1945 July: Publication of the article "As We May Think" by engineer Vannevar Bush [1890-1974] in The Atlantic Monthly; Bush predicted the Memex, a worldwide encyclopedia of knowledge (also 'dry' photography).
1957: Computer engineeers began to develop principles of time-sharing; first described in a magazine article by Bob Bemer, first implemented by John McCarthy on two modified I.B.M. mainframes.
1957 Oct 4: The Soviet Union launched the first earth-orbit satellite 'Sputnik 1', which scared the United States into a 'Space Race'.
1958 Feb: A.R.P.A. (Advanced Research Projects Agency) founded on order of President Eisen-hower to ensure that United States technology was ahead of that of any potential enemy; renamed D.A.R.P.A. (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in March 1972.
1963 April: J.C.R. Licklider (head of I.P.T.O. at A.R.P.A.) published the seminal paper on the "Intergalactic Computer Network". { read full text online }
1965: The first electronic messages are sent on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Compatible Time-Sharing System.
1966: A.R.P.A. began development of an ARPAnet, using principles of packet-switching; contract awarded to BB&N (Bolt, Beranek & Newman) in April 1969.
1968: Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan [1911-1980] predicted the phenomenon of the internet (possibly in the book "Innovations: Where Is Our Culture Going") thirty years before it existed.
1969 Sept 2: First activity occured on the internet as two computers at U.C.L.A connected by a 15-foot cable passed test data back and forth; a functional internet was created in 1983.
1969 Oct 29: First successful transmission of a message on ARPAnet; the first permanent ARPAnet link was established on 21 November 1969; the entire four-node ARPAnet was completed on 5 December 1969.
1971 (late): Ray Tomlinson at BB&N developed electronic mail for networks, introducing the @ symbol to designate recipients.
1972: The first object sold online was a bag of weed {m*rijuana).
1973: Email messages account for 75% of the traffic on ARPAnet.
1973 Nov: First demonstration of the Cyclades program, directed by Louis Pouzin and based in France; CYCLADES focused on packet-switching communications between networks; the program was shut down in 1981.
1974 May: I.E.E.E. (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers) published a paper titled "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication" by Vint Cerf & Bob Kahn, defining T.C.P. (Transmission Control Protocol); later split/combined as TCP/IP.
1978: The first spam email was sent.
1979 Sept 24: Compu-Serve was the first company to offer email to the public.
1980 June-Dec: While working as an outside contractor at C.E.R.N. in France, Tim Berners-Lee created a prototype hypertext system named ENQUIRE.
1982 March: The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP) were defined separately and then combined as the TCP-IP Protocol.
1982 Sept 19: Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman suggested punctuating humorously-intended computer messages with a colon-hyphen-parenthesis symbol – i.e. :-) – creating the first internet 'emoticon'.
{ HL's 1996 smiley/emoticon list }
1983 Jan 1: The new TCP-IP protocols were permanently activated.
1985 February: The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) was one of the first virtual communities, and still exists.
1985 March 15: Purchase of the first 'dot-com' internet domain name 'symbolics.com' by Symbolics Computer Corp. [1980-96] of Massachusetts.
1988: Microsoft introduces M/S Mail for Mac OS.
1989 March 12: Seminal document 'Information Management: A Proposal' by Tim Berners-Lee, redistributed in May 1990; Berners-Lee's paper describes certain problems and then 'derives a solution based on a distributed hypertext system', including early versions of the HTTP protocol and HTML.
1989 Nov: Launch of The World, the first commercial dialup ISP in the United States.
1990 Feb: The actual internet was in place (and ARPAnet hardware was removed).
1990 Summer: The Computer Misuse Act [of] 1990 was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that is seen as "a robust and flexible piece of legislation in terms of dealing with cybercrime"; it has been updated several times.
