The Internet & Networking

Learn how the Internet developed and how packets travel before studying protocols and the Web. Connect security, standards, and services to that technical framework, then examine the cultures built on top of it.

Origins and Network Architecture

Follow a packet through network architecture before tracing the Internet’s history.

How the Internet Works

Packet Switching and Routing

• Packets, Hardware, and Link-Layer Addressing

  • Packet — a unit of data transmitted over a network; contains a header (addressing/control info) and a payload (data). IP packets typically up to 1,500 bytes (MTU for Ethernet).

  • Packet switching — the fundamental architectural concept underlying the internet, developed independently by Paul Baran (RAND, early 1960s) and Donald Davies (NPL, UK); data is broken into packets routed independently and reassembled at the destination.
    • network packets — Network packets are the units of data sent across packet-switched networks, often routed independently to their destination. Their contents include a payload, and issues in their timing can produce jitter.

  • Router — a device that forwards packets between networks by inspecting IP destination addresses and consulting routing tables; operates at OSI Layer 3 (Network).

  • Switch — a Layer 2 (Data Link) device that forwards frames within a LAN using MAC addresses; unlike a hub, it sends frames only to the intended port.

  • Hub — a Layer 1 device that broadcasts all incoming data to every connected port; largely obsolete, replaced by switches.

  • MAC address (Media Access Control) — a 48-bit hardware address burned into a network interface card; written as six colon- or hyphen-separated hex pairs (e.g., 00:1A:2B:3C:4D:5E); uniquely identifies a device on a local network; the first three octets identify the manufacturer (OUI).

  • ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) — maps IP addresses to MAC addresses within a local network; a device broadcasts “who has IP X?” and the owner replies with its MAC address.

  • Network hardware
    • modems
      • modem — A modem is short for modulator-demodulator, a device that lets computers communicate over communication lines by converting digital data into signals and back again. It can send data over telephone lines, cable systems, or other communication links. Operation is often described with baud rates and modulation methods such as phase-shift keying, frequency-shift keying, and quadrature amplitude modulation. Modems were used for Internet access on systems such as the Dreamcast and Xbox, and later console games sometimes required one.
    • routers — Routers are network devices that forward packets between networks and perform tasks such as longest-prefix matching, NAT, and routing-table lookup. Home routers often provide Wi‑Fi access and connect local devices to the Internet through a modem or gateway.
  • Network hardware identifiers
    • MAC addresses — MAC addresses are 48-bit hardware identifiers used by network devices to map local frames to ports and to associate with IP addresses. They include an organizationally unique identifier assigned by IEEE and may be randomized on modern Wi-Fi systems.
• Routing and the Global Network

  • Routing protocols — BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) is the inter-domain (internet-wide) routing protocol; OSPF and IS-IS are common interior routing protocols within a network.

  • BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) — the “routing protocol of the internet”; exchanges reachability information between Autonomous Systems; a path-vector protocol; misconfigurations (“BGP hijacks”) can redirect global internet traffic.

  • Autonomous System (AS) — a network or group of networks under a single administrative domain; identified by an ASN; BGP routes between ASes.

  • IXP (Internet Exchange Point) — a physical facility where ISPs and networks exchange traffic; reduces cost and latency by enabling direct peering.

  • Internet backbone — high-capacity fiber-optic transmission lines and routers operated by Tier-1 ISPs (AT&T, Lumen/CenturyLink, NTT, etc.) that interconnect the entire internet; Tier-1 providers peer with each other without payment.

  • Submarine cables — undersea fiber-optic cables that carry ~95-99% of international internet traffic; subject to damage by ship anchors and earthquakes (e.g., 2006 Taiwan earthquake disrupted Asian internet); landing stations are critical infrastructure.

  • Bandwidth vs. latency — bandwidth is the maximum data throughput of a link (bits per second); latency is the time for a single packet to travel from source to destination (milliseconds); high bandwidth does not imply low latency.

• Application Topologies

  • Client-server model — the dominant internet architecture; clients (browsers, apps) request resources; servers process requests and return responses; contrasts with peer-to-peer (P2P) where nodes act as both.

  • Peer-to-peer (P2P) — a decentralized architecture where each node can act as both client and server; used by BitTorrent, early Napster/Kazaa, and blockchain networks; distributes load but complicates moderation and security.

• Computer networking
  • Internet addressing
    • IP address — An IP address is a numerical label used to identify a device on a network or computer on the Internet. IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses, often written in dotted-decimal form as four numbers from 0 to 255; IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses. DNS resolves names into these addresses, and 127.0.0.1 is the loopback/local host example.
  • LAN protocols
    • Token Ring — Token ring is a local-area network design in which a circulating token controls access to the network and helps prevent collisions. IBM developed it in the early 1980s, and the IBM local-area-network standard IEEE 802.5 is better known as Token Ring. It was an important predecessor to modern Ethernet systems.
  • Networking standards
    • ASYNCHRONOUS TRANSFER MODE — Asynchronous Transfer Mode, or ATM, is a networking standard designed for high-speed transmission over local and wide-area networks. Its name refers to its cell-based, asynchronous operation rather than a polling loop, and it was promoted for services such as video and audio delivery.

  • packets — Packets are the units of data transmitted across networks and reassembled at the destination. They can be dropped under congestion-control schemes such as random early detection, and routing and switching protocols are built around handling them efficiently.

  • routing — Routing is the network process of choosing a path for data packets between sources and destinations. It uses routing tables and protocols such as distance-vector and link-state methods, with Dijkstra’s algorithm and BGP often appearing in clues.

  • web servers — Web servers are the backend programs that respond to HTTP requests for websites, with Apache and Nginx as major examples. They often serve dynamic content, use rewrite rules, and can be benchmarked or attacked at large scale.
• Networking
  • proxies
    • Proxy — A proxy is a person or authority authorized to act or vote for another, especially at a shareholder meeting. The term also applies to a server that relays internet traffic between a local network and the wider internet.
• broadband access
  • broadband internet — Broadband internet is the high-speed internet service regulated by net neutrality policies and expanded through federal infrastructure funding. Quizbowl clues may mention Google’s citywide projects in Kansas City and Austin, as well as FCC price-and-speed labels.
• Internet service providers
  • ISPs — Internet service providers, or ISPs, are the companies that sell broadband access and control autonomous systems on the network layer. Large U.S. examples include Comcast and Verizon, and they often peer with one another to exchange traffic.
• Telecommunications
  • Facsimile — A facsimile, or fax, is a telecommunications method for transmitting still images such as photographs or drawings and reconstructing them at the other end. The term is commonly shortened to fax in everyday use.
• Telecommunications companies
  • Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. — Huawei is a major Chinese telecommunications company that has faced international scrutiny over 5G equipment and government ties. Its chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou was detained in Canada, and the company has been targeted by export controls and entity-list restrictions.

IP Addressing

• Address Formats, Ranges, and Subnets

  • IPv4 — 32-bit addresses; ~4.3 billion total (2^32); written in dotted-decimal notation (e.g., 192.168.1.1); effectively exhausted by 2011 (IANA) / 2019 (RIPE NCC for Europe).

  • IPv6 — 128-bit addresses; 2^128 (~3.4 × 10^38); written in colon-separated hex groups (e.g., 2001:0db8::1); introduced to address IPv4 exhaustion. It was designed by the IETF as the replacement for IPv4 and includes stateless autoconfiguration, prefix notation, and the double-colon shorthand for compressing zero blocks. Deployment was long delayed before becoming widespread.

  • Private/reserved ranges — 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, and 192.168.0.0/16 are private (RFC 1918); not routable on the public internet. NAT allows many devices to share one public IP.

  • CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing) — notation indicating the network prefix length (e.g., /24 = 256 addresses); replaced the older class-based system (Class A/B/C).

  • Subnet mask — a 32-bit number (e.g., 255.255.255.0) that divides an IP address into network and host portions; CIDR /24 is equivalent to 255.255.255.0.

  • Loopback — 127.0.0.1 (IPv4) / ::1 (IPv6); always refers to the local machine.

  • Broadcast address — in a subnet, the highest address (all host bits set to 1, e.g., 192.168.1.255 in a /24); packets sent here are delivered to all hosts on the subnet.

  • Network addressing

    • IP addresses — IP addresses identify devices on a network, with IPv4 written in dotted decimal and IPv6 providing a longer format. They are assigned dynamically by DHCP or manually in special cases, and they appear in records such as A and AAAA.
• Address Translation and Packet Lifetime

  • NAT (Network Address Translation) — maps private IP addresses to a public IP at a gateway; temporarily delayed IPv6 adoption by extending IPv4 usability.

  • TTL (IP Time to Live) — an 8-bit field in the IP header decremented by each router; when it reaches zero, the packet is dropped and an ICMP “Time Exceeded” message is returned; prevents infinite routing loops.

DNS

• DNS Names, Records, and Resolution

  • DNS (Domain Name System) — translates human-readable domain names into IP addresses; designed by Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel (1983 RFC 882/883).

  • Hierarchy — root zone → TLDs (.com, .org, .uk) → second-level domains (example.com) → subdomains (www.example.com).

  • Root servers — 13 named root server clusters (A through M), operated by 12 organizations; widely distributed via anycast; the authoritative source for TLD delegation.

  • Recursive resolver — the DNS server queried by your device; queries authoritative servers on your behalf and caches results. Typically provided by your ISP or a public resolver (8.8.8.8 Google, 1.1.1.1 Cloudflare).

  • TTL (Time to Live) — controls how long a DNS record is cached; lower TTL means faster propagation of changes.

  • Record types — A (IPv4 address), AAAA (IPv6), CNAME (alias to another name), MX (mail server), NS (name server), TXT (arbitrary text, used for SPF/DKIM), SOA (zone authority).

  • gTLDs and ccTLDs — generic top-level domains (.com, .org, .net) vs. country-code TLDs (.uk, .jp, .de); ICANN dramatically expanded gTLDs from 2012 onward (e.g., .london, .bank).

  • Domain names
    • top-level domains
      • .edu — .edu is the Internet top-level domain suffix used for educational institutions, especially colleges and universities. It is commonly seen in the web addresses of American universities and other four-year schools.
  • Domain registrars
    • Network Solutions — Network Solutions is an internet domain registrar and web-hosting company. The evidence here does not provide enough context to identify any narrower topic beyond the company name.
  • Internet domains
    • Sponsored top-level domains
      • .mil — The .mil domain is used for United States military organizations and other sites associated with the Department of Defense. It appears on official armed forces web addresses such as those for the Navy, DARPA, and the Marine Corps.
  • generic top-level domains — The six classic U.S. generic top-level domains are .com, .edu, .gov, .mil, .net, and .org.
• DNS Integrity and Encrypted Resolution

  • DNSSEC — DNS Security Extensions; adds cryptographic signatures to DNS responses to prevent spoofing/cache poisoning.

  • DoH (DNS over HTTPS) / DoT (DNS over TLS) — protocols that encrypt DNS queries to prevent eavesdropping or tampering by on-path observers; DoH uses port 443 and is harder for networks to block.

The OSI and TCP/IP Models

• OSI model — 7-layer conceptual framework for network communication; developed by ISO in the late 1970s. Useful for understanding and troubleshooting, but real protocols do not map cleanly to it.

• TCP/IP model — 4-layer practical model (Application, Transport, Internet, Network Access) that describes actual internet protocols.

• Encapsulation — the process by which each OSI/TCP-IP layer wraps the layer above’s data in its own header (and sometimes trailer); at the receiver, each layer strips its header and passes data up.

• MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) — the largest packet/frame a link will carry; standard Ethernet MTU is 1,500 bytes; exceeding it causes IP fragmentation or a “packet too big” ICMP error (used in Path MTU Discovery).

• Ethernet — Ethernet is the widely used local area networking standard defined by IEEE 802.3 and associated with CSMA/CD in its early bus-based form. It uses 48-bit MAC addresses, and Bob Metcalfe is one of the names most closely tied to its development.

History of the Internet

• J.C.R. Licklider / “Intergalactic Computer Network” — psychologist and DARPA/IPTO director; his August 1962 memos to colleagues described an “Intergalactic Computer Network” of interconnected computers sharing information — the conceptual forerunner of the internet; he also funded early time-sharing research and hired the people who built ARPANET.

• Leonard Kleinrock — MIT researcher whose 1961 master’s thesis applied queuing theory to message switching, laying mathematical foundations for packet switching; later supervised the UCLA node that sent ARPANET’s first message.

• Donald Davies — British NPL researcher who coined the term “packet switching” independently of Baran in 1965-1966 and built the NPL Data Communications Network, one of the first packet-switched networks.

• ARPANET (1969) — the precursor network funded by DARPA; first message sent October 29, 1969, from UCLA to SRI; the system crashed after two characters (“lo”), making the first transmitted text unintentionally “lo.”

• NCP to TCP/IP — ARPANET originally used the Network Control Program; Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn published the TCP/IP specification in 1974; the ARPANET switched to TCP/IP on January 1, 1983, known as Flag Day.

• Ray Tomlinson / email and the @ sign — BBN engineer who in 1971 wrote the first program to send messages between different computers over ARPANET (SNDMSG + CPYNET on the TENEX OS); chose the @ symbol to separate the user name from the host machine name.

• Elizabeth Feinler / NIC and HOSTS.TXT — ran the Network Information Center at SRI-NIC; maintained the HOSTS.TXT file mapping hostnames to addresses before DNS; also coined the first TLD conventions (.gov, .edu, .com, .mil, .org, .net).

• NSFNet (1986) — the National Science Foundation network that replaced ARPANET as the backbone of US academic networking; decommissioned 1990 as commercial internet providers took over.

• ARPANET decommissioning — the original ARPANET was shut down in 1990; commercial and academic networks had already taken over its function.

• Netscape Navigator (1994) — commercial successor to Mosaic; dominated early web use; went public in a landmark 1995 IPO; introduced the cookie and early JavaScript (co-created by Brendan Eich in 10 days in 1995).

• Brendan Eich — Netscape engineer who created JavaScript in 1995 in approximately 10 days; later co-founded Mozilla and the Brave browser; the language was originally named Mocha, then LiveScript.

• Dot-com boom and bust — roughly 1995-2001; massive speculative investment in internet companies; NASDAQ peaked in March 2000 and crashed ~78% by 2002.

• Web 2.0 (~2004-2010) — term popularized by Tim O’Reilly; characterized by user-generated content, social networking, AJAX-driven dynamic pages, and platforms like Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

• Paul Baran / RAND distributed communications — engineer at RAND Corporation who in 1964 published “On Distributed Communications,” proposing a survivable, decentralized network that could route around destroyed nodes; his work was conducted independently of Davies and was initially dismissed by AT&T before influencing ARPANET.

• ARPANET first message — sent October 29, 1969, by Charley Kline at UCLA to Bill Duvall at SRI; intended to transmit “login” but the system crashed after two letters, making “lo” the first internet message.

• Robert Taylor — DARPA/IPTO director who funded and launched the ARPANET project in 1966-1968; later led Xerox PARC’s computer science lab and recruited the team that built Ethernet and the Alto.

• RFC 1 — “Host Software,” authored by Steve Crocker on April 7, 1969; the first RFC in the series that would eventually document all internet standards.

• Internet “Flag Day” (January 1, 1983) — the date the ARPANET officially switched from NCP to TCP/IP; all hosts had to cut over simultaneously, hence the name.

• Mosaic (1993) — first graphical browser to display images inline with text, developed at NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina; ran on Unix, Windows, and Mac; free to download; credited with triggering the web’s mass adoption.

• First commercial ISPs — The World (1989) and PSINet/UUNET (1990) were among the first commercial ISPs offering public internet access in the United States.

• Mobile era — the iPhone (2007) and Android ecosystem shifted internet access to mobile; by the mid-2010s mobile traffic exceeded desktop globally.

• Broadband displacement — dial-up (56 Kbps peak) was largely displaced by DSL and cable broadband in the 2000s; fiber (FTTH) and 4G/5G mobile broadband followed.

• America Online — America Online (AOL) was a major dial-up internet service and information provider that began as Quantum Computer Services and was once known for Q-Link. Under Steve Case it became one of the largest online services, famous for mass marketing CDs, the “You’ve Got Mail” era, and its walled-garden service; it later acquired Netscape, Time Warner, and Mirabilis, the creator of ICQ. It was also associated with high-profile mergers, early Nintendo partnerships, subscriber surges and server failures, and cooperation with law enforcement.

• Internet service providers
  • Excite@Home — Excite@Home was a major cable broadband and internet service company formed from the merger of Excite and @Home. After AT&T’s failed takeover bid and mounting debt, the company announced that it would cease operations and file for bankruptcy in 2002.
• Broadband Internet access
  • DSL — DSL, or Digital Subscriber Line, is a broadband technology that sends digital data over ordinary telephone lines. It provides much faster speeds than dial-up without requiring dedicated phone lines or cables.

Protocols and the World Wide Web

Connect protocol layers to web requests, responses, and services.

Core Protocols

TCP and UDP

• TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) — connection-oriented; guarantees delivery and ordering via a three-way handshake (SYN, SYN-ACK, ACK), sequence numbers, and acknowledgements. Higher overhead.
  • Three-way handshake — TCP connection establishment: client sends SYN → server replies SYN-ACK → client sends ACK.

• UDP (User Datagram Protocol) — connectionless; no delivery guarantee; lower overhead; used for real-time applications (video streaming, VoIP, online gaming, DNS lookups).

• Port — a 16-bit number identifying a specific process/service on a host; 0-1023 are well-known ports.

• Internet protocol suite
  • Transmission Control Protocol — TCP is the connection-oriented, reliable transport-layer protocol used with IP in the Internet suite to deliver data in order across networks. It uses a three-way handshake, acknowledgments, sequence and acknowledgement numbers, congestion control, and flow control to manage connections and packet flow. Its header includes source and destination ports, a window field, an urgent pointer, control bits, and a checksum. It underlies common services such as HTTP, FTP, and Telnet, and is often contrasted with UDP for its greater reliability and handshake overhead.
• Networking protocols
  • Transport protocols
    • UDP — UDP, the User Datagram Protocol, is a lightweight transport protocol that sends datagrams without connection setup, ordering guarantees, or reliable delivery. Its small header makes it useful for streaming media, DNS queries, and other low-latency applications. The same abbreviation can also refer to uridine diphosphate, a biochemical nucleotide sugar carrier used in carbohydrate metabolism.

Common Ports

HTTP and HTTPS

• HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) — the application-layer protocol of the web; stateless; client sends a request, server sends a response.

  • HTTP methods — GET (retrieve), POST (submit data), PUT (replace), PATCH (partial update), DELETE (remove), HEAD (headers only), OPTIONS (capabilities).

