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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twisted_Metal_(1995_video_game)] | [TOKENS: 2160] |
Contents Twisted Metal (1995 video game) Twisted Metal is a 1995 vehicular combat video game developed by Sony Interactive Studios America and SingleTrac, and published by Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation. The game's plot is centered on the titular competition in which various drivers in modified vehicles must destroy the other vehicles in an attempt to be the last one alive. The winner meets the organizer of the competition, a mysterious man named Calypso, who will grant the winner a single wish, regardless of price, size or even reality. A commercial success, it was followed up by a sequel, Twisted Metal 2 (1996), as part of the Twisted Metal series. Gameplay Twisted Metal is a vehicular combat game in which the player takes control of one of twelve unique vehicles. While in control of a vehicle, the player can accelerate, steer, brake, reverse, activate the turbo, turn tightly, toggle between and activate weapons using the game controller's d-pad and buttons. The game can be played in either the one-player mode (in which the game's story takes place) or the Duel Mode (in which two human players can select a battleground on which to compete in). In the one-player mode, the player must progress through six combat arenas of progressively increasing size and featuring progressively more opponents. To clear a level, the player must destroy all of the enemy vehicles in that level. The game lasts until all of the player's lives have expired or until all six levels have been cleared. The player begins the game with three lives, indicated by the stacked green boxes on the bottom right corner of the screen. The length of each of the player's lives is tied to their health bar (located to the left of the life boxes), which decreases whenever the player's vehicle is damaged by enemy attacks. The player can replenish a portion of their vehicle's health bar by driving through blue ramps called "Health Stations" scattered throughout the environments. The difficulty level the game is set on determines how much of the vehicle's health is replenished and how fast the stations recharge once the player has used them. Each time the health bar is fully depleted, the player loses a life. If the last life is lost, the game ends. Weapons play a key role in winning the game. All vehicles come with a pair of mounted machine guns. They are weak in power, but have unlimited ammunition. However, the guns can overheat if used for too long at a time, preluded by the overheat light on the bottom-right corner of the screen blinking red. When the light becomes fully red, the machine guns will cease to function and the player will have to allow the guns to cool off before they can be used again. Additional weapons scattered throughout the environments can be picked up and utilized if the player drives through them. These weapons include a variety of missiles, land mines, tire spikes and oil slicks. All vehicles can carry up to 30 weapons. Plot The game takes place in the streets of Los Angeles on Christmas Eve, 2005. The contest featured in the game is the tenth annual running of the competition thus far. The first level, the "Arena", is an underground arena. The second level, "Warehouse District Warfare", takes place in the warehouse district of downtown Los Angeles. The third level, "Freeway Free for All", takes place on the freeways of Los Angeles. The fourth level, "River Park Rumble", takes place in Beverly Hills. The fifth and largest of the six levels, "Cyburbia", takes place in the suburbs. The sixth and final level, "Rooftop Combat", takes place on the rooftops of Los Angeles' tallest skyscrapers. After defeating all the opponents, the player must face the final boss Minion. The game is won when Minion is defeated. Once a year the legendary Calypso, a man who dwells beneath the streets of Los Angeles, holds the "Twisted Metal" competition. The contest takes place all around the Los Angeles area and calls upon drivers in various different vehicles to battle to the death. The contestants are selected and contacted by Calypso via an email message that simply reads "WILL YOU DRIVE?" in red letters. The one driver still alive at the end of the night is granted a single wish, with no limits on price, size or, according to some, even reality. Development and release Twisted Metal was developed by SingleTrac and produced by Sony Interactive Studios America. David Jaffe, a tester and later designer for Sony Imagesoft (a division of Sony Computer Entertainment) was appointed to head the design of a game for its first home console, the PlayStation. Jaffe had difficulty establishing positive relationships among industry developers due to his hubris. Given one final chance, Jaffe joined fellow designer Mike Giam and their boss, Sony Santa Monica's Alan Becker, for a meeting with the Evans & Sutherland company in Salt Lake City. Evans & Sutherland, a commercial and military computer simulation firm, had been contracted by Sony to create a 3D game for the new system. Initially, the development team members had difficulty coming up with ideas to fully implement the Evans & Sutherland technology. Upon returning from the meeting, the brainstorming lead designers were inspired while being stuck in a traffic jam on Interstate 405, when they jokingly fantasized about using guns and missiles on the other cars. Jaffe recalled: "We had these amazing visions of this Michael Bay or Michael Mann action movie going down the 405 freeway in LA, with car combat out of Mad Max and a potpourri of explosions". When the vehicular combat idea was pitched to the Utah programmers, director Michael D. Jackson suggested the idea of a pizza delivery simulation, Jaffe demurred and the more violent concept won out. Members of Evans & Sutherland joined the game designers in forming SingleTrac in the spring of 1994. Given a deadline of less than 12 months, SingleTrac was granted $2 million in advance royalties by Sony to develop two games for the PlayStation. SingleTrac began simultaneously developing the two projects, codenamed "Red Mercury" (Warhawk) and "Firestorm" (Twisted Metal). The two actually began as a single game with a common code base. During the testing phase, the player would be able to fly the Warhawk ship around the first arena of Twisted Metal and fire weapons at the cars below. Additionally, the second and third arenas of Twisted Metal were also originally one large stage; the designers found the stage too large for the limited number of enemies, which, along with several technical issues, prompted them to split it into two levels and shrink them down. The first arena was designed to be small so that the players would get used to the controls. Before finalizing the game's title, the developer considered various monikers including "Urban Assault", "Cars and Rockets", and "High Octane". SingleTrac also filmed live action footage for each character's ending, but it was not featured in the game's final release because some members of the development team found it too offensive. The endings were eventually included as bonus content in Twisted Metal Head-On: Extra Twisted Edition for the PlayStation 2. Twisted Metal was first shown alongside Warhawk at the first annual E3 in Los Angeles between May 11 and 13, 1995. The two games were among the first PlayStation titles available outside Japan and were part of a large, multimedia advertising campaign by Sony for the console's western debut. Retailers and members of the press were given custom Twisted Metal license plates to promote the game. Despite some criticism from members of Sony Computer Entertainment's Japanese division and focus test groups just prior to its marketing phase, Twisted Metal went gold and was completed on a budget of $850,000. Twisted Metal was officially released for the PlayStation in North America on November 5, 1995, in Europe on January 6 and in Japan on November 15, 1996. The North American version was re-released for the Sony Greatest Hits line-up on March 3, 1997. A PC version of the game was also developed and used to showcase the Windows 95-compatible Nvidia NV1 graphics accelerator chip at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in 1996. Reception and legacy Twisted Metal received positive reviews from critics. It received an aggregate score of 66.88% on GameRankings. Game Revolution praised the game's action and variety of the vehicles, but noted that the graphics were "a little sloppy". IGN criticized the single-player mode's short length of "just a couple of hours", but remarked that the two-player mode "more than makes up for the one-player mode's lack of length". Twisted Metal was awarded the 1995 "Game of the Year" from the editors of Electronic Gaming Monthly. The Black Widow of GamePro criticized the graphics for their static arena crowd, difficult-to-read radar, and heavy break-up, and described the music as "weak overall". However, they concluded that "despite its flaws, this twisted game is fun". Maximum applauded the varying strengths and weaknesses of the vehicles and most especially the innovative free-roaming levels. They criticized that the game is much too short and concluded: "A playable game, but one which is probably destined for obscurity". A reviewer for Next Generation called it "another showcase title for the PlayStation", and said that while the texture maps are simple, this allows the action to play out fast enough that players will rarely notice the lack of detail. He agreed with Maximum that the game is too short, contending that even players with nominal skill will reach the final stage in about two hours, but felt that the enduring fun of the two-player mode "nearly" makes up for this. Twisted Metal was commercially successful. By 1996, Twisted Metal and Warhawk had sold over 500,000 units combined and generated some $28 million in revenue for publisher Sony. To date, Twisted Metal has sold over one million copies in the North America alone. As a result, Sony re-released the game as part of its budget Greatest Hits range of games in March 1997. The game was re-released on other consoles through Sony's PlayStation Network service on February 23, 2011, in PAL region, and on February 12, 2013, in North America. It was then made available for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 on July 18, 2023. See also Notes References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tayibe] | [TOKENS: 1682] |
Contents Tayibe Tayibe, also spelled Taibeh or Tayiba, (Arabic: الطَّيِّبَة, romanized: et-Tayyibe, lit. 'the kind/benevolent', South Levantine pronunciation: [etˈtˤɑjbe]; Hebrew: טַיִּבָּה) is an Arab city in central Israel, 12 km (7 mi) north east of Kfar Saba. Part of the Triangle region, in 2023 it had a population of 46,194. History A village called Tayyibat al-Ism was on the list of lands allocated by sultan Baibars to his amirs in 663 AH (1265–1266 CE), about five centuries after the Arab conquest of Palestine. In Mamluk times, the village name appeared on documents referring to the waqf of the mosque in Hebron. It has been suggested that the village is identical with Tivata (טיבתה), a settlement mentioned in the Talmud. According to the Jerusalemite Talmud (Demai 22c), the inn of this settlement (Pundeqâ de Tibetah) marked the territorial limit of Caesarea. Under Ottoman rule after 1517, a sijill (royal order) from 941/1535 gave 1/3 of the revenue from Tayyibat al-Ism to Ribat al-Mansuri (Com.); a hospital in Jerusalem established by Al-Mansur Qalawun in 1282. The tax register of 1596 shows the village was under the administration of the nahiya of Bani Sab. A population of 50 households ("khana") and 5 bachelors, all Muslim, paid a fixed tax rate of 33,3% on wheat, barley, summer crops ( melons, beans, vegetables), olive trees, beehives and goats; a total of 19,800 akçe. All of the revenue went to a waqf. Pierre Jacotin called the village Taibeh on his map in 1799. In the 1860s, the Ottoman authorities granted the village agricultural plots of land called Ghabat al-Taiyiba al-Shamaliyya and Ghabat al-Taiyiba al-Qibliyya in the former confines of the Forest of Arsur (Ar. Al-Ghaba) in the coastal plain, west of the village. In 1870/1871 (1288 AH), an Ottoman census listed the village in the nahiya (sub-district) of Bani Sa'b. The French explorer Victor Guérin described it as a village south of Fardisya, while in the 1882 "Survey of Western Palestine", Tayibe was described as: "a large straggling village on the end of a slope, principally built of stone. It is supplied by cisterns and surrounded with olives." In the 1922 census of Palestine, ‘’Taibeh’’ had a population of 2,350, all Muslims, increasing in the 1931 census, to 2,944, all Muslim, living in 658 houses. The count may have included two nearby Bedouin tribes. In the 1945 statistics the population was 4,290 Muslims, while the land area was 32,750 dunams, according to an official land and population survey. This included some nearby Arab communities. Of this, 559 were allocated for citrus and bananas, 3,180 plantations and irrigable land, 23,460 for cereals, while 281 dunams were classified as built-up areas. During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Israeli forces captured the town lands, but not the town itself. Tayibe was transferred to Israel as part of the 1949 cease-fire agreement with Jordan. According to David Gilmour, "the inhabitants were furious that Abdullah I of Jordan had simply handed them over to Israel but were relieved that they were to be reunited with their land. However, the Law of Acquisition of Absentee Property, which was passed in 1950 but made retroactive, was specially devised to take care of cases like this. Although they had not moved from their village, the inhabitants were declared 'absentees' and their land 'abandoned property'. According to the villagers, they lost 8,000 acres (3,237.49 ha) of their 11,000 acres (4,451.54 ha)." Tayibe achieved local council status in 1952. In 1990, it was declared a city. In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that the 2017 seizure of 7.5 acres (3.04 ha) by the same legal device was permitted and charged costs to the petitioners. The families involved were refused access to the maps on which the ruling was based on "national security" grounds. Haaretz described the move as "legalized theft", "in defiance of both the spirit of the law and its rationale". On Oct 11 2024, five residents of Tayibe were indicted for allegedly pledging allegiance to Islamic State, viewing the group's social media content, and having watched "instructional videos on preparing explosives and bombs." with one suspect accused of stating his intent to "blow up Azrieli" a skyscraper complex in Tel Aviv. Demographics According to CBS, the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2001 the ethnic makeup of the city was 100.0% Arab (99.7% Muslim), with no significant Jewish population. In 2001 the population was 29,600 with 15,100 males and 14,500 females. 47.5% of the population was 19 years of age or younger, 17.4% between 20 and 29, 20.3% between 30 and 44, 9.6% from 45 to 59, 2.0% from 60 to 64, and 3.3% 65 years of age or older. The population growth rate in 2001 was 3.2%. In 2011, it had a population of 38,575. Tayibe had an estimated population of 40,200 in 2014, up from 35,700 in the 2008 census. The population of Tayibe, one of the largest and most developed Arab localities in Israel, is made up of 20 extended families, all Muslim. Landmarks An ancient oak tree in Tayibe was declared the largest in Israel. The oak has a trunk circumference of 690 centimeters. According to local legend, there is an angel that watches over the tree and avenges any damage to it. It is said to be 1,400 years old, although this has not been scientifically proven. Education and culture In 2001, there were 13 schools with a total enrollment of 6,970 students: 9 elementary schools (3,984 students) and 4 high schools (2,986 students). Nearly half of all 12th graders completed their Bagrut matriculation exams.[citation needed] An educational empowerment project has been operating in Tayibe since 2006 to reduce the dropout rate among Bedouin students. The students receive extra help in Arabic, Hebrew, English and math, and attend special enrichment workshops in inter-personal communication. Following the success of this project, the project has been expanded to nearby Qalansawe and other Arab villages in Israel. The Tayibe Women Against Violence organization was established to work against violence in the community. The organization offers seminars and workshops that increase women's awareness of their rights and helps them find jobs. Sports The now-defunct Hapoel Tayibe F.C. were the first Israeli Arab club to play in the top division of Israeli football. The town is currently represented by Shimshon Bnei Tayibe F.C.. Notable people See also References Bibliography External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_era] | [TOKENS: 4147] |
Contents Classical antiquity Classical antiquity, also known as the classical era, classical period, classical age, or simply antiquity, is the period of cultural European history between the 8th century BC and the 5th century AD.[note 1] It comprises the interwoven civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome, known together as the Greco-Roman world, which played a major role in shaping the culture of the Mediterranean basin. It is the period during which ancient Greece and Rome flourished and had major influence throughout much of Europe, North Africa, and West Asia. Classical antiquity was succeeded by late antiquity. Conventionally, it is often considered to begin with the earliest recorded Epic Greek poetry of Homer (8th–7th centuries BC) and end with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD. Such a wide span of history and territory covers many disparate cultures and periods. Classical antiquity may also refer to an idealized vision among later people of what was, in Edgar Allan Poe's words, "the glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome". The culture of the ancient Greeks, together with some influences from the ancient Near East, was the basis of art, philosophy, society, and education in the Mediterranean and Near East until the Roman imperial period. The Romans preserved, imitated, and spread this culture throughout Europe, until they were able to compete with it. This Greco-Roman cultural foundation has been immensely influential on the language, politics, law, educational systems, philosophy, science, warfare, literature, historiography, ethics, rhetoric, art and architecture of both the Western, and through it, the modern world. Surviving fragments of classical culture helped produce a revival beginning during the 14th century, which later came to be known as the Renaissance, and various neo-classical revivals occurred during the 18th and 19th centuries. History The earliest period of classical antiquity occurs during a time of gradual resurgence of historical sources after the Late Bronze Age collapse. The 8th and 7th centuries BC are still largely protohistorical, with the earliest Greek alphabetic inscriptions appearing during the first half of the 8th century. The legendary poet Homer is usually assumed to have lived during the 8th or 7th century BC, and his lifetime is often considered as the beginning of classical antiquity. During the same period is the traditional date for the establishment of the Ancient Olympic Games, in 776 BC. The Phoenicians originally expanded from ports in Canaan, by the 8th century dominating trade in the Mediterranean. Carthage was founded in 814 BC, and the Carthaginians by 700 BC had established strongholds in Sicily, Italy and Sardinia, which created conflicts of interest with Etruria. A stele found in Kition, Cyprus, commemorates the victory of King Sargon II in 709 BC over the seven kings of the island, marking an important part of the transfer of Cyprus from Tyrian rule to the Neo-Assyrian Empire. The Archaic period followed the Greek Dark Ages, and saw significant advancements in political theory, and the beginnings of democracy, philosophy, theatre, poetry, as well as the revitalization of the written language (which had been lost during the Dark Ages). In pottery, the Archaic period sees the development of the Orientalizing style, which signals a shift from the geometric style of the later Dark Ages and the accumulation of influences derived from Egypt, Phoenicia and Syria. Pottery styles associated with the later part of the Archaic age are the black-figure pottery, which originated in Corinth during the 7th-century BC and its successor, the red-figure style, developed by the Andokides Painter in about 530 BC. The Archaic expansion differed from the Iron Age migrations of the Greek Dark Ages, in that it consisted of organised direction (see oikistes) away from the originating metropolis rather than the simplistic movement of tribes, which characterised the aforementioned earlier migrations. Many colonies, or apoikiai (Greek: ἀποικία, transl. "home away from home"), that were founded during this period eventually evolved into strong Greek city-states, functioning independently of their metropolis. The Etruscans had established political control in the region by the late 7th-century BC, forming the aristocratic and monarchial elite. The Etruscans apparently lost power in the area by the late 6th-century BC, and at this time, the Italic tribes reinvented their government by creating republics, with greater restraints on the ability of individual rulers to exercise power. According to legend, Rome was founded on 21 April 753 BC by twin descendants of the Trojan prince Aeneas, Romulus and Remus. As the city was bereft of women, legend says that the Latins invited the Sabines to a festival and stole their unmarried maidens, resulting in the integration of Latins and Sabines. Archaeological evidence indeed shows first traces of settlement at the Roman Forum in the mid-8th century BC, though settlements on the Palatine Hill may date back to the 10th century BC. According to legend, the seventh and final king of Rome was Tarquinius Superbus. As the son of Tarquinius Priscus and the son-in-law of Servius Tullius, Superbus was of Etruscan birth. It was during his reign that the Etruscans reached their apex of power. Superbus removed and destroyed all the Sabine shrines and altars from the Tarpeian Rock, enraging the people of Rome. The people came to object to his rule when he failed to recognize the rape of Lucretia, a patrician Roman, by his own son. Lucretia's kinsman, Lucius Junius Brutus (ancestor to Marcus Brutus), summoned the Senate and had Superbus and the monarchy expelled from Rome in 510 BC. After Superbus' expulsion, the Senate in 509 BC voted to never again allow the rule of a king and reformed Rome into a republican government. The classical period of ancient Greece corresponds to most of the 5th and 4th centuries BC, in particular, from the end of the Athenian tyranny in 510 BC to the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC. In 510, Spartan troops helped the Athenians overthrow the tyrant Hippias, son of Peisistratos. Cleomenes I, king of Sparta, established a pro-Spartan oligarchy conducted by Isagoras. The Greco-Persian Wars (499–449 BC), concluded by the Peace of Callias ended with not only the liberation of Greece, Macedon, Thrace, and Ionia from Persian rule, but also with the dominance of Athens in the Delian League, which resulted in conflict with Sparta and the Peloponnesian League, resulting in the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), ending with a Spartan victory. Greece began the 4th century with Spartan hegemony, but by 395 BC the Spartan rulers dismissed Lysander from office, and Sparta lost its naval supremacy. Athens, Argos, Thebes and Corinth, the latter two of which were formerly Spartan allies, challenged Spartan dominance in the Corinthian War, which ended inconclusively in 387 BC. Later, in 371 BC, the Theban generals Epaminondas and Pelopidas won a victory at the Battle of Leuctra. The result of this battle was the end of Spartan supremacy and the establishment of Theban hegemony. Thebes sought to maintain its dominance until it was finally ended by the increasing power of Macedon in 346 BC. During the reign of Philip II, (359–336 BC), Macedon expanded into the territory of the Paeonians, the Thracians and the Illyrians. Philip's son, Alexander the Great, (356–323 BC) managed to briefly extend Macedonian power not only over the central Greek city-states but also to the Persian Empire, including Egypt and lands as far east as the fringes of India. The classical Greek period conventionally ends at the death of Alexander in 323 BC and the fragmentation of his empire, which was at this time divided among the Diadochi. Greece began the Hellenistic period with the increasing power of Macedon and the conquests of Alexander the Great. Greek became the lingua franca far beyond Greece itself, and Hellenistic culture interacted with the cultures of Persia, the Kingdom of Israel and Kingdom of Judah, Central Asia and Egypt. Significant advances were made in the sciences (geography, astronomy, mathematics, etc.), notably with the followers of Aristotle (Aristotelianism). The Hellenistic period ended with the increase of the Roman Republic to a super-regional power during the 2nd century BC and the Roman conquest of Greece in 146 BC. The Republican period of Ancient Rome began with