protect U.S. citizens from potential foreign influence and data misuse, TikTok and ByteDance are expected to appeal to the Supreme Court.
- X, formerly Twitter, had dropped nearly 80 percent in value since the owner, Musk, acquired the platform for $44 billion in 2022; today, X becomes an entire social network built on lies,
and many people see him as a one-man misinformation machine.
- The first webcam was invented at the University of Cambridge in 1991 by computer scientists Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky to monitor the status of a coffee pot in the computer science department,
the camera took pictures of the coffee pot three times a minute.
- In early 2024, National Public Data, a company that resells collected personal data for background checks, confirmed that its 2.7+ billion records
with highly sensitive personal data of nearly 170 million people were exposed. The compromised data, which includes names, Social Security numbers, physical addresses, and mailing address(es), in this breach can be exploited for different cybercrimes and
fraudulent actions. You should place a credit freeze and a fraud alert with the major credit bureaus (Transunion, Equifax, and Experian), and monitor your financial accounts (banks, credit cards, line of credit, etc) for suspicious activity.
- Phishing is a type of social engineering attack (e.g., fraudulent emails, text messages, phone calls, web sites) often used to trick users into downloading malware, sharing sensitive information or personal data
(e.g., Social Security and credit card numbers, bank account numbers, login credentials). Successful phishing attacks often lead to steal user data, including identity theft, credit card fraud, ransomware attacks, data breaches,
and huge financial losses for individuals and corporations. Some common phishing include
- Email phishing - A attack uses tactics like phony hyperlinks to lure email recipients into sharing their personal information.
- Malware phishing - A attack involves planting malware disguised as a trustworthy attachment (such as a resume or bank statement) in an email.
- Spear phishing - A attack targets specific individuals by exploiting information gathered through research into their jobs and social lives.
- Whaling - A attack targets to find an opportune moment to steal login credentials or other sensitive information.
- Smishing - A attack involves sending text messages disguised as trustworthy communications from businesses like Amazon or FedEx.
- Vishing - A attack uses fraudulent call centers to trick people into providing sensitive information over the phone.
- Cunning communication - A attack manipulates victims into giving up sensitive data by concealing malicious messages and attachments in an email.
- Perception of need - A attack convinces people to act, such as downloading malware.
- False trust - A attack fools people by creating a false sense of trust—and even the most perceptive fall for their scams.
- Emotional manipulation - A attack uses psychological tactics to convince their targets to act.
- Pegasus is spyware developed by the NSO Group
that can be covertly installed on mobile phones (and other devices) running most versions of iOS and Android. Pegasus not only enables the keystroke monitoring of all communications from a phone (texts, emails, web searches) but it also enables phone call and location tracking,
while also permitting NSO Group to hijack both the mobile phone's microphone and camera, and turning it into a constant surveillance device. Pegasus is capable of reading text messages, tracking calls, collecting passwords, tracking location, accessing the target device's microphone and camera,
and harvesting information from apps.
- The NSO Group sold the Pegasus spyware software to its clients for surveillance of anti-regime activists, journalists and political leaders around the world. A
leaked list of 50,000 phone numbers
of potential surveillance targets was obtained by Amnesty International and Paris-based journalism non-profit Forbidden Stories, and shared
with the reporting consortium, including The Washington Post and The Guardian.
How Pegasus works
- Target: Someone sends what’s known as a trap link to a smartphone that persuades the victim to tap and activate — or activates itself without any input, as in the most sophisticated “zero-click” hacks.
- Infect: The spyware captures and copies the phone’s most basic functions, NSO marketing materials show, recording from the cameras and microphone and collecting location data, call logs and contacts.
- Track: The implant secretly reports that information to an operative who can use it to map out sensitive details of the victim’s life.
- The US DOJ filed an antitrust lawsuit on 10/19/2020 against Google
alleging the company of abusing its dominance over smaller rivals by operating like an illegal monopoly. Google controls the world’s most popular web browser (Chrome), video streaming site
(YouTube) and smartphone operating system (Android), while claiming the lion’s share of the revenue from the $162 billion global online ad market.