1990 July 6: Mitch Kapor, John Perry Barlow, and John Gilmore founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
1990 Oct 17: Col Needham published a few Unix shell scripts to a Usenet group for browsing & searching through a user-generated index of movie lists subdivided into several categories. Years later, the interface was moved online and officially incorporated as the Internet Movie Database.
1990 Dec 25: Birth of the World Wide Web as computer scientists Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau created the world's first hyperlinked webpage / browser at C.E.R.N. in Geneva, Switzerland; unfortunately, the software was only available on NeXT machines and failed to gain much traction.
1991 Feb: After a history going back to 1988, America Online {A.O.L.} launched a for-pay internet service based on Geoworks for DOS users; a year later, A.O.L. launched the same for Windows.
1991 April 1: Engineers at the University of Minnesota developed Gopher, a new internet protocol and early competitor to the web; Gopher organizes documents using a tight hierarchy that can be accessed through Gopher clients, similar to web browsers. Gopher began to decline in usage in the late 1990s after U.M.N. announced plans to charge fees for its use, plus the World Wide Web kept improving.
1991 May 14: Nicola Pellow launched the Line Mode Browser - the second historical web browser - text-only CLI-based software for accessing the web; because of its simplicity, the browser could be easily ported to a variety of operating systems making it incredibly popular despite a limited feature set.
1991 June 6: Internet educator Brendan P. Kehoe [1970-2011] coined the phrase 'net surfing' while inquiring about a troublesome user on a Usenet newsgroup; common usage includes the term 'surfing the net'.
1991 Aug 6: First webpage on the World Wide Web was placed online by physicist Tim Berners-Lee at C.E.R.N. in Switzerland.
1991 Nov 28: Tim Berners-Lee introduces the first draft of HTTP v0.9 as a way for clients (web browsers) to communicate with servers.
1992 March 18: Tim Berners-Lee presented standards to the I.E.T.F. for the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), more commonly referred to as the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), the basic form of a web address that specifies the location of a resource on a computer network.
1992 April: Erwise was the first browser for the internet with a graphical user interface, and the first commonly available (designed for Unix equipment, documentation in Finnish).
1992 Oct 23: U.S. Congress passed the Scientific and Advanced-Technology Act, which allowed the government-supported scientific and academic internet to communicate with commercial functions of the internet.
1992 Dec 3: The first commercial text message was sent over the Vodafone G.S.M. network in the United Kingdom; the message 'Merry Christmas' was sent by engineer Neil Papworth from his work computer in Newbury, Berkshire to the mobile phone of Vodaphone executive Richard Jarvis.
1993: Col Needham's Usenet group launched online as the Cardiff Internet Movie Database.
1993 Jan 23: The Mosaic browser version 0.5 was released by N.C.S.A. (National Center for Super-computing Applications) in Illinois; the software was offered for free
download from the N.C.S.A. website; official support ended in 1997.
1993 Feb: Six Stanford University undergrad students created Architext, which later gave birth to the Excite search engine.
1993 Apr 21: Developers Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina released Mosaic browser version 1.0; soon after launch it became the most popular browser on the market; starting in 1995, Mosaic lost market share to Netscape Navigator and was discontinued in 1997.
{ download available for Windows 7/8 }
1993 Apr 30: At the urging of Tim Berners-Lee and his team, C.E.R.N. officially enters the World Wide Web into the public domain, making it freely available to anyone — perhaps the single most impactful decision made on behalf of the web.
1993 June: First deployment of the Wanderer, the first web-crawling robot; written in Perl by Matthew Grey at M.I.T.; it collected data on growth of the internet for the online database Wandex until shut down in 1995.
1993 Nov: Amsterdam software engineer Martijn Koster announced the first internet search engine AliWeb, which was officially presented as a paper in May 1994 at the First International Conference on the World Wide Web; he also developed Achiplex and CUSI. (AliWeb seems to be taken over by web-nasties and the search results are unreliable, skewed to make money by subterfuge.)