the overthrow of the Monarchy c. 509 BC and lasted more than 450 years until its subversion through a series of civil wars, into the Principate form of government and the Imperial period. During the half millennium of the Republic, Rome increased from a regional power of the Latium to the dominant force in Italy and beyond. The unification of Italy by the Romans was a gradual process, brought about by a series of conflicts of the 4th and 3rd centuries, the Samnite Wars, Latin War, and Pyrrhic War. Roman victory in the Punic Wars and Macedonian Wars established Rome as a super-regional power by the 2nd century BC, followed by the acquisition of Greece and Asia Minor. This tremendous increase of power was accompanied by economic instability and social unrest, resulting in the Catiline conspiracy, the Social War and the First Triumvirate, and finally the transformation to the Roman Empire during the latter half of the 1st century BC. The precise end of the Republic is disputed by modern historians;[note 2] Roman citizens of the time did not recognize that the Republic had ceased to exist. The early Julio-Claudian Emperors maintained that the res publica still existed, albeit protected by their extraordinary powers, and would eventually return to its earlier Republican form. The Roman state continued to term itself a res publica as long as it continued to use Latin as its official language. Rome acquired imperial character de facto from the 130s BC with the acquisition of Cisalpine Gaul, Illyria, Greece and Hispania, and definitely with the addition of Iudaea, Asia Minor and Gaul during the 1st century BC. At the time of the empire's maximal extension during the reign of Trajan (AD 117), Rome controlled the entire Mediterranean as well as Gaul, parts of Germania and Britannia, the Balkans, Dacia, Asia Minor, the Caucasus, and Mesopotamia. Culturally, the Roman Empire was significantly Hellenized, but also incorporated syncretic "eastern" traditions, such as Mithraism, Gnosticism, and most notably Christianity. Classical Rome had vast differences within their family life compared to the Greeks. Fathers had great power over their children, and husbands over their wives. In fact, the word family, familia in Latin, actually referred to those who were subject to the authority of a male head of household. This included non-related members such as slaves and servants. By marriage, both men and women shared property. Divorce was allowed first during the first century BC and could be done by either man or woman. The Roman Empire began to weaken as a result of the crisis of the third century. During Late antiquity Christianity became increasingly popular, finally ousting the Roman imperial cult with the Theodosian decrees of 393. Successive invasions of Germanic tribes finalized the weakening of the Western Roman Empire during the 5th century, while the Eastern Roman Empire persisted throughout the Middle Ages, in a state called Romania by its citizens, and designated the Byzantine Empire by later historians. Hellenistic philosophy was succeeded by continued development of Platonism and Epicureanism, with Neoplatonism in due course influencing the theology of the Christian Church Fathers. Many writers have attempted to name a specific date for the symbolic "end" of antiquity, with the most prominent dates being the deposing of the last Western Roman Emperor in 476, the closing of the last Platonic Academy in Athens by the Eastern Roman emperor Justinian I in 529, and the conquest of much of the Mediterranean by the new Muslim faith from 634 to 718. These Muslim conquests, of Syria (637), Egypt (639), Cyprus (654), North Africa (665), Hispania (718), Southern Gaul (720), Crete (820), Sicily (827), Malta (870), as well as the sieges of the Eastern Roman capital (first in 674–78 and then in 717–18) severed the economic, cultural, and political links that had traditionally united the classical cultures around the Mediterranean, ending antiquity (see Pirenne Thesis). The original Roman Senate continued to express decrees into the late 6th century, and the last Eastern Roman emperor to use Latin as the language of his court in Constantinople was emperor Maurice, who reigned until 602. The overthrow of Maurice by his mutinying Danube army commanded by Phocas resulted in the Slavic invasion of the Balkans and the weakening of Balkan and Greek urban culture (resulting in the flight of Balkan Latin speakers to the mountains, see Origin of the Romanians), and also provoked the Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628 in which all the great eastern cities except Constantinople were lost. The resulting turmoil did not end until the Muslim conquests of the 7th century finalized the irreversible loss of all the largest Eastern Roman imperial cities besides the capital itself. The emperor Heraclius in Constantinople, who reigned during this period, conducted his court in Greek, not Latin, though Greek had always been an administrative language of the eastern Roman regions. Eastern-Western associations weakened with the ending of the Byzantine Papacy. The Eastern Roman empire's capital city Constantinople remained the only unconquered large urban site of the original Roman empire, as well as being the largest city in Europe. Yet many classical books, sculptures, and technologies survived there along with classical Roman cuisine and scholarly traditions, well into the Middle Ages, when much of it was "rediscovered" by visiting Western crusaders. Indeed, the inhabitants of Constantinople continued to refer to themselves as Romans, as did their eventual conquerors in 1453, the Ottomans (see Romaioi and Rûm.) The classical scholarship and culture that was still preserved in Constantinople were brought by refugees fleeing its conquest in 1453 and helped to begin the Renaissance (see Greek scholars in the Renaissance). Ultimately, it was a slow, complex, and graduated change of the socio-economic structure in European history that resulted in the changeover between classical antiquity and medieval society and no specific date can truly exemplify that. Political revivalism In politics, the late Roman conception of the Empire as a universal state, commanded by one supreme divinely appointed ruler, united with Christianity as a universal religion likewise headed by a supreme patriarch, proved very influential, even after the disappearance of imperial authority in the west. This tendency reached its maximum when Charlemagne was crowned "Roman Emperor" in the year 800, an act which resulted in the formation of the Holy Roman Empire. The notion that an emperor is a monarch who outranks a king dates from this period. In this political ideal, there would always be a Roman Empire, a state the jurisdiction of which extended through the entire civilized western world. That model continued to exist in Constantinople for the entirety of the Middle Ages, where the Byzantine Emperor was considered the sovereign of the entire Christian world. The Patriarch of Constantinople was the Empire's highest-ranked cleric, but even he was subordinate to the emperor, who was "God's Vicegerent on Earth". The Greek-speaking Byzantines and their descendants continued to call themselves "Romioi" until the creation of a new Greek state in 1832. After the capture of Constantinople in 1453, the Russian Czars (a title derived from Caesar) claimed the Byzantine legacy as the champion of Orthodoxy; Moscow was described as the "Third Rome", and the Czars ruled as divinely appointed Emperors into the 20th century. Despite the fact that the Western Roman secular authority disappeared entirely in Europe, it still left traces. The Papacy and the Catholic Church in particular maintained Latin language, culture, and literacy for centuries; to this day the popes are termed Pontifex Maximus which during the classical period was a title belonging to the emperor, and the ideal of Christendom continued the legacy of a united European civilization even after its political unity had ended. The political idea of an Emperor in the West to match the Emperor in the East continued after the Western Roman Empire's collapse; it was revived by the coronation of Charlemagne in 800; the self-described Holy Roman Empire ruled central Europe until 1806. The Renaissance idea that the classical Roman virtues had been lost as a result of medievalism was especially powerful in European politics of the 18th and 19th centuries. Reverence for Roman republicanism was strong among the Founding Fathers of the United States and the Latin American revolutionaries; the Americans described their new government as a republic (from res publica) and gave it a Senate and a President (another Latin term), rather than use available English terms like commonwealth or parliament. Similarly in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, republicanism and Roman martial virtues were promoted by the state, as can be seen in the architecture of the Panthéon, the Arc de Triomphe, and the paintings of Jacques-Louis David. During the revolution, France transitioned from kingdom to republic to dictatorship to Empire (complete with Imperial Eagles) that the Romans had experienced centuries earlier. Cultural legacy Classical antiquity is a general term for a long period of cultural history. Such a wide sampling of history and territory covers many rather disparate cultures and periods. "Classical antiquity" often refers to an idealized vision of later people, of what was, in Edgar Allan Poe's words, "the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome!" During the 18th and 19th centuries AD, reverence for classical antiquity was much greater in Europe and the United States than it is now. Respect for the ancient people of Greece and Rome affected politics, philosophy, sculpture, literature, theatre, education, architecture, and sexuality. Epic poetry in Latin continued to be written and circulated well into the 19th century. John Milton and even Arthur Rimbaud received their first poetic educations in Latin. Genres like epic poetry, pastoral verse, and the frequent use of characters and themes from Greek mythology affected Western literature greatly. In architecture, there have been several Greek Revivals, which seem more inspired in retrospect by Roman architecture than Greek. Washington, DC has many large marble buildings with façades made to look like Greek temples, with columns constructed in the classical orders of architecture. The philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas was derived largely from that of Aristotle, despite the intervening change in religion from Hellenic Polytheism to Christianity. Greek and Roman authorities such as Hippocrates and Galen formed the basis of the practice of medicine even longer than Greek thought prevailed in philosophy. In the French theater, playwrights such as Molière and Racine wrote plays on mythological or classical historical subjects and subjected them to the strict rules of the classical unities derived from Aristotle's Poetics. The desire to dance in a manner allegedly similar to the manner of the ancient Greeks caused Isadora Duncan to create her brand of ballet. Timeline See also Explanatory notes References Further reading External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_44131] | [TOKENS: 269] |
Contents HD 44131 HD 44131 is a star in the equatorial constellation of Orion, positioned near the eastern constellation border with Monoceros. It has a reddish hue and is faintly visible to the naked eye with an apparent visual magnitude of 4.91. The star is located at a distance of approximately 465 light years from the Sun based on parallax, and it is drifting further away with a radial velocity of +48.6 km/s. Based on radial velocity variations, it is a candidate spectroscopic binary system and a preliminary orbital solution was published in 1991 with a period of 9.29 yr. However, these velocity variations may be due to other causes. This is an aging red giant star currently on the asymptotic giant branch with a stellar classification of M1III. With the supply of core hydrogen exhausted, this star has cooled and expanded off the main sequence. It is now estimated to have 56 times the radius of the Sun and is radiating 673 times the Sun's luminosity from its swollen photosphere at an effective temperature of 3,932 K. This is a periodic variable of unknown type with a frequency of 0.11212 cycles per day (period of 8.9 days) and an amplitude of 0.0106 in magnitude. References |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Arab_List] | [TOKENS: 1397] |
Contents United Arab List The United Arab List (Hebrew: הַרְשִׁימָה הַעֲרָבִית הַמְאוּחֶדֶת, HaReshima HaAravit HaMe'uhedet; Arabic: القائمة العربية الموحدة, al-Qā'ima al-'Arabiyya al-Muwaḥḥada), commonly known by its Hebrew acronym Ra'am (Hebrew: רע"מ, lit. 'Thunder'), is an Islamist and conservative political party in Israel, and the political wing of the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel (the Southern Branch is the portion of the Islamic Movement that supported the Oslo I Accord and began participating in Israeli parliamentary elections). It was part of the Joint List but left the alliance on 28 January 2021. In 2021 it formally joined a coalition of parties forming the thirty-sixth government. It is currently led by Mansour Abbas. History The party was established prior to the 1996 election, unrelated to the original United Arab List that existed in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was joined in an electoral alliance by the Arab Democratic Party (which held two seats in the outgoing parliament) and the southern faction of the Islamic Movement, led by Sheikh Abdullah Nimar Darwish. The party initially went under the title of Mada-Ra'am, Mada being the acronym and common name for the Arab Democratic Party. In the election, the party won four seats. During the Knesset term, the Arab Democratic Party became a faction within the United Arab List, and its name was dropped from the party title. The 1999 election saw the party increase its share of the vote and pick up five seats. However, internal disagreements saw three MKs leave; Muhamad Kanan and Tawfik Khatib left and established the Arab National Party, whilst Hashem Mahameed formed the National Unity – National Progressive Alliance party. In the 2003 election, the party's support dropped by more than a third, with the party only just crossing the electoral threshold of 2%, and winning only two seats. For the 2006 election, the party entered an alliance with Ahmad Tibi's Ta'al party. Running together, the alliance won four seats, three of which were taken by the United Arab List. The partys' alliance was maintained for the 2009 election, which initially saw the Israeli Central Elections Committee ban the party from participating, but this was overturned by the Supreme Court of Israel. In the election, the alliance again won four seats. Shortly before the 2013 election, Taleb el-Sana left the party to sit as an independent Arab Democratic Party member. After the electoral threshold to gain Knesset seats was raised from 2% to 3.25%, the party joined with Hadash, Balad, Ta'al, and the Islamic Movement to form the Joint List for the 2015 election. For the April 2019 election, it ran on a list with Balad. The party again ran as part of the Joint List in the 2020 election. In the 2021 elections the party won four seats in the Knesset. Within the fragmented political landscape of Israel, these seats gave the party the role of kingmaker in determining the next government after Benjamin Netanyahu failed to form one. On 2 June 2021, party leader Mansour Abbas signed an agreement to form a coalition government, the first time an independent Arab party became a member of the Israeli government, and the first time in more than 50 years that any Arab party formed part of the Israeli government; a photograph of Abbas, sitting with Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett, signing the coalition agreement was widely circulated. The agreement included guarantees that more than 53 billion shekels (US$16 billion) would be spent to improve infrastructure and reduce crime in Arab towns, provisions protecting homes built without permits in Arab villages, and recognition for Bedouin towns in the Negev desert. On 28 October 2021, the cabinet approved a plan to spend US$9.4 billion to improve employment opportunities and health services for Israeli Arabs and improve housing, technology, and infrastructure in Arab areas; it included a further US$1 billion to address high crime rates in Arab areas. In the scale of funding range of issues in the Arab community addressed, the plan had little precedent in Israeli history, and Abbas and Ra'am were widely credited with pushing forward what Abbas called a "historic step" forward for Arab Israelis. The plan was signed into law when the budget passed on 4 November. At the United Arab List's urging the coalition government recognized several Bedouin villages and connected thousands of previously-illegal homes to the electrical grid. In the 2022 Knesset elections the party won five seats, gaining an additional seat. The party received most of its votes in Bedouin and Sunni Muslim towns. Ideology and support Ra'am is an Islamist party. It has been described as a "religious Arab Muslim party". Under Abbas's direction, the party advocates for the full-fledged political involvement with the domestic politics of Israel in order to improve the quality of life of Arab Israelis, particularly with respect to crime, employment opportunities, housing, and infrastructure; this is a departure from other Arab parties, which historically form part of the opposition and focus on the larger Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The party supports the two-state solution, and the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital. Its constituency consists mostly of religious or nationalist Israeli Arabs, and enjoys particular popularity among the Negev Bedouin: in the 2009 election, 80% of residents of Bedouin communities voted for the party. However, it has been said[by whom?] that the party does "not emphasise the need to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories". The Islamic Movement also operates in poor Arab towns and villages, as well as in Bedouin settlements, to mobilize voters. The southern faction of the Islamic Movement is now the dominant force in the party, whilst other factions include the Arab National Party. The Islamic Movement's advisory religious body, known as the Majlis-ash-Shura (Shura Council), has guided the party's votes in parliament. According to The Times of Israel, the party and its leader Mansour Abbas hold a "virulently anti-gay outlook" and have "regularly disparaged gay people with an Arabic slur meaning 'perverts'". Election results Knesset membership See also References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabak_people] | [TOKENS: 1737] |
Contents Shabaks Shabaks (Arabic: الشبك, Kurdish: شەبەک, romanized: Şebek) are a group native to the Nineveh Plains in Iraq. They speak Shabaki, a branch of the Zaza–Gorani languages, and largely follow Shia Islam. Their ethnic origin is uncertain and disputed, although they were largely considered Kurds by scholars. Origins The origins of the word Shabak are not clear. One theory is that Shabak is an Arabic word شبك that means intertwine, indicating that the Shabak people originated as a confederation of many tribes of different ethnicities. Others claim that the word Shabak came from the Persian "shah" and Turkish "bek", meaning "master of kings", eventually being Arabized to "Shabak". Austin Henry Layard considered Shabaks to be descendants of Kurds who originated in Iran, and believed that they possibly had affinities with the Ali-Ilahis. Anastase-Marie al-Karmali also argued that Shabaks were ethnic Kurds. Another theory claimed that Shabaks were local ethnic Kurds who were influenced by many cultures due to the ethnic and religious diversity of the Nineveh Plains, which was historically one of the most diverse regions in Iraq. In 2019, Hussein al-Shabaki, a Shabak politician, claimed that the Shabaks were simply Kurds of various Kurdish tribes, and that the term "Shabak" in reality was the historical name of the region they lived in. Another theory suggests that the Shabaks originated from Anatolian Qizilbash Turkomans, who were forced to settle in the Mosul area after the defeat of Ismail I by the Ottomans at the Battle of Chaldiran. Other theories supported the Qizilbash theory, although claimed that the Shabaks specifically descended from Qizilbash Kurds, as the Qizilbash confederation did include Kurds and other Non-Turkic minorities. Historians also stated that it was possible that the Shabaks descended from an ancient Kurdish tribe known as "Shanbakiyya", and also added that it was possible that the Shabaks had affinities with Shabankara. In the 1990s, Turkish sources began denying the existence of the Shabaks, claiming they were simply part of the Iraqi Turkmen. Stephen Hemsley Longrigg, the historian of the British mandate of Iraq, described the language of the Shabaks as "a Kurdish dialect" and their religion as "a heretical type of Shi'ism". Most Shabaks belonged to the Kurdish tribes of Zangana, Bajalan, Rojbayani, Dawudi, Lak, Omerbal, Shekak, and Zirari, among others. Some individual Shabak families were of Arab or Turkmen origin who assimilated due to living in close proximity. The Shabaks speak Shabaki, a branch of the Gorani languages. However, some Shabaks claimed to be Kurds who spoke Hawrami, implying that Shabaki was a regional identity rather than ethnic or linguistic. A significant amount of Shabaks also spoke Kurmanji as a first language, likely due to living amongst Yazidis. Many Shabaks also learned and spoke Sorani. Turkish was spoken by religious elders in Shabakism, but none of the ordinary Shabaks themselves. Shabakism later declined as a religion. Shabaks also spoke Arabic due to its official status in Iraq, and some lost their language completely to Arabization. There was the Babawat community in Sinjar, sometimes considered Shabak, other times considered a Yazidi group, Other times, the Babawat were described as not being any different from the Shabak. Deportation and forced assimilation After the 1987 census, the Iraqi regime declared Shabaks to be Arabs. Many Shabak community leaders protested, insisting that they were Kurds, after which the Iraqi regime began a campaign against Shabaks. Many Shabaks chose to abandon their traditions, stop identifying with Kurds, and assimilate into the Arab identity to avoid being targeted. The Iraqi government fabricated lineage documents to portray the Shabaks as Arabs. The campaign included both deportation and forced assimilation, and many Shabaks were relocated to concentration camps near the Harir area located to the north of Erbil. An estimated 1,160 Shabaks were killed during this period. In addition, increasing efforts have been made to force the Shabaks to suppress their own identity in favour of being Arab. The Iraqi government's efforts of forced assimilation, Arabization, and religious persecution put the Shabaks under increasing threat. A researcher interviewed a Shabak survivor, who stated that "the government said we are Arabs, not Kurds; but if we are, why did they deport us from our homes?" Shabak politician Salim al-Shabaki, a Shabak representative in the Iraqi parliament, openly declared that "the Shabaks are part of the Kurdish nation." Furthermore, he claimed that Shabaks were direct descendants of the original Kurds. After the end of Baathist Iraq, the newer Shia-dominated Iraqi government maintained the practice of attempting to distance Shabaks from Kurds. Politically, the Shabaks who identified as Kurds supported the Kurdistan Region and mostly supported the KDP, while the Shabaks who identified as a distinct group supported the central Iraqi government and mostly supported Iran-backed militias. Hunain al-Qaddo, a Shabak politician who advocated that Shabaks were a distinct ethnic group, claimed that "the Peshmerga have no genuine interest in protecting his community, and that Kurdish security forces are more interested in controlling Shabaks and their leaders than protecting them." Meanwhile, Salim al-Shabaki claimed that it was actually the Iraqi Shia militias who had no interest in protecting the Shabaks and only wanted to distance Shabaks from other Kurds. He also accused the Shia militias of committing atrocities against Shabaks who did not benefit their agenda. After the decline of Shabakism during the Iraqi civil war, most Shabaks were Muslims, with a significant Yarsani minority and a small Christian minority. Shabak Muslims were around 70% Shia and 30% Sunni. Religion was a factor in the identification of Shabaks. The Shia Shabaks were divided between those who identified as Kurds and those who identified as a separate group, while the Sunni and Yarsani Shabaks identified as Kurds. Some of them migrated to the KRG and integrated well. The Shabaks who identified as Kurds sided with the KRG and mostly supported the KDP. The Shabaks who identified as a distinct ethnic group supported the Iran-backed militias. In the 1990s and 2000s, Shabaks were also targets of Turkification by Turkish groups and their Iraqi Turkmen allies. The Iraqi Turkmen National Party (ITMP) actively ran a campaign aimed at convincing Shabaks that they were Turks. In addition to Shabaks, the ITMP claimed that all Yarsanis were Turks, and that Yarsanism was a Turkic religion. After the Anfal campaign, the ITMP received aid consisting of food packages from Turkey. The ITMP caused controversy as they did not give any aid to the Shabak victims unless they signed documents agreeing that they were Turks. By 2003, the Turkification attempts had stopped, as they never had a lasting effect on the Shabaks. Shabaks had tensions with Sunni Arabs, which was worsened by Saddam Hussein, and further worsened by the rise of the Islamic State in 2014. The situation of Shabaks and Feyli Kurds in Iraq was identical, and both groups complained about being alienated from Sunni Kurds who saw them as Shia, and from Shia Arabs who saw them as Kurds. During the 2017 Kurdistan independence referendum, there were Shabaks who supported independence and called for their native region in the Nineveh Plains to be included. Settlements List of Shabak–majority settlements in the Nineveh Plains: List of mixed settlements in the Nineveh Plains: As of March 2019, all of the above settlements are under federal control and are disputed territories of Northern Iraq. References Further reading |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#cite_note-143] | [TOKENS: 9291] |