The suit follows years of complaints by smaller tech companies, news publishers and other rivals in the U.S. and Europe who say Google has abused its search engine’s role as the internet’s de
facto gatekeeper to unfairly benefit its other sprawling business interests. The complaint said for many years, Google has used anticompetitive tactics to maintain and extend its monopolies in the markets for general search services, search advertising, and general search text advertising - the cornerstones of its empire".
Google is harnessing its internet gatekeeper role to enrich the company's vast business empire, stifling competitors and hurting consumers through exclusionary agreements, including deals, such as the one it struck with Apple making Google the default search engine on the Safari browser on iPhones.
- Google has removed 17 malicious applications, which were infected with the
Joker (aka Bread) malware, from the official Android Play Store.
Google used the Play Protect service to disable the apps on infected devices, but users still need to manually intervene and remove the apps from their devices.
- All Good PDF Scanner
- Blue Scanner
- Care Message
- Desire Translate
- Direct Messenger
- Hummingbird PDF Converter - Photo to PDF
- Meticulous Scanner
- Mint Leaf Message-Your Private Message
- One Sentence Translator - Multifunctional Translator
- Part Message
- Paper Doc Scanner
- Private SMS
- Style Photo Collage
- Talent Photo Editor - Blur focus
- Tangram App Lock
- Unique Keyboard - Fancy Fonts & Free Emoticons
Once on a user's device, these apps eventually download and "drop" (with the name droppers, or loaders) other components or apps on the device that contain the
Joker malware or other malware strains.
- com.imagecompress.android
- com.relax.relaxation.androidsms
- com.file.recovefiles
- com.training.memorygame
- Push Message- Texting & SMS
- Fingertip GameBox
- com.contact.withme.texts
- com.cheery.message.sendsms (two different instances)
- com.LPlocker.lockapps
- Safety AppLock
- Emoji Wallpaper
- com.hmvoice.friendsms
- com.peason.lovinglovemessage
- com.remindme.alram
- Convenient Scanner 2
- Separate Doc Scanner
- ITU estimates that at the end of 2019, 53.6% of the global population, 4.1 billion people, are using the Internet.
- Scammers are using illegal robocalls to pitch everything from scam Coronavirus treatments to work-at-home schemes, you should ignore online offers for vaccinations and home test kits.
Scammers are trying to get you to buy products that aren’t proven to treat or prevent the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) — online or in stores. As of 3/27/2020, there also no FDA-authorized medicine or home test kits for the Coronavirus.
- At the end of 2019, ITU estimated that 53.6 per cent of the global population, or 4.1 billion people, are using the Internet; around 48% of woman and 58% of men were using the Internet in 2019.
- Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) is a technology developed by CableLabs for transfer of data over coaxial cable used for cable TV connection. Cable
Operators across the world have adopted DOCSIS standards, DOCSIS 3.1 and DOCSIS 3.0, for providing Internet data, voice, and video services using existing cable TV systems. DOCSIS 3.1
(released in October 2013) features significantly higher speeds than DOCSIS 3.0 (released in August 2006); while DOCSIS 3.0 provides maximum downstream speed and maximum upstream speed up to 1 Gbps and 200 Mbps, respectively, DOCSIS 3.1 can provide maximum downstream speed and maximum upstream speed
up to 10 Gbps and 1 Gbps.
- ToTok is most popular in the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.), but also serves millions of users in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America.
The company that created ToTok, Breej Holding, is believed to be a front group for an Abu Dhabi-based hacking firm called DarkMatter.
But the service, ToTok, is actually a spying tool. It is used by the government of the U.A.E. to try to track every conversation, movement, relationship,
appointment, sound and image of those who install it on their phones. Google removed it from its store
on 12/19/2019, and Apple followed suit on 12/20/2019.
- The top Internet-censored countries in the world are North Korea, Burma, Cuba,
Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, Syria, Tunisia, Vietnam and Turkmenistan.