  • HTTP status codes — 1xx informational, 2xx success (200 OK, 201 Created, 204 No Content), 3xx redirection (301 Moved Permanently, 302 Found), 4xx client error (400 Bad Request, 401 Unauthorized, 403 Forbidden, 404 Not Found, 429 Too Many Requests), 5xx server error (500 Internal Server Error, 502 Bad Gateway, 503 Service Unavailable).

  • HTTP/1.1 (1997) — added persistent connections, chunked transfer encoding, host headers enabling virtual hosting.

  • HTTP/2 (2015) — binary framing, multiplexing (multiple requests over one connection), header compression (HPACK); significantly reduces latency.

  • HTTP/3 (2022) — runs over QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) instead of TCP; QUIC is built on UDP, provides built-in TLS 1.3, and eliminates TCP’s head-of-line blocking.

• HTTPS — HTTP over TLS; encrypts traffic; requires a certificate from a Certificate Authority; standard for all modern sites.

• Web protocols
  • Hypertext Transfer Protocol — The standard application-layer web protocol used by browsers and web servers to transfer hypertext documents, web pages, and other resources. It appears before “://” in URLs, is stateless, and uses methods such as GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, and HEAD; common response codes include 200 and 404. HTTP/2 introduced multiplexing to reduce latency.

Other Key Protocols

• SMTP — Simple Mail Transfer Protocol; used for sending email between servers; commonly on ports 25 (server-to-server), 587 (submission with authentication). It begins sessions with HELO or EHLO.

• IMAP / POP3 — protocols for reading email from a server; IMAP (port 143/993) syncs messages across devices; POP3 (port 110/995) downloads and typically deletes from server.

• FTP — File Transfer Protocol; plain-text, largely replaced by SFTP (FTP over SSH) or FTPS (FTP with TLS) for security. It is a standard method for moving files between computers on a TCP/IP network. FTP traditionally used separate control and data channels, commonly on ports 21 and 20, and anonymous logins often used an email address as the password.

• SSH (Secure Shell) — encrypted protocol for remote login and command execution; port 22; uses public-key cryptography for authentication.

• DHCP — Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol; automatically assigns IP addresses, subnet masks, gateways, and DNS servers to devices on a network. It leases an IP address along with settings such as the subnet mask and default gateway, and it succeeded BOOTP for address assignment.

• ICMP — Internet Control Message Protocol; used for network diagnostics (ping = ICMP Echo Request/Reply; traceroute uses ICMP or UDP TTL expiry).

• QUIC — a transport protocol developed by Google, standardized in RFC 9000 (2021); runs over UDP; provides TLS 1.3 encryption, stream multiplexing, and connection migration; the basis for HTTP/3.

• NTP (Network Time Protocol) — synchronizes clocks across internet hosts; port 123/UDP; crucial for TLS certificate validation and distributed systems; designed by David Mills.

• SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) — used to monitor and manage network devices (routers, switches, servers); operates on port 161/UDP.

• Email — Internet messaging service sent through SMTP and commonly retrieved with POP or IMAP, including IMAP IDLE; it became notorious for spam and spoofing, leading to filters and authentication tools such as SPF and DKIM, with webmail and clients such as Gmail, Outlook, and Thunderbird used to manage it.

• Email services
  • Webmail services
    • Gmail — Gmail is Google’s free webmail service, launched in beta with an invitation system and later expanded into a mainstream email platform. Its search-based interface and ad-targeting features made it controversial because the service scanned email content to support advertising.
• Network protocol
  • SSH — SSH, or Secure Shell, is an encrypted protocol for remote login and command execution over a network. It uses public-key cryptography and is the basis of the SFTP connection command.
• Network utilities
  • ping — Ping is the sound or command associated with checking connectivity and measuring round-trip latency in networks. The word also titles a children’s story about a duck on the Yangtze and appears in popular culture as the name of a machine that makes a “ping” noise.
• Internet protocols

  • BGP — BGP, the Border Gateway Protocol, is the path-vector protocol that routes information between autonomous systems on the internet. Its path selection uses attributes such as AS-path length, origin, MED, and next hop.

  • Domain Name System — The Domain Name System converts names such as web addresses into IP addresses and is commonly compared to an internet phone book. It usually uses UDP port 53 and relies on nameservers and record types such as AAAA and CNAME. Its transaction IDs can be targeted by cache-poisoning attacks, and tools such as iodine can tunnel data through it.

  • secure remote access
    • Secure Shell Protocol — Secure Shell Protocol, or SSH, is a secure remote-login protocol commonly used as a replacement for Telnet. It is widely used on Unix-like systems to access another computer from the command line.
  • Telnet — Telnet is an old remote-login protocol that uses port 23. It transmits usernames and passwords in cleartext and was widely used to open shell sessions on distant Unix machines.
• Network management protocols
  • Simple Network Management Protocol — Simple Network Management Protocol, or SNMP, is a network management protocol used to monitor and control devices such as routers, hubs, and switches. It uses management information bases and messages such as get-request, set-request, get-response, and trap.

The World Wide Web

• Web Documents and Browsers

  • Internet vs. Web — the internet is the global network infrastructure; the web is one application running on it (others: email, VoIP, torrents, SSH).

  • URL (Uniform Resource Locator) — structure: scheme://host:port/path?query#fragment. The host is resolved via DNS.

  • URI vs. URL vs. URN — a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) is the general concept; a URL specifies location (https://example.com); a URN specifies a persistent name (urn:isbn:…); all URLs are URIs.

  • HTML (HyperText Markup Language) — the markup language describing web page structure; current standard is HTML5 (2014, WHATWG Living Standard).

  • CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) — describes the presentation/layout of HTML documents; handles fonts, colors, layout (Flexbox, Grid), and responsive design.

  • JavaScript — the scripting language of the web; runs in browsers; enables dynamic content, DOM manipulation, and modern single-page applications; V8 (Google) and SpiderMonkey (Mozilla) are major JS engines.

  • Browser — renders HTML/CSS/JS; major engines: Blink (Chrome, Edge, Opera), Gecko (Firefox), WebKit (Safari).

  • web browser — A web browser is a program used to access and navigate the World Wide Web. Examples include Mosaic, Safari, Firefox, and Chrome, and early browsers helped define how pages were displayed across different engines.
    • Microsoft browser
      • Internet Explorer — Microsoft’s web browser, originally based on Spyglass Mosaic and later developed through version 8 beta in 2008. It was bundled with Windows and once central to Microsoft’s software strategy, becoming widely used on Windows systems before losing ground to Firefox, Opera, and other browsers. Internet Explorer also became notorious for security flaws and antitrust scrutiny, including litigation over whether Microsoft forced manufacturers to include it with Windows 95.
  • hypertext — Hypertext is text that contains links to other text, usually activated by clicking. The Semantic Web extends hypertext’s basic idea of interconnection between web documents, and HTTP is named for transporting it.
    • web page
      • page — A page is a unit of hypertext tied to a single HTML file, such as the home page of a website. The term also names the Google ranking algorithm PageRank, which is associated with Larry Page.
  • Markup languages
    • HTML — HTML is the standard markup language used to create and structure web pages. It was created by Tim Berners-Lee, uses tags and attributes written inside angle brackets, and is maintained by the W3C. Modern versions work closely with CSS and JavaScript and include features such as the canvas element; the fifth standard is HTML5.
      • HTML5 — HTML5 is the modern version of HTML used to structure web documents with tags such as div, span, and body. It also incorporates native multimedia features that reduced dependence on Flash plugins.
  • Web standards
    • Cascading Style Sheets — Cascading Style Sheets is the web standard used to control how HTML pages are displayed. It separates presentation from content by assigning property-value pairs to selectors, allowing fonts, colors, spacing, and other visual details to be defined separately from HTML content. It supports multiple style rules, responsive layouts, and page styling based on device type.
  • Web browsing
    • crawl — To crawl is to move slowly along the ground, especially on hands and knees, as infants do. The word can also refer to a web browser visiting pages by following hyperlinks one by one, or to the motion of a scrolling news ticker.
  • Web design
    • frames — Frames are a basic organizing idea in software interfaces and web design, as in wireframes and iframes. The term also appears in psychology through framing effects and in relational frame theory.
• State, APIs, and Interactive Applications

  • Cookie — a small piece of data stored by a browser and sent with subsequent requests to the same origin; used for sessions, authentication, and tracking. Set via Set-Cookie response header.

  • REST — Representational State Transfer; an architectural style for APIs using HTTP verbs, stateless requests, and resource-oriented URLs; coined by Roy Fielding (2000 dissertation). It is Roy Fielding’s stateless architectural style for web services and APIs, emphasizing cacheable client-server interactions rather than SOAP-style operations.

  • WebSocket — a protocol providing full-duplex communication over a single TCP connection; initiated by an HTTP upgrade; used for real-time apps (chat, live data).

  • DOM (Document Object Model) — the in-memory tree representation of a parsed HTML/XML document; JavaScript manipulates the DOM to change page content dynamically without a full reload.

  • AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) — a technique using XMLHttpRequest (or the modern Fetch API) to send/receive data in the background without reloading the page; coined by Jesse James Garrett (2005); foundational to Web 2.0.

  • Caching — storing copies of responses to serve future identical requests faster; occurs at multiple levels: browser cache, CDN edge, reverse proxy (e.g., Varnish), and application; controlled by HTTP headers (Cache-Control, ETag, Last-Modified).

  • Web 3.0 / Semantic Web — Berners-Lee’s vision of machine-readable, linked data across the web; partially realized through schema.org markup; the term was later co-opted by blockchain/decentralization advocates for an unrelated concept.

  • WebAssembly — WebAssembly is an open binary instruction format for web applications, designed as a fast compilation target for languages like C and C++. It is associated with Emscripten and WASI, and recent versions added exception handling and 64-bit address space support.

  • Chatbots
    • Tay — Tay is a given name and stage name used by several entertainers and internet personalities. In one high-profile case it also referred to Microsoft’s Tay chatbot, which was manipulated into producing racist outputs after release.
  • Internet applications
    • web browsers — Web browsers are applications used to access pages on the Internet. Common examples include Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Internet Explorer.

      • Firefox — Firefox is Mozilla’s open-source web browser built on the Gecko engine and created as an alternative to Internet Explorer. It was renamed after trademark and database conflicts, and Debian’s free-software build was released as Iceweasel.

      • Google Chrome — Google Chrome is the web browser distributed by Google and currently the most widely used browser on desktop computers. Its offline page includes the hidden dinosaur game.

      • Mozilla — Mozilla is the free-software organization that grew out of Netscape and produces Firefox and Thunderbird. Its nonprofit arm also backed efforts related to KaiOS, and Brendan Eich’s departure in 2014 became a notable controversy.

      • Mozilla Firefox — Mozilla Firefox is the open-source web browser built around the Gecko engine and once second in popularity to Internet Explorer. It is known for features such as the Awesome Bar, add-ons, and its early automatic disabling of Adobe Flash for security reasons.

      • Opera web browser — Opera is a Norwegian web browser known for early tabbed browsing, the Speed Dial start page, and its Presto engine. It was developed by the company Opera Software and later inspired a Vivaldi spin-off after internal disagreements.

  • Web data extraction
    • web scraping — Web scraping is the automated extraction of text or data from webpages. It is often done with crawlers or HTML-parsing tools and may be restricted by robots.txt rules.
• World Wide Web (1989-1991) — invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN; proposal submitted March 1989; first website (info.cern.ch) went live December 1990; public access began August 1991. Distinct from the internet: the Web is an application running on top of the internet.

  • The World Wide Web — The World Wide Web is the hypertext system Tim Berners-Lee developed at CERN in 1989 to link documents over the internet. It is associated with early web standards such as HTTP, HTML, and URLs.

  • XHTML — XHTML is a stricter, more extensible version of HTML that follows XML-style rules. Documents must be well formed, use lowercase tags and attributes, and include a doctype declaration.

  • websites — Websites are collections of web pages accessed by URLs or IP addresses and built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. They can store cookies and range from simple pages to large platforms like Wikipedia or YouTube.

    • Gossip websites
      • TMZ.com — TMZ.com is a celebrity-gossip tabloid news organization and website headed by Harvey Levin. Its name refers to the Los Angeles “thirty-mile zone.” It is known for breaking major entertainment stories, recurring photo and interview features, and coverage of celebrity arrests and deaths. It has also been associated with web series and live coverage of entertainment-news incidents involving public figures, and drew criticism for breaking major celebrity deaths before families were notified.

    • Grantland — Grantland was a sports and pop-culture website founded by Bill Simmons under ESPN. It published longform pieces by writers such as Shea Serrano before its closure and later staff migration to The Ringer.

    • Mental Floss — Mental Floss is a trivia-and-facts magazine and website whose name is a pun on a dental-cleaning product. It was founded by Duke undergraduates and is known for playful, smart-aleck short articles and book tie-ins.

    • Niceme.me — Niceme.me is a simple single-purpose website that consists only of its name and a voice reading that name aloud. It is used as a playful internet response to compliments or good humor and is notable for its minimalist, one-joke design.

    • Online encyclopedias
      • Wikipedia.org — Wikipedia.org is the free, editable online encyclopedia founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001 and run by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its history is associated with controversies, vandalism, and the claim that it is a website anyone can edit.

    • Useless Web Pages — Useless Web Pages is the Yahoo!-style label for amusing or pointless websites that do little besides entertain. Examples include prank pages and novelty sites such as The Really Big Button that Doesn’t Do Anything.

    • www.FreeCreditReport.com — FreeCreditReport.com is the Experian-owned site marketed with catchy commercials about checking your credit score. It drew FTC scrutiny over misleading claims that the service was free.
• Collaborative websites
  • wiki — A wiki is a collaborative website that lets users create, edit, and link pages directly through a browser. The format is associated with Ward Cunningham’s Portland Pattern Repository and with the larger idea of user-authored online reference projects.
• Computer science
  • Stateless protocol
    • statelessness — Statelessness is the condition of lacking nationality or legal citizenship in any state. The term also describes HTTP’s lack of built-in memory between requests, which is why websites use cookies to track users.
• Computing prefixes and terms
  • cyber — Cyber is the prefix behind cyberpunk, cyberspace, cybernetics, and related terms for computer-mediated or networked activity. William Gibson’s Neuromancer and “Burning Chrome” are the key clues, along with the broader science-fiction style they helped popularize.
• Blockchain tokens
  • NFTs — NFTs are blockchain-based tokens used to represent digital artworks and other media as supposedly unique assets. They became famous for expensive sales of memes, photographs, and digital art, including works like Everydays: The First 5000 Days and Bored Ape images. Museums and collectors have also sold art in this format, even when the underlying image can still be copied freely.
• Internet
  • Blogging platforms
    • LiveJournal.com — LiveJournal.com is the blogging site founded by Brad Fitzpatrick that lets users keep online diaries and post journal entries. It was notable for invite-only early growth, paid and ad-supported accounts, and the blue pencil logo with Frank the Goat.

  • cell phones — Cell phones are portable radio telephones that use cellular networks, SIM authentication, and standards such as GSM, CDMA, LTE, and 5G. The clues mention roaming, handover, and legal disputes over device location data and unlocking.

  • cyberspace — Cyberspace is the term William Gibson popularized in Neuromancer for a shared virtual computer network of data and communication. It is often described as a computer-generated realm or abstraction of digital information.

  • Humor websites

    • I-Mockery — I-Mockery is a comedy and pop-culture website known for irreverent features such as Hacked ROM Reviews, Visionary Darkness, Ask Dr. Bactine, and The Adventures of Pickleman. Its content also includes recurring movie and retro-gaming material like Spooky Movie Spotlight and other parody-heavy columns.

    • Something Awful — Something Awful is a comedy and internet culture website founded by Rich “Lowtax” Kyanka in 1999. It became known for irreverent humor, prank culture, image edits, flash content, early memes, and high-profile web in-jokes. Its long-running forums call members “goons” and are associated with recurring features such as Photoshop Phriday, Cliff Yablonski Hates You, Awful Anime, and The Flash Tub.

  • Music review websites
    • Pitchfork — Pitchfork is a music review website that became a major tastemaker in indie and pop criticism. Its highly rated coverage includes albums such as Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters.
  • network protocols
    • Network Time Protocol — The Network Time Protocol synchronizes clocks across computer networks and is one of the Internet’s oldest widely deployed protocols. Developed by David Mills, it uses algorithms to estimate clock offsets and adjust for network delay.
  • Networking protocols
    • protocol — A protocol is a set of rules that governs communication or the exchange of information, whether in diplomacy or between computers. SMTP’s middle letter stands for this term, and HTTP is another familiar example used for web data transfer.
  • Online games
    • GeoGuessr — GeoGuessr is a geography game built around Google Street View and scoring rounds by how close a guess is to the target location. It has spawned speedrunning and challenge spinoffs, and well-known players include the YouTuber Rainbolt.
  • search engines — Search engines are online tools that index the web and return results for user queries. Early examples included AltaVista and Ask Jeeves, and the term also covers services like Yahoo! and Dogpile.

    • AltaVista — AltaVista was an early web search engine launched in 1995 and once used by Yahoo for search results. It was a major pre-Google portal before Yahoo shut it down in 2011.

    • Baidu — Baidu is a major Chinese search engine company founded by Robin Li. It offers services such as maps, news, games, and encyclopedias, and was involved in controversies over advertising, copyright, and data access.

    • Bing — Bing is Microsoft’s web search engine, launched in 2009 and formerly known as Live Search. It was promoted as a “decision engine” and briefly became a recognizable product-placement website in film and television.

    • Excite — Excite was a web portal and search engine that rose into the top tier of search usage in the late 1990s, helped by a prominent deal with Netscape. It competed with portals such as Lycos, AltaVista, and WebCrawler before being bought by Ask Jeeves and later drawn into the At Home merger.

    • www.google.com — Google is the search engine created at Stanford by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and famous for its minimalist homepage with “I’m Feeling Lucky.” It became the dominant web search site by indexing massive numbers of pages.

    • www.lycos.com — Lycos was an early Massachusetts-based web search company whose name comes from the Latin for wolf spider. It was once promoted as one of the major search engines of the dot-com era.

  • the Internet — The Internet is the global network of connected computers behind web browsing, online communities, and the dot-com boom. It is the system often contrasted with the World Wide Web, and it has inspired everything from leetspeak to AI-generated image prompts.

  • Time synchronization — Telling the time here refers to network time synchronization, especially through the Network Time Protocol. Related systems such as Chrony and the Fuzzball-based protocol keep clocks aligned by correcting for delay and offset.