Contents Internet The Internet (or internet)[a] is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP)[b] to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that comprises private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information services and resources, such as the interlinked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, discussion groups, internet telephony, streaming media and file sharing. Most traditional communication media, including telephone, radio, television, paper mail, newspapers, and print publishing, have been transformed by the Internet, giving rise to new media such as email, online music, digital newspapers, news aggregators, and audio and video streaming websites. The Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of personal interaction through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking services. Online shopping has also grown to occupy a significant market across industries, enabling firms to extend brick and mortar presences to serve larger markets. Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across entire industries. The origins of the Internet date back to research that enabled the time-sharing of computer resources, the development of packet switching, and the design of computer networks for data communication. The set of communication protocols to enable internetworking on the Internet arose from research and development commissioned in the 1970s by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense in collaboration with universities and researchers across the United States and in the United Kingdom and France. The Internet has no single centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage. Each constituent network sets its own policies. The overarching definitions of the two principal name spaces on the Internet, the Internet Protocol address (IP address) space and the Domain Name System (DNS), are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols is an activity of the non-profit Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Terminology The word internetted was used as early as 1849, meaning interconnected or interwoven. The word Internet was used in 1945 by the United States War Department in a radio operator's manual, and in 1974 as the shorthand form of Internetwork. Today, the term Internet most commonly refers to the global system of interconnected computer networks, though it may also refer to any group of smaller networks. The word Internet may be capitalized as a proper noun, although this is becoming less common. This reflects the tendency in English to capitalize new terms and move them to lowercase as they become familiar. The word is sometimes still capitalized to distinguish the global internet from smaller networks, though many publications, including the AP Stylebook since 2016, recommend the lowercase form in every case. In 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary found that, based on a study of around 2.5 billion printed and online sources, "Internet" was capitalized in 54% of cases. The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used interchangeably; it is common to speak of "going on the Internet" when using a web browser to view web pages. However, the World Wide Web, or the Web, is only one of a large number of Internet services. It is the global collection of web pages, documents and other web resources linked by hyperlinks and URLs. History In the 1960s, computer scientists began developing systems for time-sharing of computer resources. J. C. R. Licklider proposed the idea of a universal network while working at Bolt Beranek & Newman and, later, leading the Information Processing Techniques Office at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense. Research into packet switching,[c] one of the fundamental Internet technologies, started in the work of Paul Baran at RAND in the early 1960s and, independently, Donald Davies at the United Kingdom's National Physical Laboratory in 1965. After the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in 1967, packet switching from the proposed NPL network was incorporated into the design of the ARPANET, an experimental resource sharing network proposed by ARPA. ARPANET development began with two network nodes which were interconnected between the University of California, Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute on 29 October 1969. The third site was at the University of California, Santa Barbara, followed by the University of Utah. By the end of 1971, 15 sites were connected to the young ARPANET. Thereafter, the ARPANET gradually developed into a decentralized communications network, connecting remote centers and military bases in the United States. Other user networks and research networks, such as the Merit Network and CYCLADES, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Early international collaborations for the ARPANET were rare. Connections were made in 1973 to Norway (NORSAR and, later, NDRE) and to Peter Kirstein's research group at University College London, which provided a gateway to British academic networks, the first internetwork for resource sharing. ARPA projects, the International Network Working Group and commercial initiatives led to the development of various protocols and standards by which multiple separate networks could become a single network, or a network of networks. In 1974, Vint Cerf at Stanford University and Bob Kahn at DARPA published a proposal for "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication". Cerf and his graduate students used the term internet as a shorthand for internetwork in RFC 675. The Internet Experiment Notes and later RFCs repeated this use. The work of Louis Pouzin and Robert Metcalfe had important influences on the resulting TCP/IP design. National PTTs and commercial providers developed the X.25 standard and deployed it on public data networks. The ARPANET initially served as a backbone for the interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the United States to enable resource sharing. Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET). In 1982, the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) was standardized, which facilitated worldwide proliferation of interconnected networks. TCP/IP network access expanded again in 1986 when the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNet) provided access to supercomputer sites in the United States for researchers, first at speeds of 56 kbit/s and later at 1.5 Mbit/s and 45 Mbit/s. The NSFNet expanded into academic and research organizations in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan in 1988–89. Although other network protocols such as UUCP and PTT public data networks had global reach well before this time, this marked the beginning of the Internet as an intercontinental network. Commercial Internet service providers emerged in 1989 in the United States and Australia. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. The linking of commercial networks and enterprises by the early 1990s, as well as the advent of the World Wide Web, marked the beginning of the transition to the modern Internet. Steady advances in semiconductor technology and optical networking created new economic opportunities for commercial involvement in the expansion of the network in its core and for delivering services to the public. In mid-1989, MCI Mail and Compuserve established connections to the Internet, delivering email and public access products to the half million users of the Internet. Just months later, on 1 January 1990, PSInet launched an alternate Internet backbone for commercial use; one of the networks that added to the core of the commercial Internet of later years. In March 1990, the first high-speed T1 (1.5 Mbit/s) link between the NSFNET and Europe was installed between Cornell University and CERN, allowing much more robust communications than were capable with satellites. Later in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee began writing WorldWideWeb, the first web browser, after two years of lobbying CERN management. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 0.9, the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the first Web browser (which was also an HTML editor and could access Usenet newsgroups and FTP files), the first HTTP server software (later known as CERN httpd), the first web server, and the first Web pages that described the project itself. In 1991 the Commercial Internet eXchange was founded, allowing PSInet to communicate with the other commercial networks CERFnet and Alternet. Stanford Federal Credit Union was the first financial institution to offer online Internet banking services to all of its members in October 1994. In 1996, OP Financial Group, also a cooperative bank, became the second online bank in the world and the first in Europe. By 1995, the Internet was fully commercialized in the U.S. when the NSFNet was decommissioned, removing the last restrictions on use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic. As technology advanced and commercial opportunities fueled reciprocal growth, the volume of Internet traffic started experiencing similar characteristics as that of the scaling of MOS transistors, exemplified by Moore's law, doubling every 18 months. This growth, formalized as Edholm's law, was catalyzed by advances in MOS technology, laser light wave systems, and noise performance. Since 1995, the Internet has tremendously impacted culture and commerce, including the rise of near-instant communication by email, instant messaging, telephony (Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP), two-way interactive video calls, and the World Wide Web. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks operating at 1 Gbit/s, 10 Gbit/s, or more. The Internet continues to grow, driven by ever-greater amounts of online information and knowledge, commerce, entertainment and social networking services. During the late 1990s, it was estimated that traffic on the public Internet grew by 100 percent per year, while the mean annual growth in the number of Internet users was thought to be between 20% and 50%. This growth is often attributed to the lack of central administration, which allows organic growth of the network, as well as the non-proprietary nature of the Internet protocols, which encourages vendor interoperability and prevents any one company from exerting too much control over the network. In November 2006, the Internet was included on USA Today's list of the New Seven Wonders. As of 31 March 2011[update], the estimated total number of Internet users was 2.095 billion (30% of world population). It is estimated that in 1993 the Internet carried only 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunication. By 2000 this figure had grown to 51%, and by 2007 more than 97% of all telecommunicated information was carried over the Internet. Modern smartphones can access the Internet through cellular carrier networks, and internet usage by mobile and tablet devices exceeded desktop worldwide for the first time in October 2016. As of 2018[update], 80% of the world's population were covered by a 4G network. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) estimated that, by the end of 2017, 48% of individual users regularly connect to the Internet, up from 34% in 2012. Mobile Internet connectivity has played an important role in expanding access in recent years, especially in Asia and the Pacific and in Africa. The number of unique mobile cellular subscriptions increased from 3.9 billion in 2012 to 4.8 billion in 2016, two-thirds of the world's population, with more than half of subscriptions located in Asia and the Pacific. The limits that users face on accessing information via mobile applications coincide with a broader process of fragmentation of the Internet. Fragmentation restricts access to media content and tends to affect the poorest users the most. One solution, zero-rating, is the practice of Internet service providers allowing users free connectivity to access specific content or applications without cost. Social impact The Internet has enabled new forms of social interaction, activities, and social associations, giving rise to the scholarly study of the sociology of the Internet. Between 2000 and 2009, the number of Internet users globally rose from 390 million to 1.9 billion. By 2010, 22% of the world's population had access to computers with 1 billion Google searches every day, 300 million Internet users reading blogs, and 2 billion videos viewed daily on YouTube. In 2014 the world's Internet users surpassed 3 billion or 44 percent of world population, but two-thirds came from the richest countries, with 78 percent of Europeans using the Internet, followed by 57 percent of the Americas. However, by 2018, Asia alone accounted for 51% of all Internet users, with 2.2 billion out of the 4.3 billion Internet users in the world. China's Internet users surpassed a major milestone in 2018, when the country's Internet regulatory authority, China Internet Network Information Centre, announced that China had 802 million users. China was followed by India, with some 700 million users, with the United States third with 275 million users. However, in terms of penetration, in 2022, China had a 70% penetration rate compared to India's 60% and the United States's 90%. In 2022, 54% of the world's Internet users were based in Asia, 14% in Europe, 7% in North America, 10% in Latin America and the Caribbean, 11% in Africa, 4% in the Middle East and 1% in Oceania. In 2019, Kuwait, Qatar, the Falkland Islands, Bermuda and Iceland had the highest Internet penetration by the number of users, with 93% or more of the population with access. As of 2022, it was estimated that 5.4 billion people use the Internet, more than two-thirds of the world's population. Early computer systems were limited to the characters in the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), a subset of the Latin alphabet. After English (27%), the most requested languages on the World Wide Web are Chinese (25%), Spanish (8%), Japanese (5%), Portuguese and German (4% each), Arabic, French and Russian (3% each), and Korean (2%). Modern character encoding standards, such as Unicode, allow for development and communication in the world's widely used languages. However, some glitches such as mojibake (incorrect display of some languages' characters) still remain. Several neologisms exist that refer to Internet users: Netizen (as in "citizen of the net") refers to those actively involved in improving online communities, the Internet in general or surrounding political affairs and rights such as free speech, Internaut refers to operators or technically highly capable users of the Internet, digital citizen refers to a person using the Internet in order to engage in society, politics, and government participation. The Internet allows greater flexibility in working hours and location, especially with the spread of unmetered high-speed connections. The Internet can be accessed almost anywhere by numerous means, including through mobile Internet devices. Mobile phones, datacards, handheld game consoles and cellular routers allow users to connect to the Internet wirelessly.[citation needed] Educational material at all levels from pre-school (e.g. CBeebies) to post-doctoral (e.g. scholarly literature through Google Scholar) is available on websites. The internet has facilitated the development of virtual universities and distance education, enabling both formal and informal education. The Internet allows researchers to conduct research remotely via virtual laboratories, with profound changes in reach and generalizability of findings as well as in communication between scientists and in the publication of results. By the late 2010s the Internet had been described as "the main source of scientific information "for the majority of the global North population".: 111 Wikis have also been used in the academic community for sharing and dissemination of information across institutional and international boundaries. In those settings, they have been found useful for collaboration on grant writing, strategic planning, departmental documentation, and committee work. The United States Patent and Trademark Office uses a wiki to allow the public to collaborate on finding prior art relevant to examination of pending patent applications. Queens, New York has used a wiki to allow citizens to collaborate on the design and planning of a local park. The English Wikipedia has the largest user base among wikis on the World Wide Web and ranks in the top 10 among all sites in terms of traffic. The Internet has been a major outlet for leisure activity since its inception, with entertaining social experiments such as MUDs and MOOs being conducted on university servers, and humor-related Usenet groups receiving much traffic. Many Internet forums have sections devoted to games and funny videos. Another area of leisure activity on the Internet is multiplayer gaming. This form of recreation creates communities, where people of all ages and origins enjoy the fast-paced world of multiplayer games. These range from MMORPG to first-person shooters, from role-playing video games to online gambling. While online gaming has been around since the 1970s, modern modes of online gaming began with subscription services such as GameSpy and MPlayer. Streaming media is the real-time delivery of digital media for immediate consumption or enjoyment by end users. Streaming companies (such as Netflix, Disney+, Amazon's Prime Video, Mubi, Hulu, and Apple TV+) now dominate the entertainment industry, eclipsing traditional broadcasters. Audio streamers such as Spotify and Apple Music also have significant market share in the audio entertainment market. Video sharing websites are also a major factor in the entertainment ecosystem. YouTube was founded on 15 February 2005 and is now the leading website for free streaming video with more than two billion users. It uses a web player to stream and show video files. YouTube users watch hundreds of millions, and upload hundreds of thousands, of videos daily. Other video sharing websites include Vimeo, Instagram and TikTok.[citation needed] Although many governments have attempted to restrict both Internet pornography and online gambling, this has generally failed to stop their widespread popularity. A number of advertising-funded ostensible video sharing websites known as "tube sites" have been created to host shared pornographic video content. Due to laws requiring the documentation of the origin of pornography, these websites now largely operate in conjunction with pornographic movie studios and their own independent creator networks, acting as de-facto video streaming services. Major players in this field include the market leader Aylo, the operator of PornHub and numerous other branded sites, as well as other independent operators such as xHamster and Xvideos. As of 2023[update], Internet traffic to pornographic video sites rivalled that of mainstream video streaming and sharing services. Remote work is facilitated by tools such as groupware, virtual private networks, conference calling, videotelephony, and VoIP so that work may be performed from any location, such as the worker's home.[citation needed] The spread of low-cost Internet access in developing countries has opened up new possibilities for peer-to-peer charities, which allow individuals to contribute small amounts to charitable projects for other individuals. Websites, such as DonorsChoose and GlobalGiving, allow small-scale donors to direct funds to individual projects of their choice. A popular twist on Internet-based philanthropy is the use of peer-to-peer lending for charitable purposes. Kiva pioneered this concept in 2005, offering the first web-based service to publish individual loan profiles for funding. The low cost and nearly instantaneous sharing of ideas, knowledge, and skills have made collaborative work dramatically easier, with the help of collaborative software, which allow groups to easily form, cheaply communicate, and share ideas. An example of collaborative software is the free software movement, which has produced, among other things, Linux, Mozilla Firefox, and OpenOffice.org (later forked into LibreOffice).[citation needed] Content management systems allow collaborating teams to work on shared sets of documents simultaneously without accidentally destroying each other's work.[citation needed] The internet also allows for cloud computing, virtual private networks, remote desktops, and remote work.[citation needed] The online disinhibition effect describes the tendency of many individuals to behave more stridently or offensively online than they would in person. A significant number of feminist women have been the target of various forms of harassment, including insults and hate speech, to, in extreme cases, rape and death threats, in response to posts they have made on social media. Social media companies have been criticized in the past for not doing enough to aid victims of online abuse. Children also face dangers online such as cyberbullying and approaches by sexual predators, who sometimes pose as children themselves. Due to naivety, they may also post personal information about themselves online, which could put them or their families at risk unless warned not to do so. Many parents choose to enable Internet filtering or supervise their children's online activities in an attempt to protect their children from pornography or violent content on the Internet. The most popular social networking services commonly forbid users under the age of 13. However, these policies can be circumvented by registering an account with a false birth date, and a significant number of children aged under 13 join such sites.[citation needed] Social networking services for younger children, which claim to provide better levels of protection for children, also exist. Internet usage has been correlated to users' loneliness. Lonely people tend to use the Internet as an outlet for their feelings and to share their stories with others, such as in the "I am lonely will anyone speak to me" thread.