- Bahrain, China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates, Vietnam and Yemen are the top countries that restrict Internet usage in the world.
- During a pretrial hearing to dismiss a lawsuit stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal in July 2019,
it was surprised that Facebook told the judge that it didn't violate users' privacy rights because there's no
expectation of privacy when using social media. Facebook also claimed it isn't a
social network and not somewhere you can make friends.
- Google decided to work
with the Chinese military while refusing to work with the U.S. Department of Defense.
The Intercept reported that Google was working on a secret prototype of a new, censored Chinese search engine, called Project Dragonfly, to help Chinese
government to monitor its people. In 3/2019 President Trump concerned about “Google is helping China
and their military, but not the US”.
- China uses its Internet censorship policy, which prevents Internet users from accessing proscribed websites from within the country,
China blocked about 10,000 domain names. These include many
popular websites, such as
Google,
Youtube,
Bing,
Yahoo,
Live,
Facebook,
WhatsApp,
Instagram,
Pinterest,
Twitter,
Amazon,
Wikipedia,
HBO,
Netflix,
Nintendo,
Bloomberg,
Reuters,
The Wall Street Journal,
The New York Times,
The Washington Post,
The Guardian,
The Economist,
Independent,
Time Magazine, and
BBC.
You can test if a website is blocked in China.
- While the U.S. encourages countries to have cybersecurity strategies that fully incorporate human rights and economic interests, some states, China and Russia, have like
"cybersecurity" policies and laws that are aimed at controlling discourse and dissent. These countries both claim "absolute sovereignty" in cyberspace and do not recognize that international human rights transcend
international borders. Restrictive policies curtailing the free flow of information have both negative human rights and economic impacts. Many of China’s laws and regulations, including its Cybersecurity Law, are deliberately vague but have broad
implications for data localization, mandatory testing, cooperation with Chinese authorities, forced technology transfer and market access in China.
- China has the most aggressive data localization laws.
China’s Cybersecurity Law that went into effect in June 2017 requires all "important information" and "personal information" to be
stored in China. Under this regime, "network operators" are prohibited from transferring covered data outside of China without undergoing a government‐mandated security
assessment. As currently defined, the law could cover any entity that owns or operates a computer network and applies to a vast and ambiguous assortment of different types of data.
China is not the only country with data localization requirements: India, Russia, Nigeria, and South Korea all have enacted laws that prohibit the transfer of a range of business and
consumer data outside of their respective jurisdictions. In some cases, these laws mandate physical servers be installed in‐country as a condition of doing business.
- IEEE 802.11ac, which was finalized in 2013, uses the 5 GHz band while IEEE 802.11n, which has been around since 2009,
uses 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz; higher bands are faster but lower bands reach further. IEEE 802.11ac is fully backwards compatible with previous WiFi standards, it works well with
IEEE 802.11a (introduced in 1999),
IEEE 802.11b (1999),
IEEE 802.11g (2003) and
IEEE 802.11n (2009).
Theoretically, IEEE 802.11ac is capable of transmitting data up to 1300 megabits per second (Mbps), which is the equivalent of 162.5 megabytes per second (MBps); this is 3x faster than the typical 450 Mbps speed attributed to IEEE 802.11n.
However, actually the fastest IEEE 802.11ac can transmit data up to 720 Mbps (90MBps) while IEEE 802.11n tops out at about 240 Mbps (30 MBps). Furthermore, at 3.3 feet (1 meter) IEEE 802.11ac speeds only up to 90 MBps, at 33 ft (10 meters): 70 MBps, and at 66 ft (20 meters) behind two solid walls: 50 MBps.
- Ransomware damage costs predicted to hit $11.5B by 2019
- Your iPad is obsolete if it is an original iPad,
iPad 2, iPad 3, iPad 4 and iPad mini.
These models no longer receive operating system updates, but the vast majority of applications still work on them.
- A tablet computer, commonly shortened to tablet, is a mobile device, typically with a mobile operating system and LCD touchscreen display processing circuitry, and a rechargeable battery
in a single thin, flat package. The differences being that tablets are relatively larger than smartphones, with screens 7 inches (18 cm) or larger, measured diagonally, and may not support access to a
cellular network.
