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It is still considered young and a new media, but it turns 40 today. INTERNET, the networking technology that started from a small room by connecting two computer systems today connects billions around the globe despite the political boundaries governing the nations.

This middle-aged technology was created with the intentions to form an open network that could facilitate free exchange of information. But, it was never thought to have enveloped the human existence with social networking, blogging, tweeting, shopping or haven to the World Wide Web.

September 2, 1969, ARPANET, the forerunner of INTERNET was developed when two computers at University of California, Los Angeles were connected to share some useless data on an experimental military network by Len Kleinrock and his team at UCLA. And, today it stands as one of the most essential medium of communication that has become an inevitable part of human lives.

Later in 1970s Vint Cerf, often referred to as ‘father of internet’ built TCP/IP and email, crafted by Ray Tomlinson followed with multiple networks to connect.

Till 90s access to INTERNET was not an easy task, till Tim Berners-Lee formulated the Web, a part of INTERNET that made the task to connect resources spread across different locations an effortless activity. This followed the Dot com crash which represented the darker side of the INTERNET.

Despite these, overcoming the initial failures INTERNET has emerged out as a winner in every sphere. Even after 40 years of existence it has a wide scope for innovations and potential to grow which have never crossed a normal mind.

Growth is also accompanied by surfacing of cybercrimes – spam, phishing, hacking, denial of service, etc. Even though we expect INTERNET, the combatant to fight these rivals and breakthrough the barriers to rise and shine. Happy Birthday INTERNET!

The Internet portal didn't shed light on a possible deal with the software giant as it reported a loss and more job cuts.

The DNS infrastructure of the Internet plays a critical role in resolving host and domain names into IP addresses. A great deal of effort has gone into ensuring that DNS works efficiently and is resilient in the face of server failures, incorrect data, or malicious attempts to disrupt the system. But even with these safeguards in place, the system is still subject to attack.

The potential benefit for someone involved in Internet fraud is huge. If you can change the DNS records for a major bank so that they point to your fake site, then you can potentially capture the account numbers and passwords of anyone who logs into the system. This approach sidesteps the need to send out email messages that try to get users to log in, but it does require a high level of technical sophistication. Two approaches have been used: DNS Poisoning and Pharming .

DNS servers around the Internet keep their tables updated by querying other more authoritative servers. The structure is a hierarchy with the network root servers at its origin. In a DNS poisoning attack, DNS servers are manipulated to fetch updated, incorrect DNS records from a server that has been set up by the attacker. This is a sophisticated type of attack to which modern DNS servers are largely immune. But successful attacks do still take place, usually by exploiting bugs in the server software. In March 2005, the SANS Internet Storm Center reported one such attack in which users were redirected to sites that contained spyware, which was then downloaded to users' computers. A detailed report on this attack can be found at http://isc.sans.org/presentations/dnspoisoning.php.

Pharming is somewhat of an umbrella term for several different approaches to manipulating DNS records. Rather than going after DNS servers directly, an attacker may try to con a domain registrar into changing the authoritative DNS record for a domain to point to their fake site. Examples of this form of social engineering have included someone simply calling a registrar on the phone and persuading them that they represent the owner of the target domain.

One example of this involved the New York-based Internet service provider Panix. In January 2005, an attacker was able to transfer control of its DNS records to a server in the United Kingdom, with all company email being redirected to a server in Canada. Even though the problem was spotted quickly, the impact on the company and its customers was substantial.

Another form of attack takes advantage of the fact that most operating systems have a local file of hostname-to-IP-address mappings that will be queried before making a remote DNS query. If such a file contains a match, then that address will be used without any further lookups. This has been exploited by a computer virus called the Banker Trojan. In addition to logging user keystrokes, it adds lines to the end of a host file on a Windows system that will redirect users to fake bank sites. Many variants of this trojan have been found.

DNS is fundamental to the operation of the Internet and usually works so well that people take it for granted. Attacks like these are a reminder that all components of the Internet are vulnerable.

Shares of some top internet companies are mixed at noon:

Akamai Technologies (nasdaq: AKAM - news - people ) rose $.11 or .7 percent, to $16.34.

Amazon fell $3.35 or 5.2 percent, to $61.42.

eBay (nasdaq: EBAY - news - people ) fell $.34 or 3.3 percent, to $10.12.

Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) fell $6.46 or 2.1 percent, to $299.18.

Yahoo (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) rose $.36 or 2.9 percent, to $12.89.

Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed

Electronics maker's new TV model can pull movies off the Internet all by itself.

Is the internet going down? Undersea sub-cables have just broken...

Breaking news: something's happening to the internet, right now. We're just not quite sure what.

Interoute, the internet networks company, reports that three of the four internet sub-cables that run from Asia to North America have been damaged.

These carry more than 75 per cent of traffic between the Middle East, Europe and America. It's hard to gather what this actually means - is it that the internet is down or (more likely) significantly slower than usual between the Middle East and America? (If you're reading this, let's face it, the internet has not shut down altogether)

But, according to the company, there is a domino effect taking place. Interoute says it is:

hearing that offices have lost their entire private network connectivity. As a result, users are unable to do their daily job over the internet and are turning to their mobile phones to communicate across the globe. This is having a knock on effect on the domestic voice networks, which are getting a surge of calls needing to be routed internationally. These calls need to be routed onto international gateways that pass voice traffic in longer directions around the world to avoid the cable breaks – causing more quality issues and risk more call failures, in turn causing more calls to be placed and increasing the pressure on local voice networks.

What (I think) this means is that companies' private internet services have gone down. So, if they can get access, they have had to go on the public internet and mobile phones, like the rest of us average joes, to get their work done. That results in more strain on mobile phone networks, which means more phone calls go down and the internet becomes slower.

