Portal:Internet

"The Bus Uncle" is a Cantonese video clip of an argument between two men aboard a bus in Hong Kong on April 27, 2006. While the older man, nicknamed the Bus Uncle, scolded the person behind him, a nearby passenger used his camera phone to record the entire incident to provide evidence for the police in the event of a fight. However, the resulting six-minute video was uploaded to the HK Golden Forum, YouTube, and Google Video. The clip became YouTube's most viewed video in May 2006, attracting viewers with its rhetorical outbursts and copious use of profanity by the older man, receiving 1.7 million hits in the first 3 weeks of that month. The video became a cultural sensation in Hong Kong, inspiring vigorous debate and discussion on lifestyle, etiquette, civic awareness and media ethics within the city, eventually attracting the attention of the media around the world.

Client Hints is an extension to the HTTP protocol that allows servers to ask the client (usually a web browser) for information about its configuration. This helps the server tailor its responses to the client; for example, a server can choose to send a smaller image if a client advertises that they have a very small screen. The client can choose to respond to this request by advertising the requested information about itself by sending the data using a specific part of the HTTP protocol called HTTP header fields or by exposing the same information to the JavaScript code being executed on a web page.

Proposed by Google engineers in 2013, Client Hints was designed as a privacy-focused alternative to user-agent headers. This was done as part of an initiative by Google called Privacy Sandbox. User-agent headers are code snippets sent by a client to identify itself to a server. While initially intended for statistical purposes, these headers had increasingly become a tool for tracking users across websites. Client Hints aimed to address this issue by providing a more controlled way to share the same information. Despite the focus on privacy, the initial design of Client Hints faced criticism from other browsers. One of the primary concerns that was brought up was that the protocol could enable new forms of tracking by third-party domains. Third-party domains are web servers not owned by the website that load resources like images and script files. Despite these concerns, Chrome implemented support for Client Hints in August 2020. By 2024, over 75% of web users had browsers that supported Client Hints.

Privacy researchers have since raised concerns that Client Hints is primarily being used by JavaScript code which tracks users. In 2023, a study from KU Leuven and Radboud University found that when examining the top 100,000 websites on the internet, most accesses of Client Hints came from JavaScript code used for tracking and advertising purposes. (Full article...)

• Main project: WikiProject Internet
• Related WikiProjects: Blogging • Websites • Early Web History • Internet culture

• ... that An African Song or Chant from Barbados was nominated for inscription on UNESCO's Memory of the World International Register by someone who saw it in an online exhibition?
• ... that a website has ranked a giant Santa statue as the world's most "unintentionally creepy Christmas ornament"?
• ... that the founders of the news website San José Spotlight considered San Jose to be a news desert?
• ... that gymnast McKayla Maroney caused an Internet phenomenon with her "not impressed" facial expression?
• ... that Black Forest gateau inspired an Internet meme?
• ... that Syrian vlogger Hayla Ghazal used online humour to explore the limitations placed on women in the Arab world?

Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (March 11, 1915 – June 26, 1990), known simply as J.C.R. or "Lick" was an American computer scientist, considered one of the most important figures in computer science and general computing history. After early work in psychoacoustics, he became interested in information technology early in his career. Much like Vannevar Bush, J.C.R. Licklider's contribution to the development of the Internet consists of ideas, not inventions. He foresaw the need for networked computers with easy user interfaces. His ideas foretold of graphical computing, point-and-click interfaces, digital libraries, e-commerce, online banking, and software that would exist on a network and migrate wherever it was needed. Licklider was instrumental in conceiving, funding and managing the research that led to modern personal computers and the Internet. His seminal paper on Man-Computer Symbiosis foreshadowed interactive computing, and he went on to fund early efforts in time-sharing and application development, most notably the work of Douglas Engelbart, who founded the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute and created the famous On-Line System. He played a similar role in conceiving of and funding early networking research, most notably the ARPAnet.