- Facebook allows devices made by Amazon.com, Blackberry, Apple and Samsung to access data from the social network's users without users' knowledge.
- As of July 31 2018, GoDaddy managed over 76 million domain names for 18 million customers worldwide.
as of today (5/2019) it has around 18.8 million customers and about 78 million domain names.
- As of 8/2018 300+ million people across 49 countries have gigabit internet availability.
The United States remains the country with Gigabit internet available to over 64 million people, South Korea with access for 46.9 million, Spain with 30.1 million, China with 20.7 million and Canada with 15.7 million.
- The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form, as of 9/2022 its archive contains:
- One Terabyte (TB), which is 1,000 Gigabyte, consists of around 85,900,000 pages of Word documents.
For an one-Terabyte data cap a month, you can watch up to 104 90-minute movies per month or five (5) hours of Netflix per day.
- Popular Free Email Services:
- As of October 2017 there are approximately 3.27 billion Internet users in the world, of which Asia accounts for around 50% of that total number.
- To remove the Google Ad program, which ties consumers' online behaviors to their purchases and tracks shoppers using the Google products, such as Google Search, Google Chrome, and Android smart phones,
when shopping online, users of Google's products can go to their My Activity Page, click on Activity Controls, and uncheck "Web and Web Activity".
- Click here (haveibeenpwned.com) or here (shouldichangemypassword.com) and type your email address to check if your account has been compromised in a data breach.
- Ransomware is a kind of cyber attack that involves hackers taking control of a computer or mobile device and demanding payment. It is a type of malicious software
designed to block access to a computer system or data until a ransom is paid. Simple ransomware may lock the system in a way which is not difficult for a knowledgeable person to reverse, and display a message
requesting payment to unlock it. More advanced malware encrypts the victim's files, making them inaccessible, and demands a ransom payment to decrypt them. The best protection against ransomware
is to back up all of the information and files on your devices in a completely separate system. A good place to do this is on an external hard drive that isn't connected to the Internet. This means that if you suffer an attack you won't lose any information to the hackers.
- The most common cyber-crimes:
- The most expensive virus to date has been MyDoom, an email worm, which gave hackers remote control over systems, and conducted DDoS attacks.
MyDoom is also known as W32.MyDoom@mm, Novarg, Mimail.R and "'Shimgapi'", is a computer worm affecting Microsoft Windows. It was first sighted on January 26, 2004.
It became the fastest-spreading e-mail worm ever (as of January 2004, exceeding previous records set by the Sobig worm and ILOVEYOU,
a record which as of 2016 has yet to be surpassed.
- Phishing is the attempt to obtain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and
credit card details (and, indirectly, money), often for malicious reasons, by disguising as a trustworthy entity in an
electronic communication. The aim of phishing is to trick people into handing over their card details or access to protected systems. A Verizon data breach investigations report has shown that 23% of people open phishing emails.
- As of the end of 2016, around 40% of global Internet users shopped online to buy products or goods.
- As of January 2016 there were 3.26 billion Internet users, of which 21.97% for China, 9.58% for the U.S. and 8.33% for India. 86.75% of the U.S. population and 89.90% of U.K. citizens use the Internet, and Bermuda has the highest Internet penetration at 97.75% (63,987 over 65,461 population). Asia accounts for 48.4% of global internet users.
- As of January 2016 there were around 123.78 million registered .com domain names, accounted for 50% of all domain registrations, followed by the .tk with 27.7 million.
- An estimated 37,000 websites are hacked every day. The most highly-publicized breaches accounts in recent years:
- Hackers stole data on 500 million Yahoo! users' accounts in 2014, and more than 450,000 user accounts were compromised in 2012. Account user information includes names, email addresses, telephone numbers, birth dates, encrypted passwords and, in some cases, security questions.
- More than 70 million households and seven million small businesses accounts at JPMorgan were hacked in 2014.
