By Charles kulwa n reg no 42688

Cyberspace

Cyberspace by the late Alaska senator ted Stevens famously explained cyberspace during a congressional hearing in 2006.as a late night humorist Jon Stewart noted. That someone who doesn’t seem to know jack bleep about computers or internet. Is just the guy in charge of regulating it, is a near perfect illustration of how disconnected Washington policymakers’ can be from technological reality.

While it’s easy to mock the elderly senators notion of electronic letters shooting through tubes, the reality is that defining ideas and terms in cyber issues can be difficult., Stevens tubes is actually a mangling of the idea of pipes, an analogy that is used by experts in the field to describe data connections

If he wanted to be perfectly accurate, Stevens could have used science fiction writer William Gibson original conception of cyber space. Gibson first used the word, an amalgam of cybernetics and space, in a 1982 short story. He defined it two years later in his genre revolutionizing novel neuromancer as ‘a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.. A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.

Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the no space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data, of course, if the senator had described cyberspace that way, most people would have thought him stoned rather than simply disconnected.

Part of why cyberspace is so difficult lies not only in its expensive, global nature but also in the fact that the cyberspace of today is almost unrecognizable compared to its humble beginnings. The us department of defence can be considered the godfather of cyber space, dating back to its funding of early computing and original networks like arparnet .

Yet even pentagon has struggled to keep pace as its baby has grown up. Over the year, it has issued at least twelve different definitions is what It thinks of as cyberspace. These range from the notional environment in which digitized information is communicated over computer networks, which was rejected because it implied cyberspace was only for communication and largely imaginary. to a domain characterized by the use of electronics and the electromagnetic spectrum, which was also rejected as it encompassed everything from computers and missiles to the light from the sun.

In its latest attempt in 2008, the pentagon assembled a team of experts who took over a year to agree on yet another definition of cyberspace. This time they termed it the global domain within the information environment consisting of the interdependent networks of information technology infrastructures, including the internet, telecommunication networks, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers, it is certainly a more detailed definition but so dense that one almost wishes we could go back to just the tubes.

Cyberspace is the realm of computer networks and the users behind them in which information is stored, shared and communicated online. But rather trying to find the exact perfectly worded definition of cyberspace.