[citation needed] Cyberslacking can become a drain on corporate resources; employees spend a significant amount of time surfing the Web while at work. Internet addiction disorder is excessive computer use that interferes with daily life. Nicholas G. Carr believes that Internet use has other effects on individuals, for instance improving skills of scan-reading and interfering with the deep thinking that leads to true creativity. Electronic business encompasses business processes spanning the entire value chain: purchasing, supply chain management, marketing, sales, customer service, and business relationship. E-commerce seeks to add revenue streams using the Internet to build and enhance relationships with clients and partners. According to International Data Corporation, the size of worldwide e-commerce, when global business-to-business and -consumer transactions are combined, equate to $16 trillion in 2013. A report by Oxford Economics added those two together to estimate the total size of the digital economy at $20.4 trillion, equivalent to roughly 13.8% of global sales. While much has been written of the economic advantages of Internet-enabled commerce, there is also evidence that some aspects of the Internet such as maps and location-aware services may serve to reinforce economic inequality and the digital divide. Electronic commerce may be responsible for consolidation and the decline of mom-and-pop, brick and mortar businesses resulting in increases in income inequality. A 2013 Institute for Local Self-Reliance report states that brick-and-mortar retailers employ 47 people for every $10 million in sales, while Amazon employs only 14. Similarly, the 700-employee room rental start-up Airbnb was valued at $10 billion in 2014, about half as much as Hilton Worldwide, which employs 152,000 people. At that time, Uber employed 1,000 full-time employees and was valued at $18.2 billion, about the same valuation as Avis Rent a Car and The Hertz Corporation combined, which together employed almost 60,000 people. Advertising on popular web pages can be lucrative, and e-commerce. Online advertising is a form of marketing and advertising which uses the Internet to deliver promotional marketing messages to consumers. It includes email marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), social media marketing, many types of display advertising (including web banner advertising), and mobile advertising. In 2011, Internet advertising revenues in the United States surpassed those of cable television and nearly exceeded those of broadcast television.: 19 Many common online advertising practices are controversial and increasingly subject to regulation. The Internet has achieved new relevance as a political tool. The presidential campaign of Howard Dean in 2004 in the United States was notable for its success in soliciting donation via the Internet. Many political groups use the Internet to achieve a new method of organizing for carrying out their mission, having given rise to Internet activism. Social media websites, such as Facebook and Twitter, helped people organize the Arab Spring, by helping activists organize protests, communicate grievances, and disseminate information. Many have understood the Internet as an extension of the Habermasian notion of the public sphere, observing how network communication technologies provide something like a global civic forum. However, incidents of politically motivated Internet censorship have now been recorded in many countries, including western democracies. E-government is the use of technological communications devices, such as the Internet, to provide public services to citizens and other persons in a country or region. E-government offers opportunities for more direct and convenient citizen access to government and for government provision of services directly to citizens. Cybersectarianism is a new organizational form that involves: highly dispersed small groups of practitioners that may remain largely anonymous within the larger social context and operate in relative secrecy, while still linked remotely to a larger network of believers who share a set of practices and texts, and often a common devotion to a particular leader. Overseas supporters provide funding and support; domestic practitioners distribute tracts, participate in acts of resistance, and share information on the internal situation with outsiders. Collectively, members and practitioners of such sects construct viable virtual communities of faith, exchanging personal testimonies and engaging in the collective study via email, online chat rooms, and web-based message boards. In particular, the British government has raised concerns about the prospect of young British Muslims being indoctrinated into Islamic extremism by material on the Internet, being persuaded to join terrorist groups such as the so-called "Islamic State", and then potentially committing acts of terrorism on returning to Britain after fighting in Syria or Iraq.[citation needed] Applications and services The Internet carries many applications and services, most prominently the World Wide Web, including social media, electronic mail, mobile applications, multiplayer online games, Internet telephony, file sharing, and streaming media services. The World Wide Web is a global collection of documents, images, multimedia, applications, and other resources, logically interrelated by hyperlinks and referenced with Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), which provide a global system of named references. URIs symbolically identify services, web servers, databases, and the documents and resources that they can provide. HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the main access protocol of the World Wide Web. Web services also use HTTP for communication between software systems for information transfer, sharing and exchanging business data and logistics and is one of many languages or protocols that can be used for communication on the Internet. World Wide Web browser software, such as Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Apple's Safari, and Google Chrome, enable users to navigate from one web page to another via the hyperlinks embedded in the documents. These documents may also contain computer data, including graphics, sounds, text, video, multimedia and interactive content. Client-side scripts can include animations, games, office applications and scientific demonstrations. Email is an important communications service available via the Internet. The concept of sending electronic text messages between parties, analogous to mailing letters or memos, predates the creation of the Internet. Internet telephony is a common communications service realized with the Internet. The name of the principal internetworking protocol, the Internet Protocol, lends its name to voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).[citation needed] VoIP systems now dominate many markets, being as easy and convenient as a traditional telephone, while having substantial cost savings, especially over long distances. File sharing is the practice of transferring large amounts of data in the form of computer files across the Internet, for example via file servers. The load of bulk downloads to many users can be eased by the use of "mirror" servers or peer-to-peer networks. Access to the file may be controlled by user authentication, the transit of the file over the Internet may be obscured by encryption, and money may change hands for access to the file. The price can be paid by the remote charging of funds from, for example, a credit card whose details are also passed—usually fully encrypted—across the Internet. The origin and authenticity of the file received may be checked by a digital signature. Governance The Internet is a global network that comprises many voluntarily interconnected autonomous networks. It operates without a central governing body. The technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols (IPv4 and IPv6) is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by contributing technical expertise. While the hardware components in the Internet infrastructure can often be used to support other software systems, it is the design and the standardization process of the software that characterizes the Internet and provides the foundation for its scalability and success. The responsibility for the architectural design of the Internet software systems has been assumed by the IETF. The IETF conducts standard-setting work groups, open to any individual, about the various aspects of Internet architecture. The resulting contributions and standards are published as Request for Comments (RFC) documents on the IETF web site. The principal methods of networking that enable the Internet are contained in specially designated RFCs that constitute the Internet Standards. Other less rigorous documents are simply informative, experimental, or historical, or document the best current practices when implementing Internet technologies. To maintain interoperability, the principal name spaces of the Internet are administered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN is governed by an international board of directors drawn from across the Internet technical, business, academic, and other non-commercial communities. The organization coordinates the assignment of unique identifiers for use on the Internet, including domain names, IP addresses, application port numbers in the transport protocols, and many other parameters. Globally unified name spaces are essential for maintaining the global reach of the Internet. This role of ICANN distinguishes it as perhaps the only central coordinating body for the global Internet. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an agency of the United States Department of Commerce, had final approval over changes to the DNS root zone until the IANA stewardship transition on 1 October 2016. Regional Internet registries (RIRs) were established for five regions of the world to assign IP address blocks and other Internet parameters to local registries, such as Internet service providers, from a designated pool of addresses set aside for each region:[citation needed] The Internet Society (ISOC) was founded in 1992 with a mission to "assure the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world". Its members include individuals as well as corporations, organizations, governments, and universities. Among other activities ISOC provides an administrative home for a number of less formally organized groups that are involved in developing and managing the Internet, including: the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), and Internet Research Steering Group (IRSG). On 16 November 2005, the United Nations-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis established the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) to discuss Internet-related issues.[citation needed] Infrastructure The communications infrastructure of the Internet consists of its hardware components and a system of software layers that control various aspects of the architecture. As with any computer network, the Internet physically consists of routers, media (such as cabling and radio links), repeaters, and modems. However, as an example of internetworking, many of the network nodes are not necessarily Internet equipment per se. Internet packets are carried by other full-fledged networking protocols, with the Internet acting as a homogeneous networking standard, running across heterogeneous hardware, with the packets guided to their destinations by IP routers.[citation needed] Internet service providers (ISPs) establish worldwide connectivity between individual networks at various levels of scope. At the top of the routing hierarchy are the tier 1 networks, large telecommunication companies that exchange traffic directly with each other via very high speed fiber-optic cables and governed by peering agreements. Tier 2 and lower-level networks buy Internet transit from other providers to reach at least some parties on the global Internet, though they may also engage in peering. End-users who only access the Internet when needed to perform a function or obtain information, represent the bottom of the routing hierarchy.[citation needed] An ISP may use a single upstream provider for connectivity, or implement multihoming to achieve redundancy and load balancing. Internet exchange points are major traffic exchanges with physical connections to multiple ISPs. Large organizations, such as academic institutions, large enterprises, and governments, may perform the same function as ISPs, engaging in peering and purchasing transit on behalf of their internal networks. Research networks tend to interconnect with large subnetworks such as GEANT, GLORIAD, Internet2, and the UK's national research and education network, JANET.[citation needed] Common methods of Internet access by users include broadband over coaxial cable, fiber optics or copper wires, Wi-Fi, satellite, and cellular telephone technology.[citation needed] Grassroots efforts have led to wireless community networks. Commercial Wi-Fi services that cover large areas are available in many cities, such as New York, London, Vienna, Toronto, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago and Pittsburgh. Most servers that provide internet services are today hosted in data centers, and content is often accessed through high-performance content delivery networks. Colocation centers often host private peering connections between their customers, internet transit providers, cloud providers, meet-me rooms for connecting customers together, Internet exchange points, and landing points and terminal equipment for fiber optic submarine communication cables, connecting the internet. Internet Protocol Suite The Internet standards describe a framework known as the Internet protocol suite (also called TCP/IP, based on the first two components.) This is a suite of protocols that are ordered into a set of four conceptional layers by the scope of their operation, originally documented in RFC 1122 and RFC 1123:[citation needed] The most prominent component of the Internet model is the Internet Protocol. IP enables internetworking, essentially establishing the Internet itself. Two versions of the Internet Protocol exist, IPv4 and IPv6.[citation needed] Aside from the complex array of physical connections that make up its infrastructure, the Internet is facilitated by bi- or multi-lateral commercial contracts (e.g., peering agreements), and by technical specifications or protocols that describe the exchange of data over the network.[citation needed] For locating individual computers on the network, the Internet provides IP addresses. IP addresses are used by the Internet infrastructure to direct internet packets to their destinations. They consist of fixed-length numbers, which are found within the packet. IP addresses are generally assigned to equipment either automatically via Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, or are configured.[citation needed] Domain Name Systems convert user-inputted domain names (e.g. "en.wikipedia.org") into IP addresses.[citation needed] Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) defines an IP address as a 32-bit number. IPv4 is the initial version used on the first generation of the Internet and is still in dominant use. It was designed in 1981 to address up to ≈4.3 billion (109) hosts. However, the explosive growth of the Internet has led to IPv4 address exhaustion, which entered its final stage in 2011, when the global IPv4 address allocation pool was exhausted. Because of the growth of the Internet and the depletion of available IPv4 addresses, a new version of IP IPv6, was developed in the mid-1990s, which provides vastly larger addressing capabilities and more efficient routing of Internet traffic. IPv6 uses 128 bits for the IP address and was standardized in 1998. IPv6 deployment has been ongoing since the mid-2000s and is currently in growing deployment around the world, since Internet address registries began to urge all resource managers to plan rapid adoption and conversion. By design, IPv6 is not directly interoperable with IPv4. Instead, it establishes a parallel version of the Internet not directly accessible with IPv4 software. Thus, translation facilities exist for internetworking, and some nodes have duplicate networking software for both networks. Essentially all modern computer operating systems support both versions of the Internet Protocol.[citation needed] Network infrastructure, however, has been lagging in this development.[citation needed] A subnet or subnetwork is a logical subdivision of an IP network.: 1, 16 Computers that belong to a subnet are addressed with an identical most-significant bit-group in their IP addresses. This results in the logical division of an IP address into two fields, the network number or routing prefix and the rest field or host identifier. The rest field is an identifier for a specific host or network interface.[citation needed] The routing prefix may be expressed in Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) notation written as the first address of a network, followed by a slash character (/), and ending with the bit-length of the prefix. For example, 198.51.100.0/24 is the prefix of the Internet Protocol version 4 network starting at the given address, having 24 bits allocated for the network prefix, and the remaining 8 bits reserved for host addressing. Addresses in the range 198.51.100.0 to 198.51.100.255 belong to this network. The IPv6 address specification 2001:db8::/32 is a large address block with 296 addresses, having a 32-bit routing prefix.[citation needed] For IPv4, a network may also be characterized by its subnet mask or netmask, which is the bitmask that when applied by a bitwise AND operation to any IP address in the network, yields the routing prefix. Subnet masks are also expressed in dot-decimal notation like an address. For example, 255.255.255.0 is the subnet mask for the prefix 198.51.100.0/24.[citation needed] Computers and routers use routing tables in their operating system to forward IP packets to reach a node on a different subnetwork. Routing tables are maintained by manual configuration or automatically by routing protocols. End-nodes typically use a default route that points toward an ISP providing transit, while ISP routers use the Border Gateway Protocol to establish the most efficient routing across the complex connections of the global Internet.[citation needed] The default gateway is the node that serves as the forwarding host (router) to other networks when no other route specification matches the destination IP address of a packet. Security Internet resources, hardware, and software components are the target of criminal or malicious attempts to gain unauthorized control to cause interruptions, commit fraud, engage in blackmail or access private information. Malware is malicious software used and distributed via the Internet. It includes computer viruses which are copied with the help of humans, computer worms which copy themselves automatically, software for denial of service attacks, ransomware, botnets, and spyware that reports on the activity and typing of users.[citation needed] Usually, these activities constitute cybercrime. Defense theorists have also speculated about the possibilities of hackers using cyber warfare using similar methods on a large scale. Malware poses serious problems to individuals and businesses on the Internet. According to Symantec's 2018 Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR), malware variants number has increased to 669,947,865 in 2017, which is twice as many malware variants as in 2016. Cybercrime, which includes malware attacks as well as other crimes committed by computer, was predicted to cost the world economy US$6 trillion in 2021, and is increasing at a rate of 15% per year. Since 2021, malware has been designed to target computer systems that run critical infrastructure such as the electricity distribution network. Malware can be designed to evade antivirus software detection algorithms. The vast majority of computer surveillance involves the monitoring of data and traffic on the Internet. In the United States for example, under the Communications Assistance For Law Enforcement Act, all phone calls and broadband Internet traffic (emails, web traffic, instant messaging, etc.) are required to be available for unimpeded real-time monitoring by Federal law enforcement agencies. Under the Act, all U.S. telecommunications providers are required to install packet sniffing technology to allow Federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies to intercept all of their customers' broadband Internet and VoIP traffic.[d] The large amount of data gathered from packet capture requires surveillance software that filters and reports relevant information, such as the use of certain words or phrases, the access to certain types of web sites, or communicating via email or chat with certain parties. Agencies, such as the Information Awareness Office, NSA, GCHQ and the FBI, spend billions of dollars per year to develop, purchase, implement, and operate systems for interception and analysis of data. Similar systems are operated by Iranian secret police to identify and suppress dissidents. The required hardware and software were allegedly installed by German Siemens AG and Finnish Nokia. Some governments, such as those of Myanmar, Iran, North Korea, Mainland China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, restrict access to content on the Internet within their territories, especially to political and religious content, with domain name and keyword filters. In Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden, major Internet service providers have voluntarily agreed to restrict access to sites listed by authorities. While this list of forbidden resources is supposed to contain only known child pornography sites, the content of the list is secret. Many countries, including the United States, have enacted laws against the possession or distribution of certain material, such as child pornography, via the Internet but do not mandate filter software. Many free or commercially available software programs, called content-control software are available to users to block offensive specific on individual computers or networks in order to limit access by children to pornographic material or depiction of violence.[citation needed] Performance As the Internet is a heterogeneous network, its physical characteristics, including, for example the data transfer rates of connections, vary widely. It exhibits emergent phenomena that depend on its large-scale organization. PB per monthYear020,00040,00060,00080,000100,000120,000140,000199019952000200520102015Petabytes per monthGlobal Internet Traffic Volume The volume of Internet traffic is difficult to measure because no single point of measurement exists in the multi-tiered, non-hierarchical topology. Traffic data may be estimated from the aggregate volume through the peering points of the Tier 1 network providers, but traffic that stays local in large provider networks may not be accounted for.[citation needed] An Internet blackout or outage can be caused by local signaling interruptions. Disruptions of submarine communications cables may cause blackouts or slowdowns to large areas, such as in the 2008 submarine cable disruption. Less-developed countries are more vulnerable due to the small number of high-capacity links. Land cables are also vulnerable, as in 2011 when a woman digging for scrap metal severed most connectivity for the nation of Armenia. Internet blackouts affecting almost entire countries can be achieved by governments as a form of Internet censorship, as in the blockage of the Internet in Egypt, whereby approximately 93% of networks were without access in 2011 in an attempt to stop mobilization for anti-government protests. Estimates of the Internet's electricity usage have been the subject of controversy, according to a 2014 peer-reviewed research paper that found claims differing by a factor of 20,000 published in the literature during the preceding decade, ranging from 0.0064 kilowatt hours per gigabyte transferred (kWh/GB) to 136 kWh/GB. The researchers attributed these discrepancies mainly to the year of reference (i.e. whether efficiency gains over time had been taken into account) and to whether "end devices such as personal computers and servers are included" in the analysis. In 2011, academic researchers estimated the overall energy used by the Internet to be between 170 and 307 GW, less than two percent of the energy used by humanity. This estimate included the energy needed to build, operate, and periodically replace the estimated 750 million laptops, a billion smart phones and 100 million servers worldwide as well as the energy that routers, cell towers, optical switches, Wi-Fi transmitters and cloud storage devices use when transmitting Internet traffic. According to a non-peer-reviewed study published in 2018 by The Shift Project (a French think tank funded by corporate sponsors), nearly 4% of global CO2 emissions could be attributed to global data transfer and the necessary infrastructure. The study also said that online video streaming alone accounted for 60% of this data transfer and therefore contributed to over 300 million tons of CO2 emission per year, and argued for new "digital sobriety" regulations restricting the use and size of video files. See also Notes References Sources Further reading External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychonauts] | [TOKENS: 7889] |