1993 Nov: I.B.M. and BellSouth announced the first smartphone, the IBM Simon Personal Communicator (aka IBM Simon), which had email as one of its features. Sales began in August 1994; competition from flip phones ended production in February 1995; total sales were around 50,000 devices.
1994 Jan 1: David Filo and Jerry Yang of Stanford University released a little directory named Yahoo!; the creators claim that they consider themselves 'yahoos', but later legend says that the name stands for 'Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle'; the company Yahoo!, Inc. was incorporated in March 1995.
1994 Spring: Brian Pinkerton of the University of Washington released WebCrawler, which examined and indexed entire pages. Although it started out as a desktop application rather than an online service, WebCrawler soon became immensely popular and in June 1995 was purchased by A.O.L. That purchase provided web search access to A.O.L., which at the time had less than 1 million users; in return, A.O.L.'s resources gave WebCrawler a major presence on the internet. (WebCrawler was sold to InfoSpace in 2001.)
1994 Apr 5: N.C.S.A. brought in Spyglass, Inc. [1990-2000] of Illinois to begin distributing the Mosaic browser commercially; Spyglass eventually rewrote the Mosaic browser and licensed it to companies like IBM and O’Reilly Media and D.E.C., before it eventually licensed Mosaic to Microsoft as a foundational element of Internet Explorer, released in 1995.
1994 Apr 20: WebCrawler was among the first search engines, and the first to offer full text search of page content; developed by University of Washington computer science student Brian Pinkerton; it served over a million queries in the first six months, and was acquired by A.O.L. shortly after its first anniversary, then changed owners several more times over the years. WebCrawler was redesigned from scratch in 2018 and the logo was changed.
1994 Spring: The first annual International World Wide Web Conference was organized by Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau and Joseph Hardin; the name was changed to The Web Conference for #27 in 2018.
1994 June 1: BookLink Technologies released InternetWorks for Windows, the first browser to feature tabbed browsing and advanced browsing history features; A.O.L. purchased InternetWorks several months later for use inside the platform; InternetWorks was later replaced by Netscape.
1994 July 6: Launch of the Amazon.com electronic commerce website in Seattle, Washington.
1994 Sept 2: Cyberia, widely regarded as the first official internet café, opened its doors in London, U.K.; originally intended as a space for women to learn about the internet, but open to all. Chain of stores purchased in 2001 by South Korean investors and rebranded as Be The Reds (BTR), named for a popular Korean soccer/- futball team; chain/stores lasted until circa 2008.
1994 Sept 29: The domain name tripod.com was registered; after operating in 'sneak-preview mode' for a period, the Tripod site officially launched in May 1995, pre-dating most other free web hosting services like Geocities and Angelfire; Tripod’s original goal was to give college students a way of setting up a spot for themselves on the web. Search engine Lycos purchased Tripod for $58 million in February 1998; free webpages are no longer available and have been replaced by paid services.
1994 Oct 1: Online magazine HotWired [1994-2006] launched with the web’s first official banner ad, a simple image with the text “Have You Ever Clicked Your Mouse Right Here?”; the ad highlighted the forward thinking of AT&T and sent users to a landing page and a virtual tour of worldwide art museums.
1994 Oct 1: Tim Berners-Lee founded The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a standards body organi- zation that makes recommendations on the technologies that make up the web; members include standards experts, browser makers, and multi-national companies with a stake in the web’s future; shared headquarters are at M.I.T. [est. 1861] in Cambridge, Massachusetts and at the Institute for Research in Computer Science & Automation [est. 1967] in Paris, France.
1994 Oct 13: Launch of the Netscape Navigator browser beta version; version 1.0 was released on December 15th; Netscape Navigator was used by 95% of internet users by the end of 1995, but usage neared zero by 2002 (due to Microsoft's illegal bundling of Internet Explorer). The final release in February 2008 was version 9.0.0.6.
