Have you heard of the new Web? It’s known as Web 2 and this time they are not fooling about. The Abilene Network , started in 1999 provides the main backbone and they are a pure optical network wired for speed.

According to their website, (on the plain previous regular Web) &quotThe Abilene Network, which presently connects over 3 million users, 220 study and schooling establishments, and 34 state schooling networks, operates at a speed 15,000 occasions quicker than the average household broadband connection and with a capacity to send nine.7 million five-paragraph e-mails in one second.&quot

This means we’re soon going to get nuclear driven spam!

Everyone understands speed is addictive. Not only for Indy 500 racecar drivers, but also for computer science mega-geeks who will one day finally rule the globe. They are shooting for speeds in the Terabyte variety that is a trillion bits of info every second.

&quotWe now want to be known as &quotTera-geeks, you puny sub-creatures!&quot

&quotDo I require all that speed for my email?&quot one might inquire. You do if you’re attaching astrophysics, fusion energy computations, and bioinformatics with your message. The current Web cannot deal with this kind of math. But will Web 2 be used only for noble functions? I haven’t heard of any holographic lap dances yet, but some people are definitely not happy with what Web 2 users are performing.

Like the starting of the first Web in the 70′s and 80′s, Web 2 is the domain of universities and study organizations for the purpose of advancing the aspirations and greater pondering of humanity. University college students are already benefiting from the technologies by illegally downloading movies and audio at warp speed. A full-duration movie only requires five minutes to download on the Web 2 rather of an hour or much more by cable modem. Songs come at a pithy twenty seconds.

&quotNot so quick!&quot says the record and movie industry. They are nipping this one in the bud. The RIAA introduced that it is suing 405 individual college students for copyright infringement violations using the &quoti2hub&quot. The movie industry is suing an undisclosed number of college students as well. What is i2hub? It’s like a Napster on crack. But you require to use it on Web 2 to really fly – and that is not open to the general public yet.

According to the Movement Image Association of The united states, there had been 7070 users sharing ninety nine.2 TB of files in one current snapshot of time. “Ninety-9 terabytes is sufficient storage area to hold all the movies that are available in a nearby Blockbuster store, yet people are swapping these movies completely free,” said an outraged and very annoyed Dan Glickman, President of the MPAA.

The RIAA will sue a handful of college students per university to plant the seeds of fear broadly. UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, &#038 the University of Southern California are among the 18 Universities exactly where college students are becoming served papers.

Can they stuff the digital genie again in the bottle? If they cannot, the RIAA and MPAA are not going down easy. Imagine 405 college students calling house telling Mom &#038 Dad to be prepared to put up the home because they believed the Web 2 was a private network and they just wanted to fill up the iPod they had been given for Xmas. The highest offenders, in accordance to the RIAA, had been caught with up to 13,600 MP3′s, and 72,700 total files (this kind of as audio, software program and video).

&quotSon, what had been you pondering, I’ve acquired &quotPlanet of the Apes&quot at house!

Rick David writes a humor column known as, “Don’t Laugh It Could Happen To You” for http://sandiego.merchantamerica.com