Contents Psychonauts Psychonauts is a 2005 platform game developed by Double Fine Productions and published by Majesco Entertainment for Microsoft Windows, Xbox, and PlayStation 2. The game follows Razputin (Raz), a young boy gifted with psychic abilities, who runs away from a circus to try to sneak into a summer camp for those with similar powers to become a "Psychonaut", a spy with psychic abilities. He finds that there is a sinister plot occurring at the camp that only he can stop. The game is centered on exploring the strange and imaginative minds of various characters that Raz encounters as a Psychonaut-in-training/"Psycadet" to help them overcome their fears or memories of their past, so as to gain their help and progress in the game. Raz gains use of several psychic abilities during the game that are used for both attacking foes and solving puzzles. Psychonauts was based on an abandoned concept that Double Fine founder Tim Schafer had during his previous development of Full Throttle. The game was initially backed by Microsoft's Ed Fries as a premiere title for the original Xbox console, but several internal and external issues led to difficulties for Double Fine in meeting various milestones and responding to testing feedback. Following Fries' departure in 2004, Microsoft dropped the publishing rights, making the game's future unclear. Double Fine was able to secure Majesco as a publisher a few months later allowing them to complete the game after four and a half years of development. The game was well received, but publisher Majesco encountered a severe financial loss after the game's release and departed from the video game market. Psychonauts has earned a number of industry awards and gained a cult following. It has since been cited as one of the greatest video games ever made. In 2011, Double Fine acquired the rights for the title, allowing the company to republish the title through digital distribution with updates for modern gaming systems and ports for Mac OS X and Linux. Double Fine reported that their own sales of the game have far exceeded what was initially sold on its original release, with cumulative sales of nearly 1.7 million as of December 2015[update]. A sequel, Psychonauts 2, was announced at The Game Awards in December 2015 and was released on August 25, 2021. Gameplay Psychonauts is a platform game that incorporates various adventure elements. The player controls the main character Raz in a third-person, three-dimensional view, helping Raz to uncover a mystery at the Psychonauts training camp. Raz begins with basic movement abilities such as running and jumping, but as the game progresses, Razputin gains additional psychic powers such as telekinesis, levitation, invisibility, and pyrokinesis. These abilities allow the player to explore more of the camp as well as fight off enemies. These powers can be awarded either by completing certain story missions, gaining PSI ranks during the game, or purchasing them with hidden arrowheads scattered around the camp. Powers can be improved — such as more damaging pyrokinesis or longer periods of invisibility — through gaining additional PSI ranks. The player can assign three of these powers to their controller or keyboard for quick use, but all earned powers are available at any time through a selection screen. The game includes both the "real world" of the camp and its surroundings, as well as a number of "mental worlds" which exist in the consciousness of the game's various characters. The mental worlds have wildly differing art and level design aesthetics, but generally have a specific goal that Raz must complete to help resolve a psychological issue a character may have, allowing the game's plot to progress. Within the mental worlds are censors that react negatively to Raz's presence, and attack him. There are also various collectibles within the mental worlds, including "figments" of the character's imagination which help increase Razputin's PSI ranking, "emotional baggage" which can be sorted by finding tags and bringing them to the baggage, and "memory vaults" which can unlock a short series of slides providing extra information on that character's backstory. Most of these worlds culminate in a boss battle that fully resolves the character's emotional distress and advance the story. The player is able to revisit any of these worlds after completing them to locate any additional collectibles they may have missed. Razputin is given some items early in the game, one that allows him to leave any mental world at any time, and another that can provide hints about what to do next or how to defeat certain enemies. Raz can take damage from psychically empowered creatures around the camp at night, or by censors in the mental worlds; due to a curse placed on his family, Raz is also vulnerable to water. If Raz's health is drained, he is respawned at the most-recent checkpoint. However, this can only be done so many times while Raz is within a mental world, indicated by the number of remaining astral projections; if these are expended through respawning, Raz is ejected from the character's mind and must re-enter to make another attempt. Health and additional projections can be collected throughout the levels, or purchased at the camp store. Plot The story is set in the fictional Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp, a remote US government training facility under the guise of a children's summer camp. Centuries ago the area was hit by a meteor made of Psitanium (a fictional mineral that can grant psychic powers or strengthen existing powers), creating a huge crater. The Psitanium affected the local wildlife, giving them limited psychic powers, such as bears with the ability to attack with telekinetic claws, cougars with pyrokinesis, and rats with confusion gas. The Native Americans of the area called Psitanium "whispering rock", which they used to build arrowheads. When settlers began inhabiting the region, the psychoactive properties of the meteor slowly drove them insane. An asylum named Thorny Towers Home of the Disturbed was built to house the afflicted, but within fifteen years, the asylum had more residents than the town did and the founder Houston Thorny committed suicide by throwing himself from the asylum's tower. The government relocated the remaining inhabitants and flooded the crater to prevent further settlement, creating what is now Lake Oblongata. The asylum still stands, but has fallen into disrepair. The government took advantage of the Psitanium deposit to set up a training camp for Psychonauts, a group of agents gifted with psychic abilities used to help defeat evil-doers. The training ground is disguised as a summer camp for young children, but in reality helps the children to hone their abilities and to train them to be Psychonauts themselves. Due to this, only those recruited by the Psychonauts are allowed into the camp. The protagonist and playable character of the game is Razputin "Raz" Aquato (voice actor Richard Horvitz), the son of a family of circus performers, who runs away from the circus to become a Psychonaut, despite his father Augustus' wishes. His family is cursed to die in water, and a watery hand called the Hand of Galochio attempts to submerge Raz whenever he approaches any significantly deep water. When at camp, Raz meets four of the Psychonauts that run the camp: the cool and calculating Sasha Nein (voice actor Stephen Stanton), the fun-loving Milla Vodello (voice actress Alexis Lezin), the regimental Agent/Coach Morceau Oleander (voice actor Nick Jameson), and the aged, Mark Twainesque Ford Cruller (voice actor David Kaye), said by Razputin to have been the greatest leader the Psychonauts ever had, until a past psychic duel shattered Ford's psyche and left him with dissociative identity disorder. Only when he is near the large concentration of Psitanium does his psyche come together enough to form his real personality. During his time at camp, Raz meets several of the other gifted children including Lili Zanotto (voice actress Nicki Rapp), the daughter of the Grand Head of the Psychonauts, who falls in love with him at first sight (which he eventually reciprocates); and Dogen Boole (voice actress Nika Futterman), the grandson of one of the Psychonaut's founders who can communicate with animals and goes around with a tin foil hat to prevent his abilities from causing anyone's head to explode. Raz also meets the residents of the insane asylum including ex-dentist and brain surgeon Dr. Caligosto Loboto; as well as Boyd Cooper, a former security guard that holds a number of government conspiracy theories about a person known as "the Milkman"; Fred Bonaparte, an asylum orderly struggling control over his mind by a hallucination of his ancestor, Napoleon Bonaparte; Gloria Van Gouton, a former actress driven insane by a family tragedy; Edgar Teglee, a painter whose girlfriend cheated on him; and Linda, the gigantic lungfish that, due to Oleander and Loboto's experiments on it (which included a mind-control chip in its' brain) brings campers to the asylum. Razputin, having fled from the circus, tries to sneak into the camp, but is caught by the Psychonauts. They agree to let him stay until his parents arrive, but refuse to let him take part in any activities. However, they do allow him to take part in Morceau's "Basic Braining" course, which he easily passes. Impressed, Sasha invites Raz to take part in an experiment to determine the extent of his abilities. During the experiment, Raz comes across a vision of Dr. Loboto, an insane ex-dentist, extracting Dogen's brain, but is unable to intervene. Raz eventually realizes that the vision is true after finding Dogen without his brain, but the Psychonauts refuse to believe him. After receiving additional training from Milla, Raz learns that Dr. Loboto is working on behalf of Morceau, who intends to harvest the campers' brains to power an army of psychic death tanks. Lili is soon abducted as well, and with both Sasha and Milla missing, Raz takes it upon himself to infiltrate the abandoned Thorny Towers Home of the Disturbed insane asylum where she was taken. Ford gives him a piece of bacon which he can use to contact him at any time, and tasks him with retrieving the stolen brains so that he can return them to the campers. Raz frees the mutated lungfish Linda from Morceau's control, and she takes him safely across the lake. At the asylum, Raz helps the inmates overcome their illnesses, and they help him access the upper levels of the asylum, where Loboto has set up his lab. He frees Lili and restores Sasha and Milla's minds, allowing them to confront Morceau. The inmates subsequently burn down the asylum, allowing Morceau to transfer his brain to a giant tank. Raz defeats him, but when he approaches the tank, it releases a cloud of sneezing powder, causing him to sneeze his brain out. Raz uses his telekinesis to place his brain inside the tank, merging it with Morceau's. Inside, Raz discovers that Morceau's evil springs from his childhood fear of his father, who ran a butcher shop. At the same time, Raz's own father appears and the two dads join forces. However, he turns out to be an imposter, with Raz's real father, Augustus, appearing and using his own psychic abilities to fix his son's tangled mind and beat the personal demons. At the camp's closing ceremony, Ford presents him with a uniform and welcomes him into the Psychonauts. Raz prepares to leave camp with his father, but word arrives that the Grand Head of the Psychonauts—Lili's father, Truman Zanotto—has been captured. Thus Raz and the Psychonauts fly off on their new mission. Development Psychonauts was the debut title for Double Fine Productions, a development studio that Tim Schafer founded after leaving LucasArts, following their decision to exit the point-and-click adventure game market. Schafer's initial studio hires included several others that worked alongside him on Grim Fandango (1998). Super Mario 64 (1996) had introduced him to direct player character movement in a 3D space, along with Final Fantasy VII (1997) and The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time (1998), which also prominently featured storytelling and puzzle-solving, like Schafer's previous works. He said, "I think that was the moment where I was like, 'I don't think I want to make a point-and-click adventure anymore. I think I want to make a console game. I want to make a character-driven console game that is just really immediate and has more action, but, you know, still has a lot of narrative.'" The conception of Psychonauts can be traced as far back as during the development of Full Throttle, where Schafer envisioned a sequence in which the protagonist Ben goes under a peyote-induced psychedelic experience. This was eventually ejected from the game for not being family-friendly enough, though Schafer still held a fascination with products of the subconscious, feeling that one could "understand your mind better" through dreams rather than thinking consciously. In his later years at LucasArts, Schafer pitched a "spy game" featuring martial arts and meditation, in which the player character would solve puzzles by embarking on vision quests through their mind. One of Schafer's co-workers misinterpreted his pitch, believing that the player would go into other peoples' minds, and Schafer realized that he preferred this idea. Other influences include the film Dreamscape (1984), in which the main character can enter into other peoples' dreams, and in a child's dream, his father is portrayed in an exaggeratedly negative manner, as is Razputin's father in Psychonauts; the Haruki Murakami novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), which inspired the concept of visiting dream-like constructs inside a character's head; the Jet Li films The New Legend of Shaolin (1994) and My Father Is a Hero (1995), in which the main character is accompanied by a child who is abnormally determined and mature for his age, much like Raz; The Fly II (1989), where a group of children with psychic abilities are held in a research facility and experimented on (this evolved into the idea of Psychonauts taking place at a summer camp); The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), as the team was inspired by the visuals of the scene where Jack Skellington confronts Oogie Boogie when creating the level "Black Velvetopia", as well at the film's overall craftsmanship, and initially desired to recreate the stop-motion style, though they were limited by a lack of technical expertise; the work of artist Joe Sorren, who was drawn from heavily when designing the characters, with their unconventional proportions and color schemes; the video game Skies of Arcadia (2000), which features collectibles that are hidden underground and make the player's controller vibrate when they stand over them, much like the arrowheads in Psychonauts; both The Suffering (2004) and the work of artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Paul Klee inspired the idea for figments according to different members of the team. While still working at LucasArts, Schafer decided to use the name "Raz" for the main character because he liked the nickname of the LucasArts animator, Razmig "Raz" Mavlian. When Mavlian joined Double Fine, there was increased confusion between the character and the animator. The game's associate producer, Camilla Fossen, suggested the name "Rasputin". As a compromise, Double Fine's lawyer suggested the trademarkable name "Razputin", which was used for the game. Most of the game's dialog and script was written by Schafer and Erik Wolpaw, who at the time was a columnist for the website Old Man Murray. After establishing the game's main characters, Schafer undertook his own exercise to write out how the characters would see themselves and the other characters' on a social media site similar to Friendster, which Schafer was a fan of at the time and from where he met his wife-to-be. This helped him to solidify the characters in his own head prior to writing the game's dialog, as well as providing a means of introducing the characters to the rest of the development team. To help flesh out character dialog outside of cutscenes, Schafer developed an approach that used dozens of spoken lines by a character that could be stitched together in a random manner by the game as to reduce apparent repetition; such stitching included elements like vocal pauses and coughs that made the dialog sound more natural. Schafer used the camp and woods setting as a natural place that children would want to wander and explore. The game's mental worlds were generally a result of an idea presented by Schafer to the team, fleshed out through concept art and gameplay concepts around the idea, and then executed into the game with the asset and gameplay developers, so each world had its own unique identity. One of the game's most famous levels is "The Milkman Conspiracy", which takes place in the mind of Boyd, one of the patients at the mental hospital who is obsessed with conspiracy theories. Schafer had been interested in knowing what went on inside the minds of those that believed in conspiracy theories, inspired by watching Capricorn One as a child. During a Double Fine dinner event, someone had uttered the line "I am the milkman, my milk is delicious.", which led Schafer to create the idea of Boyd, a milkman bent on conspiracy theories. Schafer then worked out a web of conspiracy theories, wanting the level to be a maze-like structure around those, tying that in to Boyd's backstory as a person who had been fired from many different jobs, partially inspired by a homeless person that Double Fine occasionally paid to help clean their office front. Schaefer had wanted the 1950s suburban vibe to the level as it would fit in with the spy theme from the same period. Artist Scott Campbell fleshed out these ideas, along with the featureless G-men modeled after the Spy vs. Spy characters. Peter Chan came up with the idea of vaulting the suburban setting into vertical spaces as to create a maze-like effect, which inspired the level designers and gameplay developers to create a level where the local gravity would change for Raz, thus allowing him to move across the warped setting that was created. The level's unique gameplay aspect, where Raz would need to give specific G-men a proper object as in point-and-click adventure games, was from gameplay developer Erik Robson as a means to take advantage of the inventory feature that they had given Raz. Schafer had wanted Wolpaw to write the lines for the G-men, but as he was too busy, Schafer ended up writing these himself. The art design crew included background artist Peter Chan and cartoonist Scott Campbell. Voice actor Richard Steven Horvitz, best known for his portrayal of Zim in the cult favorite animated series Invader Zim, provides the voice of Raz, the game's protagonist. Initially the team tried to bring in children to provide the voices for the main cast, similar to Peanuts cartoons, but struggled with their lack of acting experience. Schafer had selected Horvitz based on his audition tapes and ability to provide a wide range of vocal intonations on the spot, providing them with numerous takes to work with. Raz was originally conceived as an ostrich suffering from mental imbalance and multiple personalities. Tim Schafer killed the idea because he strongly believes in games being "wish fulfillments," guessing that not many people fantasize about being an insane ostrich. Double Fine created a number of internal tools and processes to help with the development of the game, as outlined by executive producer Caroline Esmurdoc. With the focus of the game on Raz as the playable character within a platform game, the team created the "Raz Action Status Meeting" (RASM). These were held bi-weekly with each meeting focusing on one specific movement or action that Raz had, reviewing how the character controlled and the visual feedback from that so that the overall combination of moves felt appropriate. With extensive use of the Lua scripting language, they created their own internal Lua Debugger nicknamed Dougie, after a homeless man near their offices they had befriended, that helped to normalize their debugging processes and enable third-party tools to interact with the name. With a large number of planned cutscenes, Double Fine took the time to create a cutscene editor so that the scriptwriters could work directly with the models and environments already created by the programmers without requiring the programmer's direct participation. For level design, though they had initially relied on the idea of simply placing various triggers throughout a level to create an event, the resulting Lua code was large and bulky with potential for future error. They assigned eight of the game programmers to assist the level developers to trim this code, and instituted an internal testing department to overlook the stability of the whole game which had grown beyond what they could do internally. Initially this was formed from unpaid volunteers they solicited on Double Fine's web site, but following the signing of the Majesco publication deal in 2004, they were able to commit full-time staff to this team. Esmurdoc described the development of Psychonauts as difficult due to various setbacks, compounded by the new studio's lack of experience in how to manage those setbacks. The game's initial development began in 2001 during the dot-com boom. Due to the cost of office space at that time, Double Fine had established an office in an inexpensive warehouse in San Francisco that initially fit their development needs. By 2003, they had come to realize the area they were in was not safe or readily accommodating, slowing down their development. With the collapse of the dot-com bubble, they were able to secure better office space, though this further delayed production. Schafer was also handling many of the duties for both the studio and the development of the game. Though some of the routine business tasks were offloaded to other studio heads, Schafer brought Esmurdoc onto the project in 2004 to help produce the game while he could focus on the creative side. The intent to allow all developers to have artistic freedom with the game created some internal strife in the team, particularly in the level design; they had initially scoped that level designers would create the basic parts of a level - main paths, scripted events, and the level's general design, while the artists would build out the world from that. As development progressed, they determined that the artists should be the ones constructing the level geometry, which the level designers resented. Subsequently, levels that were generated were not to the expected standards due to conflicts in the toolsets they used and Schafer's inability to oversee the process while handling the other duties of the studio. In 2003, the decision was made to dismiss all but one of the level design team, and unify the level design and art into a World Building team overseen by Erik Robson, the remaining level designer and who would go on to become the game's lead designer; the change, which Esmurdoc stated was for the better, disrupted the other departments at Double Fine. Psychonauts was to be published by Microsoft for release exclusively on their Xbox console; Schafer attributes this to Microsoft's Ed Fries, who at the time of Psychonauts's initial development in 2001, was looking to develop a portfolio of games for the new console system. Schafer believes that Fries was a proponent of "pushing games as art", which helped to solidify Double Fine's concept of Psychonauts as an appropriate title for the console after the team's collected experience of developing for personal computers. However, according to Esmurdoc, Microsoft had also created some milestones that were unclear or difficult to meet, which delayed the development process. She also believes that their own lack of a clear vision of the ultimate product made it difficult to solidify a development and release schedule for the game as well as created confusion with the publisher. Schafer stated that Microsoft also found some of their gameplay decisions to be confusing based on play-testing and requested them to include more instructional information, a common approach for games during the early 2000s, while Schafer and his team felt such confusion was simply the nature of the adventure-based platform that they were developing. Double Fine was also resistant to make changes that Microsoft had suggested from play-testing, such as making the humor secondary to the story, removing the summer camp theme, and drastically altering the story. Fries departed Microsoft in January 2004; shortly thereafter, the company soon pulled the publishing deal for Psychonauts. Esmurdoc said that Microsoft's management considered Double Fine to be "expensive and late", which she agreed had been true but did not reflect on the progress they had been making at this point. Schafer also noted that at the time of Microsoft's cancellation that they were planning on transitioning to the Xbox 360 and were not funding any further development of games that would not be released after 2004; even though Schafer had set an approximate release date in the first quarter of 2005 by this point, Microsoft still opted to cancel. Following this, Schafer and Esmurdoc worked to secure a new publishing deal while using internal funds and careful management to keep the project going. One source of funds that helped keep the company operational came from Will Wright, who had recently sold his company Maxis to Electronic Arts. Prevented from investing into Double Fine by the Maxis deal, he instead provided Double Fine a loan of funds that kept them afloat over the next several months. Wright is credited for this support within the game. By August 2004, Double Fine had negotiated a new publishing deal with Majesco Entertainment to release the game on Windows as well as the Xbox. Tim Schafer was quoted as saying "Together we are going to make what could conservatively be called the greatest game of all time ever, and I think that's awesome." Though the publishing deal ensured they would be able to continue the development, Esmurdoc stated they had to forgo plans for hiring new developers to meet the scope of the game as agreed to with Majesco. Subsequently, the studio entered, as described by Esmurdoc, "the most insane crunch I have ever witnessed" in order to complete the game. This was compounded when Majesco announced a PlayStation 2 port to be developed by Budcat Creations in October 2004, which further stretched the availability of Double Fine's staff resources. The game went gold in March 2005; Esmurdoc attributes much of the success of this on the solidarity of the development team that kept working towards this point. A GameCube port of the game was planned, but was cancelled after publisher Majesco Entertainment dropped support for the platform. This may have been partially due to the game's extensive use of FMVs and voice recordings, resulting in a large file size (about 4.7 GB), which would have presented difficulties with the GameCube's MiniDVD format (about 1.5 GB).