- Michael Aldrich demonstrates the first online shopping system in 1979.
- Minitel was introduced by France Télécom and used for online ordering nationwide in France in 1982.
- CompuServe launched the Electronic Mall, which was the first comprehensive electronic commerce service in the USA and Canada, in April 1984.
- Tim Berners-Lee wrote about a software and database project that enabled information sharing among international researchers; he wrote the first web browser, WorldWideWeb,
using a Apple NeXT computer in 1990, and it became the platform for the World Wide Web.
- Raymond Samuel Tomlinson was an American computer programmer who implemented the first email program (in 1971) on ARPANET, an early packet switching network and the first network to
implement the protocol suite TCP/IP, which were the foundation of the Internet.
- Book Stacks Unlimited in Cleveland, OH, opened the first commercial website (books.com) selling books online with credit card processing in 1992.
- Netscape 1.0 was introduced in late 1994 with SSL encryption that made transactions secure for electronic commerce.
- Ipswitch IMail Server became the first electronic commerce software available online for sale in 1994, and it could be downloaded from the websites, Ipswitch, Inc. and OpenMarket.
- Amazon.com, an American electronic commerce launched by Jeff Bezos
in 1995, is the largest Internet-based retailer in the U.S, started as an online bookstore, later diversifying to sell DVDs,
Blu-rays, CDs, video downloads/streaming,
MP3 downloads/streaming, audiobook downloads/streaming, software, video games,
electronics, apparel, furniture, food, toys and jewelry.
- To reach 50 million users it took the World Wide Web 4 years, the radio 38 years, and the television 13 years.
- Zappos.com wasbacquired by Amazon.com for $928 million in 2009.
- eBay acquires PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002
- Business.com sold $7.5 million to eCompanies in 1999; it was purchased $149,000 in 1997. The most expensive domain name ever sold is Insurance.com, for $35.6 million in 2010.
- Alibaba Group, the largest Chinese e-commerce company that provides consumer-to-consumer,
business-to-consumer and business-to-business sales services via web portals,
was established in China in 1999. Alibaba Group has the largest Initial public offering ever, worth $25 billion, in 9/2014 in the U.S.
- IndiaMART business-to-business (B2B) marketplace established in India in 1996; it's one of the largest Indian online marketplaces based in Noida, India
- The first message sent over the Internet was "LOG", and it was done at MIT.
- The first YouTube video, “Me at the zoo”, which features Jawed Karim, one of the founders of YouTube, at the San Diego Zoo, was uploaded on April 23, 2005.
The other co-founders are Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.
Google acquired YouTube, a 65-employee company headquartered in San Bruno, CA, for $1.65 billion in an all stock transaction on October 16, 2006.
- Sina Weibo is a Chinese
micro-logging website, which has features that are similar to Twitter and
Facebook. It is one of the most popular sites in China, in use by well over 30% of Internet users,
and has about 100 million messages posted daily. It was launched by SINA Corporation
on 14 August 2009, and has 503 million registered users as of December 2012.
- Twitter has 271 million monthly active users, and 500 million Tweets are sent per day as of 9/2014.
- On May 19, 2014, a grand jury in the Western District of Pennsylvania (U.S) indicted five Chinese military hackers, Wang Dong, Sun Kailiang, Wen Xinyu, Huang Zhenyu, and Gu Chunhui, for computer hacking, economic espionage and other offenses.
- As of April 2014, every minute there are 1,820 TB of data created, 168+ million emails sent, 698,500 Google searches, 11+ million instant messages, 695,000+ Facebook accesses, and 98,000+ tweets.
- January 2014 Facebook has revenue of $2.59bn for the three months to the end of December 2013 – up 63% from the same time the previous year.
- Google promoted copycat sites, happily taking the revenue that it generates.
- 152,445,165 Adobe accounts were compromised in a massive October 2013 breach with each containing an internal ID, username, email, encrypted password and a password hint in plain text.
- 453,427 Yahoo! accounts were breached in 2012 via an SQL [structured query language] injection attack.