  • YouTube
    • YouTube Rewind — YouTube Rewind was the platform’s annual year-in-review video series. Its later entries became infamous for heavy criticism, especially the 2018 installment that became one of the site’s most disliked videos.
  • YouTube channels

    • asdfmovie — asdfmovie is TomSka’s absurdist YouTube animation series made up of short, repetitive sketches. It includes recurring bits such as Mine Turtle, the Muffin Song, and the joke about a cow pretending to be a man.

    • Smosh — Smosh is a comedy YouTube brand founded by Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla, known for sketches, Food Battle videos, and spin-off channels like Smosh Pit and Smosh Games. The channel became one of YouTube’s earliest subscriber giants and later changed hands before Padilla’s return in 2023.

    • WatchMojo — WatchMojo is a list-based YouTube channel known for countdown-style entertainment videos. It is often mocked for clickbait-heavy topics such as rankings of anime characters and other pop-culture lists.

  • YouTube creators

    • CGP Grey — CGP Grey is an educational YouTuber known for stick-figure videos on topics such as voting systems, U.S. state flags, and geography. His most famous videos include “Hexagons are the Bestagons” and discussions of places like the Statue of Liberty and Nuuk Airport.

    • MrBeast — MrBeast is the YouTube creator Jimmy Donaldson, known for extravagant giveaways, charity stunts, elaborate challenge videos, and record-setting subscriber counts. His ventures include Team Trees, Feastables, and MrBeast Burger, and he has made widely watched videos such as a real-life Squid Game recreation.

• JavaScript libraries
  • React — React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces with reusable components and a virtual DOM. It is maintained by Facebook and commonly uses JSX in component code.
• markup languages
  • markup — Markup is the system of annotating text with tags or codes that describe structure for display or processing. Examples include HTML, XML, and Markdown, which all use conventions to separate content from presentation or meaning.
• Web technologies
  • XML — XML, or Extensible Markup Language, is a structured data format descended from SGML. It underlies RSS feeds and was central to the X in AJAX before JSON became more common in web applications.

Encryption and Network Security

Distinguish encryption, authentication, and common network threats.

TLS and Encryption

• TLS (Transport Layer Security) — the protocol providing encryption, authentication, and integrity for HTTPS and other protocols; TLS 1.3 (2018) is current; SSL is the deprecated predecessor.

  • Certificate pinning — hard-coding expected certificate/public key in an application to prevent MITM even with rogue CAs.

  • TLS handshake — client and server negotiate cipher suites, authenticate the server (via certificate), and establish a shared session key using asymmetric cryptography (key exchange), then switch to symmetric encryption for data.

• Certificate Authority (CA) — a trusted third party that issues digital certificates binding a public key to a domain/organization. Browsers ship with a list of trusted root CAs.

  • X.509 — the standard format for public-key certificates used in TLS.

  • Let’s Encrypt — a free, automated, open CA launched 2016 by ISRG; dramatically increased HTTPS adoption.

• Symmetric encryption — the same key encrypts and decrypts; fast; used for bulk data transfer in TLS. Examples: AES-256-GCM.

• Asymmetric encryption — mathematically linked key pair; the public key encrypts (or verifies), private key decrypts (or signs); used in TLS key exchange and signatures. Examples: RSA, ECDH.

• HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) — a header instructing browsers to only connect via HTTPS for a specified duration; prevents downgrade attacks.

• Public-key infrastructure (PKI) — the system of CAs, certificates, and policies that underpins trust on the internet; relies on a hierarchy of root CAs pre-installed in browsers and operating systems.

• Forward secrecy (PFS) — a TLS property ensuring that compromise of a long-term private key does not expose past session keys; achieved via ephemeral Diffie-Hellman key exchange (ECDHE).

• Diffie-Hellman key exchange — a 1976 method (Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman) allowing two parties to establish a shared secret over a public channel without prior shared knowledge; foundational to TLS and modern cryptography.

• Cryptographic libraries
  • OpenSSL — OpenSSL is the widely used open-source cryptographic library that implements SSL and TLS for HTTPS connections. It became infamous after the Heartbleed vulnerability and earlier security mishaps exposed how much of the web depended on it.
• Cryptography
  • Alice and Bob — Alice and Bob are the standard hypothetical participants in cryptography problems, with Eve often acting as the eavesdropper. The names are also used in physics and computer science examples where two generic parties exchange messages or perform calculations.

Security Concepts and Attacks

• HTTPS adoption metrics — browser telemetry documented a transition to majority-HTTPS browsing around 2017. HTTPS percentages depend on the browser, population, and measurement unit: a share of page loads is not a share of all global traffic bytes, and measurements from different browsers need not cross 50% on the same date.¹

• Network Defense and Encrypted Access

  • Firewall — hardware or software that filters network traffic based on rules (IP, port, protocol); stateful firewalls track connection state. Firewalls may be stateful, application-level, packet-filtering, or proxy-based; they block unauthorized or unwanted traffic between networks and are used in both home and business settings. China’s “Great Firewall” is a famous example.

  • VPN (Virtual Private Network) — encrypts traffic and tunnels it through a server, masking the user’s IP and protecting data on untrusted networks.

  • Zero Trust architecture — a security model that eliminates the concept of a trusted internal network; every request must be authenticated and authorized regardless of origin; popularized by Google’s BeyondCorp.

  • Anonymity networks
    • Tor — Tor is anonymity software that routes internet traffic through multiple relays to obscure a user’s source address. The name is also a homonym for a rocky hill and is the source of the term used for the Tor network and browser.
  • Internet privacy and security
    • VPNs — VPNs, or virtual private networks, let users route their internet traffic through another network as if they were on a private connection. They are often used to access blocked sites or to make online activity appear to come from another country.
  • Internet security
    • Distributed denial of service attack — A distributed denial of service attack overwhelms a target by recruiting many compromised computers to flood it with traffic.
  • Internet privacy and anonymity
    • anonymity — Anonymity is the condition of being unidentifiable, especially in communication and data protection. Clues point to k-anonymity, remailers, mix networks, DC-nets, and Tor as tools or schemes meant to preserve it.
  • Internet privacy
    • Location tracking
      • User’s location — The topic is user location data, including geolocation information gathered by phones and apps. Clues point to Google Timeline, Find My iPhone, CSLI, and the Carpenter v. United States decision.
• Attacks, Vulnerabilities, and Online Deception

  • DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) — overwhelming a server/network with traffic from many sources to make it unavailable.

  • SQL injection — inserting malicious SQL into input fields to manipulate a database; one of the most common and dangerous web vulnerabilities. Prepared statements and careful escaping are common defenses against these attacks, which are exemplified by the “Bobby Tables” joke.

  • XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) — injecting malicious scripts into web pages viewed by other users; exploits the browser’s trust in the site.

  • CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) — tricks a user’s browser into making unwanted requests to a site where they are authenticated.

  • Phishing — social engineering via fake emails or websites to steal credentials or install malware.

  • Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) — attacker intercepts communication between two parties; HTTPS/TLS mitigates this.

  • Zero-day exploit — a vulnerability unknown to the software vendor; attackers can exploit it before a patch is available; high-value zero-days are sold for millions on gray and black markets.

  • Ransomware — malware that encrypts a victim’s files and demands payment (typically cryptocurrency) for the decryption key; high-profile attacks include WannaCry (2017, exploited EternalBlue/NSA leak) and NotPetya (2017).
    • WannaCry — WannaCry is the ransomware worm that spread widely in 2017 by encrypting Windows machines and demanding bitcoin payments. The attack was widely attributed to North Korea and became one of the best-known global cyber incidents of that year.

  • Botnet — a network of compromised machines (bots/zombies) controlled by an attacker (botmaster) via a command-and-control server; used for DDoS, spam, and credential stuffing. The malware may connect through IRC so the operator can issue real-time commands to many machines at once.

  • Social engineering — manipulating people rather than systems to gain unauthorized access; phishing, vishing (voice), and pretexting are subtypes; the human is consistently the weakest link.

  • Cybercrime
    • Hacktivist groups
      • The Syrian Electronic Army — The Syrian Electronic Army is a pro-Assad hacking group known for hijacking social media accounts and spreading propaganda. It was tied to attacks such as a fake White House bombing story and the manipulation of links posted from Barack Obama’s Twitter account.
  • Computer worms
    • Code Red — Code Red was a notorious computer worm that attacked Microsoft IIS servers in the early 2000s. Infected machines displayed the message “Hacked by Chinese,” making the worm one of the best-known Internet security incidents of its era.
  • Malware
    • Spyware — Spyware is software that secretly gathers information about a user’s activity and transmits it to another party. It is often bundled with freeware or shareware and may be associated with adware, cookies, or other intrusive tracking programs.
  • Data privacy scandals
    • Cambridge Analytica — Cambridge Analytica was a British political consulting firm that worked on Donald Trump’s campaign. It became notorious for a data-collection scandal involving Facebook user information gathered through personality quizzes.
  • Human verification tests
    • CAPTCHAs — CAPTCHAs are challenge-response tests used to distinguish humans from computers. Modern versions often use image or text challenges, while newer implementations may rely on background signals such as cookies and mouse movement.
  • Online deception
    • catfishing — Catfishing is the act of deceiving someone online by inventing a false persona, often through social media or dating platforms. The term was popularized by the documentary about Nev Schulman and the hoax involving Manti Te’o.
• Computer security
  • Denial-of-service attacks
    • denial of service — A denial of service attack overwhelms a target with traffic or other requests so it cannot respond normally. The goal is to crash or disable the system by exhausting its resources.

  • hackers — Hackers are people who gain unauthorized access to computer systems, though the term can also cover legitimate security testers. Quizbowl clues often connect them to the Jargon File, white-hat and black-hat distinctions, and the film Hackers.

  • Honeypots
    • Honeypot — A honeypot is a decoy system or scheme designed to lure and monitor hackers. The word also has the ordinary meaning of something attractive or a large amount of money.
• Cybersecurity
  • IP spoofing — IP spoofing is a form of intrusion in which a machine forges the source address of its packets. It is used to impersonate a trusted host and gain unauthorized access.
• hacking
  • Mafiaboy — Mafiaboy was the online alias of a Canadian teenager linked to several website attacks in 2000. The nickname became associated with a high-profile hacking case that drew attention to early denial-of-service attacks.
• Hacktivism
  • Anonymous — Anonymous is the loosely organized hacktivist collective that grew out of 4chan’s /b/ board. It is associated with attacks on the Church of Scientology, the use of Guy Fawkes masks, and denial-of-service tools such as LOIC and HOIC.

Cloud Infrastructure and Data Centers

Build on addressing and transport to understand distributed service infrastructure and delivery.

• Cloud computing — delivering computing resources (servers, storage, databases, software) over the internet on demand; IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service, e.g., AWS EC2) provides raw virtual machines; PaaS (Platform as a Service, e.g., Heroku) provides a deployment platform; SaaS (Software as a Service, e.g., Gmail, Salesforce) provides finished applications.

• Data center — a facility housing thousands of servers, networking equipment, and storage; organized into racks and rows; requires massive power, cooling, and redundancy infrastructure; hyperscale data centers (Google, Amazon, Meta) span millions of square feet.

• CDN (Content Delivery Network) — geographically distributed servers that cache and serve content closer to users; reduces latency and origin server load.

• Cloud computing services
  • Amazon Web Services — Amazon Web Services, or AWS, is Amazon’s cloud-computing subsidiary. It provides services such as EC2, S3, Lambda, and DynamoDB, and it dominates the cloud market alongside Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
• Cloud storage services
  • Dropbox — Dropbox is a cloud storage and file-sharing service founded by Drew Houston. It became known for sync-based file access, sharing links, and early controversies over deduplication and account security.
• Distributed computing
  • @Home (“at home”) — This is the @home suffix used by distributed-computing projects such as Folding@Home and Rosetta@Home. The name became associated with large-scale volunteer protein-folding work and with the old Excite subsidiary of the same name.

Communication, Search, and Publishing

Compare communication and publishing services by what they do.

Online Communication

• Instant messaging apps
  • WhatsApp — WhatsApp is a messaging app owned by Facebook’s parent company Meta, and it has been implicated in allegations about spyware attacks and misinformation. It was blamed in part for lynchings in India and became a focus of fact-checking efforts there.
• Instant messaging services
  • AOL Instant Messenger — AOL Instant Messenger, or AIM, was an America Online chat program. It became known for a security flaw discovered by Matthew Conover shortly after release. It was a popular real-time communication tool and later received an AOL Time Warner patent.
• Team collaboration software
  • Slack — Slack is a workplace chat platform founded by Stewart Butterfield after the failure of the game startup Tiny Speck. It organizes communication through channels and became a major enterprise messaging service alongside competitors such as Mattermost.

• Telegram — Telegram is the cloud-based messaging app founded by Nikolai and Pavel Durov, known for secret chats and the MTProto protocol. It has also been used by protest movements such as Nexta and has drawn attention for its role in extremist recruiting and political scandals.

• Video chat services

  • Chatroulette — Chatroulette is an online video chat service created by Andrey Ternovskiy that randomly pairs users through their webcams. It became notorious for chaotic encounters and for references in shows and performances by celebrities and comedians.

  • Skype — Skype is Microsoft’s internet calling and video chat service, bought by Microsoft in 2011 for billions of dollars. It appears in the horror film Unfriended and was later overshadowed in everyday use by Zoom.

• Internet telephony
  • VoIP — VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol, is internet-based telephony that routes phone calls as data packets over broadband networks instead of the traditional telephone system. It is used by services such as Skype and other internet calling applications and is known for low cost, though it can suffer from delay, packet loss, and echo.
• messaging apps
  • WeChat — WeChat, also called Weixin, is Tencent’s Chinese superapp that began as a messaging service. It has drawn attention for being used by Chinese Americans for contact abroad and for censorship and fraud-related controversies.
• Video chat websites
  • www.Chatroulette.com — Chatroulette is the random videochat website founded by Andrey Ternovskiy. Its notoriety came from pairing strangers on webcam, with users and celebrities alike using it as a novelty and prank platform.

Search and Portals

• Search engine — indexes the web via crawlers; major milestones: AltaVista (1995), Yahoo (1995), Google (1998); Google dominates with ~90% market share as of the mid-2020s.

• PageRank — the algorithm developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford (1998) that scores web pages by the number and quality of inbound links; the foundation of Google’s search engine. Its iterative form relies on a damping factor and is closely tied to the stationary distribution of a graph.

• News aggregation websites
  • Fark.com — Fark.com is a news-aggregation and humor site founded by Drew Curtis, built around user-submitted headlines on real news and “not news.” It became known for greenlighting submissions, Photoshop contests, and recurring joke phrases in headlines.
• News aggregators
  • Drudge Report — The Drudge Report is a conservative news aggregation website founded by Matt Drudge. It became famous for breaking the Monica Lewinsky scandal and for its stark, text-heavy front page.
• Ask.com — Ask.com is a search engine originally launched as Ask Jeeves, a question-and-answer search site that later dropped its butler mascot. It became known for search features like Smart Answers and for encouraging users to phrase searches as questions.
  • Ask Jeeves — Ask Jeeves was an early question-based search engine created by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen. Its butler mascot made it one of the first internet advertising figures to appear as a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon.
• Google
  • Google Earth — Google Earth is Google’s satellite-imagery and 3D mapping service, originally developed from the Keyhole program. It is used for navigation, discovery, and visualizing places on Earth, the Moon, and Mars.
• Web discovery services
  • StumbleUpon — StumbleUpon was a web-discovery service that randomly directed users to pages matching their interests. It was acquired by eBay, later declined, and was eventually replaced by Mix.

• Delicious — Delicious was the social bookmarking site acquired by Yahoo in 2005. Its later redesign dropped the stylized dot-heavy domain name and simplified the branding.

• Web portals

  • Yahoo! — Yahoo! is the internet company founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo as Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web. It became a major web portal and email service, and later drew attention for acquisitions like Flickr as well as controversies over sharing user data with Chinese authorities.

  • Go.com — Go.com, also called the Go Network, was Disney’s web portal project that bundled properties like ABC News and ESPN. It became a notorious money loser and was later abandoned after Disney announced major charges and layoffs.

  • Newgrounds.com — Newgrounds.com is the Flash-era web portal founded by Tom Fulp that became known for games, animation, and user-submitted content. It published titles such as Alien Hominid, Madness Interactive, Meat Boy, and the Henry Stickmin series, and its logo is a tank.

  • Yahoo! Inc — Yahoo! Inc. is the web portal company founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo and long associated with search, email, and GeoCities. It later became a major internet brand under leaders such as Carol Bartz and Marissa Mayer.

Web Publishing

• Anti-abortion activism
  • The Nuremburg Files — The Nuremberg Files was an anti-abortion website that became the subject of major litigation brought by Planned Parenthood.
• Creepypasta characters
  • Jeff the Killer — Jeff the Killer is a creepypasta character depicted as a disfigured young man with a carved smile and eyelids cut away. The character is associated with revenge killings, burns, and a white-faced image with red lips and no eyelids.

• Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared — Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared is a British musical horror web series that looks like a children’s puppet show before turning surreal and gruesome. Its recurring images include Green Is Not a Creative Colour, Malcolm the King of Love, and characters such as Red Guy and Yellow Guy.

• Fandom
  • fanfiction — Fanfiction is amateur fiction written about preexisting characters, settings, or media, often posted serially online. Common subtypes include real-person fiction, self-insert stories, and alternate-universe or shipping-focused works.
• Flash animation
  • JibJab — JibJab is a web animation site and internet animation studio founded by the Spiridellis brothers, known for Flash satire and rapid-fire satirical montages packed with celebrity and political caricature. It drew major attention for election parodies such as This Land, which featured George W. Bush and John Kerry to the tune of Woody Guthrie.
• Flash websites
  • Newgrounds — Newgrounds is a long-running web community known for Flash animations, games, and user-submitted content. It helped launch works like Salad Fingers, Friday Night Funkin’, and the Henry Stickmin series, and its old logo featured a man in a tank.
• Internet animation
  • John Kricfalusi — John Kricfalusi is the animator behind Ren & Stimpy and the creator of The Goddamn George Liquor Program. He is associated with the Spumco studio and with early web animation experiments.
• Internet publishing
  • blogs — Blogs are online journals or commentary forums that can range from economics commentary to literary fiction embedded as posts. Clues may mention Paul Krugman, Greg Mankiw, or a novel structured around blog entries and blog-like writing.

    • blog — A blog is a personal web log, usually updated with short posts in reverse chronological order. Early examples included political and personal sites such as the ones associated with LiveJournal and MySpace.

    • blogosphere — The blogosphere is the collective term for the world of blogs and blog readers. The term was popularized by William Quick, who used it for the entire blogging community.

    • Fleshbot — Fleshbot is a sex blog associated with Gawker Media that covers pornography and sex culture online. It has offered separate Straight and Gay sections, and Dashiell Bennett was once its head editor.

