Is there more to the Internet than we suspect? As far as most of us are concerned the Internet is nothing more than a way to connect to different websites. This is true, it does connect to different websites as we all know, but is there something mysterious going on here? We know the Internet can be used as a pipeline back to our computers. This has been demonstrated many times legitimately. Several projects use this method to create a sort of super computer out of our computers. It turns out you can distribute work among millions of computers and when you combine all these machines they may have much more processing power than even a supercomputer. This method has been used by scientists who have a lot of data being returned to them from probes and such, who have asked permission from people to leave their computers on so they could use them to crunch data. It has also been used by scientists in the medical profession to work on a cure for cancer.

The point I am making with this is the Internet can be used as a two-way Street. We can use it for our purposes which use much less data than the purposes of large organizations. Criminals realize they can get into millions of machines at the same time and turn them against websites they want to crash. Just about every website has a limit on how much traffic it can handle. Big ones may be able to handle millions of requests at a time and smaller ones much less. What criminals want to do is flood those websites with so many requests the websites will go down, because they can’t handle all those requests. In this way the Internet can be used as a weapon. This criminal procedure is usually aimed at a business website.

There are those people who believe the Internet can possess an intelligence if it is used correctly. They liken millions of computers connected to it to like the cells of the human brain and they believe there is something going on we don’t know about. Humans do not understand what consciousness really is or where it comes from. Some believe the Internet with all its connections is analogous to a human mind. When asked why we don’t notice this, some respond it hasn’t become mature enough yet. In other words it doesn’t know how to handle all the information it has on its own. They say it is growing in intelligence every day and the proof of this is all the new machines that are added to it on a daily basis. Each machine is probably more advanced than its predecessor. What they are saying is all the machines are being replaced with newer ones and machines are being added which never were on the Internet before. They claim with each new addition the Internet becomes smarter.

The Internet is being used in some fairly strange ways by some people. You and I probably go on it and use it to read our mail, check our news and see what our friends are doing. These are fairly simple and these mundane tasks certainly do not tax the Internet very much, but there are those who use the Internet to predict the future. Does the Internet have some kind of secret power most of us are not aware of? Web Bot is a program which is used to predict this future. It tracks keywords all over the Internet. It has been around for a while, since 1997 and uses secret algorithms to get these predictions. So far it has been successful in some areas, but a failure in others. Some of its successes were the great Northeast blackout of 2003, Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. It also predicted that something terrible would happen in 2012 and it could reverse the earth magnetic poles. Luckily this didn’t happen. Another prediction was the collapse of the US dollar in 2011 and a massive earthquake in Vancouver Canada in 2008, which thankfully did not occur. So you can see there is some validity to a small portion of its predictions, but its success rate is far below 50%. I can’t calculate it, but from what I have read it seems to be about 25%. The question is as more advanced computers get added to the Internet will the predictions made by Web Bot get more accurate?

There are those who believe the Internet is killing religion. It is true there are many diverse opinions on the Internet about any particular religion and all religions in general and people may be put off religion by them. Before the Internet there was not the diversity of religious opinions being discussed. There is also another reason for people being influenced by the Internet as far as religion goes. Some things which were being done by different religious factions were not generally known, but with the Internet much of these secrets have been put out for the public to see. There are a lot of people who are disappointed with their religion and have opted out. In a recent survey taken of first-year college students, the amount of students who claim no religious affiliation has grown from 8% to 25%. It was not proven the Internet was responsible for this, but many believe it was. If the Internet is proven to have intelligence could it be steering us in a certain direction on purpose? Wouldn’t it be funny to find out we were being manipulated by something we thought was harmless?

Aside from whether or not the Internet could possess intelligence, could some of the strange websites and strange information sites be affecting the way we think? Could the Internet have changed our morals? Many people would never go into a store and steal an item and yet some of these same people think nothing of copying commercial software and distributing it. This is the equivalent of stealing. The same is true for songs, movies, etc. for some reason the Internet has made some people feel that certain crimes are not crimes at all.

I don’t believe the Internet possesses intelligence, but I have to preface this with the word “yet”. I say this because we are advancing so quickly it could be just a matter of time before the Internet turns into some huge brain. Maybe it will happen soon, or maybe it will happen when quantum computers are added to the Internet. We have no way of knowing even if it will ever happen, but sometimes things just seem inevitable.