- Apple Inc. reported a new record, with preorders for the new models,
iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, in the first 24 hours after its announcement day (September 9, 2014), surpassing 4 million, twice that for the iPhone 5.
About 2 million pre-orders were received for the iPhone 5 in the first 24 hours after it went on sale in September 2012. More than 10 million iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus devices were sold in the first three days.
Apple sold 5 million of iPhone 5 in the first weekend.
- Apple sold a record-breaking 9 million new iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c models, just three days after the launch of the new iPhones on September 20, 2013.
- More than 200 million Apple users are running the new iOS 7 on their iPhones and iPads, and that more than 11 million unique listeners already tuned in to iTunes Radio in the first five days after it went live.
- Apple took 21 days to sell 10 million iPhone 5s; Samsung took 50 days to sell 10 million Galaxy S IIIs
- As of 3/2013 Microsoft's Internet Explorer has a 56% market share for Internet browsers on personal computers, Mozilla's Firefox has a 20% share and Google's Chrome has 17%.
- Apple took 21 days to sell 10 million iPhone 5s; Samsung took 50 days to sell 10 million Galaxy S IIIs
- Apple expects to sell about 250 million iPhone 5 with a projected revenue of $144 billion before the next generation of iPhone is released.
- About 145.8 million iPhones were sold before iPhone 5 was released (9/21/2012).
- There were about 94 million iPhone sold in 2012.
- Around 75% of iPhone users slept with their iPhone next to them in bed, and 94% confessed to having a certain level of addiction to their iPhone.
- Apple iPhone 5 vs Apple iPhone 4 - In addition to having a size that is taller, thinner and lighter than the size of Apple iPhone 4S, Apple iPhone 5 uses 4G LTE connectivity that has a speed as four times faster
than the one of Apple iPhone 4S, which only offers 3G HSDPA connectivity. iPhone 5 also has 8MP camera that can simultaneously capture 1080p HD videos and images while Apple iPhone 4 has 5MP camera that can only capture 720p HD videos.
- As of 2012, Apple employs 60,400 full-time employees, but most of them are employees in Apple's retail stores (36,000).
- As of August 2012, Twitter had about 900 employees, and over 500 million active users, generating over 340 million tweets daily and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day.
- As of March 2014, Facebook had 7,185 employees (June 2014) and about 1.28 billion monthly unique 1.28 billion worldwide. As of July 2012, it had
3,976 employees, and 955 million monthly active users worldwide (552 million daily active users), of which approximately 81% of its monthly active users were outside the U.S. and Canada, and 543 million active users using Facebook on a mobile device.
There were about 155.6 million members from the U.S., 52.8 million members from Brazil, 51 million members from India, 44 million members from Indonesia, and 36.2 million members from Mexico.
- On average, teenagers send 60 text messages per day.
- WhatsApp Inc., a 55-employee copmany that provides a mobile messenger service, was founded in 2009 by Brian Acton
and Jan Koum, both former employees of Yahoo! As of August, 2014, WhatsApp, which had over 600 million active users as of 9/2014, was acquired by Facebook for $19 billion in February 2014.
- Instagram is an online mobile photo-sharing,
video-sharing and social networking
service that enables its users to take pictures and videos, and share them on a variety of social networking platforms, such as Facebook,
Twitter, Tumblr and Flickr
Instagram was acquired by Facebook in April 2012 for approximately US$1 billion in cash and stock.
- Google, which has about 31,400 employees as of 2012, is the Internet's leading brand in terms of number of users. In May 2012 it had 155 million unique U.S. visitors from desktop and laptop computers, compared with Facebook's 140 million.
- In 2011 Google had 38.5% of the online advertising market, compared with 4.6% for Facebook.
- Google learns about you while you enter requests into its search engine, the YouTube site, or receive or send emails using your Gmail account. Moreover, if you write memos on Google's online word processing program, Docs, Google will alert you if you misspell the name of a friend or co-worker who has communicated with you on Google's Gmail.