    • Washingtonienne — Washingtonienne is the blog pseudonym used by Congressional aide Jessica Cutler. The blog became notorious for detailing her affairs and encounters with Washington, D.C. power players, leading to widespread media attention.

• Media bloggers
  • Jim Romenesko — Jim Romenesko is a media blogger and former newspaper and magazine writer known for MediaNews.org and ObscureStore.com. He became a prominent figure in media gossip and journalism-watch reporting after work with Poynter and earlier newspaper jobs.
• Web series
  • animated comedy
    • Llamas With Hats — Llamas With Hats is a black comedy web series from FilmCow about the increasingly unhinged relationship between Paul and Carl. Across its short run, the series escalates from absurd domestic violence to apocalypse and ends with a fatal fall from the San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge.
  • machinima
    • Red vs. Blue — This long-running Rooster Teeth web series centers on a comedic war between the Red and Blue teams and helped popularize machinima. Its early premise comes from an argument over why a military vehicle is called a Warthog when some think it looks more like a puma.
  • tabletop role-playing web series
    • Critical Role — Critical Role is a tabletop roleplaying web series led by Dungeon Master Matthew Mercer and performed by voice actors. It began as a Dungeons & Dragons campaign on Twitch and later inspired The Legend of Vox Machina.
  • Travel competition series
    • Jet Lag: The Game — Jet Lag: The Game is a travel-based web series in which Sam, Ben, and Adam compete in elaborate games while moving across different countries and time zones. Its seasons have featured tag, law-breaking challenges, and other traveling competitions across Europe and the United States.
• Webcomics

  • Achewood — Achewood is a Chris Onstad webcomic set in the fictional town of the same name and centered on Ray Smuckles and his circle of oddball characters. It is known for absurd recurring plot lines, the Great Outdoor Fight, and characters such as Roast Beef Kazenzakis and Philippe.

  • Axe Cop — Axe Cop is a webcomic and animated series created by Malachi Nicolle with art by his brother Ethan Nicolle. Its title character is a wildly absurd crime fighter accompanied by characters such as Flute Cop and Sockarang.

  • Ctrl-Alt-Del — Ctrl-Alt-Del is a webcomic by Tim Buckley featuring characters such as Ethan, Lilah, and Lucas. Its title comes from the keyboard shortcut, and the strip became known for gaming and internet-culture satire.

  • Dark-humor webcomics
    • Cyanide and Happiness — Cyanide and Happiness is a dark-humor webcomic hosted on Explosm.net and associated with Kris Wilson, Rob DenBleyker, and Dave McElfatrick. It began as crude cartoons made by Kris Wilson and became known for bald, minimalist characters and absurdly bleak jokes.

  • Hyperbole and a Half — Hyperbole and a Half is Allie Brosh’s blog and webcomic, known for crude drawings, autobiographical humor, and posts about depression. It later became a book and included the viral Alot comic.

  • newspaper comic strips
    • Dilbert — Dilbert is Scott Adams’s comic strip about a technically competent but socially powerless office worker in Silicon Valley. It features the Pointy-Haired Boss, coworkers like Alice, Wally, and Asok, and recurring satirical settings such as the fictional country of Elbonia.

  • Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is Zach Weinersmith’s gag-a-day webcomic, known for jokes about science, atheism, and economics. Its strips often feature recurring one-off scenarios, absurd satire, and deadpan punch lines rather than a fixed cast.

  • Sluggy Freelance — Sluggy Freelance is Pete Abrams’s long-running webcomic about Torg, Riff, Bun-Bun, and their absurd science-fiction adventures. Its recurring gimmicks include the Dimension of Pain, time travel, parallel universes, and a vicious rabbit named Bun-Bun.

  • User Friendly — User Friendly is a webcomic by J. D. “Illiad” Fraser set around the small ISP Columbia Internet. Its cast includes Dust Puppy and a group of Linux-loving tech workers, and the strip is known for its software and internet jokes.

  • Webtoon — Webtoon is a South Korean digital-comics format usually designed for smartphone reading and vertical scrolling. It also names a major webcomic platform that hosts series such as Tower of God, Heartstopper, and I Want to Be a Cute Anime Girl.

  • Diesel Sweeties — Diesel Sweeties is a webcomic by R. Stevens featuring a cast that includes Clango Cyclotron, Lil’ Sis, Maura, and Pale Suzie. Its deadpan strip humor and online-first popularity helped it build a fanbase before print publication.

  • Questionable Content — Questionable Content is a long-running webcomic by Jeph Jacques about Marten Reed, Faye, Dora Bianchi, and a cast of hipster and robot characters. It features Coffee of Doom, AnthroPCs like Pintsize and Momo, and supporting characters such as Tai, Hannelore, and Pizza Girl.
• Weebl
  • Badger Badger
    • BadgerBadgerBadger.com — BadgerBadgerBadger.com is the website for Weebl’s looping flash cartoon about badgers, mushrooms, and a snake. The animation became famous for its repeating chant and many parody versions set in different locations.
• Whistleblowing organization
  • WikiLeaks — WikiLeaks is the organization founded by Julian Assange that publishes leaked and restricted documents online. It became famous for releases such as the Iraq War Logs, the Afghan War Diary, Cablegate, and the Collateral Murder video.

    • Julian Assange — Australian founder of WikiLeaks, which released large caches of diplomatic cables and other classified material. He adopted the alias Mendax as a teenager, later helped release U.S. diplomatic cables in 2010, and the leaks associated with Chelsea Manning helped make WikiLeaks prominent. He gave a 2010 talk titled “Why the World Needs Wikileaks.” He became a public figure after seeking asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London amid Swedish sexual-assault allegations, and was later remanded at Belmarsh after leaving the embassy.

    • Wikileaks.org — WikiLeaks is the whistleblowing website founded by Julian Assange that publishes leaked documents and videos. It is known for releases such as Collateral Murder and the Afghan War Diary.

• Wikis
  • Conservapedia — Conservapedia is a conservative wiki founded by Andrew Schlafly as an anti-Wikipedia project. It is known for strongly right-wing editorial stances on topics such as evolution, feminism, atheism, and homosexuality.
• fan fiction — Fan fiction is nonprofessional writing that borrows characters or settings from existing media and reworks them into new stories. It is strongly associated with Archive of Our Own, slash fiction, and tropes like Mary Sue and the Omegaverse.
  • My Immortal — My Immortal is the notoriously inept Harry Potter fan fiction by Tara Gilesbie that imagines a goth vampire romance involving Ebony and Draco Malfoy. It shares its title with an Evanescence song and became famous as an internet absurdity.
    • Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way — Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way is the absurdly named protagonist of the fan fiction My Immortal. She is portrayed as a goth, bisexual vampire involved with Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy.

• Harry Potter fanfiction — Harry Potter fanfiction is a broad category of fan works based on J. K. Rowling’s series, ranging from parody to elaborate alternate-universe stories. Common references include notorious examples like My Immortal and the better-known Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

• Blogging platforms
  • Blogger.com — Blogger.com is Google’s blogging platform, originally created by Pyra Labs in 1999. It later added photo-posting features through integration with Picasa and underwent major redesigns before a 2006 beta.
• Blogs and online journals
  • LiveJournal — LiveJournal is the blogging and online diary platform founded by Brad Fitzpatrick in 1999. It became known for invite-based growth, the Frank the Goat mascot, and later ownership changes involving Six Apart and SUP Media.
• Celebrity bloggers
  • Rance — Rance is the name of an anonymous celebrity blogger whose identity was being speculated about in the clue. The framing suggests a gossip or internet persona rather than a clearly established public figure.
• Celebrity gossip bloggers
  • Perez Hilton — Perez Hilton is the celebrity gossip blogger and website operator behind perezhilton.com, known for posting crude, heavily marked-up photos and for his public feuds and lawsuits. He is also associated with reality-TV appearances, including judging Miss USA 2009 and other television cameo work.
• Content management systems
  • Wordpress — WordPress is a widely used content management system and blogging platform created by Matt Mullenweg and Automattic. It became known for its plugin ecosystem, version names drawn from jazz musicians, and competition with systems like Drupal and Movable Type.
• newspapers — Newspapers are periodicals, including broadsheets, that present news, features, and serialized writing and are part of journalism and the press. They became major vehicles for political argument, libel cases, and headline reporting; examples include colonial papers such as The New York Weekly Journal, the Zenger trial, and Soviet papers like Pravda and Izvestiya, whose editors and mastheads became politically significant. They are also associated with the Hearst empire in Citizen Kane.
  • Le Figaro — Le Figaro is a French newspaper with a conservative reputation whose name comes from Beaumarchais’s Figaro. It is also identified as the paper read in portraits by Mary Cassatt and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
• Online journalism
  • Nonprofit newsrooms
    • ProPublica — This nonprofit investigative newsroom publishes data-driven reporting on corruption, public spending, institutional misconduct, tax avoidance, immigration, and government policy. It became the first online news source to win a Pulitzer Prize and broke stories such as the Secret IRS Files and reporting on gifts to Justice Clarence Thomas from Harlan Crow.
• Online magazines

  • Salon Magazine — An online magazine and news site associated with liberal commentary and web journalism. Under editor David Talbot it described itself as a smart tabloid, and it featured sections such as Ivory Tower and Mothers Who Think. It became well known for coverage of the Henry Hyde and Bill Clinton affair controversy. In the early 2000s it expanded with premium subscriptions and Daypass access, and it had ties to online communities including The WELL and Table Talk.

  • Slate — Online magazine launched by Microsoft in 1996 and later acquired by the Washington Post. It covers politics, culture, and opinion, and became known for features such as the counterintuitive “pitches,” “Dear Prudence,” “Today’s Papers,” “The Breakfast Table,” and “The Book Club.” It was positioned as an online rival to Salon, had early internet experiments under Michael Kinsley, and later produced podcasts through the Panoply network. Slate also once had a print edition sold at Starbucks, and its contributors have included Christopher Hitchens, William Saletan, Jacob Weisberg, and Michael Kinsley.

• Online media
  • blog networks
    • Gawker Media — Gawker Media was Nick Denton’s blog network and internet media company, best known for properties such as Gizmodo, Deadspin, and Jezebel. It became widely associated with the Gamergate-era backlash over its gossip-driven reporting and celebrity coverage.

      • Defamer — Defamer was a Los Angeles-based entertainment gossip blog and one of the Gawker Media sites. It covered Hollywood rumors through features such as Blind Item Guessing Game and PrivacyWatch.

      • Gawker.com — Gawker.com was the flagship site of Gawker Media, known for Manhattan media gossip and the slogan about reporting live from the center of the universe. It became especially associated with early coverage of the Rob Ford crack tape and the broader rise of snarky blog journalism.

• Online media companies
  • BuzzFeed — BuzzFeed is an online media company known for viral lists, quizzes, web video, and pop-culture reporting. It later developed a news division whose journalism first published the Steele dossier and won a Pulitzer for reporting on detention facilities in Xinjiang. BuzzFeed also expanded into broader entertainment and film production, including BuzzFeed Studios and projects like Dear David, and its programming included Try Guys and puppy interviews.
• Online publishing
  • online — This describes material published on the Internet rather than in print, including fan fiction posted electronically. It also fits the anonymous-circulation setting in a Kelly Clarkson song lyric about a girl being cooler in that place.
• Political blogs
  • Wonkette — Wonkette is Ana Marie Cox’s irreverent Washington-focused blog. It became known for gossip and inside-the-Beltway political commentary, including coverage of Capitol Hill scandals.
• Public radio
  • National Public Radio — National Public Radio is the American nonprofit public radio network behind programs such as Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Here and Now, and Fresh Air. It is listener-supported and distributes or produces shows including This American Life, A Prairie Home Companion, Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!, Planet Money, Car Talk, and Tiny Desk Concerts.
• Publishing
  • Underground publishing
    • samizdat — Samizdat was the underground self-publishing of censored works in the Soviet Union and other Communist states. Dissidents used it to circulate banned literature and evade official press restrictions.
• Quote websites
  • Bash.org — Bash.org is a website known as the Quote Database, where IRC and other chat logs are submitted and voted on. Its name became internet slang for the act of drawing on humorous chat quotes from the site.

• Sci-Hub — Sci-Hub is an online shadow library created by Alexandra Elbakyan that provides access to academic papers. It became notorious after legal challenges over copyright and for its role in promoting free access to scholarly research.

• Tech news websites
  • Slashdot — Slashdot is a tech news website founded in 1997 by Rob Malda, known as CmdrTaco, and associated with the slogan “News for nerds. Stuff that matters.” It is known for geek-oriented coverage, user comments, moderation and karma systems, Anonymous Cowards, and the “Slashdot effect,” when a linked site is overwhelmed by a surge of traffic.
• Digital image archives
  • Corbis — Corbis is a digital image and media archive company backed by Bill Gates. It became known for assembling a massive visual collection, including famous artworks and archival photographs, for online distribution and licensing.
• Digital libraries

  • JSTOR — JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals whose name abbreviates Journal Storage. It became especially visible in 2013-era debates over access to scholarly articles, and it later opened some content to users without accounts.

  • Project Gutenberg — Project Gutenberg is Michael S. Hart’s volunteer-run digital library, founded in 1971, that makes public-domain texts freely available online in plain text. Its holdings include classic literature by authors such as Shakespeare, Dante, and Poe, as well as reference works and many other public-domain documents. It is a model for later national public-domain archives.

• Fanfiction archives
  • Archive of Our Own — Archive of Our Own, or AO3, is a free fanfiction archive launched to keep fanworks noncommercial and accessible. The site hosts millions of works across thousands of fandoms and is a major alternative to FanFiction.net and Wattpad.

• Homestuck — Homestuck is Andrew Hussie’s long-running webcomic, famous for its immense length, flash animation, and cast of trolls with gray skin and multicolored horns. It follows characters playing a game that remakes reality, and Toby Fox contributed music to its broader multimedia world.

• Nicholas Gurewitch
  • The Perry Bible Fellowship — Perry Bible Fellowship is a black-humor webcomic by Nicholas Gurewitch, noted for minimalist characters and strips that often juxtapose childish or cute setups with morbid, abrupt punch lines. Its title comes from a Maine church, and it was collected in The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories.
• Ryan North
  • Dinosaur Comics — Dinosaur Comics is Ryan North’s webcomic built from the same six-panel art every day, with T-Rex, Utahraptor, and Dromiceiomimus trading dialogue. Its recurring oddball cameos include God and the Devil speaking in all caps.
• The Brothers Chaps
  • Homestar Runner — Homestar Runner is the title character of the Flash cartoon universe created by the Brothers Chaps, whose web page became a cult favorite. He is usually shown in a red-and-blue propeller cap and interacts with characters such as Strong Bad, The Cheat, and Marzipan.

    • Homestarrunner.com — Homestarrunner.com is the Flash-animation website best known for Strong Bad Emails and its cast of surreal cartoon characters. The site grew from a children’s-book concept into one of the most famous early internet animations. Related clues often mention Trogdor, Teen Girl Squad, and Strong Bad.

    • Strong Bad — Strong Bad is the masked Homestar Runner character who answers email, wears boxing gloves, and hangs out with The Cheat. He is a recurring internet-cartoon antagonist whose catchphrases and game spin-offs make him a standard pop-culture clue.

• Randall Munroe — Randall Munroe is the creator of xkcd, the webcomic known for stick figures, mathematical jokes, and absurdly precise internet humor. His work also includes the What If? series and widely cited comics such as “Little Bobby Tables.”

• xkcd
  • Wikipedian Protester
    • Citation Needed — “Citation Needed” is the phrase shown on a sign in xkcd’s Wikipedian Protester strip. It is used online as a request for a source or verification.
• xkcd characters
  • Black Hat Guy — Black Hat Guy is the mischievous xkcd character who carries out sadistic pranks and other absurd schemes. He is the one associated with nerd sniping, the “Secretary of the Internet” bit, and the recurring black-hat hacker look.
• Online film databases
  • IMDb — IMDb, the Internet Movie Database, is an online film reference site with extensive cast, crew, and ranking information. Its famous Top 250 list, celebrity photos, and movie pages made it one of the best-known entertainment databases on the web.
• Online music publications
  • Pitchfork Media — Pitchfork Media is an online music publication known for reviewing indie and alternative rock and for both championing and snobbishly panning new artists. It became influential through its reviews and festival sponsorships, and its “Best New Music” picks helped boost acts like Arcade Fire and Run the Jewels.
• NPR Music
  • NPR Music Tiny Desk Concerts — NPR Music Tiny Desk Concerts is a video series of short, intimate live performances, usually staged in a cramped office-like setting. It was sparked by NPR editor Stephen Thompson’s suggestion to Bob Boilen and has featured artists ranging from Adele and Anderson .Paak to Mac Miller and Lizzo. The series is associated with Bob Boilen, host of NPR’s music show All Songs Considered, and uses a small audience rather than a formal concert hall.
• Satirical news
  • The Onion — The Onion is a satirical news website and media company known for parody headlines, recurring stock-photo jokes, and the fictional founder T. Herman Zweibel. It also owns The A.V. Club and is often cited in internet discussions of fake news satire.

• Deadspin — Deadspin is a sports-and-culture website that became known for features like the annual “Why Your Team Sucks” series. Founded by Will Leitch and formerly part of Gawker Media, it broke major stories including the Manti Te’o hoax and later saw much of its staff depart to form Defector.

• ESPN

  • ESPN Deportes — ESPN Deportes is ESPN’s Spanish-language network, launched in 2004. Its name simply means “ESPN sports” in Spanish.

  • Grantland.com — Grantland was the ESPN-owned web publication edited by Bill Simmons. It featured contributors such as Jay Caspian Kang and Chuck Klosterman and was named after sportswriter Grantland Rice.