Here's the big problem right now:

Finance companies [are] looking to settle trades on European and American exchanges. This cable outage means there is no real-time access to, for example, trading ticker services. This means branch offices are compromised when trying to place trades. As private networks are being affected, these organisations are forced to rely on public internet services that may have more latency and may not update as quickly. The loss of time even precious seconds is hugely important to trading exchanges. These public internet services are now struggling to cope with peak in demand – leading to increased latency, and further compromising the integrity of the trading data.

I'm told that these major sub-sea cables break once a year. So companies have developed a fall-back plan. If one sub-sea cable is out, traffic is re-routed onto a second cable. In theory, a dual break, where both cables go out at once, is incredibly rare. Prior to January this year, it had not happened before.

The problem with all of this is that it's hard to see the impact, or its significance, until something disastrous happens. So, we're keeping an eye on it and like we said, er, something's happening to the internet.

The Internet is offering (almost) all the programming you need, at little or no cost.

In Pictures: 12 Cheap Ways To Watch TV

Usually, we all look forward to the holidays as a time of cheer, relaxation and endless James Bond marathons on TV.

But this year, with global economies in shambles and daily reports of massive layoffs, your all-you-can-watch $50 monthly cable TV service is looking excessive. And forget upgrading to a fancier digital video recorder or a new jumbo HDTV.

Fortunately, there are now myriad ways for you to get your weekly dose of House without cable or even a TV. Just use your laptop to access online video repositories like Hulu.com, where you can watch most Fox and NBC programs for free 12 hours after they air.

In Pictures: 12 Cheap Ways To Watch TV

You can also go directly to TV network sites. On ABC.com, you can find shows like Ugly Betty and Desperate Housewives streamed free--often in high definition. CBS (nyse: CBS - news - people ) is offering its shows with social chat features, and most other programs can be picked up a la carte from Amazon.com (nasdaq: AMZN - news - people ) or iTunes. Finally, you can also use your Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 to stream content.

All this means that your computer or game console is a far cheaper way to watch TV and movies than a cable subscription, and you'll have the added bonus of watching any time you like. Really, the only thing you're going to miss is HBO or Showtime, but you can rent the last season of Entourage or The Tudors from Netflix (nasdaq: NFLX - news - people ) or buy them on iTunes.

It's inevitable that the Internet will rival, if not surpass, television. According to Nielsen, Internet viewers watched on average 27 hours of streamed video feeds per month during the third quarter. And online viewing of video content at television network sites soared 155% from August to September, due to season premieres, coverage of political news and the financial crisis, Nielsen said.

The biggest roadblock is live programming. TV networks aren't ready to cannibalize their premium TV ad spots, which is why most shows air online a day after they've been taped. But the networks are starting to make concessions: The NFL is streaming Sunday Night Football live and CNN offers live streaming reports.

Shares of some top internet companies are mixed at 10 a.m.:

Akamai Technologies (nasdaq: AKAM - news - people ) fell $.74 or 6.0 percent, to $11.53.

Amazon fell $.25 or .6 percent, to $42.45.

eBay (nasdaq: EBAY - news - people ) fell $.24 or 1.8 percent, to $12.89.

Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) fell $13.31 or 4.5 percent, to $279.65.

Yahoo (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) rose $.10 or .9 percent, to $11.61.

For each Internet social network effort that thrives, there are dozens that fail to generate any interest from the surfing masses.

An early dud was BountyQuest.com, launched in 2000 with financial backing from Amazon's Jeff Bezos. The premise was simple: Posters to the site would highlight a patent they wanted to see blown out of the water, and visitors could receive up to $50,000 for presenting evidence that the patent wasn't, in fact, the first document to describe the invention in question. BountyQuest's problem was that too few got involved in the action. It fizzled within three years.

One former employee, Cheryl Milone, believes the company's business model deserves a second chance, given the rise in popularity of "crowdsourced" online projects like Wikipedia. In November, Milone, a Manhattan patent attorney, launched ArticleOnePartners.com to do more than just provide a means for prior-art mercenaries to peddle their wares. This time, Milone and a team of three intellectual property lawyers are the ones deciding which patents visitors should be harassing. And she's got two strategies for quickly turning a buck if a visitor does submit patent-busting information. (See "Meta Data: ArticleOnePartners.com").

Say a visitor sends ArticleOne evidence (an article in an obscure academic journal, for example) that calls into question the validity of one of Pfizer's Pfizer (nyse: PFE - news - people ) patents for cholesterol reducer Lipitor. Milone would make that information public on the site--and, at the same time, she could short the stock of Pfizer and go long on the stock of competitors eager to sell a generic version of Lipitor. In theory, she'd make a bundle once the industry finds out what she knows.

And if Milone doesn't see a way to make money on the markets using her newfound information? She could try selling the information to Pfizer directly--or to one of its competitors. "Our interest is first to monetize our research, to maintain our revenue stream," Milone says.

She might be on her way. Within three days of launching, ArticleOne received more than 50 prior-art submissions, some from as far away as India and the Ukraine. Milone calls visitors who submit prior art "advisors." A year from now, 5% of ArticleOne's net profit will be divvied up among the advisors, who will have been awarded points based on the amount of prior art they've coughed up. If an advisor provides prior art Milone and company think is strong enough to invalidate a patent, a $50,000 reward is automatic.

Milone wouldn't say who has funded ArticleOne, but she raised "low seven figures" from Wall Street investors and has invested some of her own money in the site. Milone insists funding hasn't come from major tech companies or wealthy patent trolls.