1994 Nov 1: David Bohnett and John Rezner created a free web hosting service called Beverly Hills Internet and quickly changed the name to Geocities, creating a number of 'neighborhoods' for amateur webmasters to connect through. Search engine Yahoo! purchased Geocities in January 1999, at which time it was considered to be the third-most visited website on the World Wide Web. Yahoo! GeoCities was taken offline in the United States in 2009; GeoCities Japan endured until 31 March 2019.
1995 Apr 10: After working on an experimental browser as part of a research project at Telenor of Norway, Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner and Geir Ivarsøy demonstrated their new browser Opera at the third International WWW Conference; over the years, the Opera company expanded to a whole host of devices, from mobile phones to gaming devices to in-store checkout lines.
1995 June 8: Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf publicly released his Personal Home Page Tools package (or just 'PHP Tools' for short), which was originally a fairly rudimentary tool built on top of C.G.I.; after several iterations, the P.H.P. Hypertext Preprocesser eventually evolved into the most popular programming language on the web.
1995 June 15: The U.S. Senate voted 81-18 for the 1996 Communications Decency Act, adding it to the Telecommunications Act; Section 230 broadly shields social media companies and other internet sites from legal liability for user content posted on their sites by third parties, and is considered a fundamental foundational provision of the internet.
1995 Aug 9: Though still in its first year as a company, Netscape went public to soaring stock prices and a boosted valuation; not long after, they released Netscape Navigator 2.0 which went on to claim 75% of the browser market.
1995 Aug 16: In order to compete with Netscape's success, Microsoft released a browser of their own; the first version, Internet Explorer 1.0, was mostly licensed code from Spyglass Mosaic, which was eventually rewritten; the browser lacked crucial features, but subsequent versions saw marked improvements; the initial release was included as part of Microsoft Plus! in Windows 95.
1995 Aug 24: Microsoft launched a dial-up service and I.S.P. (internet service provider) known as The Microsoft Network alongside a web portal known as Microsoft Internet Start, to coincide with its release of the Internet Explorer 1.0 browser; by 1998, Microsoft closed their proprietary network in favor of a suite of web-based tools, and collapsed Internet Start into the MSN.com web portal as a more traditional web directory & navigation site.
1995 Sept 3: Pierre Omidyar carved out a small section on his site for auctioning stuff off and called it AuctionWeb; the first item that he listed personally was a broken laser pointer which was snatched up in no time; by 1997, AuctionWeb had moved to its own domain with the new name eBay.com.
1995 Sept 10: Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner create web based radio site AudioNet, based on an Internet based radio startup by Chris Jaeb. Within a few years, the company would stream broadcasts from hundreds of sporting events and stream content to millions of users. It would eventually rebrand to Broadcast.com, a high watermark of investment during the dot-com boom.
1995 Sept 18: Netscape bundles the first version of their new programming language in browser betas. The language is originally developed by Brendan Eich in the months prior, and would soon become a novel, foundational, language of the web. JavaScript gives developers an easy way to access the DOM (Document Object Model) and add interactivity to websites.
1995 Sept 18: Netscape Navigator 2.0 Netscape releases the second version of their browser on the heels of a massively successful IPO. The browsers is faster, includes an email and messenger client, and provides an easy to use layer for new web users. It is also the first version of the browser to include support for Java applets and an offshoot scripting language created at Netscape known as JavaScript.
1995 Oct 24: One of the first pieces of legislation passed internationally regarding privacy online, the Data Protection Directive provides protections for individuals with regard to data collection online. It restricts the unnecessary collection of personal data, and requires sites to make clear exactly what data will be tracked. It was superseded in 2018 by the General Data Protection Regulation.
1995 Nov 1: FrontPage is released by Vermeer Technologies. Its goal is to allow even beginners to create websites easily using drag and drop tools and would soon become one of the most popular web authoring tools on the market.
1995 Nov 14: NetRadio The first streaming radio website from co-founders Scott Bourne and Scot Combs. Their servers are set up to convert analog radio stations to digital RealAudio streams, discoverable on their website alongside concert schedules and band profiles. In 1997, NetRadio would be acquired by Navarre Corporation, and then suspended altogether in 2001.