• Parody encyclopedias
  • Uncyclopedia — Uncyclopedia is a parody encyclopedia modeled on Wikipedia, with a potato-themed logo and a deliberately absurd, joke-filled style. It is known for satirical quotations and mock-articles that imitate encyclopedia entries while undercutting their authority.
• Wikimedia projects
  • English Wikipedia — English Wikipedia is the large free online encyclopedia run by the Wikimedia Foundation. Clues about crowd-sourced reliability studies, editor demographics, and the Wikimedia scanner point to the English-language version of Wikipedia.
• Wikipedia
  • Jimmy Wales — Jimmy Wales co-founded Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation with Larry Sanger. He previously founded Bomis and later expanded the encyclopedia project into Wikipedia.
    • Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales — Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales is the co-founder of Wikipedia and the associated online encyclopedia project. He first made his name through Bomis and later became known for public fundraising appeals and disputes over how the site’s history was described.
• Calvin and Hobbes
  • Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie — Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie is the fake children’s book Calvin loves in Calvin and Hobbes. Its sequel is jokingly attributed to Mabel Syrup, and the title became a minor internet hoax when a supposed edition appeared for sale online.
• Encyclopedias
  • Citizendium — Citizendium is an online encyclopedia founded by Larry Sanger after his departure from Wikipedia. It emphasizes real-name registration and expert-approved articles rather than anonymous editing.
• Gossip websites
  • Gawker — Gawker was a Manhattan-focused gossip and media website that became a major blogging-era media brand. It is especially associated with Deadspin and Jezebel, and became notorious after the Hulk Hogan lawsuit over a sex tape.
• Government websites
  • HealthCare.gov — HealthCare.gov is the federal website used to sign up for Affordable Care Act insurance plans. It became famous for technical failures at its launch before being repaired by outside contractors and government technologists.
• Journalism
  • Anderson Cooper — CNN anchor and journalist who hosts Anderson Cooper 360. He is the son of Gloria Vanderbilt, began at Channel One, worked for ABC before joining cable news, graduated from Yale, has covered major disasters, hosted The Mole, and has also been a correspondent for 60 Minutes.
• Magazines
  • Esquire — Esquire is an American men’s magazine long associated with literary journalism and fiction. It published works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, and later fiction edited by Gordon Lish.
• Online comics and tracts
  • Jack Chick — Jack Thomas Chick was a fundamentalist Christian cartoonist and pamphleteer behind Chick Publications and the aggressively anti-Catholic, anti-occult pamphlets known as Chick tracts. His works include This Was Your Life and culture-war comics such as Dark Dungeons and The Nervous Witch, and they also attack freemasonry, evolution, and other targets in a stark, paranoid style.
• online writing styles
  • all caps — All caps is the writing style in which every letter is capitalized. The packet notes its use for emphasis online and its association with shouting, as well as examples in music titles and artists’ names.
• Reference works
  • Guinness World Records — The reference work was first published in 1955 to settle pub arguments and was originally edited by the McWhirter twins. It tracks extremes such as the tallest, shortest, largest, and smallest examples, and the organization certifies feats ranging from human records to extreme natural occurrences. It is associated with official certificates and the familiar gold-star logo, and began after a brewery-related argument about the golden plover.
• recap websites
  • Televisionwithoutpity.com — Television Without Pity was a television recap and discussion website known for sharp, sarcastic episode writeups and active forums. It was associated with writers like Tara Ariano and Pamela Ribon and used Tubey as its mascot.
• Software development platforms
  • GitHub — GitHub is the online code-hosting platform centered on repositories, pull requests, and collaboration around software development. It became a major Microsoft-owned service and is often paired with tools like GitHub Pages and Gist.
• webcomics creators

  • Chris Crosby — Chris Crosby is a webcomics creator known for Superosity and for founding Keenspot Entertainment. His own strip features a cape-wearing idiot, a scheming teenager, a pink turtle, and other recurring oddball characters.

  • Pete Abrams — Pete Abrams is the creator of the webcomic Sluggy Freelance. The prompt asks for a web-based comic strip from its artist and hints at a character list, which fits that strip’s quizbowl profile.

Online Services

• Online services

  • Cameo — Cameo is a website where users pay celebrities for personalized video messages and shoutouts. It has been referenced in celebrity fundraising and prank-related anecdotes involving figures such as Caitlyn Jenner, Chris Hansen, and Ms. Rachel.

  • Early online services

    • CompuServe — CompuServe was an early online service and internet provider known for features such as CB Simulator, GIF development, and the WorldsAway virtual environment. It later became a rival and eventually an acquisition target of AOL, while its consumer service WOW! was a notable failure.
• Crowdsourcing platforms
  • Amazon Mechanical Turk — Amazon Mechanical Turk is Amazon’s crowdsourcing platform for paying workers to complete Human Intelligence Tasks. It takes its name from the famous chess-playing automaton, and researchers often use it to collect survey and experiment data.
• Internet advertising
  • Commercial campaign
    • FreeCreditReport.com — FreeCreditReport.com is a consumer-credit website known for its catchy commercials and musical ads. Its campaign featured a waiter who sang about bad credit, living in his girlfriend’s parents’ basement, and selling his subcompact car.
• Internet archiving
  • Internet Archive — The Internet Archive is the nonprofit digital library that hosts Open Library and the Wayback Machine. It opened portions of its collections for public access in 2020 and also preserves large book and media archives.
• Internet companies
  • Starwave — Starwave was a Disney-related web and digital media company associated with ESPN SportsZone and early online search and directory projects. It appears in old computer-technology questions about the growth of internet properties in the 1990s.
• Internet file sharing
  • Megaupload
    • Kim Dotcom — Kim Dotcom is the internet entrepreneur behind Megaupload, later known for legal troubles in New Zealand over copyright and money-laundering charges. Quizbowl clues often mention his many aliases, his extravagant online persona, and the successor service he launched after Megaupload.
• Internet marketing
  • clickbait — Clickbait is online content designed to attract traffic by using sensational or misleading headlines. It is often associated with low-quality viral websites that prioritize ad revenue and attention over substance.
• Job search websites

  • HotJobs — HotJobs was a career website that was purchased by Yahoo for $436 million.

  • Monster.com — Monster.com is a job-search website created from a merger and known for a green mascot with an open mouth. It was advertised with children listing career frustrations like being a yes-man or having a brown nose.

• Mobile apps
  • Photo editing apps
    • FaceApp — FaceApp is a photo-editing app whose viral filters include an old-age effect and beauty transformations. It drew attention for its terms of service and for concerns that user photos were being used for data collection.
  • HQ Trivia — HQ Trivia is the live trivia app developed by Vine creators Colin Kroll and Rus Yusupov. Hosted for much of its run by Scott Rogowsky, it became known for eliminations, viral clips, and a short-lived expansion into spin-off formats.
• Napster
  • Shawn Fanning — Shawn Fanning is the programmer who created Napster as a college student. He became famous as the young founder and president of the file-sharing service.
• Translation services
  • Babelfish — A babelfish is the tiny alien translator from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The name was later borrowed for a translation service or algorithm associated with AltaVista.
• Web hosting services
  • GeoCities — An early web-hosting service founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner, associated with the domain GeoCities.com. It was known for themed neighborhood-style pages and amateur-looking 1990s personal websites, and Yahoo! bought it in 1999 before shutting it down years later outside Japan.
• Web mapping services
  • Google Maps — Google Maps is Google’s mapping and navigation service, best known for street-view imagery and turn-by-turn directions. It is often paired with Google Earth when questions refer to satellite imagery or map browsing.

• Gnutella — Gnutella is a decentralized peer-to-peer file-sharing network created in 2000. It is known for an early protocol using ping, pong, query, query hit, and push messages.

• Blackboard — A blackboard is a writing surface used in classrooms and other settings, traditionally paired with chalk. The name also appears in the company Blackboard, an educational technology platform used by many universities and school systems.

• Crowdfunding platforms
  • Kickstarter — Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform launched in 2009 that became a major site for creative projects. It funded projects like Exploding Kittens and was used by Joel Hodgson to help revive Mystery Science Theater 3000.
• Classified advertising websites
  • Craigslist — A San Francisco-based website for free online classified ads and community listings, with sections such as housing, jobs, personals, services, and forums. Founded by Craig Newmark and later headed by Jim Buckmaster, it became famous for local classifieds; its personals section was later shut down after FOSTA-SESTA, and it had replaced the adult-services category.
• Daily deals websites
  • Groupon — Groupon is the daily-deals website started by Andrew Mason and launched from Chicago, where it sold local discounts to subscribers. It expanded internationally, bought LivingSocial, and became famous as a model for coupon and local-offer platforms.
• E-commerce apps
  • Temu — Temu is the ultra-discount shopping app and website whose slogan is “Shop Like a Billionaire.” It launched in 2022 and became notorious for aggressive advertising and comparisons to Shein.
• E-commerce companies
  • Amazon.com, Inc. — Amazon.com is the Seattle-based e-commerce and cloud-computing giant founded by Jeff Bezos. It began as an online bookseller and later expanded into services and subsidiaries such as Whole Foods, Twitch, and Alexa-connected devices.
• Online brokerages
  • Robinhood — Robinhood is the online brokerage and trading app that became famous during the 2021 GameStop trading frenzy. It drew criticism for high-volume trading and for payment for order flow to firms such as Citadel.
• Online dating

  • Christian Mingle — Christian Mingle is a dating site aimed at Christian singles looking for like-minded partners. It is often mentioned as a more niche counterpart to mainstream online dating services.

  • Grindr — Grindr is a geosocial dating app aimed primarily at gay men. It became famous for large user numbers, location-based matching, and controversy over access and privacy in various countries.

  • niche dating services

    • FarmersOnly.com — FarmersOnly.com is a rural-focused dating website known for the slogan “City folks just don’t get it” and the jingle “You don’t have to be lonely.” Its ads and publicity have made it a recognizable pop-culture answer.
• Online dating services

  • eHarmony — eHarmony is an online dating site founded by Neil Clark Warren and known for its personality-matching questionnaire. It drew attention for its heterosexual-only policies and later created Compatible Partners for same-sex dating after legal challenges.

  • eHarmony.com — eHarmony is an online dating service that matches users through a compatibility algorithm rather than free browsing. It is associated with Neil Clark Warren and advertising that emphasizes deep compatibility and long-term relationships.

  • Match.com — Match.com is a major online dating site founded by Gary Kremen in 1993. It was once recognized by Guinness as the largest dating site in the world and was later linked to experiments such as Dr. Phil’s MindFindBlind pairing system and accusations about covert employee outreach.

  • OkCupid — OkCupid is a free online dating site created by the founders of SparkNotes, known for its match-percentage system and profile quizzes. It also became known for features and tests such as the UberAlgorithm, Virgin Game, purity tests, and matching compatibility categories like Deliberate Gentle Love Dreamers.

• Online marketplaces for handmade goods
  • Etsy — Etsy is the online marketplace for handmade and craft goods founded by Rob Kalin. It became a major B Corporation and later drew controversy for allowing some manufactured goods and for investor pressure over its business model.
• Online payment systems
  • PayPal — An online payment service formed from the merger of Confinity and X.com. It was founded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, with Elon Musk as one of its cofounders. PayPal lets users send money electronically and was later bought by eBay, becoming a withdrawal option for cashing out online auction earnings.
• Online retailers
  • ThinkGeek.com — ThinkGeek.com was a pop-culture merchandise retailer known for geeky gadgets, novelty clothing, and fandom products. Its site also became famous for humorous April Fool’s Day fake items.
• Online shopping
  • subscription services
    • Amazon Prime — Amazon Prime is Amazon’s paid membership service, launched in 2005, that bundles free two-day shipping with streaming video perks.
• Online travel booking sites

  • Priceline — Priceline is the online travel company that lets customers name their own price for flights, hotel rooms, and rental cars. The evidence emphasizes its rapid growth after opening in 1998 and its success selling travel bookings.

  • Priceline.com — Priceline.com is an online travel booking site known for its “name your own price” model and early ads featuring William Shatner. Its business expanded beyond travel into other consumer categories, and the company later became part of Booking Holdings, which also owns OpenTable and Kayak.

• Peer-to-peer file sharing
  • BitTorrent — BitTorrent is Bram Cohen’s peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol, built around swarms of peers and trackers that distribute files in pieces. Its clients use .torrent metadata and it became widely associated with piracy, large-bandwidth distribution, and software such as Vuze and Tixati.
• Photo-sharing websites
  • Flickr — Flickr is a photo-sharing website founded by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake through their company Ludicorp. It became widely known for tagging and sharing photos before being acquired by Yahoo.
• Photography
  • Selfie — A selfie is a self-taken photograph, usually made with a camera or phone held by the subject, often with the arm extended, a front-facing phone camera, or a selfie stick. The term became especially prominent in social media culture and in references to celebrity or novelty photos. Selfies have also been discussed in relation to narcissism, social media behavior, and studies linking frequent selfie-taking with traits associated with the Dark Triad.
• Real estate websites
  • Zillow — Zillow is an online real-estate company best known for its home-value estimate tool, the Zestimate. It owns Trulia and became notorious for a highly publicized iBuying failure under CEO Rich Barton.
• Rating websites
  • Hotornot.com — Hotornot.com is an early photo-rating website founded by James Hong and Jim Young in 2000. It originally had “Am I” in its title and became known for letting users rate the attractiveness of uploaded pictures.
• Review aggregation websites
  • Rotten Tomatoes — RottenTomatoes.com is a film-review aggregation website that compiles critic reviews into a freshness score. Its Tomatometer classifies films as fresh or rotten based on the percentage of positive reviews.
• BitTorrent trackers
  • The Pirate Bay — The Pirate Bay is a Swedish BitTorrent tracker and file-sharing site known for hosting torrents of unauthorized media and for its ship-and-crossbones logo. It became notorious after a 2006 police raid, inspired its own political party, and once drew attention for mocking cease-and-desist letters. One famous story about it concerns an attempted purchase of Sealand in 2007.
• Pets.com
  • Pets.com sock puppet — The Pets.com sock puppet was the advertising mascot for the now-defunct online pet supply company, created by TBWA Chiat/Day. It became a late-1990s and early-2000s pop-culture joke through appearances at events, in commercials, and in later ads for Bar None.
• File hosting services
  • Megaupload Limited — Megaupload was a defunct file-hosting service founded by Kim Dotcom and incorporated in Hong Kong. Its shutdown in 2012 triggered major legal fallout, including raids in New Zealand and retaliatory action by Anonymous.
• Shopping holidays
  • Singles Day — Singles’ Day is a Chinese shopping holiday held on November 11 and popularized by online retailers such as Alibaba’s Tmall. It is associated with buying gifts for people who are not in relationships and is often traced to student dorm culture in Nanjing.
• Companies
  • GameStop Corp. — GameStop is the video game retailer whose ticker symbol GME became infamous during the 2021 short squeeze and trading frenzy. The company’s stock was heavily discussed on Reddit’s WallStreetBets and was briefly restricted by Robinhood during the surge.
• Dating apps
  • Tinder — Tinder is the dating app known for swipe-based matching and features such as boosts, Swipe Night, and its former Moments service. It originally used the Matchbox name and later became associated with the “Tinder Swindler” documentary.
• dot-com companies
  • CMGI — CMGI was a late-1990s internet and venture-capital company that owned or backed properties such as AltaVista and Lycos. It was also tied to the New England Patriots stadium naming-rights deal.
• Online databases
  • LexisNexis — LexisNexis is a subscription database used heavily by lawyers, journalists, and academics. It provides searchable legal and news records and is part of the RELX corporate family.
• Online entertainment companies
  • Internet Entertainment Group — The Internet Entertainment Group was a Seattle-based company headed by Seth Warshavsky. It became notorious for hosting adult material online and for legal disputes over planned film distribution.
• Online marketplaces
  • Airbnb — Airbnb is the San Francisco-based online marketplace where hosts rent rooms, homes, or experiences to guests. It became controversial for discrimination complaints, rent inflation, and pressure on traditional hotels.
• Prediction markets

  • Hollywood Stock Exchange — Hollywood Stock Exchange is a virtual market where users buy and sell fictional securities based on movies, television, and related entertainment projects.

  • Polymarket — Polymarket is a prediction-market website founded by Shane Coplan that lets users bet on future events. Nate Silver has served as an advisor for the platform.

• Travel websites
  • Expedia.com — Expedia.com is an online travel agency known for its commercials featuring the annoying character Cooper. The ads portray absurd consequences of choosing the wrong travel options.
• Web browser data
  • Cookies — Cookies are small pieces of client-side data stored by a website in a browser, used for state management such as sessions, authentication, login persistence, user preferences, and tracking across websites. They are central to browser logins, privacy settings, advertising networks, and third-party tracking, and are often discussed in relation to CSRF protection, GDPR consent prompts, session hijacking, HTTP-only cookies, and efforts to replace tracking cookies with alternatives such as FLoC.

Social Platforms, Media, and Games

Connect platforms and digital cultures to their underlying services.

Social Media

• Social media companies
  • Meta Platforms, Inc. — Founded by Mark Zuckerberg as Facebook, Inc., the company later renamed itself Meta Platforms, Inc. It owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads. It has faced antitrust scrutiny, misinformation and content-moderation controversies, child-safety rules criticism, and a 2021 outage that took several of its services offline.
• Social media platforms

  • Bluesky — Bluesky is a social media platform built on the AT Protocol and identified by a butterfly logo. It emerged as a competitor to X, with rapid user growth noted in 2024.

  • Truth Social — Truth Social is a social media platform launched in 2022 and associated with Donald Trump’s media company, Trump Media & Technology Group. It drew attention when a post reading “IF YOU COME AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU” led prosecutors to seek a protective order in the election interference case.

  • Twitter.com — Twitter is the microblogging service known for short posts, the fail whale, and its early 140-character limit. It began as an Odeo project before the founders formed Obvious Corporation, and it later acquired Vine.

• Reddit
  • Ellen Pao — Ellen Pao became widely known as interim CEO of Reddit and later as the public face of controversy over the site’s moderation decisions. She had earlier filed a gender discrimination suit against Kleiner Perkins. Her tenure was overshadowed by backlash over subreddit bans and the firing of Victoria Taylor, after which she resigned.
• Reddit account
  • GameStop trading figure
    • u/DeepFuckingValue — u/DeepFuckingValue is the Reddit account used by Keith Gill, whose GameStop commentary helped inspire the 2021 short squeeze. The account became a symbol of the WallStreetBets trading frenzy.
• Reddit mascots
  • Snoo — Snoo is the alien mascot of Reddit, used in customized forms for many subreddits. The mascot’s name sounds like an earlier pre-launch Reddit name.
• Hashtags

  • hashtag — A hashtag is the social-media tag formed with the hash or pound sign, often called the octothorpe. The symbol is widely used online to group posts by topic and is the target of French-language replacement efforts.

  • #BringBackOurGirls — #BringBackOurGirls is a social-media hashtag that drew global attention to the 2014 Boko Haram kidnapping of schoolgirls in Chibok, Nigeria. It became a widely shared slogan of solidarity after Michelle Obama and others used it to highlight the abduction.

• Social networking
  • Blogging platform
    • Xanga — Xanga was an early social networking and blogging site that let users post weblogs, photoblogs, and profiles. It featured eProps, footprints, and blogrings as part of its user community.
  • Social games
    • FarmVille — FarmVille is Zynga’s Facebook farming game, released in 2009 and built around planting, harvesting, and trading crops with friends. It became a major social-network phenomenon and was often mocked for its freemium design and constant invitations.
• Social networking services

  • Myspace.com — Myspace.com was an early social networking site known for Top 8 friends lists and Tom Anderson as the default first friend. It became the most visited site on the internet in 2006 before being overtaken by Facebook.