[citation needed] Esmurdoc stated that Psychonauts took about 4.5 years to complete — though that without all the complications the real development time was closer to 2 years — with a team of 42 full-time developers and additional contractors, with a final budget of $11.5 million. The soundtrack to Psychonauts was composed by Peter McConnell, known for his work on LucasArts titles such as Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle. Schafer's familiarity with McConnell, having worked with him on numerous projects in the past, led Schafer to select him for the soundtrack composition. The Psychonauts Original Soundtrack, featuring all the in-game music, was released in 2005. The following year, in late 2006, Double Fine released a second soundtrack, Psychonauts Original Cinematic Score, containing music from the game's cutscenes as well as a remix of the main theme and credits. Release The final U.S. release date for the game on Xbox and Windows was April 19, 2005, with the PlayStation 2 port following on June 21, 2005. Psychonauts was re-released via Valve's Steam digital distribution platform on October 11, 2006. Although initially unplayable on the Xbox 360, Tim Schafer spearheaded a successful e-mail campaign by fans which led to Psychonauts being added to the Xbox 360 backwards compatible list on December 12, 2006, and on December 4, 2007, Microsoft made Psychonauts one of the initial launch titles made available for direct download on the Xbox 360 through their Xbox Originals program. In June 2011, the original publishing deal with Majesco expired, and full publication rights for the game reverted to Double Fine. When Majesco's rights expired, the game was temporarily removed from the service in August 2011, as Microsoft does not allow unpublished content on its Xbox Live Marketplace. Schafer worked with Microsoft to gain their help in publishing the title under the Microsoft Studios name, and the game returned to the Marketplace in February 2012. In September 2011, Double Fine released an updated version for Microsoft Windows and a port to Mac OS X and Linux through Steam. The new version provided support for Steam features including achievements and cloud saving. The Mac OS X port was developed in partnership with Steven Dengler's Dracogen. In conjunction with this release, an iOS application, Psychonauts Vault Viewer!, was released at the same time, featuring the memory vaults from the game with commentary by Tim Schafer and Scott Campbell. The game was added to the PlayStation Network store as a "PS2 Classic" for the PlayStation 3 in August 2012. As part of a deal with Nordic Games, who gained the rights to Costume Quest and Stacking after THQ's bankruptcy, Double Fine took over publishing rights for both games, while Nordic published and distribute retail copies of all three games for Windows and Mac OS X systems. Double Fine offered Psychonauts as part of a Humble Bundle in June 2012. In 2016, Double Fine also released Psychonauts as a classic title for use with the PlayStation 4's emulation software. Reception Psychonauts received positive reception, according to review aggregator website Metacritic. Schafer and Wolpaw's comedic writing was highly praised, as well as the uniqueness and quirks that the individual characters were given. Alex Navarro of GameSpot commented favorably on the "bizarre" cast of characters, their conversations that the player can overhear while exploring the camp, and how these conversations will change as the story progresses, eliminating repetition that is typical of such non-player characters in platform games. Tom Bramwell of Eurogamer found that he was incentivized to go back and explore or experiment in the game's level to find more of the comedic dialog that others had observed. The game was also noted for its innovations, such as the use of a second-person perspective during a boss battle. The game's art and level design (in particular, the designs of the various mental worlds that Raz visits) were well-received. Jason Hill of the Sydney Morning Herald stated that each of the dream worlds "is a memorable journey through the bizarre inner psyche" of the associated character. Two particular levels have been considered iconic of the game's humor and style: the aforementioned Milkman Conspiracy, and Lungfishopolis, where Raz enters the mind of a lungfish monster that lives near camp; in the lungfish's mind Raz is portrayed as a giant monster akin to Godzilla that is attacking the tiny lungfish citizens of Lungfishopolis, effectively creating an absurd role reversal of the typical giant monster formula. The overall game structure has been a point of criticism. Some reviewers identified that the first several hours of the game are focused on tutorials and instruction, and are less interesting than the later mental worlds. The game's final level, the "Meat Circus", was also considered unexpectedly difficult when compared to earlier sections of the game, featuring a time limit and many obstacles that required an unusual level of precision. On its re-release in 2011, Double Fine adjusted the difficulty of this level to address these complaints. Some found that the game's humor started to wane or become predictable in the latter part of the game. GamingOnLinux reviewer Hamish Paul Wilson gave the game 8/10, praising the game's creativity and presentation, but also criticizing several other areas of the game, including the large number of unaddressed bugs. Wilson concluded that "Psychonauts has to be viewed as a flawed masterpiece". In 2010, the game was included as one of the titles in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die. The editors of Computer Games Magazine presented Psychonauts with their 2005 awards for "Best Art Direction" and "Best Writing", and named it the year's tenth-best computer game. They called the game "a wonderfully weird journey high on atmosphere, art direction, and creativity." Psychonauts won PC Gamer US's 2005 "Best Game You Didn't Play" award. The editors wrote, "Okay, look, we gave it an Editors' Choice award — that's your cue to run out right now and buy Tim Schafer's magnificent action/adventure game. So far, only about 12,000 PC gamers have." It was also a nominee for the magazine's "Game of the Year 2005" award, which ultimately went to Battlefield 2. During the 9th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, Psychonauts received a nomination for "Outstanding Achievement in Game Design" by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. Psychonauts won the award for Best Writing at the 6th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards. Psychonauts did not reach publisher Majesco's retail sale expectations. Although the game was first cited as the primary contributing factor to a strong quarter immediately following its launch, a month later Majesco revised their fiscal year projections from a net profit of $18 million to a net loss of $18 million, and at the same time its CEO, Carl Yankowski, announced his immediate resignation. By the end of the year, the title had shipped fewer than 100,000 copies in North America, and Majesco announced its plans to withdraw from the "big budget console game marketplace". Schafer stated that by March 2012 the retail version Psychonauts had sold 400,000 copies. Following Double Fine's acquisition of the rights, they were able to offer the game on more digital storefronts and expand to other platforms; as previously described, this allowed the company to achieve sales in a short term far in excess of what they had been prior to obtaining the rights. In the announcement for Psychonauts 2 in December 2015, Schafer indicated that Psychonauts sold nearly 1.7 million copies, with more than 1.2 million occurring after Double Fine's acquisition of the rights. Double Fine lists 736,119 sold copies via the Humble Bundle (including a Steam key), 430,141 copies via the Steam storefront, 32,000 GOG.com copies, and 23,368 Humble Store copies. On Humble Bundle, the game sold well, with Schafer stating that they sold more copies of Psychonauts in the first few hours of the Bundle's start than they had since the release of the retail copy of the game. Later in 2012, Schafer commented that their ability to use digital venues such as Steam that "[Double Fine] made more on Psychonauts this year than we ever have before". Legacy A sequel to Psychonauts has been of great interest to Schafer, as well as to fans of the game and the gaming press. Schafer had pitched the idea to publishers but most felt the game too strange to take up. During the Kickstarter campaign for Double Fine's Broken Age in February 2012, Schafer commented on the development costs of a sequel over social media, leading to a potential interest in backing by Markus Persson, at the time the owner of Mojang. Though Persson ultimately did not fund this, interactions between him and Double Fine revealed the possibility of several interested investors to help. In mid-2015, Schafer along with other industry leaders launched Fig, a crowd-sourced platform for video games that included the option for accredited investors to invest in the offered campaigns. Later, at the 2015 Game Awards in December, Schafer announced their plans to work on Psychonauts 2, using Fig to raise the $3.3 million needed to complete the game, with an anticipated release in 2018. The campaign succeeded on January 6, 2016. The sequel was released on August 25, 2021 and sees the return of Richard Horvitz and Nikki Rapp as the voices of Raz and Lili respectively, along with Wolpaw for writing, Chan and Campbell for art, and McConnell for music. Additionally, Double Fine has developed a VR title called Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin for use on Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR. Released in 2017, it serves as a standalone chapter to tie the original game and its sequel, based on Raz and the other Psychonauts rescuing Truman Zanotto. Psychonauts 2 was released on August 25, 2021. The character Raz has made appearances in other Double Fine games, including as a massive Mount Rushmore-like mountain sculpture in Brütal Legend, and on a cardboard cutout within Costume Quest 2. Raz also appeared in a downloadable content package as a playable character for Bit.Trip Presents... Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien. A cameo of Raz appears in Alice: Madness Returns which can be found at the Red Queen's castle as a propped-up skeleton that bears a striking resemblance to the protagonist itself. There is also a hidden symbol of Raz in A Hat in Time which can be found using one of the hat abilities in a certain part of Chapters 3 Act 4. Notes References External links |
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Contents OpenAI OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence research organization comprising both a non-profit foundation and a controlled for-profit public benefit corporation (PBC), headquartered in San Francisco. It aims to develop "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence (AGI), which it defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work". OpenAI is widely recognized for its development of the GPT family of large language models, the DALL-E series of text-to-image models, and the Sora series of text-to-video models, which have influenced industry research and commercial applications. Its release of ChatGPT in November 2022 has been credited with catalyzing widespread interest in generative AI. The organization was founded in 2015 in Delaware but evolved a complex corporate structure. As of October 2025, following restructuring approved by California and Delaware regulators, the non-profit OpenAI Foundation holds 26% of the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC, with Microsoft holding 27% and employees/other investors holding 47%. Under its governance arrangements, the OpenAI Foundation holds the authority to appoint the board of the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC, a mechanism designed to align the entity’s strategic direction with the Foundation’s charter. Microsoft previously invested over $13 billion into OpenAI, and provides Azure cloud computing resources. In October 2025, OpenAI conducted a $6.6 billion share sale that valued the company at $500 billion. In 2023 and 2024, OpenAI faced multiple lawsuits for alleged copyright infringement against authors and media companies whose work was used to train some of OpenAI's products. In November 2023, OpenAI's board removed Sam Altman as CEO, citing a lack of confidence in him, but reinstated him five days later following a reconstruction of the board. Throughout 2024, roughly half of then-employed AI safety researchers left OpenAI, citing the company's prominent role in an industry-wide problem. Founding In December 2015, OpenAI was founded as a not for profit organization by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba, with Sam Altman and Elon Musk as the co-chairs. A total of $1 billion in capital was pledged by Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Infosys. However, the actual capital collected significantly lagged pledges. According to company disclosures, only $130 million had been received by 2019. In its founding charter, OpenAI stated an intention to collaborate openly with other institutions by making certain patents and research publicly available, but later restricted access to its most capable models, citing competitive and safety concerns. OpenAI was initially run from Brockman's living room. It was later headquartered at the Pioneer Building in the Mission District, San Francisco. According to OpenAI's charter, its founding mission is "to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity." Musk and Altman stated in 2015 that they were partly motivated by concerns about AI safety and existential risk from artificial general intelligence. OpenAI stated that "it's hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society", and that it is equally difficult to comprehend "how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly". The startup also wrote that AI "should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as possible", and that "because of AI's surprising history, it's hard to predict when human-level AI might come within reach. When it does, it'll be important to have a leading research institution which can prioritize a good outcome for all over its own self-interest." Co-chair Sam Altman expected a decades-long project that eventually surpasses human intelligence. Brockman met with Yoshua Bengio, one of the "founding fathers" of deep learning, and drew up a list of great AI researchers. Brockman was able to hire nine of them as the first employees in December 2015. OpenAI did not pay AI researchers salaries comparable to those of Facebook or Google. It also did not pay stock options which AI researchers typically get. Nevertheless, OpenAI spent $7 million on its first 52 employees in 2016. OpenAI's potential and mission drew these researchers to the firm; a Google employee said he was willing to leave Google for OpenAI "partly because of the very strong group of people and, to a very large extent, because of its mission." OpenAI co-founder Wojciech Zaremba stated that he turned down "borderline crazy" offers of two to three times his market value to join OpenAI instead. In April 2016, OpenAI released a public beta of "OpenAI Gym", its platform for reinforcement learning research. Nvidia gifted its first DGX-1 supercomputer to OpenAI in August 2016 to help it train larger and more complex AI models with the capability of reducing processing time from six days to two hours. In December 2016, OpenAI released "Universe", a software platform for measuring and training an AI's general intelligence across the world's supply of games, websites, and other applications. Corporate structure In 2019, OpenAI transitioned from non-profit to "capped" for-profit, with the profit being capped at 100 times any investment. According to OpenAI, the capped-profit model allows OpenAI Global, LLC to legally attract investment from venture funds and, in addition, to grant employees stakes in the company. Many top researchers work for Google Brain, DeepMind, or Facebook, which offer equity that a nonprofit would be unable to match. Before the transition, OpenAI was legally required to publicly disclose the compensation of its top employees. The company then distributed equity to its employees and partnered with Microsoft, announcing an investment package of $1 billion into the company. Since then, OpenAI systems have run on an Azure-based supercomputing platform from Microsoft. OpenAI Global, LLC then announced its intention to commercially license its technologies. It planned to spend $1 billion "within five years, and possibly much faster". Altman stated that even a billion dollars may turn out to be insufficient, and that the lab may ultimately need "more capital than any non-profit has ever raised" to achieve artificial general intelligence. The nonprofit, OpenAI, Inc., is the sole controlling shareholder of OpenAI Global, LLC, which, despite being a for-profit company, retains a formal fiduciary responsibility to OpenAI, Inc.'s nonprofit charter. A majority of OpenAI, Inc.'s board is barred from having financial stakes in OpenAI Global, LLC. In addition, minority members with a stake in OpenAI Global, LLC are barred from certain votes due to conflict of interest. Some researchers have argued that OpenAI Global, LLC's switch to for-profit status is inconsistent with OpenAI's claims to be "democratizing" AI. On February 29, 2024, Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, accusing them of shifting focus from public benefit to profit maximization—a case OpenAI dismissed as "incoherent" and "frivolous," though Musk later revived legal action against Altman and others in August. On April 9, 2024, OpenAI countersued Musk in federal court, alleging that he had engaged in "bad-faith tactics" to slow the company's progress and seize its innovations for his personal benefit. OpenAI also argued that Musk had previously supported the creation of a for-profit structure and had expressed interest in controlling OpenAI himself. The countersuit seeks damages and legal measures to prevent further alleged interference. On February 10, 2025, a consortium of investors led by Elon Musk submitted a $97.4 billion unsolicited bid to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, declaring willingness to match or exceed any better offer. The offer was rejected on 14 February 2025, with OpenAI stating that it was not for sale, but the offer complicated Altman's restructuring plan by suggesting a lower bar for how much the nonprofit should be valued. OpenAI, Inc. was originally designed as a nonprofit in order to ensure that AGI "benefits all of humanity" rather than "the private gain of any person". In 2019, it created OpenAI Global, LLC, a capped-profit subsidiary controlled by the nonprofit. In December 2024, OpenAI proposed a restructuring plan to convert the capped-profit into a Delaware-based public benefit corporation (PBC), and to release it from the control of the nonprofit. The nonprofit would sell its control and other assets, getting equity in return, and would use it to fund and pursue separate charitable projects, including in science and education. OpenAI's leadership described the change as necessary to secure additional investments, and claimed that the nonprofit's founding mission to ensure AGI "benefits all of humanity" would be better fulfilled. The plan has been criticized by former employees. A legal letter named "Not For Private Gain" asked the attorneys general of California and Delaware to intervene, stating that the restructuring is illegal and would remove governance safeguards from the nonprofit and the attorneys general. The letter argues that OpenAI's complex structure was deliberately designed to remain accountable to its mission, without the conflicting pressure of maximizing profits. It contends that the nonprofit is best positioned to advance its mission of ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity by continuing to control OpenAI Global, LLC, whatever the amount of equity that it could get in exchange. PBCs can choose how they balance their mission with profit-making. Controlling shareholders have a large influence on how closely a PBC sticks to its mission. On October 28, 2025, OpenAI announced that it had adopted the new PBC corporate structure after receiving approval from the attorneys general of California and Delaware. Under the new structure, OpenAI's for-profit branch became a public benefit corporation known as OpenAI Group PBC, while the non-profit was renamed to the OpenAI Foundation. The OpenAI Foundation holds a 26% stake in the PBC, while Microsoft holds a 27% stake and the remaining 47% is owned by employees and other investors. All members of the OpenAI Group PBC board of directors will be appointed by the OpenAI Foundation, which can remove them at any time. Members of the Foundation's board will also serve on the for-profit board. The new structure allows the for-profit PBC to raise investor funds like most traditional tech companies, including through an initial public offering, which Altman claimed was the most likely path forward. In January 2023, OpenAI Global, LLC was in talks for funding that would value the company at $29 billion, double its 2021 value. On January 23, 2023, Microsoft announced a new US$10 billion investment in OpenAI Global, LLC over multiple years, partially needed to use Microsoft's cloud-computing service Azure. From September to December, 2023, Microsoft rebranded all variants of its Copilot to Microsoft Copilot, and they added MS-Copilot to many installations of Windows and released Microsoft Copilot mobile apps. Following OpenAI's 2025 restructuring, Microsoft owns a 27% stake in the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC, valued at $135 billion. In a deal announced the same day, OpenAI agreed to purchase $250 billion of Azure services, with Microsoft ceding their right of first refusal over OpenAI's future cloud computing purchases. As part of the deal, OpenAI will continue to share 20% of its revenue with Microsoft until it achieves AGI, which must now be verified by an independent panel of experts. The deal also loosened restrictions on both companies working with third parties, allowing Microsoft to pursue AGI independently and allowing OpenAI to develop products with other companies. In 2017, OpenAI spent $7.9 million, a quarter of its functional expenses, on cloud computing alone. In comparison, DeepMind's total expenses in 2017 were $442 million. In the summer of 2018, training OpenAI's Dota 2 bots required renting 128,000 CPUs and 256 GPUs from Google for multiple weeks. In October 2024, OpenAI completed a $6.6 billion capital raise with a $157 billion valuation including investments from Microsoft, Nvidia, and SoftBank. On January 21, 2025, Donald Trump announced The Stargate Project, a joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank and MGX to build an AI infrastructure system in conjunction with the US government. The project takes its name from OpenAI's existing "Stargate" supercomputer project and is estimated to cost $500 billion. The partners planned to fund the project over the next four years. In July, the United States Department of Defense announced that OpenAI had received a $200 million contract for AI in the military, along with Anthropic, Google, and xAI. In the same month, the company made a deal with the UK Government to use ChatGPT and other AI tools in public services. OpenAI subsequently began a $50 million fund to support nonprofit and community organizations. In April 2025, OpenAI raised $40 billion at a $300 billion post-money valuation, which was the highest-value private technology deal in history. The financing round was led by SoftBank, with other participants including Microsoft, Coatue, Altimeter and Thrive. In July 2025, the company reported annualized revenue of $12 billion. This was an increase from $3.7 billion in 2024, which was driven by ChatGPT subscriptions, which reached 20 million paid subscribers by April 2025, up from 15.5 million at the end of 2024, alongside a rapidly expanding enterprise customer base that grew to five million business users. The company’s cash burn remains high because of the intensive computational costs required to train and operate large language models. It projects an $8 billion operating loss in 2025. OpenAI reports revised long-term spending projections totaling approximately $115 billion through 2029, with annual expenditures projected to escalate significantly, reaching $17 billion in 2026, $35 billion in 2027, and $45 billion in 2028. These expenditures are primarily allocated toward expanding compute infrastructure, developing proprietary AI chips, constructing data centers, and funding intensive model training programs, with more than half of the spending through the end of the decade expected to support research-intensive compute for model training and development. The company's financial strategy prioritizes market expansion and technological advancement over near-term profitability, with OpenAI targeting cash-flow-positive operations by 2029 and projecting revenue of approximately $200 billion by 2030. This aggressive spending trajectory underscores both the enormous capital requirements of scaling cutting-edge AI technology and OpenAI's commitment to maintaining its position as a leader in the artificial intelligence industry. In October 2025, OpenAI completed an employee share sale of up to $10 billion to existing investors which valued the company at $500 billion. The deal values OpenAI as the most valuable privately owned company in the world—surpassing SpaceX as the world's most valuable private company. On November 17, 2023, Sam Altman was removed as CEO when its board of directors (composed of Helen Toner, Ilya Sutskever, Adam D'Angelo and Tasha McCauley) cited a lack of confidence in him. Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati took over as interim CEO. Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, was also removed as chairman of the board and resigned from the company's presidency shortly thereafter. Three senior OpenAI researchers subsequently resigned: director of research and GPT-4 lead Jakub Pachocki, head of AI risk Aleksander Mądry, and researcher Szymon Sidor. On November 18, 2023, there were reportedly talks of Altman returning as CEO amid pressure placed upon the board by investors such as Microsoft and Thrive Capital, who objected to Altman's departure. Although Altman himself spoke in favor of returning to OpenAI, he has since stated that he considered starting a new company and bringing former OpenAI employees with him if talks to reinstate him didn't work out. The board members agreed "in principle" to resign if Altman returned. On November 19, 2023, negotiations with Altman to return failed and Murati was replaced by Emmett Shear as interim CEO. The board initially contacted Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei (a former OpenAI executive) about replacing Altman, and proposed a merger of the two companies, but both offers were declined. On November 20, 2023, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced Altman and Brockman would be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team, but added that they were still committed to OpenAI despite recent events. Before the partnership with Microsoft was finalized, Altman gave the board another opportunity to negotiate with him. About 738 of OpenAI's 770 employees, including Murati and Sutskever, signed an open letter stating they would quit their jobs and join Microsoft if the board did not rehire Altman and then resign. This prompted OpenAI investors to consider legal action against the board as well. In response, OpenAI management sent an internal memo to employees stating that negotiations with Altman and the board had resumed and would take some time. On November 21, 2023, after continued negotiations, Altman and Brockman returned to the company in their prior roles along with a reconstructed board made up of new members Bret Taylor (as chairman) and Lawrence Summers, with D'Angelo remaining. According to subsequent reporting, shortly before Altman’s firing, some employees raised concerns to the board about how he had handled the safety implications of a recent internal AI capability discovery. On November 29, 2023, OpenAI announced that an anonymous Microsoft employee had joined the board as a non-voting member to observe the company's operations; Microsoft resigned from the board in July 2024. In February 2024, the Securities and Exchange Commission subpoenaed OpenAI's internal communication to determine if Altman's alleged lack of candor misled investors. In 2024, following the temporary removal of Sam Altman and his return, many employees gradually left OpenAI, including most of the original leadership team and a significant number of AI safety researchers. In August 2023, it was announced that OpenAI had acquired the New York-based start-up Global Illumination, a company that deploys AI to develop digital infrastructure and creative tools. In June 2024, OpenAI acquired Multi, a startup focused on remote collaboration. In March 2025, OpenAI reached a deal with CoreWeave to acquire $350 million worth of CoreWeave shares and access to AI infrastructure, in return for $11.9 billion paid over five years. Microsoft was already CoreWeave's biggest customer in 2024. Alongside their other business dealings, OpenAI and Microsoft were renegotiating the terms of their partnership to facilitate a potential future initial public offering by OpenAI, while ensuring Microsoft's continued access to advanced AI models. On May 21, OpenAI announced the $6.5 billion acquisition of io, an AI hardware start-up founded by former Apple designer Jony Ive in 2024. In September 2025, OpenAI agreed to acquire the product testing startup Statsig for $1.1 billion in an all-stock deal and appointed Statsig's founding CEO Vijaye Raji as OpenAI's chief technology officer of applications. The company also announced development of an AI-driven hiring service designed to rival LinkedIn. OpenAI acquired personal finance app Roi in October 2025. In October 2025, OpenAI acquired Software Applications Incorporated, the developer of Sky, a macOS-based natural language interface designed to operate across desktop applications. The Sky team joined OpenAI, and the company announced plans to integrate Sky’s capabilities into ChatGPT. In December 2025, it was announced OpenAI had agreed to acquire Neptune, an AI tooling startup that helps companies track and manage model training, for an undisclosed amount. In January 2026, it was announced OpenAI had acquired healthcare technology startup Torch for approximately $60 million. The acquisition followed the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT Health product and was intended to strengthen the company’s medical data and healthcare artificial intelligence capabilities. OpenAI has been criticized for outsourcing the annotation of data sets to Sama, a company based in San Francisco that employed workers in Kenya. These annotations were used to train an AI model to detect toxicity, which could then be used to moderate toxic content, notably from ChatGPT's training data and outputs. However, these pieces of text usually contained detailed descriptions of various types of violence, including sexual violence. The investigation uncovered that OpenAI began sending snippets of data to Sama as early as November 2021. The four Sama employees interviewed by Time described themselves as mentally scarred. OpenAI paid Sama $12.50 per hour of work, and Sama was redistributing the equivalent of between $1.32 and $2.00 per hour post-tax to its annotators. Sama's spokesperson said that the $12.50 was also covering other implicit costs, among which were infrastructure expenses, quality assurance and management. In 2024, OpenAI began collaborating with Broadcom to design a custom AI chip capable of both training and inference, targeted for mass production in 2026 and to be manufactured by TSMC on a 3 nm process node. This initiative intended to reduce OpenAI's dependence on Nvidia GPUs, which are costly and face high demand in the market. In January 2024, Arizona State University purchased ChatGPT Enterprise in OpenAI's first deal with a university. In June 2024, Apple Inc. signed a contract with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT features into its products as part of its new Apple Intelligence initiative. In June 2025, OpenAI began renting Google Cloud's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) to support ChatGPT and related services, marking its first meaningful use of non‑Nvidia AI chips. In September 2025, it was revealed that OpenAI signed a contract with Oracle to purchase $300 billion in computing power over the next five years. In September 2025, OpenAI and NVIDIA announced a memorandum of understanding that included a potential deployment of at least 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems and a $100 billion investment from NVIDIA in OpenAI. OpenAI expected the negotiations to be completed within weeks. As of January 2026, this has not been realized, and the two sides are rethinking the future of their partnership. In October 2025, OpenAI announced a multi-billion dollar deal with AMD. OpenAI committed to purchasing six gigawatts worth of AMD chips, starting with the MI450. OpenAI will have the option to buy up to 160 million shares of AMD, about 10% of the company, depending on development, performance and share price targets. In December 2025, Disney said it would make a $1 billion investment in OpenAI, and signed a three-year licensing deal that will let users generate videos using Sora—OpenAI's short-form AI video platform. More than 200 Disney, Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar characters will be available to OpenAI users. In early 2026, Amazon entered advanced discussions to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI as part of a potential artificial intelligence partnership. Under the proposed agreement, OpenAI’s models could be integrated into Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa and other internal projects. OpenAI provides LLMs to the Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge and to the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. In October 2024, The Intercept revealed that OpenAI's tools are considered "essential" for AFRICOM's mission and included in an "Exception to Fair Opportunity" contractual agreement between the United States Department of Defense and Microsoft. In December 2024, OpenAI said it would partner with defense-tech company Anduril to build drone defense technologies for the United States and its allies. In 2025, OpenAI's Chief Product Officer, Kevin Weil, was commissioned lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army to join Detachment 201 as senior advisor. In June 2025, the U.S. Department of Defense awarded OpenAI a $200 million one-year contract to develop AI tools for military and national security applications. OpenAI announced a new program, OpenAI for Government, to give federal, state, and local governments access to its models, including ChatGPT. Services In February 2019, GPT-2 was announced, which gained attention for its ability to generate human-like text. In 2020, OpenAI announced GPT-3, a language model trained on large internet datasets. GPT-3 is aimed at natural language answering questions, but it can also translate between languages and coherently generate improvised text. It also announced that an associated API, named the API, would form the heart of its first commercial product. Eleven employees left OpenAI, mostly between December 2020 and January 2021, in order to establish Anthropic. In 2021, OpenAI introduced DALL-E, a specialized deep learning model adept at generating complex digital images from textual descriptions, utilizing a variant of the GPT-3 architecture. In December 2022, OpenAI received widespread media coverage after launching a free preview of ChatGPT, its new AI chatbot based on GPT-3.5. According to OpenAI, the preview received over a million signups within the first five days. According to anonymous sources cited by Reuters in December 2022, OpenAI Global, LLC was projecting $200 million of revenue in 2023 and $1 billion in revenue in 2024. After ChatGPT was launched, Google announced a similar chatbot, Bard, amid internal concerns that ChatGPT could threaten Google’s position as a primary source of online information. On February 7, 2023, Microsoft announced that it was building AI technology based on the same foundation as ChatGPT into Microsoft Bing, Edge, Microsoft 365 and other products. On March 14, 2023, OpenAI released GPT-4, both as an API (with a waitlist) and as a feature of ChatGPT Plus. On November 6, 2023, OpenAI launched GPTs, allowing individuals to create customized versions of ChatGPT for specific purposes, further expanding the possibilities of AI applications across various industries. On November 14, 2023, OpenAI announced they temporarily suspended new sign-ups for ChatGPT Plus due to high demand. Access for newer subscribers re-opened a month later on December 13. In December 2024, the company launched the Sora model. It also launched OpenAI o1, an early reasoning model that was internally codenamed strawberry. Additionally, ChatGPT Pro—a $200/month subscription service offering unlimited o1 access and enhanced voice features—was introduced, and preliminary benchmark results for the upcoming OpenAI o3 models were shared. On January 23, 2025, OpenAI released Operator, an AI agent and web automation tool for accessing websites to execute goals defined by users. The feature was only available to Pro users in the United States. OpenAI released deep research agent, nine days later. It scored a 27% accuracy on the benchmark Humanity's Last Exam (HLE). Altman later stated GPT-4.5 would be the last model without full chain-of-thought reasoning. In July 2025, reports indicated that AI models by both OpenAI and Google DeepMind solved mathematics problems at the level of top-performing students in the International Mathematical Olympiad. OpenAI's large language model was able to achieve gold medal-level performance, reflecting significant progress in AI's reasoning abilities. On October 6, 2025, OpenAI unveiled its Agent Builder platform during the company's DevDay event. The platform includes a visual drag-and-drop interface that lets developers and businesses design, test, and deploy agentic workflows with limited coding. On October 21, 2025, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Atlas, a browser integrating the ChatGPT assistant directly into web navigation, to compete with existing browsers such as Google Chrome and Apple Safari. On December 11, 2025, OpenAI announced GPT-5.2. This model will be better at creating spreadsheets, building presentations, perceiving images, writing code and understanding long context. On January 27, 2026, OpenAI introduced Prism, a LaTeX-native workspace meant to assist scientists to help with research and writing. The platform utilizes GPT-5.2 as a backend to automate the process of drafting for scientific papers, including features for managing citations, complex equation formatting, and real-time collaborative editing. In March 2023, the company was criticized for disclosing particularly few technical details about products like GPT-4, contradicting its initial commitment to openness and making it harder for independent researchers to replicate its work and develop safeguards. OpenAI cited competitiveness and safety concerns to justify this repudiation. OpenAI's former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever argued in 2023 that open-sourcing increasingly capable models was increasingly risky, and that the safety reasons for not open-sourcing the most potent AI models would become "obvious" in a few years. In September 2025, OpenAI published a study on how people use ChatGPT for everyday tasks. The study found that "non-work tasks" (according to an LLM-based classifier) account for more than 72 percent of all ChatGPT usage, with a minority of overall usage related to business productivity. In July 2023, OpenAI launched the superalignment project, aiming within four years to determine how to align future superintelligent systems. OpenAI promised to dedicate 20% of its computing resources to the project, although the team denied receiving anything close to 20%. OpenAI ended the project in May 2024 after its co-leaders Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike left the company. In August 2025, OpenAI was criticized after thousands of private ChatGPT conversations were inadvertently exposed to public search engines like Google due to an experimental "share with search engines" feature. The opt-in toggle, intended to allow users to make specific chats discoverable, resulted in some discussions including personal details such as names, locations, and intimate topics appearing in search results when users accidentally enabled it while sharing links. OpenAI announced the feature's permanent removal on August 1, 2025, and the company began coordinating with search providers to remove the exposed content, emphasizing that it was not a security breach but a design flaw that heightened privacy risks. CEO Sam Altman acknowledged the issue in a podcast, noting users often treat ChatGPT as a confidant for deeply personal matters, which amplified concerns about AI handling sensitive data. Management In 2018, Musk resigned from his Board of Directors seat, citing "a potential future conflict [of interest]" with his role as CEO of Tesla due to Tesla's AI development for self-driving cars. OpenAI stated that Musk's financial contributions were below $45 million. On March 3, 2023, Reid Hoffman resigned from his board seat, citing a desire to avoid conflicts of interest with his investments in AI companies via Greylock Partners, and his co-founding of the AI startup Inflection AI. Hoffman remained on the board of Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI. In May 2024, Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever resigned and was succeeded by Jakub Pachocki. Co-leader Jan Leike also departed amid concerns over safety and trust. OpenAI then signed deals with Reddit, News Corp, Axios, and Vox Media. Paul Nakasone then joined the board of OpenAI. In August 2024, cofounder John Schulman left OpenAI to join Anthropic, and OpenAI's president Greg Brockman took extended leave until November. In September 2024, CTO Mira Murati left the company. In November 2025, Lawrence Summers resigned from the board of directors. Governance and legal issues In May 2023, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever posted recommendations for the governance of superintelligence. They stated that superintelligence could happen within the next 10 years, allowing a "dramatically more prosperous future" and that "given the possibility of existential risk, we can't just be reactive". They proposed creating an international watchdog organization similar to IAEA to oversee AI systems above a certain capability threshold, suggesting that relatively weak AI systems on the other side should not be overly regulated. They also called for more technical safety research for superintelligences, and asked for more coordination, for example through governments launching a joint project which "many current efforts become part of". In July 2023, the FTC issued a civil investigative demand to OpenAI to investigate whether the company's data security and privacy practices to develop ChatGPT were unfair or harmed consumers (including by reputational harm) in violation of Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914. These are typically preliminary investigative matters and are nonpublic, but the FTC's document was leaked. In July 2023, the FTC launched an investigation into OpenAI over allegations that the company scraped public data and published false and defamatory information. They asked OpenAI for comprehensive information about its technology and privacy safeguards, as well as any steps taken to prevent the recurrence of situations in which its chatbot generated false and derogatory content about people. The agency also raised concerns about ‘circular’ spending arrangements—for example, Microsoft extending Azure credits to OpenAI while both companies shared engineering talent—and warned that such structures could negatively affect the public. In September 2024, OpenAI's global affairs chief endorsed the UK's "smart" AI regulation during testimony to a House of Lords committee. In February 2025, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated that the company is interested in collaborating with the People's Republic of China, despite regulatory restrictions imposed by the U.S. government. This shift comes in response to the growing influence of the Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek, which has disrupted the AI market with open models, including DeepSeek V3 and DeepSeek R1. Following DeepSeek's market emergence, OpenAI enhanced security protocols to protect proprietary development techniques from industrial espionage. Some industry observers noted similarities between DeepSeek's model distillation approach and OpenAI's methodology, though no formal intellectual property claim was filed. According to Oliver Roberts, in March 2025, the United States had 781 state AI bills or laws. OpenAI advocated for preempting state AI laws with federal laws. According to Scott Kohler, OpenAI has opposed California's AI legislation and suggested that the state bill encroaches on a more competent federal government. Public Citizen opposed a federal preemption on AI and pointed to OpenAI's growth and valuation as evidence that existing state laws have not hampered innovation. Before May 2024, OpenAI required departing employees to sign a lifelong non-disparagement agreement forbidding them from criticizing OpenAI and acknowledging the existence of the agreement. Daniel Kokotajlo, a former employee, publicly stated that he forfeited his vested equity in OpenAI in order to leave without signing the agreement. Sam Altman stated that he was unaware of the equity cancellation provision, and that OpenAI never enforced it to cancel any employee's vested equity. However, leaked documents and emails refute this claim. On May 23, 2024, OpenAI sent a memo releasing former employees from the agreement. OpenAI was sued for copyright infringement by authors Sarah Silverman, Matthew Butterick, Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad in July 2023. In September 2023, 17 authors, including George R. R. Martin, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and Jonathan Franzen, joined the Authors Guild in filing a class action lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that the company's technology was illegally using their copyrighted work. The New York Times also sued the company in late December 2023. In May 2024 it was revealed that OpenAI had destroyed its Books1 and Books2 training datasets, which were used in the training of GPT-3, and which the Authors Guild believed to have contained over 100,000 copyrighted books. In 2021, OpenAI developed a speech recognition tool called Whisper. OpenAI used it to transcribe more than one million hours of YouTube videos into text for training GPT-4. The automated transcription of YouTube videos raised concerns within OpenAI employees regarding potential violations of YouTube's terms of service, which prohibit the use of videos for applications independent of the platform, as well as any type of automated access to its videos. Despite these concerns, the project proceeded with notable involvement from OpenAI's president, Greg Brockman. The resulting dataset proved instrumental in training GPT-4. In February 2024, The Intercept as well as Raw Story and Alternate Media Inc. filed lawsuit against OpenAI on copyright litigation ground. The lawsuit is said to have charted a new legal strategy for digital-only publishers to sue OpenAI. On April 30, 2024, eight newspapers filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York against OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming illegal harvesting of their copyrighted articles. The suing publications included The Mercury News, The Denver Post, The Orange County Register, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, Sun Sentinel, and New York Daily News. In June 2023, a lawsuit claimed that OpenAI scraped 300 billion words online without consent and without registering as a data broker. It was filed in San Francisco, California, by sixteen anonymous plaintiffs. They also claimed that OpenAI and its partner as well as customer Microsoft continued to unlawfully collect and use personal data from millions of consumers worldwide to train artificial intelligence models. On May 22, 2024, OpenAI entered into an agreement with News Corp to integrate news content from The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, The Times, and The Sunday Times into its AI platform. Meanwhile, other publications like The New York Times chose to sue OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement over the use of their content to train AI models. In November 2024, a coalition of Canadian news outlets, including the Toronto Star, Metroland Media, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press and CBC, sued OpenAI for using their news articles to train its software without permission. In October 2024 during a New York Times interview, Suchir Balaji accused OpenAI of violating copyright law in developing its commercial LLMs which he had helped engineer. He was a likely witness in a major copyright trial against the AI company, and was one of several of its current or former employees named in court filings as potentially having documents relevant to the case. On November 26, 2024, Balaji died by suicide. His death prompted the circulation of conspiracy theories alleging that he had been deliberately silenced. California Congressman Ro Khanna endorsed calls for an investigation. On April 24, 2025, Ziff Davis sued OpenAI in Delaware federal court for copyright infringement. Ziff Davis is known for publications such as ZDNet, PCMag, CNET, IGN and Lifehacker. In April 2023, the EU's European Data Protection Board (EDPB) formed a dedicated task force on ChatGPT "to foster cooperation and to exchange information on possible enforcement actions conducted by data protection authorities" based on the "enforcement action undertaken by the Italian data protection authority against OpenAI about the ChatGPT service". In late April 2024 NOYB filed a complaint with the Austrian Datenschutzbehörde against OpenAI for violating the European General Data Protection Regulation. A text created with ChatGPT gave a false date of birth for a living person without giving the individual the option to see the personal data used in the process. A request to correct the mistake was denied. Additionally, neither the recipients of ChatGPT's work nor the sources used, could be made available, OpenAI claimed. OpenAI was criticized for lifting its ban on using ChatGPT for "military and warfare". Up until January 10, 2024, its "usage policies" included a ban on "activity that has high risk of physical harm, including", specifically, "weapons development" and "military and warfare". Its new policies prohibit "[using] our service to harm yourself or others" and to "develop or use weapons". In August 2025, the parents of a 16-year-old boy who died by suicide filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI (and CEO Sam Altman), alleging that months of conversations with ChatGPT about mental health and methods of self-harm contributed to their son's death and that safeguards were inadequate for minors. OpenAI expressed condolences and said it was strengthening protections (including updated crisis response behavior and parental controls). Coverage described it as a first-of-its-kind wrongful death case targeting the company's chatbot. The complaint was filed in California state court in San Francisco. In November 2025, the Social Media Victims Law Center and Tech Justice Law Project filed seven lawsuits against OpenAI, of which four lawsuits alleged wrongful death. The suits were filed on behalf of Zane Shamblin, 23, of Texas; Amaurie Lacey, 17, of Georgia; Joshua Enneking, 26, of Florida; and Joe Ceccanti, 48, of Oregon, who each committed suicide after prolonged ChatGPT usage. In December 2025, Stein-Erik Soelberg, who was 56 years old at the time, allegedly murdered his mother Suzanne Adams. In the months prior the paranoid, delusional man often discussed his ideas with ChatGPT. Adam's estate then sued OpenAI claiming that the company shared responsibility due to the risk of chatbot psychosis despite the fact that chatbot psychosis is not a real medical diagnosis. OpenAI responded saying they will make ChatGPT safer for users disconnected from reality. See also References Further reading External links |