- Google increased its share of the search market to 66.2 percent in January 2012, up from 65.9 percent in December 2011. Microsoft's Bing climbed from 15.1 percent to 15.2 percent, and Yahoo fell from 14.5 percent to 14.1 percent market share. (Source: comScore).
- As of June 2012 there were 7,017,846,922 people used Internet worldwide; of which Africa: 1,073,380,925; Asia: 3,922,066,987; Europe: 820,918,446; Middle East: 223,608,203; North America: 348,280,154; Latin America / Caribbean: 593,688,638; and Oceania / Australia: 35,903,569.
- As of January 2017, Google is the #1 most popular website in the world, followed by Facebook and YouTube. As of 1/2012 Google+ had 90 million users and about 60% loged in every day.
- As of the 1/2012 Bing Search supports 37 languages, including Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. Search in the English language with the English-French Bing translator can produce French language results.
- Since 5/2011 Microsoft included comments from Facebook friends into its Bing search engine.
- Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), the set of communications protocols used for the Internet was designed in 1973.
- Ray Tomlinson introduced electronic mail system with the @ to distinguish between the sender's name and network name in the e-mail address in 1971.
- The French Culture Ministry has banned the word 'e-mail and replace it by the term 'courriel' in all government documentation, because 'e-mail' is an English word.
- Internet Domain Registration was free until an announcement by the National Science Foundation on 14th September, 1995, changed it.
- As the end of 2011, Facebook has more than 800 million active users around the world, and roughly 200 million in the United States.
- Per Forbes, at the end of March 2011, the value of Facebook, Zynga, Twitter and Linkedin is $65B, $8B, $4B and $2.2B, respectively.
- MySpace had 25 million as of June 2012. It had around 63 million users in February 2011, down from about 110 million in February 2010.
- A majority of Americans ignore Internet ads the most; smaller percentages ignore television, radio and newspaper ads.
- During the period of October 2009 to October 2010 Facebook members increased 22%, Twitter up only 1% , LinkedIn lost 5%, and MySpace lost 21%.
- Around 21% of Americans have never accessed the internet.
- In 2010 American people aged 18-24 spent more than 4 times shopping online than older consumers.
- Google scans the text of all incoming messages sent to users holding Gmail accounts for advertising purposes. Google claims that it is a fair and necessary tradeoff for the company's free Gmail service.
- Google leads in providing free mapping service, Google Maps: 51,996,000, MapQuest: 39,801,000, and Yahoo! Maps: 10,457,000.
- Facebook leads to attract people using its online photo sharing site, Facebook Photos: 44,796,000, Flickr: 24,657,000, Photobucket 22,171,000, and
Google Picasa Network: 9,701,000.
- Facebook had more than 2000 employees as of 2010. Employee' benefits package sounds pretty sweet: medical, dental and vision health plans with no premiums, 401(k) plan, 4 weeks vacation and 8 company holidays, free catered breakfast, lunch and dinner every day, dry cleaning and laundry services, and a free IBM Thinkpad or Apple MacBook Pro.
- 4.33 million hours are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide); more than 13 million users update their profile daily.
- MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn account for seven of the top 20 most visited Web sites in the world.
- Today there are more than 300 social networking sites around the world with 80% of sites having headquarters in the U.S.
- MySpace grew at a rate of about 157 member profiles every minute totaling about 82.7 million new profiles a year.
- While other social networks have a broader age demographics, member profiles in Bebo and Xanga consist mostly of teens and early 20's.
- 57% of social network users are female; 35% of all users (male/female) are 18 to 29 years old, 23% of them are students, and 48% are single.
- Nearly half of all students under 18 years old who have access to the internet have their own personal profiles on social networking sites.
- The number of U.S. consumers who frequent online video sites has climbed 339% since 2003, while time spent on these sites has shot up almost 2,000% over the same period.
- In China, surveillance and censorship of the Internet's use are very extensive. The Chinese government has mandated that all computers in the country must have the government screening software installed. Reporters Without Borders lists China as one of 13 "enemies of the Internet
- China has approximate 384 million Internet users (about 30 percent of the population) as of January 2010, of which 59 percent of Internet users had home/office access and 41 percent used at 1,100,000 Internet cafes, they are possibly the world's heaviest users of Internet-based products, capabilities and services.