  • Orkut — Orkut was a Google-owned social networking site named after its Turkish creator and especially popular in Brazil. It organized user profiles around features like communities and scrapbooks.

  • Yik Yak — Yik Yak was an anonymous social app centered on nearby posts, especially popular on college campuses. It originally shut down in 2017, then returned in 2021 after being acquired by Block.

• Social networking websites
  • Facebook.com — Facebook is the social networking website founded by Mark Zuckerberg, originally created for Harvard students before expanding broadly and dropping “the” from its domain name. Its early staff included Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, and Sean Parker, and it became known for user profiles with a timeline feature.
• Twitter

  • Tweet — A tweet is a short message posted on Twitter, originally limited to 140 characters and often using hashtags. The medium became widely recognized through celebrity use, parody accounts, and platform-specific features like retweets.

  • tweets — Tweets are a form of short online writing associated with Twitter and its character-limit format. Writers such as Jennifer Egan and Tao Lin have used or collected the form as literary material.

• Twitter personalities
  • @dril — @dril is the anonymous Twitter personality known for absurd, deadpan posts and the pinned tweet that says only “no.” The account’s surreal humor and intentionally opaque persona made it one of the internet’s most recognizable meme sources.

• Vine — Vine was the short-form video app owned by Twitter that let users post clips up to six seconds long. It became a major internet platform for looping comedy, cat videos, and early viral creators before its demise.

• Twitter, Inc — Twitter, Inc. was the social media company acquired by Elon Musk, later rebranded as X. It became notorious for upheaval over moderation, verification fees, mass layoffs, and the release of internal documents such as the Twitter Files.

• Online communities
  • Imageboards
    • /pol/ — /pol/ is 4chan’s politics board, known for politically charged trolling and memes. Its references include figures such as Jihad Jesus and Kim-Jong-Anon.
  • Reddit
    • AskReddit — AskReddit is a large Reddit community devoted to discussion-driven questions and answers, and it is one of the site’s biggest subreddits by membership. Posts there often invite serious replies and have inspired popular reply-to-response projects such as poem-making from comments.
• Social news websites
  • Digg.com — Digg is a social news site where users submit links and vote stories up or down. Founded by Kevin Rose, it became famous for its namesake verb, early tech-news prominence, and later decline after controversies and competition from Reddit.
• Facebook
  • Applications
    • SuperPoke! — SuperPoke! was a Facebook application that let users send cartoonish actions to friends, such as hugging them or throwing a sheep at them. Its action list included playful prompts like poker, Sunday brunch, embezzling, and going Chuck Norris on someone.

  • Mark Zuckerberg — Mark Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook from a Harvard dorm room, with classmates including Dustin Moskovitz, and later became its chief executive; Facebook later became Meta. He was a central figure in the lawsuits and ownership disputes involving Eduardo Saverin and the Winklevoss twins, and the company’s early public image was strongly associated with Zuckerberg as its public face. He is also noted for his philanthropy with Priscilla Chan and for the blue-themed social network being linked to his color blindness.

  • thefacebook.com — Thefacebook.com was the original college-only social networking site created by Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz. It later became Facebook and was known for letting students display profiles, photos, and preferences to classmates.
• Facebook features
  • poke — A poke is a nudge or attention-getting gesture, and Facebook popularized it as a feature for drawing another user’s notice. The word also appears in programming contexts as a counterpart to PEEK, though that usage is a separate clue path.
• Image-sharing websites
  • Pinterest — Pinterest is an image-sharing and curation site where users collect ideas on boards. It launched in 2010 and was founded by Paul Sciarra and Evan Sharp.
• Imageboards
  • 4chan — 4chan is an anonymous imageboard founded in 2003 by Chris Poole, known online as moot. It became notorious for boards such as /b/ and /pol/, greentext posting, prank campaigns and raids, and for helping shape early meme culture and internet phenomena such as lolcats, Pedobear, Caturday, Rickrolling, and anti-Scientology activism. It is closely associated with Anonymous and with the spread of imageboard culture.
• microblogging platforms

  • Sina Weibo — Sina Weibo is the Chinese microblogging platform often described as China’s version of Twitter. It became a venue for public controversy and censorship, including the Peng Shuai accusations and blocked searches on sensitive topics.

  • Tumblr — A microblogging and social networking platform founded by David Karp in 2007. It became known for reblogs, notes, fandom communities and overlaps such as Superwholock, soft-grunge aesthetics, and highly recursive internet discourse. It also drew attention for Dashcon, Xkit, the “dress” image debate, and controversy over its adult-content/pornography ban, later partly reversed.

• Reddit communities
  • Nottheonion — r/nottheonion is a subreddit for true news headlines that are so absurd they sound like satire. Its posts often highlight bizarre real-world articles that readers might mistake for pieces from The Onion.

Streaming Media

• Streaming media devices
  • Roku — Roku is a streaming-media device company whose name comes from the Japanese word for six. It became widely known through set-top boxes used to stream video to televisions.
• Streaming media services
  • Hulu — Hulu is a streaming video service known for hosting television episodes and original series. It began as a joint venture involving NBC, Fox, and Disney and has offered both free and subscription-based access.

• Crackle — Crackle is the fine network of fractures or crazing that can appear under the glaze of some Chinese ceramics. The word also names the streaming service once owned by Sony and later acquired by Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment.

• Lifecasting websites
  • JenniCam — JenniCam was one of the earliest major lifecasting websites, run by Jennifer Ringley. It became notable for pointing a camera at her dorm room and updating continuously for years before shutting down in 2003.
• Live-streaming services
  • Justin.tv — Justin.tv was an early live-streaming website named after its first user, Justin Kan. It became the precursor to the more popular gaming platform Twitch.
• Livestreaming
  • internet personalities
    • IShowSpeed — IShowSpeed is the online persona of Darren Watkins Jr., an exuberant streamer and rapper known for viral outbursts and Cristiano Ronaldo fandom. He has also drawn attention for songs, livestream mishaps, and high-profile stunts such as a cheese-rolling race injury.
• Livestreaming platforms
  • Kick — Kick is a livestreaming platform associated with Trainwreckstv, Stake.com, and a looser moderation style than Twitch. It has attracted creators such as Hikaru Nakamura and Adin Ross and is identified by a green K logo.
• Lo-fi hip hop streams
  • Lofi Girl — Lofi Girl is the animated student seen writing beside a sleeping cat in the long-running lo-fi hip hop stream that began on ChilledCow. She became a recognizable mascot for online study music and ambient streaming culture.
• Music streaming services

  • Grooveshark — Grooveshark was an online music streaming service known for playlists, user-run radio stations, and a distinctive orange homepage. It drew copyright scrutiny early on, was once removed from the iOS App Store, and later shut down after a public apology in 2015.

  • Spotify — Spotify is a Swedish music streaming service founded by Daniel Ek. It became widely known for disputes over artist compensation and for its green logo with sound-wave circles.

• Short-form streaming services
  • Quibi — Quibi was a short-form streaming platform launched in April 2020 with videos under ten minutes long. Despite raising over a billion dollars, it shut down only about six months later.
• Streaming services
  • Ad-supported streaming services
    • Tubi — Tubi is a free, ad-supported streaming service known for licensing lowbrow but popular shows and for its yellow-and-purple interface. Its marketing has leaned into the idea that many users are “cord-nevers” who have never paid for cable.

  • Apple TV+ — Apple TV+ is Apple’s streaming service, home to Ted Lasso, The Morning Show, and See. It also carries sports programming such as Friday Night Baseball and MLS coverage. Its original series range from comedy to prestige drama, with several of its best-known titles led by Jason Sudeikis, Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, and Jason Momoa.

  • Crunchyroll — Crunchyroll is an anime streaming and distribution service that began as a fan-upload site before becoming a major legal platform. It was among the first services to legally stream Attack on Titan in the United States and was later acquired by Sony.

  • Dropout.tv — Dropout.tv is a streaming comedy platform associated with Sam Reich and the former CollegeHumor brand. Its original programming includes Game Changer and other internet comedy game shows.

  • HBO Max — HBO Max is the Warner Bros. streaming service that launched in 2020 and later carried films such as Wonder Woman 1984 and series like Infinity Train. It also produced originals including The Flight Attendant and Gossip Girl, and it was often prompted by mention of HBO.
• Video genres
  • Mukbang — Mukbang is a South Korean video genre centered on people eating large quantities of food, often with an ASMR-like presentation. The format has drawn controversy over waste, authenticity, and variations that pair eating with other content such as true crime.
• Viral videos

  • Brokeback to the Future — Brokeback to the Future is a parody trailer that re-edits Back to the Future with a Brokeback Mountain-style romance. It became one of the early viral video mashups widely circulated online.

  • Numa Numa Dance — The Numa Numa Dance is Gary Brolsma’s lip-syncing dance video to O-Zone’s “Dragostea din tei.” It spread as a viral internet fad and inspired numerous parodies and follow-up videos.

  • Charlie the Unicorn — Charlie the Unicorn is a Flash animated short about a unicorn tricked on a journey to Candy Mountain. The video became an early internet favorite and is remembered for its surreal comedy, including the stolen kidneys gag and the “magical leopleuridon.”

• Web videos
  • history videos
    • History of Japan — History of Japan is Bill Wurtz’s viral animated history video about Japan’s past. It is known for surreal narration, rapid-fire jokes, and compressed treatment of events from early Japan through conflicts like the Ōnin War and later foreign pressure.
• Webcasting
  • Broadcast.com — Broadcast.com was an early web-casting company co-founded by Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner as AudioNet. It was later sold to Yahoo after drawing attention as an Internet stock and as a site for streaming television and radio signals.

• PewDiePie — PewDiePie is the Swedish YouTuber Felix Kjellberg, known for gaming commentary and for once holding the top spot among YouTube subscribers. He became widely known for viral videos such as “Congratulations” and for overtaking Smosh before later being surpassed by T-Series.

• Amazon Prime Video — Amazon Prime Video is the streaming service associated with shows such as The Boys, Hanna, Transparent, and Sneaky Pete. It also produced Good Omens and other recent adaptations and reality-TV projects.

• Cable news channels
  • Current TV — Current TV was Al Gore’s cable channel, built around short, user-generated programming segments called pods. It became widely known after journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling were detained in North Korea while reporting for the network.

• Bad Lip Reading — Bad Lip Reading is a YouTube comedy project that dubs video footage with intentionally absurd dialogue. Its videos include “Gang Fight,” a political-debate parody, and “SEAGULLS! (Stop It Now),” which uses Star Wars footage.

• BuzzFeed Unsolved
  • Ryan Bergara — Ryan Bergara is a creator and host associated with BuzzFeed Unsolved and later Ghost Files. He is the believer half of the duo, paired with skeptic Shane Madej in ghost-hunting videos.
• podcasts — Podcasts are internet-distributed audio series released in episodes, usually in a radio-style format. Examples include fictional series like Welcome to Night Vale and Alice Isn’t Dead, as well as nonfiction programs such as This American Life.
  • Serial — Serial is the investigative podcast hosted by Sarah Koenig that began with the Adnan Syed case. Its first season became a widely discussed true-crime phenomenon and helped popularize podcast journalism.
• Digital audio/video series
  • podcast — A podcast is a digital audio or video series that listeners can subscribe to and download through apps and feeds. Quiz clues may point to well-known examples like Serial or describe it as an audio feed for portable players.
• Equals Three
  • Ray William Johnson — Ray William Johnson is a YouTube personality best known for hosting Equals Three, a series built around commentary on viral videos. He was still hosting the show when clips such as Froggy Fresh’s “The Baddest” gained wider attention through it.
• Felicia Day
  • The Guild — The Guild is Felicia Day’s web series about online gamers and the everyday lives of the Knights of Good. Its central character is Cyd Sherman, known online as Codex, and the show runs on MMORPG culture and player rivalries.
• Horror streaming services
  • Shudder — Shudder is an AMC Networks streaming service launched in 2015 to specialize in horror films and related genre programming. Its original offerings include series tied to Creepshow, and it has a seasonal Halloween “Ghoul Log” parody of the Christmas yule log.
• YouTube
  • The Evolution of Dance — The Evolution of Dance is a viral YouTube video featuring Judson Laipply performing a dance montage through different eras of music. It was once among the site’s most viewed videos.
• YouTube channels

  • ContraPoints — ContraPoints is the YouTube essay channel of Natalie Wynn, whose videos blend philosophy, politics, and elaborate characters and sets. Her work includes discussions of shame, envy, opulence, and other themes within the BreadTube milieu.

  • Jaiden Animations — Jaiden Animations is the YouTube channel of Jaiden Dittfach, an animator and gaming creator. Her videos include Pokémon nuzlocke runs, comedy stories, and animation collaborations with other creators.

  • list videos
    • WatchMojo.com — WatchMojo.com is the YouTube channel known for its daily Top 10 list videos and glossy countdown format. Its recognizable voiceover is provided by Rebecca Brayton, whose narration became widely familiar through those rankings.

  • Markiplier — Markiplier is the online persona of Mark Edward Fischbach, a YouTube gaming personality best known for horror playthroughs and interactive projects. He also appeared in Unus Annus and drew attention for the site-crashing launch of an OnlyFans account.

  • Markiplier (similar to “multiplier”) — Markiplier is the online persona of Mark Fischbach, a YouTuber known for horror Let’s Plays and elaborate interactive videos. He also created the alter ego Wilford Warfstache and helped found the clothing line CLOAK.

  • Outdoor Boys — Outdoor Boys is the survival and bushcraft YouTube channel created by Luke Nichols, featuring him and his three sons. The channel became known for Alaska-based outdoor projects and a recurring honey-butter gag, and Nichols announced in 2025 that he would step away from it.

  • Parody tutorial channels
    • HowToBasic — HowToBasic is an anonymous YouTube creator known for tutorials that end in destruction, especially involving eggs. The channel parodies instructional videos and has amassed a very large subscriber base.
  • Science channels
    • Veritasium — Veritasium is a science YouTube channel created by Derek Muller, whose name comes from the Latin root for truth. Its branding describes itself as “an element of truth,” and its videos cover topics ranging from Collatz conjectures to aerogel and Slinkys.

  • T-Series — T-Series is the Indian music and video company that became a massive YouTube channel. It briefly battled PewDiePie for the platform’s most-subscribed channel and is also known as Super Cassettes Industries Private Limited.

  • Vsauce — Vsauce is the educational YouTube channel hosted by Michael Stevens. Its videos explore scientific and philosophical questions, and related projects include the DONG/D!NG series and Mind Field.

  • Watcher — Watcher is a YouTube channel created by former BuzzFeed personalities Ryan Bergara, Shane Madej, and Steven Lim. It is associated with paranormal and comedy-adjacent series such as Ghost Files, Too Many Spirits, and Dish Granted.
• YouTube creators
  • TomSka — TomSka is the online name of Thomas Ridgewell, a British YouTube creator known for asdfmovie. He also created Eddsworld and Crash Zoom.
• YouTube group
  • Sidemen — The Sidemen are a British YouTube group that includes KSI, W2S, and Vikkstar. They are known for challenge videos, charity soccer matches, and highly public feuds among members and collaborators.
• YouTube personalities
  • Anthony Fantano — Anthony Fantano is the YouTube music critic behind The Needle Drop, where he bills himself as the internet’s busiest music nerd. Questions about him often mention Cal Chuchesta, his album reviews, and the nickname “melon.”
• YouTube personality
  • Comedy commentator
    • Drew Gooden — Drew Gooden is a YouTube comedian and commentary creator known for opening videos with “Hey Guy.” He is frequently paired with Danny Gonzalez in collaborations and in a 2019 tour, and some of his popular videos mock bizarre internet trends and advertisements.
      • Road Work Ahead — “Road Work Ahead” is the Vine punchline associated with Drew Gooden, who reacts to a construction warning sign by repeating the words and then joking, “Yeah, I sure hope it does.” The phrase comes from a highway sign that warns drivers of construction or other non-ideal road conditions.
  • Educational YouTuber
    • Tom Scott — Tom Scott is a British educational YouTuber known for short explanatory videos, gameshows, and quirky web projects. He became famous for topics ranging from unusual places to programming mistakes and later announced a form of retirement from regular uploads.
  • Film reviewer persona
    • Nostalgia Critic — The Nostalgia Critic is Doug Walker’s sarcastic review persona, known for angrily riffing on bad films and for the catchphrase about remembering things so the audience does not have to. The character became widely associated with internet review culture through reactions to movies like Batman and Robin and The Room.
  • Minecraft YouTuber
    • Technoblade — Technoblade was the Minecraft YouTuber known for the pig-and-crown logo, the Sleepyboisinc group, and his rivalry-focused videos. He died in 2022 after a public battle with sarcoma, and his farewell video “so long nerds” became closely associated with his channel.
• YouTube videos

  • Evolution of Dance — Evolution of Dance is the viral Judson Laipply video that strings together dances associated with songs from Elvis to Michael Jackson and beyond. It became one of the most viewed YouTube videos in the site’s early years and inspired later follow-up versions and parodies.

  • Me at the zoo — Me at the zoo was the first video ever uploaded to YouTube. It was posted by co-founder Jawed Karim and shows him at the San Diego Zoo.

• YouTube viral videos
  • Charlie Bit My Finger–Again! — The viral home video in which a baby bites his older brother’s finger. It became one of YouTube’s best-known early hits and was long among the site’s most-viewed videos before being surpassed by a major music video.
• YouTube web series

  • Epic Rap Battles of History — Epic Rap Battles of History is the YouTube web series of historical and pop-cultural rap battles created by Nice Peter and his collaborators. Its episodes feature figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Darth Vader, Thomas Edison, and Steve Jobs, and the series has continued into current events.

  • video blog hoaxes

    • lonelygirl15 — lonelygirl15 was an early YouTube web series built around the character Bree Avery, who presented herself as a teenage vlogger. The project was later exposed as scripted fiction starring Jessica Lee Rose, which turned the channel into a famous internet hoax.
• YouTubers

  • Brian David Gilbert — Brian David Gilbert is a YouTuber and former Polygon host known for Unraveled and for elaborate, joke-heavy video essays. His work includes absurd analyses of game logistics, the Zelda timeline, and other deeply detailed internet comedy bits.

  • Northernlion — Northernlion, also known as Ryan Letourneau, is a Canadian streamer and YouTuber. He became especially associated with games like The Binding of Isaac, Balatro, Super Auto Pets, and Umamusume: Pretty Derby.

  • ProZD — ProZD is the screen name of SungWon Cho, a Korean-American voice actor and online creator. He is known for short comedy videos mocking game and anime tropes and for sketches featuring his distinctive deep voice.

