A Universal History of (Internet) Infamy Quiz

Answer: 29 October 1969

Computers existed as standalone beasts since the 1940s, but on October 29 1969, for the first time in history a group of UCLA engineers led by Leonard Kleinrock sent a character (the "L" letter) from one computer to another in a different physical location: the team of Douglas Engelbart at SRI international in Menlo Park, CA.

The network channel then successfully transmitted an "O" and then, when trying to transmit a "G" it crashed. But it was just the seed of what eventually was known as ARPANET, a network of universities and research laboratories controlled by the U.S. Department of Defense and precursor of today's Internet.

Answer: Tim Berners-Lee

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee is a British computer scientist, founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, creator of the HTTP protocol, programmer of the first web client, and called the Father of the Internet for all his contributions to this phenomenon. Credit goes in some way also to Nikola Tesla, because without his pioneering work on the invention of alternate current and many others, the electronic era would have been delayed, if ever existed. Jim Kimsey was founder and CEO of AOL, and Thomas Watson leaded IBM during its golden years.

Answer: 1971

The first known computer virus was in fact an experimental self-replicating program written by Bob Thomas at BBN Technologies in 1971. It used the ARPANET network to copy itself to a remote system and display the message "I'm The Creeper, catch me if you can!".

The first virus to actually go wild outside the labs was called "Elk Cloner", created in 1981, and it used floppy disks to spread from one target computer to another.

Answer: 1978

On 1978, Gary Thuerk used the still young ARPANET network to send a single mass e-mail message to 393 recipients promoting a demo of a new computer created by the Digital Equipment Corporation. The reaction of the community was "fiercely negative", but the message generated some sales nevertheless.

The first global, massive spam campaign is credited to a couple of lawyers, Canter & Siegel, who in 1994 spammed Usenet with ads promoting immigration and naturalization law services. They tried to claim right of free speech to defend the practice, but condemnation was widespread and eventually the massive sending of unsolicited, commercial electronic messages was declared illegal.

Answer: A pyramidal scheme to make money fast

Some unknown person, going by the pseudonym Dave Rhodes, posted a text file in a BBS under the title "MAKE.MONEY.FAST". It asked the reader to send via classic mail a dollar bill to six persons, delete the first name of the list, add his own name to the bottom and keep the list rolling.

In 1989 it appeared for the first time on Usenet, and for a few years later it spread via e-mail, even using PayPal to make the money transfer. There are no proof at all that this scheme has ever stopped to trawl the globe, despite the creative masterminds of pyramidal schemes having used lots of other, more complex strategies to take money away from the credulous.

Answer: Spyware

The first use of the term "spyware" was tracked to a Usenet post of 1995 describing software meant for espionage purposes. On 1998 Steve Gibson, famous for creating the light-pen pointing device for Apple and Atari, noted how some online stores were silently monitoring and uploading the user activity on their sites, to aggregate this data and work out patterns and preferences.

He subsequently created a software to protect users again this practice. Today, Internet giants as Facebook and Google had fallen under scrutiny and received massive criticism for their indiscriminate use of similar practices with commercial purposes.

Answer: Dancing Baby

The 3D rendered animation "Dancing Baby" was one of the first viral videos ever, and the first meme to go mainstream. Originally a sample file (sk_baby.max) shipped with 3D Studio Max modeling software, it started appearing on forums and websites around 1997, and from there to email attachments, music videos, films and TV. Uncountable parodies have been built on top of the original Baby and eventually it became an icon of the booming Internet and the whole 90's aesthetics.

Answer: Internet Explorer 6

No history of Internet infamy will be complete without mentioning MSIE 6, the web browser bundled with Windows XP on 2001 and dubbed the "least secure software on the planet" and "one of the worst tech products of all time". Riddled by numerous, well documented security flaws, purposefully oblivious of the established web standards of its time, prone to crashes and afflicted by a slow update schedule by its developers, for over a decade it was the most used browser worldwide.

The introduction of Mozilla Firefox, and later Google Chrome, and the withdrawal of support by many heavy parties in the Internet landscape, such as Facebook and Google itself, slowly started convincing users to update their browsers and, fortunately, today its usage is well below 1%.

Answer: Rickrolling

Rickrolling is the practice of redirecting unsuspecting users to a 1987 music video featuring Rick Astley singing "Never gonna give you up". This practical joke spread until being featured by major media outlets and having even world class figures falling for it. As an example, on April Fools' Day 2008, all videos from the Youtube main page pointed to the Astley video.

Answer: 1894 - 2005

The oldest cat video on record was shot in July 1894 by Thomas Edison and his motion picture technicians, in a studio owned by the latter. Under the title "The Boxing Cats (Prof. Welton's)" it was uploaded for the first time to Youtube the very same year the online video service was launched (2005). Nothing new under the sun, but still as funny as they were twelve decades ago.