1995 Nov 17: One of the earliest examples we have of a social network, founder Randy Conrads initially launches Classmates.com as a way of finding former high school classmates through a paid service. It eventually expands to include many of the features familiar in modern social media, including profile, chat, and friends.
1995 Nov 24: HTML 2.0 is published as IETF RFC 1866, and includes elements from previous iterations of HTML specifications alongside some brand new ones. It would remain the latest specification until January of 1997.
1995 Dec 28:Adobe enters the webpage editor scene with PageMill, a visual tool for creating websites. Originally, Adobe PageMill offered basic layout and content editing, but starting in version 2.0, grows to include a robust table and frames editor and a host of advanced visual features.
1996 January: The Internet Movie Database was incorporated as IMDb.com.
1996 May: HTTP/1 was finalized and fully documented as the final HTTP/1.0 revision.
1996 July 4: Hotmail launched the first free web-based email service; Hotmail reported more than 8.5 million subscribers by December 1997, when it was sold to Microsoft for a reported $400 million.
1996 Dec: America Online switched from hourly payment for usage to a monthly fee of $19.95.
1997 January: Official release of the HTTP/1.1 specifications, which soon became the standard.
1997 Dec: Microsoft purchased Hotmail for a reported $400 million.
1998: The Internet Movie Database was purchased by Amazon.
1998 June 25: Retail release of Microsoft's Windows 98 operating system.
1998 Sept 4: Launch of the Google search engine by Larry Page & Sergey Brin in Menlo Park, California.
1999 June: Launch of pioneering peer-to-peer file-sharing service Napster; Macster version released in 2000; rock band Metallica sued in 2000, followed by rap star Dr. Dre. Then R.I.A.A. and several record companies sued Napster; the judge ordered Napster to monitor usage and restrict access on its network; unable to comply, Napster shut down in July 2001 and filed bankruptcy the next year.
The Year 2 0 0 0
2000 March 10:  The 'Dot com bubble' reached its peak, closing at $5,048.62 on NASDAQ; by late 2002, the stock market had lost 25% of its value.
2000 Nov 20: Launch of the Internet Broadway Database website.
2001 Oct 25: Retail release of Microsoft's Windows XP operating system.
2004 Feb 4: Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook.
2004 April 1: Google rolled out the Gmail free email service with a storage capacity of 1 GB for each user, 500 times what Hotmail offered; beta testing ended on 7 July 2009.
2004 Nov 3: First felony convictions against internet 'spam' distributors – In a Leesburg, Virginia case, Jeremy D. Jaynes received a 9-year prison term & his sister Jessica DeGroot received a $7,500 fine.
2005 Feb 14: Launch of YouTube by three former employees of PayPal; purchased by Google in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion.
2006 July 15: Launch of the Twitter microblogging & social networking service; as-of February 2019 they have 321 million active users.
2006 Oct 4: Launch of Wikileaks in Iceland by Julian Assange and others.
2007 Jan 28: Establishment of International Data Privacy Day which is currently observed in the United States, Canada, Israel, and 47 European countries.
2007 Jan 30: Retail release of Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system.
2007 May: Economic cyberattacks by a Russian activist against Estonia.
2008 Oct 31:  A white paper entitled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” appeared on the mailing list metzdowd.com; it bore the byline of one Satoshi Nakamoto, the address of a new website – bitcoin.org – and the outlines of the first decentralized digital currency.
2009 Oct 22: Retail release of Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system.
2010: The Google search engine left China over censorship issues.
2012 Oct 4: Facebook proudly announced having reached one billion members.
2012 Oct 26: Retail release of Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system.
2015 Feb 26: U.S. government agency Federal Communications Commission issued strong new rules protecting net neutrality (basically by decreeing the internet to be a public common carrier, to be regu-lated just like the telephone companies, citing Title II of the Telecommunications Act). Although warned by other conglomerates of the dangers of doing so, Verizon filed suit to vacate the F.C.C.'s order.