  • Seth Everman — Seth Everman is a Swedish YouTuber and musician known for deadpan, minimalist performance videos. He became widely known for recreating songs such as Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy” and for a most-liked YouTube comment that simply says, “I’m the bald guy.” Other viral clips associated with him include a transition from Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” to Dr. Dre’s “Still D.R.E.”

  • Video game commentators

    • Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw — Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw is a game reviewer and developer best known as the host of Zero Punctuation. He also created the Chzo Mythos games and became known for sharp, one-sentence review humor.

    • MatPat — MatPat, or Matthew Robert Patrick, is the YouTuber behind Game Theory and its spin-offs Film Theory, Food Theory, and Style Theory. He retired from content creation in 2023 and was known for channels such as The Game Theorists and The Film Theorists.

• audiobook services
  • Audible — Audible is Amazon’s audiobook company, known for its subscription service and its role in producing and distributing spoken-word audio. It has been associated with audiobook hardware and with litigation over speech-to-text features, and it competes with alternatives such as LibriVox.
• online audio platforms
  • SoundCloud — SoundCloud is the online audio-sharing platform associated with independent rappers, mixtapes, and streaming uploads. It became especially prominent for hip-hop and lo-fi scenes and is recognizable by its orange cloud logo.
• television channels
  • G4 TV — G4 TV was a cable channel focused on gaming and internet culture, later known for shows such as Attack of the Show! and coverage of E3. It also aired series like Code Monkeys, Ninja Warrior, and the eating contest parody Hurl.
• TikTok creators
  • Charli D’Amelio — Charli D’Amelio is a TikTok creator who became the platform’s most-followed star and was associated with the Hype House. Her popularity helped drive the Dunkin’ collaboration drink and the viral spread of the Renegade dance, often misattributed to her.
• Video hosting services
  • Vimeo — Vimeo is a video-hosting platform that began as a CollegeHumor project in 2004. It has promoted higher-quality uploads and a cleaner interface than YouTube.

Online Games

• Online games
  • massively multiplayer online games
    • massive multiplayer online games — Massive multiplayer online games are persistent online worlds used in studies of player behavior, cheating, and virtual economies. Examples such as EverQuest helped researchers analyze networks, leveling, and social roles like achiever or explorer.
  • Virtual pet games
    • Neopets — Neopets is the online virtual-pet game centered on feeding, training, and caring for colorful creatures with species like the Gelert, Kacheek, and Kougra. Its Battledome and merchandise made it a major early-2000s internet brand.
      • Neopia — Neopia is the fictional world of Neopets, home to places such as Kreludor, Roo Island, Meridell, and the Tyrannian Plateau. It uses Neopoints and hosts events like the Altador Cup and the Obelisk War.

• cloud gaming — Cloud gaming lets players run videogames on remote servers and stream the result instead of executing the game on their own hardware. Examples in the clues include Stadia, Luna, GeForce Now, and earlier services such as Gaikai and LiquidSky.

• Location-based games
  • geocaching — Geocaching is an outdoor activity in which participants use GPS coordinates to find hidden containers. It grew out of Dave Ulmer’s 2000 cache and is organized through Groundspeak, with trackables like Travel Bugs and coins.
• Massively multiplayer online games
  • MUDs — MUDs are early text-based multiplayer online worlds, the predecessors of modern MMORPGs. They began with Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle’s Essex program and later included influential codebases such as DikuMUD and LambdaMOO.
• Minecraft YouTubers
  • CaptainSparklez — CaptainSparklez is the Minecraft YouTuber Jordan Maron, known for parodies like “Revenge,” “TNT,” and “Fallen Kingdom.” He also became known for streaming, music projects, and a large gaming following.
    • Revenge
      • Aw Man — “Aw Man” is the shouted refrain from CaptainSparklez’s Minecraft parody “Revenge.” The phrase appears after the opening cry of “Creeper!” and is recognizable as a meme lyric.
  • PopularMMOs — PopularMMOs is the Minecraft-focused YouTube channel of Patrick Thomas Julianelle, best known for videos with his ex-wife Jen. Its most familiar material includes challenge games, lucky block games, and other long-running Minecraft series.
• Trivia websites
  • Sporcle — Sporcle is the trivia website known for its orange logo, huge library of user-created quizzes, and slogan about mentally stimulating diversions. It became famous for quizzes such as find-the-states maps and other typed-answer, multiple-choice, and clickable quiz formats.
• Video game websites
  • Kotaku — Kotaku is a Gawker Media video game website that also covers some Japanese culture. Its name riffs on the Japanese word otaku, and it became known for investigative reporting and gaming commentary.
• Virtual pet websites
  • Neopets.com — Neopets.com is a virtual-pet website where users adopt and care for creatures across worlds like Meridell, the Lost Desert, and Tyrannia. It also became known for games such as Chia Bomber and for features like the shop, stock market, and battle dome.
• Virtual worlds
  • Second Life — Second Life is Linden Lab’s avatar-based virtual world built around user-created spaces, commerce, and the Linden Dollar. It became famous for art installations, in-world communities, and Tom Boellstorff’s ethnography Coming of Age in Second Life.
• Web game portals
  • Miniclip — Miniclip is a web game portal known for hosting browser games such as 8-Ball Pool and Agar.io. The site shifted in 2022 toward mobile development and is associated with games like Gravity Guy and Soccer Stars.

• Among Us — Among Us is the social deduction game by InnerSloth in which crewmates try to identify hidden impostors. Its best-known maps include The Skeld, Polus, MIRA HQ, and The Airship, and gameplay revolves around meetings, ejections, vents, and sabotages. The game became a huge internet phenomenon in 2020 and was widely streamed and memed.

• Browser games

  • Blaseball — Blaseball is a surreal browser-based sports simulation that parodied baseball with absurd lore, gods, and catastrophic events. Its memorable features include the Shelled One, player incinerations, and teams such as the Baltimore Crabs and the Seattle Garages.

  • Robot Unicorn Attack — Robot Unicorn Attack is an Adult Swim flash game in which a unicorn dashes through a surreal side-scrolling world. It is set to Erasure’s “Always” in the original version and spawned holiday and heavy metal variants.

• Niantic
  • Pokémon Go — Pokémon Go is the augmented-reality mobile game from Niantic and Nintendo that uses GPS and camera features. Players walk around catching Pokémon, defending gyms, and completing special regional collections. Its teams are Mystic, Instinct, and Valor, and it drew attention for a number of public incidents and controversies.
• Nintendo
  • The Legend of Zelda
    • Link — Link is the sword-wielding hero of The Legend of Zelda series. Clues include the Master Sword, Ganondorf, the Hookshot, the Pegasus Boots, pieces of heart, and Breath of the Wild-style climbing and gliding.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild — The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a 2017 open-world Nintendo game set in a ruined Hyrule. Players explore the Great Plateau, defeat Divine Beasts, and eventually face Calamity Ganon.
• Nintendo avatars
  • Miis — Miis are the customizable avatar characters used on Nintendo systems such as the Wii and 3DS. They appear in games and channels built around player-made lookalikes, including titles like Tomodachi-style roleplaying and Wii Party minigames.

• Nintendo Direct — Nintendo Direct is Nintendo’s online presentation format for announcing games and hardware without a conventional live press conference. These videos have revealed projects such as Animal Crossing entries and Ring Fit Adventure accessories.

• Old School RuneScape — Old School RuneScape is the 2013 Jagex reboot of RuneScape, a fantasy MMORPG with 24 trainable skills capped at level 99. It is known for its retro browser-game style, its PvP modes such as Deadman Mode, and its longtime player base.

• Online chess platforms
  • Chess.com — Chess.com is a major online chess platform with a green pawn logo. It hosts events such as Titled Tuesday and has been central to public cheating disputes, including the Hans Niemann controversy.
• Online game
  • Children’s RPG
    • Poptropica — Poptropica is Jeff Kinney’s children’s online RPG built around exploring themed islands and completing quests. Players travel by hot-air balloon, gather credits, and unlock costumes as they move through islands such as Time Tangled and Astro-Knights.
• Online game platforms
  • Roblox — Roblox is the user-generated game platform known for its blocky avatars and virtual currency Robux. Popular titles such as Adopt Me! and Work at a Pizza Place helped make it a major children’s gaming service. Questions may mention Builder’s Club, Game Passes, and the famous “oof” death sound that was later removed. It is a common answer for prompts about online creation platforms or dress-up games.
• Online game websites
  • Uproar.com — Uproar.com was an online game site that hosted casual games, arcade titles, bingo, and versions of television game shows. The clues link it to the Flipside Network and to online play for games such as Family Feud and other quiz-style titles.
• Online poker
  • UltimateBet — UltimateBet was a poker site endorsed by players such as Annie Duke, Phil Hellmuth, and Antonio Esfandiari. It was also tied to Phil Hellmuth’s 2007 World Series of Poker entrance sponsorship.
• Online poker sites

  • Full Tilt Poker — Full Tilt Poker was a poker site known for sponsoring televised poker programming and for a player roster that included Phil Ivey, Phil Gordon, Howard Lederer, and Chris Ferguson. It was one of the most prominent online poker brands of its era.

  • PokerStars — This poker website has been represented by Chris Moneymaker, Greg Raymer, Joseph Hachem, and Wil Wheaton. It was identified as one of the major online poker sites in a clue set about dot-net gambling websites.

• Pokémon

  • Eevee — Eevee is the Pokémon known for evolving into many different forms depending on stones, happiness, time of day, or location. Its evolutions include Jolteon, Vaporeon, Flareon, Espeon, Umbreon, Leafeon, and Glaceon.

  • Items

    • Mail — Mail is the held item category used in early Pokémon games to send messages to trading partners, with variants such as Retro Mail and Harbor Mail. Pokémon cannot be released or stored while holding mail, and different mail designs show Pokémon like Duskull or Wingull.
• Pokémon locations
  • Lavender Town — Lavender Town is the haunted Kanto location in Pokémon Red and Blue, famous for the Pokémon Tower and its eerie music. It is also the subject of creepypastas about harmful high-pitched audio, though those stories are part of fandom folklore rather than canon.
• Adventure game series
  • Leisure Suit Larry — Leisure Suit Larry is Sierra’s risqué adventure-game series created by Al Lowe and centered on the balding, usually unlucky seducer Larry Laffer. The series began with Land of the Lounge Lizards and became especially known for Passionate Patti and the joke that the missing fourth game vanished with the source code.
• Digital distribution platforms for video games
  • Good Old Games — Good Old Games, usually abbreviated GOG, is a digital storefront for older PC games. It is known for selling DRM-free titles and began as a competitor to Steam.
• Digital game storefronts
  • Wii games
    • WiiWare — WiiWare was Nintendo’s Wii digital storefront for original downloadable games. It hosted releases such as LostWinds, World of Goo, and Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People, often with motion-control support.
• World of Warcraft
  • Leeroy Jenkins — Leeroy Jenkins is the World of Warcraft player turned internet meme after he charged into a raid shouting his own name. The famous video is tied to the PALS for LIFE guild and the line “time’s up, let’s do this.”
• Xbox
  • XBox Live — Xbox Live is Microsoft’s online gaming service for the Xbox family of consoles, offering multiplayer play and downloadable content. Questions on it may mention the Marketplace, voice chat, and the early games and service expansions that helped define the platform.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series — Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series is LittleKuriboh’s parody dubbing of the anime Yu-Gi-Oh!, known for exaggerated comedy and recurring jokes like Kaiba’s dramatic outbursts. It became a landmark internet abridged series after being moved off YouTube.
• Roblox games
  • Dress to Impress — Dress to Impress is a Roblox fashion game in which players build outfits around a theme and are judged in a runway-style competition. It became known for viral memes, themed collaborations, and in-game codes tied to content updates.
• Video game companies
  • Valve — Valve is the video game company behind Steam and games such as Portal and Half-Life 2. It is also the name of an engine component that controls fluid flow into an internal combustion engine.
    • Left 4 Dead — Left 4 Dead is Valve’s cooperative zombie-shooter series, built around four survivors fighting through campaigns against special infected like the Witch, Boomer, Hunter, Smoker, and Tank. Its AI Director changes encounters dynamically, and the sequel expanded the formula with new campaigns and enemies.
• Video game content

  • Let’s Play — A Let’s Play is a video-game commentary format in which a player records gameplay while talking over it. Achievement Hunter and PewDiePie are both associated with this style of content.

  • Let’s Plays — Let’s Plays are video game recordings in which the player comments while playing, often as a community-facing YouTube format. The format became associated with creators such as PewDiePie, Achievement Hunter, and early forums like Something Awful.

Internet Culture

• Internet adages
  • Godwin’s Law — Godwin’s Law is the online-discussion rule that as a thread grows longer, the probability of a Nazi or Hitler comparison approaches one. It is used to signal that a debate has become exhausted once that comparison appears.
• Internet aesthetics
  • cottagecore — Cottagecore is an internet aesthetic that idealizes rustic, pastoral life, with imagery of baking, gardening, flowers, and wooden settings. It rose to prominence on Tumblr and during the pandemic, especially through references to folk music, homemade bread, and an escapist view of rural living.
• Internet challenge
  • Dare
    • cinnamon challenge — The cinnamon challenge is an internet dare in which someone tries to swallow a spoonful of dry cinnamon. It became notorious for causing breathing problems and other medical risks.
• Internet controversies
  • GamerGate — A 2014 online controversy that presented itself as a campaign for ethics in video game journalism; it was associated with coordinated harassment of women in gaming and media, later linking to broader anti-feminist and alt-right activity. It first appeared under the alternate name “quinnspiracy” in reference to Zoe Quinn.
• collaborative online art
  • r/place — r/place is a Reddit project in which users can edit individual pixels on a shared digital canvas. It became known for massive collaborative images, factional artwork, and restrictions that limited how often a user could change a pixel.
• Cyberculture
  • the Californian Ideology — This essay describes a fusion of hippie culture and techno-libertarianism that emerged in Silicon Valley. Andy Cameron and Richard Barbrook coined the phrase to criticize the politics of Wired-era cyberculture and the virtual class.
• emoticons — Emoticons are text-based symbols used to represent emotion, like :-) or XD. They became popular with early computer messaging systems such as PLATO, and Eastern variants are often read vertically.

  • Emoticon — An emoticon is a text-based symbol or punctuation combination used to express emotion in electronic communication. Common examples include the smiley face, wink, and frown made from characters like colons, semicolons, and parentheses.

  • uwu — UwU is an emoticon used for a cutesy, affectionate expression, often associated with internet meme culture. It has also inspired a conlang and shows up in jokes and remixes that play on its cute sound.

  • smiley face — The smiley face is the familiar yellow circular symbol with two eyes and a smile. It was popularized by Harvey Ball and later adapted into the ASCII emoticon by Scott Fahlman.

• Fandom conventions
  • DashCon — DashCon was a 2014 Tumblr fandom convention that became infamous for poor planning, low turnout, and a ball pit. Its collapse into fundraising appeals and internet ridicule made it a lasting meme about convention mismanagement.
• Hacker slang
  • grok — Grok is a slang term meaning to understand something intuitively or deeply, especially in science-fiction and hacker usage. The word was coined by Robert Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land and later became the name of an AI service and chatbot.
• Internet challenges
  • Tide Pod challenge — The Tide Pod challenge was the internet fad of eating laundry detergent pods, prompting warnings from figures like Rob Gronkowski. It became notorious in early 2018 as a dangerous dare involving detergent capsules that were never meant to be consumed.
• slang and jargon

  • Delete your account — “Delete your account” is an internet insult and dismissive reply that became widely associated with Twitter culture. It was famously used by Hillary Clinton in response to Donald Trump and later repeated by Wendy’s.

  • Jughead — Jughead is the Archie Comics character whose real name is Forsythe P. Jones and whose appetite, crown-shaped cap, and friendship with Archie are recurring markers. The same name also refers to a Gopher search utility that queries one server at a time rather than the whole network.

  • SCREAMSHEET — A screamsheet is a cyberpunk term for a tabloid-style or mass-market printed newspaper sold by the page from street dispensers. The term evokes cheap, sensational hardcopy news in a futuristic urban setting.

• software mascots
  • Bonzi Buddy — Bonzi Buddy was a purple animated gorilla and Internet helper program distributed as a free download. It was criticized for deceptive advertising and spyware-like behavior.

• Twitch Plays Pokémon — Twitch Plays Pokémon was the 2014 social experiment in which viewers controlled a Pokémon game through chat commands. Its mythology centered on the struggle between Anarchy and Democracy, with Helix Fossil and Bird Jesus becoming recurring icons.

• Internet etiquette
  • Netiquette — Netiquette is the set of informal rules for proper behavior on the internet, especially in discussion forums and email. Common examples include avoiding all caps, spamming, and overly long signatures.
• Internet hoaxes

  • Birds Aren’t Real — Birds Aren’t Real is a satirical conspiracy theory claiming that birds were replaced by government surveillance drones. The movement was created by Peter McIndoe and has been promoted by the self-styled bird brigade.

  • death hoaxes
    • John Basedow — John Basedow is the fitness personality behind the Fitness Made Simple workout videos. He was the subject of an internet rumor that falsely claimed he died in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
  • John Titor — John Titor was an Internet figure who claimed to be a time traveler from the year 2036. His story centered on an IBM 5100 computer, a future civil war, and warnings about nuclear war and disease.
• Internet memes
  • Conspiracy theories
    • Bielefeld Conspiracy — The Bielefeld Conspiracy is the joke theory that the German city of Bielefeld does not exist. The meme imagines the city as a hoax by intelligence agencies or aliens and was even alluded to by Angela Merkel.

  • Badger Badger Badger — Badger Badger Badger is the looping internet animation from Weebl’s Stuff featuring dancing badgers, a mushroom chant, and a snake interruption. Its repetitive structure made it a widely parodied early web meme.

  • Giving Carly Rae Jepsen a sword — This is the memetic act of giving Carly Rae Jepsen a sword, first popularized online after her performance of “Cut to the Feeling” at Lollapalooza. Internet art and jokes treated the gesture as a surreal honor for the singer of “Call Me Maybe.”

  • Harlem Shake — The Harlem Shake was a viral internet meme built around a Baauer song that triggered a sudden cut from one dancer to a crowd joining in. The fad spread through countless parody videos, including sports teams and pop-culture mashups.

  • Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams — “Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” is an internet slogan tied to conspiracy theories about the collapse of the World Trade Center. It became a meme in discussions of 9/11 truth claims and structural failure.

  • Peanut Butter Jelly Time — ‘Peanut Butter Jelly Time’ is a novelty internet song and flash animation by the Buckwheat Boyz that became famous for a dancing banana. The meme spread into television and games after appearing in places like The Proud Family, Family Guy, and World of Warcraft references.