- 43% of China's Internet users contribute to net forums and discussion boards. The most prolific group is young professionals with ages between 25 to 29. 37% of bloggers post daily, and 41 million of users engage in at least 6 activities that connect with 84 people on a weekly basis.
- 42% of Hispanic Internet users report downloading content compared to 35% of all U.S. adults; 55% of Hispanic users send text messages; 28% send pictures; and 15% downloaded a video game and sent/received email.
- In the United States there are about 220 million Internet users (70 percent of its population) in 2009, of which 99 percent of Internet users had home access and 1 percent used Internet cafes.
- Sweden has the highest percentage of internet users (72 percent).
- 33% of Americans (all ages) have social networking profiles; 40% of them visit their profiles daily.
- About 42 million Americans tune into online radio each week.
- Hundreds of thousands may lose Internet after July 9, 2012 because of the malicious software installed in their computers. The FBI is encouraging users to visit a website run by its security partner, dcwg.org, that will inform them whether they're infected and explain how to fix the problem.
- Number of years to reach 50 million users - Internet: 5 years, Cable TV: 10 years, TV: 13 years, and Radio: 38 years.
- Microsoft Internet Explorer browser continues sliding in popularity (down from 95% to 68% - as of January 2010) while Firefox and Safari have eaten into that share.
- Google (362M), Microsoft (322M),Yahoo (238M), and Facebook (218.8M) were the only sites attracted more than 200 million unique visitors (for each) in February 2010.
- As of October 2009, there are about 200 million free email accounts provided by various groups, of which Yahoo! Mail: 105,458,000, Windows Live Hotmail: 48,962,000, and Gmail: 39,251,000.
- Netscape found by Jim Clark, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina,
is the first Internet browser developed by Netscape Communications, Inc. (formerly known as Netscape Communications Corporation) and made it available for the public use in October 1994.
- Mosaic (web browser), designed by Eric Bina and Marc Andreessen at the
University of Illinois’s National Center for Supercomputer Applications, was released on January 23, 1993, and was the first commercial software that allowed graphical access to content on the Internet.
- Yahoo!, found by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994,
as "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web", is a web portal with a web directory providing an extensive range of products and services for various online activities.
- The "TheProject.html" webpage is the first one posted on the Internet.
- The World Wide Web (WWW), which is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet,
was born when Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN, the high-energy physics laboratory in Geneva, developed HyperText Markup Language.
- Steve Wilhite of CompuServe invented the GIF file format, which went on to become the
de facto standard for 8-bit images on the Internet until the late 1990s.
- An intranet is a private network accessible only to employees in an organization for improving internal communication, collaboration, and information sharing. The concept of intranets emerged in the mid-1990s, leveraging Internet technologies such as content management systems,
enterprise portals, and collaboration tools, for internal use within organizations.
- The first email was sent in 1971 over the ARPANET between two computers set side by side.
- The Internet, which was derived from "internetworking," (i.e., interconnection of multiple networks), is a global network made up of millions of public, private, business, academic, and government networks; as of today
there are over 1.5 billion websites on the Internet; however, a significant number of them are inactive.
- The origins of the Internet can be traced back to ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), which was developed by the U.S. Department of Defense in the late 1960s; it was initially designed to enable communication between research institutions and U.S. military bases.
- 1969: The first successful message was sent over ARPANET between Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
- 1971: The development of the Network Control Protocol (NCP) allowed different computers to communicate more effectively.
- 1983: ARPANET transitioned to using the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite, which became the foundation for modern internet protocols.
- 1989-1990: Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, invented the World Wide Web (WWW), which made the Internet more accessible to the general public by creating a system of linked hypertext documents.
- 1991: The World Wide Web was publicly released.
- 1993: The first web browser, Mosaic, was introduced, leading to a rapid increase in Internet usage.
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