2015 May: Official publication of HTTP/2, 'a more efficient expression of HTTP's semantics on the wire'; work began in early 2012.
2015 Sept 24: The American Registry for Internet Numbers announced that it had given out the last of the IPv4 addresses that it had in its free pool for North America. (The IPv6 solution is a long, long way from implementation.)
2015 Nov: Just five corporations earned 70% of the $300B in revenue generated by all internet companies over the past year: Amazon, Inc. and Alphabet, Inc. (Google) took in a combined 57%; the others are Facebook, Inc., eBay, and Q.V.C. owner Liberty Interactive. — per USA Today
2017 Dec 14: Trump's F.C.C voted to repeal net neutrality.
The Year 2 0 1 8
2018 Feb 15: Google announced and implemented a new ad blocker function on its popular Chrome browser; advertisers that employ 'invasive ads' will be warned and, if not corrected in 30 days, are subject to blocking; controversy arose about the web’s largest ad company acting as advertising’s biggest traffic cop.
2018 March 23: Craigslist shut down its 'personals' section in response to a new online sex trafficking measure passed by Congress, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (F.O.S.T.A.), which holds websites liable for hosting content that advertises sex or enables potentially illegal actions. F.O.S.T.A. has a down-side: the law permits retroactive enforcement, is unconstitutional, threatens free speech, and will make it more difficult to prosecute sex traffickers.
2018 May 17: Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, told reporters that the tech giant had purged 65 Israeli accounts, 161 pages, dozens of groups and four Instagram accounts that ran an influence campaign aimed at disrupting elections in various countries.
2018 May 25: The General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union goes into effect; the law was adopted in April 2016 with a two-year transition period. The new rules on data protection and privacy for all individuals within the European Union give control over their personal data to citizens and residents and are being adopted by major and minor internet businesses in America and elsewhere so that they can continue to operate in European countries.
2018 July 12: Twitter began purging tens of millions of fake or suspicious accounts; the move comes in the wake of a January New York Times investigation into a 'follower farm', which Twitter executives say inspired the company to crack down on fake accounts; Twitter began locking millions of questionable accounts this spring.
2018 July 13: U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats warned of impending, potentially devastating cyberattacks on U.S. systems that could affect the upcoming midterm elections; he said that the country's digital infrastructure 'is literally under attack' and warned that among state actors, Russia is the 'worst offender'.
2018 Aug 20: Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit said that it discovered and disabled fake sites created by the notorious APT28 hacking group (sometimes called Strontium or Fancy Bear) that is affiliated with the Russian government; they removed phony versions of six websites — including some related to public policy and to the U.S. Senate — with the apparent goal of hacking into the computers of people who were tricked into visiting.
2018 Aug 22:  T-Mobile announced that hackers may have made off with the personal data of two million users.
2018 Sept 5: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg testified before the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee about meddling in the 2016 presidential election and on their efforts to weed out offensive content and misinformation spread by foreign sources; following this testimony, Twitter shares fell 6%.
2018 Sept 6: Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles, California said that they have charged Park Jin Hyok, a computer programmer working for the North Korean government, with cyberattacks that infected computers in 150 countries with the May 2017 WannaCry ransomware virus; the hacking targeted Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2014 and spread from there; Park also was charged with conspiring to launch attacks that resulted in the theft of $81M from a Bangladesh bank; the charges were unsealed in a Los Angeles court after a years-long investigation; Park is believed to be in North Korea.
2018 Sept 14-15: A cyber attack at Bristol Airport in the U.K. caused flight display screens to fail for two days; the information screens were taken offline early on Friday to contain an attack similar to so-called 'ransomware'; key functions were restored first, including departures and arrivals, while work continued to get the whole site back online. A number of applications were taken offline as a precautionary measure to contain the problem and to avoid any further impact on more critical systems; no ransom was paid to get the systems working again.