  • rickroll — A rickroll is the prank of luring someone to a clip of Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ instead of the expected content. The meme spread through internet forums and later became a widely recognized bait-and-switch joke.
• Internet musicians
  • Tay Zonday — Tay Zonday is the internet musician who wrote and performed “Chocolate Rain.” He became known for his deep voice and the distinctive way he moved away from the microphone to breathe.
• Internet naming campaigns
  • Boaty McBoatface — Boaty McBoatface was the famously rejected internet name for a British research ship. The name ended up attached instead to an autonomous submarine, while the ship itself was ultimately named for David Attenborough.
• Internet slang

  • absolute unit — Absolute unit is an internet slang phrase for a very large or impressively hefty person, animal, or object. It became widely known through a social-media reaction to an unusually large man, and later spread to memes about oversized animals and toys.

  • algospeak — Algospeak is the intentional rewording or misspelling of taboo or censored terms online. It often substitutes euphemisms like “unalive” for banned words and is associated with social media language that avoids moderation filters.

  • brain rot — Brain rot is a slang term for the mental fog or degradation associated with consuming endless short-form content online. The phrase was also used much earlier by Henry David Thoreau, and it was named Oxford’s 2024 Word of the Year.

  • Brainrot — Brainrot is slang for the mental fog or supposed cognitive decline caused by consuming low-quality, repetitive, or unchallenging online content. It is especially associated with meme-heavy social media trends such as TikTok content.

  • simp — Simp is a slang term for someone seen as excessively attentive or submissive toward a potential romantic interest. It became widely used in internet and TikTok culture through memes, music references, and viral clips.

  • Social media term
    • Milkshake Duck — Milkshake Duck is an internet slang term for a figure who is initially adored online and then revealed to have troubling or objectionable past behavior. The phrase came from a tweet by @pixelatedboat and became shorthand for rapid online disillusionment.

  • sus — Sus is slang for something suspicious or suspect, especially in online and gaming contexts. It was also used for the British Vagrancy Act of 1824 and has been popularized by internet memes, celebrity usage, and short-form comedy references.

  • swag — Swag is slang for style, confidence, or the general attitude someone carries. It appears in song titles such as “Pretty Boy Swag” and “Turn My Swag On,” and in internet and social-media usage.

  • You only live once — YOLO is the modern acronym and catchphrase for “you only live once,” associated with reckless or impulsive carpe diem behavior. It was popularized in rap and internet culture, became a major slogan after Drake’s “The Motto,” and was widely circulated as a 2012 hashtag.
• Meme websites

  • 9GAG — 9GAG is a Hong Kong-based humor and image-sharing website known for memes, comments, and viral post chains. It was co-founded by Ray Chan and others in 2008 and later expanded into apps and games.

  • YTMND.com — YTMND, short for “You’re the Man Now, Dog,” is an early meme website built around looping audio, tiled images, and flashy text. Created by Max Goldberg, it became a repository for user-made remix pages and later shut down in 2019.

• Samwell
  • What, What (In the Butt) — “What, What (In the Butt)” is Samwell’s novelty internet video built around its flamboyantly explicit refrain. It became known through South Park, which parodied the song with Butters performing it to solve a Canadian strike.
• Subreddits
  • me_irl — me_irl is a Reddit subreddit built around highly relatable or absurdly self-referential posts. It became known for meme culture, with posts required to use the community’s title phrase and for recurring in-jokes like title-only posts and joke meme events.

• Time Cube — Time Cube was Gene Ray’s eccentric website and pseudo-philosophical project arguing that reality is divided into repeating four-part daily cycles. The site is infamous for its hostile prose and bizarre claims about race and time.

• Twitch emotes
  • PogChamp — PogChamp is a Twitch emote used to express excitement or shock. It was based on Ryan ‘Gootecks’ Gutierrez and was later removed after his comments surrounding the January 6th attack on the Capitol, with Twitch temporarily rotating replacement faces before switching to KomodoHype.
• Viral messages
  • chain letters — Chain letters are circulating messages that urge the reader to forward them, often by promising luck or threatening misfortune. They have appeared in mail, email, and handwritten forms such as Himmelsbriefe, and they were adapted into schemes like Send-a-Dime.
• Big John
  • bosh — Bosh is the catchphrase repeated by the internet reviewer Big John, and it is also the name of a vegan cookbook and media partnership.
• Comedy websites

  • CollegeHumor — CollegeHumor is a comedy website and production company known for sketch videos and web series. It launched series such as Jake and Amir and Hardly Working, and later spawned Dropout as a related offshoot.

  • CollegeHumor.com — CollegeHumor.com is a comedy website founded by Ricky van Veen that became known for sketch videos, games, and web shows. Its output included Bleep Bloop, Jake and Amir, and other viral comedy features, and it later received an MTV adaptation.

• Comedy-sharing apps
  • iFunny — iFunny is a comedy-sharing app whose content is organized into sections like Featured, Popular, and Collective. It was targeted by 4chan raids and later associated with jokes about dislike nights and black holes for banned posts.
• Google Easter eggs
  • Do a Barrel Roll — ‘Do a Barrel Roll’ is the Star Fox 64 meme instructing a vehicle to perform a rapid aerial spin, usually via the Z or R buttons. It became a stock internet joke and a parody of useless advice.
• Nicknames
  • Doc — A doc is a Microsoft Word document, and the title format has inspired several novels and literary references. The word also appears as a nickname for the marine biologist in Cannery Row, who is repeatedly called Doc by Mack and his friends.
• Onomatopoeia
  • Meow — Meow is the sound a cat makes, and it is often used as an onomatopoeic marker in internet and gaming culture. The word also appears as a recurring gag in a Super Troopers quote and in contexts involving cat-related references.
• Parody websites

  • Clickhole — ClickHole is The Onion’s parody site that satirizes clickbait outlets like BuzzFeed and Upworthy. It is known for absurd quizzes, spoof articles, and short-form internet comedy.

  • People Eating Tasty Animals — People Eating Tasty Animals was a parody website created by Mike Doughney that mimicked PETA’s domain name. It became known in a trademark dispute after using peta.org-style satire to promote meat, fur, and hunting.

• Political meme groups
  • Bernie Sanders’ Dank Meme Stash — Bernie Sanders’ Dank Meme Stash was a large Facebook meme group created to support Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary. It became a prominent hub for pro-Sanders internet politics and meme culture.

• Encyclopedia Dramatica — Encyclopedia Dramatica is a satirical wiki known for trolling, obscene humor, and deliberately offensive content. Its logo uses an ash ligature, and its slogan is “In lulz we trust.”

• Humor websites
  • eBaum’s World — eBaum’s World is a comedy and media-sharing website launched in 2001. It became notorious for controversy over reposted or stolen content and for internet feuds with sites such as Something Awful and Newgrounds.
• Image macros
  • LOLcats — LOLcats are internet image macros featuring cats with captions written in broken English. They are strongly associated with sites like I Can Has Cheezburger and with the “I can has” style of captioning.

    • Ceiling Cat — Ceiling Cat is the lolcat internet deity who is imagined watching from above. It became a recurring image in the LOLCat Bible Translation Project and related memes.

    • cheeseburgers — Cheeseburgers are the favored fast-food object of LOLcat captions, where cats are shown asking for them in deliberately broken English.

• Sanrio
  • Hello Kitty — Hello Kitty, also known as Kitty White, is Sanrio’s famous kawaii character, said to be a London-born girl with a red bow rather than a cat. She appears with friends such as My Melody and Pochacco and is one of the best-known symbols of Sanrio’s media empire.
• Television psychics
  • Miss Cleo — Miss Cleo was the faux-psychic television spokesperson behind late-night tarot infomercials and the catchphrase ‘Call me now for your free reading.’ Her advertising campaign drew fraud lawsuits against her employer, Access Resource Services, and made her a widely mocked pop-culture figure. She was also promoted in a self-help style book and described as a Shango shaman in training.
• Pornographic websites
  • The Hotbox — The Hotbox was the members-only area of Danni Ashe’s website, originally known as Danni’s Hard Drive. It became the name for the subscription section after her server demands outgrew her first ISP.
• internet fads
  • planking — Planking is the internet fad of lying stiffly face-down in an unusual place, also called the lying down game or face dancing. It became notorious in 2011 after a series of public stunts and injuries.
• Internet horror characters
  • Slender Man — Slender Man is a tall, faceless internet horror figure that originated in creepypasta and later spread through web videos and films. The character became notorious after a 2014 stabbing case involving two girls who said they were appeasing him.
• Internet humor
  • Good or Bad? — Good or Bad? is a recurring Brunching Shuttlecocks feature written by Lore Sjöberg. It lets readers vote on items and then displays the tally as a judgment call on whether they are good or bad.
• Internet personalities
  • Hbomberguy — Hbomberguy is the online persona of Harry Brewis, a YouTuber known for long video essays and charity livestreams. He raised large sums for Mermaids in 2019 and later drew attention for a lengthy exposé on plagiarism in online creators’ work.
• Memes

  • covfefe — Covfefe is the nonsense word from a Donald Trump tweet that became an internet meme and political punchline. It is commonly associated with the phrase “Despite the constant negative press covfefe” and with later jokes about its meaning.

  • Herobrine — Herobrine is the Minecraft urban legend described as Notch’s dead brother or evil brother, and changelogs often joked that he had been removed. He is typically imagined as a Steve-like figure with blank white eyes, and some stories claim he can be summoned with a special block-and-fire pattern.

  • references to JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure — These are meme references to JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, often built from replacing an expected figure with a recognizable JoJo character or quote. Common examples include the “It was me” gag and the recurring use of the “Roundabout” ending theme in internet jokes.

  • Rule 34 — Rule 34 is the internet maxim that if something exists, there is pornography of it. The phrase also inspired Charles Stross’s near-future thriller titled Rule 34.

  • Wojaks — Wojaks are simple reaction images that became popular on internet forums like 4chan. Variants include the Feels Guy, NPC, Doomer, and Soyjak forms.

  • YouTube Poops — YouTube Poops are heavily edited parody videos that remix existing media into chaotic, often vulgar mashups. Common techniques include sentence mixing and repeated audio loops, and many examples draw on old game cutscenes and meme clips.

• slang
  • yeet — Yeet is a slang exclamation and verb used for enthusiastic throwing or rejection, popularized online through Vine and later social media. It is especially associated with viral clips of people shouting the word while tossing something away or celebrating a flashy move.
• viral challenges
  • Ice Bucket Challenge — This 2014 social-media fundraising craze for ALS involved dumping ice water over one’s head and spread with celebrity participation. It became famous for viral videos by figures such as Kim Kardashian and Matt Damon and was linked to major donation surges.
• viral stunts
  • Diet Coke and Mentos — Diet Coke and Mentos became a viral stunt in which dropping Mentos into soda produces a dramatic fountain. The craze was popularized online by Eepybird and had earlier publicity from Steve Spangler and television appearances.
• web hoaxes
  • Bert Is Evil — “Bert Is Evil” was a satirical web project built around doctored photos of Sesame Street’s Bert placed beside villains and notorious figures. It became widely known after a Reuters photograph from a protest in Bangladesh accidentally showed an image from the site in the background.
• Online sexual activity
  • Cybersex — Cybersex is sexual activity carried out through internet chat or messaging, often by typing explicit messages to another person. It is associated with online roleplay and with sting operations that capture explicit conversations.

Standards, Organizations, and Pioneers

Associate standards bodies and pioneers with the infrastructure they shaped.

Key Organizations and Standards

• IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) — develops and promotes internet standards via Request for Comments (RFC) documents; open participation; no formal membership. Published TCP/IP, HTTP, TLS, DNS, and most core internet protocols.

• RFC (Request for Comments) — the document series for internet standards and informational documents; numbered sequentially; e.g., RFC 791 (IP), RFC 793 (TCP), RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1), RFC 7540 (HTTP/2).

• W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) — founded by Tim Berners-Lee (1994); develops web standards: HTML, CSS, XML, SVG, accessibility guidelines (WCAG).

• ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) — coordinates the DNS root, IP address allocation, and protocol parameters; a private non-profit under US oversight until 2016.

• IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) — function operated by ICANN; manages IP address allocation (to RIRs), AS numbers, the DNS root, and protocol port/number registries.

• RIRs (Regional Internet Registries) — allocate IP addresses within regions: ARIN (North America), RIPE NCC (Europe/Middle East), APNIC (Asia-Pacific), LACNIC (Latin America), AFRINIC (Africa).

• IEEE 802 — IEEE standards for local area networks; 802.3 (Ethernet), 802.11 (Wi-Fi), 802.1Q (VLANs).

• WHATWG — Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group; maintains the HTML Living Standard; a rival to W3C that now effectively controls the HTML spec.

• Internet standards
  • Request for Comments — Requests for Comments are the Internet technical documents published by the IETF. They are used to describe protocols and standards such as email, hypertext, and TCP/IP.
• Internet governance bodies
  • Internet Assigned Numbers Authority — The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority manages key Internet numbering resources, including protocol parameters and address coordination. Jonathan Postel helped create and maintain this foundational registry.
• Wireless networking standards
  • IEEE 802.11 — IEEE 802.11 is the family of wireless networking standards better known as Wi‑Fi. It commonly uses the 2.4 and 5 gigahertz bands, uses CSMA/CA on overlapping 2.4 GHz channels, and later amendments increased throughput for cord-free Internet access and for connecting devices to routers in home and office networks.

Key Figures

• Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn — co-designed TCP/IP (1974); widely called “Fathers of the Internet.”

• Tim Berners-Lee — invented the World Wide Web (1989-1991); founded the W3C; knighted 2004.
  • Information Management: A Proposal (March 1989) — Tim Berners-Lee proposed a linked information system at CERN that became the World Wide Web. His supervisor Mike Sendall annotated the proposal “Vague, but exciting”; CERN preserves the proposal and its annotation.²

• Paul Baran — developed packet-switching theory at RAND in the early 1960s.

• Jon Postel — edited hundreds of foundational RFCs; managed IANA for decades; wrote the “robustness principle” (Postel’s Law): “be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept.”

• Marc Andreessen — co-created Mosaic (1993), co-founded Netscape (1994).

• Paul Mockapetris — designed DNS (RFC 882/883, 1983).

• Roy Fielding — defined REST architecture in his 2000 PhD dissertation; co-author of HTTP/1.1.

• Larry Roberts — chief scientist who led ARPANET development at DARPA.

• Douglas Engelbart — SRI researcher who demonstrated hypertext, video conferencing, collaborative editing, and the computer mouse in the “Mother of All Demos” (December 9, 1968); directly influenced Berners-Lee’s hypertext thinking. He pioneered human-computer interaction, invented the computer mouse, led the SRI work behind the NLS system, and helped make his lab the second host on the ARPANET.

• Claude Shannon — mathematician whose 1948 paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” founded information theory; defined the bit, channel capacity, and entropy; foundational to all digital communications.

• Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman — published public-key cryptography concepts in “New Directions in Cryptography” (1976); Diffie-Hellman key exchange enabled secure communication without pre-shared keys; Turing Award 2015.

• Radia Perlman — invented the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP, 1985), which prevents loops in Ethernet networks and made large LAN architectures feasible; called the “Mother of the Internet” (though she disputes the title).

• Stewart Brand — counterculture figure and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog; early internet culture influencer; co-founded the WELL (1985), an influential early online community; coined the phrase “information wants to be free.” He is also a countercultural writer and publisher who promoted long-term thinking through the Long Now Foundation and later worked with the Global Business Network.

• MySpace founders
  • Tom Anderson — Tom Anderson is the older neighbor in Beavis and Butt-Head, the one who resembles Hank Hill and often enlists the boys for chores. He is also widely known as an early MySpace founder and internet entrepreneur.
• Internet analysts
  • Esther Dyson — Esther Dyson is an analyst and investor known for her writing on how the Internet will change business and social life. She edited the newsletter Release 1.0 through her company EDventure Holdings and later wrote Release 2.0.
• Mike Godwin — Mike Godwin is an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer best known for the maxim that as an online discussion grows longer, comparisons to Nazis or Hitler become increasingly likely. He later drew attention for responding to the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally by saying that such comparisons were fair game.

Governance, Rights, and Internet Policy

Distinguish technical standards bodies from public policy, privacy, neutrality, and licensing questions.

• Net neutrality — the principle that ISPs must treat all internet traffic equally, without throttling, blocking, or paid prioritization; the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet Order (Title II classification) was repealed in 2017 and debated continuously since; the EU’s net neutrality rules (2016) remain in force. It is closely associated with Tim Wu and FCC debates over common-carrier regulation.

• Section 230 — a provision of the US Communications Decency Act (1996) that shields internet platforms from liability for user-generated content; foundational to the modern web; frequently challenged legislatively. It has been a major target of debate because of its role in moderating harmful speech and other third-party posts.

• GDPR — the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (effective May 2018); sets strict rules for collection, processing, and transfer of personal data; introduced the right to erasure and data portability; fines up to 4% of global annual revenue. It also includes rules on consent and breach notification.

• IANA stewardship transition (1 October 2016) — the U.S. government’s stewardship contract ended, with operational and accountability arrangements coordinated through the global multistakeholder community. The IANA functions are provided by Public Technical Identifiers, an ICANN affiliate; this is a transition in stewardship of shared identifiers, not a transfer of ownership of the entire internet.³

• Edward Snowden — NSA contractor who in 2013 disclosed mass surveillance programs (PRISM, XKeyscore) revealing bulk collection of internet metadata and content; spurred widespread adoption of end-to-end encryption and HTTPS.

• Aaron Swartz — internet prodigy who co-authored RSS 1.0 at age 14 and co-created Reddit’s early codebase; co-founded Demand Progress; arrested (2011) for bulk-downloading JSTOR articles; his prosecution and death (2013) became a flashpoint in open-access debates. He was a programmer and internet activist; the JSTOR case was framed as an open-access protest.

• Internet policy
  • Network neutrality
    • Tim Wu — Tim Wu is a legal scholar and policy figure who coined the term “network neutrality.” He wrote The Master Switch and later served in the Biden administration as a technology and competition policy adviser.
• Internet law and policy
  • Creative Commons licensing
    • Creative Commons — Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that offers licenses allowing creators to share and reuse copyrighted works. Its licensing system includes options such as ShareAlike, and it was founded by Lawrence Lessig.
• Internet free speech activists
  • John Perry Barlow — John Perry Barlow was a lyricist for the Grateful Dead who later became a prominent internet free-speech activist. He co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation and wrote “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” He was also known as a Wyoming cattle rancher and was nicknamed the Thomas Jefferson of Cyberspace.