2018 Sept 24: After banning hip-hop music the previous week, China announced a ban of Twitter, all internet porn, all celebrity gossip sites, and all internet gambling websites.
2018 Sept 29: Social network Facebook, Inc. revealed a network attack that exposed the stored data of about 50 million users; the vulnerability has been patched; Facebook is investigating the extent of the damage, has notified law enforcement about the breach, and on the previous day had logged 90 million users out of their accounts as a security measure. • Two weeks later, Facebook clarified its announcement about the September data breach. Only some 30 million users were affected; of those, 14 million had detailed personal information stolen; an additional 15 million users had their name & contact information accessed; and 1 million users were affected but did not have any information stolen; the F.B.I. is investigating the breach.
2018 Oct 4: Netherlands officials announced that they had expelled four Russian military officers from the country for hacking attempts into various government and non-government organizations. Dutch security police captured the four men while they were inside a car next to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague - they were trying to hack into the building's wi-fi network. The Dutch also captured laptops and other equipment that led to evidence of hacking by the Russian military in Malaysia and Switzerland. The British independent open source research group Bell¿ngcat researched various databases and then revealed the identities of 305 more Russian secret agents around the world similarly connected to Russia's G.R.U. military intelligence agency.
2018 Oct 29: White supremacist sanctuary social networking site Gab went offline after hosting and PayPal and other credit services cancelled because of Gab's acceptance of Nazi users' extremist content and specifically the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh. UPDATE Nov 4: Gab went back online after finding a domain registrar & site host in Oregon.
2018 Oct 30: The Marriott International hotel chain disclosed a massive data breach affecting up to 500 million guests at its Starwood division; the breach of its database was discovered in on September 8, and an investigation found that there has been unauthorized access to the Starwood network since 2014; the attack was traced to China's Ministry of State Security, the Communist-controlled country's civilian spy agency. The New York Attorney General is investigating the incident.
2018 Nov 2: Twitter removed 10,000 bots pretending to be Democrats telling other Democrats not to vote.
2018 Nov 2: Long overdue: Facebook and Instagram banned far-right hate group The Proud Boys as well as their founder.
2018 Nov 5: Release of the draft version of The Contract for The Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
2018 Nov 6: The U.S. military Cyber Command blocked a Russian troll factory's internet access on the day of the November midterm elections, targeting the Internet Research Agency, a company backed by Yevgeniy Viktorovich Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin.
2018 Nov 12: The Internet Governance Forum organized at the Paris-based U.N. cultural agency UNESCO produced a document entitled the “Paris call for trust and security in cyberspace”; supported by fifty nations and over 150 tech companies - EU countries, Japan, and Canada as well as tech giants Facebook, Google, Microsoft - but not the United States, Russia, or China. The group of governments and companies pledged to work together to better regulate the internet and to do more to fight online criminal activity, including hate speech and interference in elections, and to prevent malicious activities like online censorship and the theft of trade secrets.
2018 Dec: A malware attack on software used by Tribune Publishing prevented a number of major newspapers from printing their weekend editions; the affected papers are current and former Tribune properties including The Chicago Tribune, The New York Daily News, The Baltimore Sun, and The Los Angeles Times; the virus was discovered after it 'impacted some back-office systems which are primarily used to publish and produce newspapers across our properties', per the publisher. The Los Angeles Times reported that a 'foreign entity' was responsible, and that the Department of Homeland Security is investigating.
2018 Dec 14: Social network Facebook, Inc. revealed a software bug that may have given up to 1,500 third-party apps improper access to photos from up to 6.8 million Facebook users; normally, such apps would only be permitted to access photos that users posted to their Facebook timelines, but the bug gave access to pictures that weren't posted publicly, including pictures shared on Facebook's Marketplace and pictures that users uploaded but didn't end up posting; the apps had access to these photos for 12 days in September of 2018, which would have affected only users who authorized the apps in question to access their photos.
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