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Contents Maor Farid Dr. Maor Farid (Hebrew: מאור פריד; born April 20, 1992) is an Israeli scientist, engineer and artificial intelligence researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, social activist, and author. He is the founder and CEO of Learn to Succeed (Hebrew: ללמוד להצליח) for empowering of youths from the Israeli socio-economic periphery and youths at risk, a regional manager of the Israeli center of ScienceAbroad at MIT, and an activist in the American Technion Society. He is an alumnus of Unit 8200, and a fellow of Fulbright Program and the Israel Scholarship Educational Foundation [he]. Dr. Farid was elected to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list of 2019, and won the Moskowitz Prize for Zionism. Early life Maor was born in Ness Ziona, a city in central Israel, as the eldest son for parents from immigrating families of Mizrahi Jews from Iraq and Libya. Maor suffered from Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) from a young age, and was classified as a problematic and violent student. His ADHD issues were diagnosed only after he began his university studies. However, inspired by his parents' background, he aspired to excel at school for a better future for his family. During elementary school, Maor attended local quizzes about Jewish history and Zionism, which significantly shaped his identity and national perspective. Farid graduated high school with the highest GPA in school. Later he was recruited to the Israel Defense Forces and drafted to the Brakim Program [he] – an excellence program of the Israeli Intelligence Corps for training leading R&D officers for the Israeli military and defense industry. Maor graduated the program with honors and was elected by the Israeli Prime Minister's Office and Unit 8200, where he served as an artificial intelligence researcher, officer, and commander. During his Military service, he received various honors and awards, such as the Excellent Scientist Award, given to the top three academics serving in the Israel Defense Forces. In 2019, Farid completed his military service in the rank of a Captain. Education and academic career As part of the (4 years) Brakim Program, Maor completed his Bachelor's and Master's degrees at the Technion in Mechanical Engineering with honors. Then, he initiated his Ph.D. research as a collaboration with the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) in parallel to his duty military service. The main goals of his Ph.D. research were predicting irreversible effects of major earthquakes on Israel's nuclear facilities, and improving their seismic resistance using energy absorption technologies. The mathematical models developed by Farid were able to forecast earthquake effects on facilities with major hazard potential, and predicted the failure of liquid storage tanks due to earthquakes took place in Italy (2012) and Mexico (2017). The energy absorption technologies used, increased in up to 90% the seismic resistance abilities of those sensitive facilities. The research results were published in multiple papers in peer-reviewed academic journals and presented in international academic conferences. Later, this research expanded to an official collaboration between the Technion and the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center, which aims to implement the findings obtained on existing sensitive systems, and won funding of 1.5 million NIS from the Pazy foundation of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission and the Council for Higher Education. In 2017, Farid completed his Ph.D. and as the youngest graduate at the Technion for that year, at the age of 24. In the graduation ceremonies, he honored his parents to receive the diplomas on his behalf. At the same year, he served as a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University in an original course he developed as a solution for knowledge gaps he identified in the Israeli defense industry. In 2018, Dr. Farid served as an artificial intelligence researcher at a Data Science team of Unit 8200, where he developed machine learning-based solutions for military and operational needs. In 2019, Farid won the Fulbright and the Israel Scholarship Educational Foundation scholarships, and was accepted to post-doctoral position at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he develops real-time methods for predicting earthquake effects using machine learning techniques. In 2020, Farid was accepted to the Emerging Leaders Program at Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At the same year, he received the excellence research grant of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities for leading his research in collaboration between MIT and the Technion. Social activism Farid social activism focuses on empowering youths from disadvantaged backgrounds from an early age. In 2010–2015, he served as a mentor of a robotics team from Dimona in FIRST Robotics Competition, a mathematics tutor in "Aharai!" [he] program for high-school students at risk in Dimona and Be'er Sheva, and a mentor and private tutor of adolescence and reserve duty soldiers from disadvantaged backgrounds. In 2010, he initiated "Learn to Succeed" (Hebrew: ללמוד להצליח) project, for mitigating the social gaps in the Israeli society by empowering youths from the social, economical, and geographical periphery for excellence, self-fulfillment and gaining formal education. In 2018, Learn to Succeed became an official non-profit organization. At the same year, Farid led a crowdfunding project of 150,000 NIS in order to expand the organization to a national scale. In 2019, he published the book "Learn to Succeed", in which he describes his struggle with ADHD, the violent environment in which he grew up, and the changing process he went through from being a violent teenager to becoming the youngest Ph.D. graduate at the Technion. The book was given to more than two thousand youths at risk and became a top seller in Israel shortly after its publication. Maor dedicated the book to his parents and to the memorial of his friend Captain Tal Nachman who was killed in operational activity during his military service in 2014. The organization consists of hundreds of volunteers, gives full scholarships to STEM students from the periphery who serve as mentors of youths, both Jews and Arabs, from disadvantaged backgrounds, runs a hotline which gives online practical and mental support to hundreds of youths, parents and educators, initiates inspirational activities with military orientation to increase the motivation of its teen-age members for significant military service, and gives inspirational lectures to more than 5,000 youths each year. In 2019, Maor initiated a collaboration with Unit 8200 in which tens of the program's members are being interviewed to the unit. This opportunity is usually given to students with the highest grades in the matriculate exams in each class. In 2020, Dr. Farid established the ScienceAbroad center at MIT, aiming to strengthen the connections between Israeli researchers in the institute and the state of Israel. Moreover, he serves as a volunteer in the American Technion Society. Honors and awards Personal life Farid is married to Michal. Interviews and articles References External links |
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Contents Meta Platforms Meta Platforms, Inc. (doing business as Meta) is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Meta owns and operates several prominent social media platforms and communication services, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Threads and Manus. The company also operates an advertising network for its own sites and third parties; as of 2023[update], advertising accounted for 97.8 percent of its total revenue. Meta has been described as a part of Big Tech, which refers to the largest six tech companies in the United States, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, and Nvidia, which are also the largest companies in the world by market capitalization. The company was originally established in 2004 as TheFacebook, Inc., and was renamed Facebook, Inc. in 2005. In 2021, it rebranded as Meta Platforms, Inc. to reflect a strategic shift toward developing the metaverse—an interconnected digital ecosystem spanning virtual and augmented reality technologies. In 2023, Meta was ranked 31st on the Forbes Global 2000 list of the world's largest public companies. As of 2022, it was the world's third-largest spender on research and development, with R&D expenses totaling US$35.3 billion. History Facebook filed for an initial public offering (IPO) on January 1, 2012. The preliminary prospectus stated that the company sought to raise $5 billion, had 845 million monthly active users, and a website accruing 2.7 billion likes and comments daily. After the IPO, Zuckerberg would retain 22% of the total shares and 57% of the total voting power in Facebook. Underwriters valued the shares at $38 each, valuing the company at $104 billion, the largest valuation yet for a newly public company. On May 16, one day before the IPO, Facebook announced it would sell 25% more shares than originally planned due to high demand. The IPO raised $16 billion, making it the third-largest in US history (slightly ahead of AT&T Mobility and behind only General Motors and Visa). The stock price left the company with a higher market capitalization than all but a few U.S. corporations—surpassing heavyweights such as Amazon, McDonald's, Disney, and Kraft Foods—and made Zuckerberg's stock worth $19 billion. The New York Times stated that the offering overcame questions about Facebook's difficulties in attracting advertisers to transform the company into a "must-own stock". Jimmy Lee of JPMorgan Chase described it as "the next great blue-chip". Writers at TechCrunch, on the other hand, expressed skepticism, stating, "That's a big multiple to live up to, and Facebook will likely need to add bold new revenue streams to justify the mammoth valuation." Trading in the stock, which began on May 18, was delayed that day due to technical problems with the Nasdaq exchange. The stock struggled to stay above the IPO price for most of the day, forcing underwriters to buy back shares to support the price. At the closing bell, shares were valued at $38.23, only $0.23 above the IPO price and down $3.82 from the opening bell value. The opening was widely described by the financial press as a disappointment. The stock set a new record for trading volume of an IPO. On May 25, 2012, the stock ended its first full week of trading at $31.91, a 16.5% decline. On May 22, 2012, regulators from Wall Street's Financial Industry Regulatory Authority announced that they had begun to investigate whether banks underwriting Facebook had improperly shared information only with select clients rather than the general public. Massachusetts Secretary of State William F. Galvin subpoenaed Morgan Stanley over the same issue. The allegations sparked "fury" among some investors and led to the immediate filing of several lawsuits, one of them a class action suit claiming more than $2.5 billion in losses due to the IPO. Bloomberg estimated that retail investors may have lost approximately $630 million on Facebook stock since its debut. S&P Global Ratings added Facebook to its S&P 500 index on December 21, 2013. On May 2, 2014, Zuckerberg announced that the company would be changing its internal motto from "Move fast and break things" to "Move fast with stable infrastructure". The earlier motto had been described as Zuckerberg's "prime directive to his developers and team" in a 2009 interview in Business Insider, in which he also said, "Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough." In November 2016, Facebook announced the Microsoft Windows client of gaming service Facebook Gameroom, formerly Facebook Games Arcade, at the Unity Technologies developers conference. The client allows Facebook users to play "native" games in addition to its web games. The service was closed in June 2021. Lasso was a short-video sharing app from Facebook similar to TikTok that was launched on iOS and Android in 2018 and was aimed at teenagers. On July 2, 2020, Facebook announced that Lasso would be shutting down on July 10. In 2018, the Oculus lead Jason Rubin sent his 50-page vision document titled "The Metaverse" to Facebook's leadership. In the document, Rubin acknowledged that Facebook's virtual reality business had not caught on as expected, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on content for early adopters. He also urged the company to execute fast and invest heavily in the vision, to shut out HTC, Apple, Google and other competitors in the VR space. Regarding other players' participation in the metaverse vision, he called for the company to build the "metaverse" to prevent their competitors from "being in the VR business in a meaningful way at all". In May 2019, Facebook founded Libra Networks, reportedly to develop their own stablecoin cryptocurrency. Later, it was reported that Libra was being supported by financial companies such as Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Uber. The consortium of companies was expected to pool in $10 million each to fund the launch of the cryptocurrency coin named Libra. Depending on when it would receive approval from the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory authority to operate as a payments service, the Libra Association had planned to launch a limited format cryptocurrency in 2021. Libra was renamed Diem, before being shut down and sold in January 2022 after backlash from Swiss government regulators and the public. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of online services, including Facebook, grew globally. Zuckerberg predicted this would be a "permanent acceleration" that would continue after the pandemic. Facebook hired aggressively, growing from 48,268 employees in March 2020 to more than 87,000 by September 2022. Following a period of intense scrutiny and damaging whistleblower leaks, news started to emerge on October 21, 2021 about Facebook's plan to rebrand the company and change its name. In the Q3 2021 earnings call on October 25, Mark Zuckerberg discussed the ongoing criticism of the company's social services and the way it operates, and pointed to the pivoting efforts to building the metaverse – without mentioning the rebranding and the name change. The metaverse vision and the name change from Facebook, Inc. to Meta Platforms was introduced at Facebook Connect on October 28, 2021. Based on Facebook's PR campaign, the name change reflects the company's shifting long term focus of building the metaverse, a digital extension of the physical world by social media, virtual reality and augmented reality features. "Meta" had been registered as a trademark in the United States in 2018 (after an initial filing in 2015) for marketing, advertising, and computer services, by a Canadian company that provided big data analysis of scientific literature. This company was acquired in 2017 by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), a foundation established by Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, and became one of their projects. Following the rebranding announcement, CZI announced that it had already decided to deprioritize the earlier Meta project, thus it would be transferring its rights to the name to Meta Platforms, and the previous project would end in 2022. Soon after the rebranding, in early February 2022, Meta reported a greater-than-expected decline in profits in the fourth quarter of 2021. It reported no growth in monthly users, and indicated it expected revenue growth to stall. It also expected measures taken by Apple Inc. to protect user privacy to cost it some $10 billion in advertisement revenue, an amount equal to roughly 8% of its revenue for 2021. In meeting with Meta staff the day after earnings were reported, Zuckerberg blamed competition for user attention, particularly from video-based apps such as TikTok. The 27% reduction in the company's share price which occurred in reaction to the news eliminated some $230 billion of value from Meta's market capitalization. Bloomberg described the decline as "an epic rout that, in its sheer scale, is unlike anything Wall Street or Silicon Valley has ever seen". Zuckerberg's net worth fell by as much as $31 billion. Zuckerberg owns 13% of Meta, and the holding makes up the bulk of his wealth. According to published reports by Bloomberg on March 30, 2022, Meta turned over data such as phone numbers, physical addresses, and IP addresses to hackers posing as law enforcement officials using forged documents. The law enforcement requests sometimes included forged signatures of real or fictional officials. When asked about the allegations, a Meta representative said, "We review every data request for legal sufficiency and use advanced systems and processes to validate law enforcement requests and detect abuse." In June 2022, Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of 14 years, announced she would step down that year. Zuckerberg said that Javier Olivan would replace Sandberg, though in a “more traditional” role. In March 2022, Meta (except Meta-owned WhatsApp) and Instagram were banned in Russia and added to the Russian list of terrorist and extremist organizations for alleged Russophobia and hate speech (up to genocidal calls) amid the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Meta appealed against the ban, but it was upheld by a Moscow court in June of the same year. Also in March 2022, Meta and Italian eyewear giant Luxottica released Ray-Ban Stories, a series of smartglasses which could play music and take pictures. Meta and Luxottica parent company EssilorLuxottica declined to disclose sales on the line of products as of September 2022, though Meta has expressed satisfaction with its customer feedback. In July 2022, Meta saw its first year-on-year revenue decline when its total revenue slipped by 1% to $28.8bn. Analysts and journalists accredited the loss to its advertising business, which has been limited by Apple's app tracking transparency feature and the number of people who have opted not to be tracked by Meta apps. Zuckerberg also accredited the decline to increasing competition from TikTok. On October 27, 2022, Meta's market value dropped to $268 billion, a loss of around $700 billion compared to 2021, and its shares fell by 24%. It lost its spot among the top 20 US companies by market cap, despite reaching the top 5 in the previous year. In November 2022, Meta laid off 11,000 employees, 13% of its workforce. Zuckerberg said the decision to aggressively increase Meta's investments had been a mistake, as he had wrongly predicted that the surge in e-commerce would last beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. He also attributed the decline to increased competition, a global economic downturn and "ads signal loss". Plans to lay off a further 10,000 employees began in April 2023. The layoffs were part of a general downturn in the technology industry, alongside layoffs by companies including Google, Amazon, Tesla, Snap, Twitter and Lyft. Starting from 2022, Meta scrambled to catch up to other tech companies in adopting specialized artificial intelligence hardware and software. It had been using less expensive CPUs instead of GPUs for AI work, but that approach turned out to be less efficient. The company gifted the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research $1.3 million to finance the Social Media Archive's aim to make their data available to social science research. In 2023, Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner imposed a record EUR 1.2 billion fine on Meta for transferring data from Europe to the United States without adequate protections for EU citizens.: 250 In March 2023, Meta announced a new round of layoffs that would cut 10,000 employees and close 5,000 open positions to make the company more efficient. Meta revenue surpassed analyst expectations for the first quarter of 2023 after announcing that it was increasing its focus on AI. On July 6, Meta launched a new app, Threads, a competitor to Twitter. Meta announced its artificial intelligence model Llama 2 in July 2023, available for commercial use via partnerships with major cloud providers like Microsoft. It was the first project to be unveiled out of Meta's generative AI group after it was set up in February. It would not charge access or usage but instead operate with an open-source model to allow Meta to ascertain what improvements need to be made. Prior to this announcement, Meta said it had no plans to release Llama 2 for commercial use. An earlier version of Llama was released to academics. In August 2023, Meta announced its permanent removal of news content from Facebook and Instagram in Canada due to the Online News Act, which requires Canadian news outlets to be compensated for content shared on its platform. The Online News Act was in effect by year-end, but Meta will not participate in the regulatory process. In October 2023, Zuckerberg said that AI would be Meta's biggest investment area in 2024. Meta finished 2023 as one of the best-performing technology stocks of the year, with its share price up 150 percent. Its stock reached an all-time high in January 2024, bringing Meta within 2% of achieving $1 trillion market capitalization. In November 2023 Meta Platforms launched an ad-free service in Europe, allowing subscribers to opt-out of personal data being collected for targeted advertising. A group of 28 European organizations, including Max Schrems' advocacy group NOYB, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, Wikimedia Europe, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, signed a 2024 letter to the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) expressing concern that this subscriber model would undermine privacy protections, specifically GDPR data protection standards. Meta removed the Facebook and Instagram accounts of Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in February 2024, citing repeated violations of its Dangerous Organizations & Individuals policy. As of March, Meta was under investigation by the FDA for alleged use of their social media platforms to sell illegal drugs. On 16 May 2024, the European Commission began an investigation into Meta over concerns related to child safety. In May 2023, Iraqi social media influencer Esaa Ahmed-Adnan encountered a troubling issue when Instagram removed his posts, citing false copyright violations despite his content being original and free from copyrighted material. He discovered that extortionists were behind these takedowns, offering to restore his content for $3,000 or provide ongoing protection for $1,000 per month. This scam, exploiting Meta’s rights management tools, became widespread in the Middle East, revealing a gap in Meta’s enforcement in developing regions. An Iraqi nonprofit Tech4Peace’s founder, Aws al-Saadi helped Ahmed-Adnan and others, but the restoration process was slow, leading to significant financial losses for many victims, including prominent figures like Ammar al-Hakim. This situation highlighted Meta’s challenges in balancing global growth with effective content moderation and protection. On 16 September 2024, Meta announced it had banned Russian state media outlets from its platforms worldwide due to concerns about "foreign interference activity." This decision followed allegations that RT and its employees funneled $10 million through shell companies to secretly fund influence campaigns on various social media channels. Meta's actions were part of a broader effort to counter Russian covert influence operations, which had intensified since the invasion. At its 2024 Connect conference, Meta presented Orion, its first pair of augmented reality glasses. Though Orion was originally intended to be sold to consumers, the manufacturing process turned out to be too complex and expensive. Instead, the company pivoted to producing a small number of the glasses to be used internally. On 4 October 2024, Meta announced about its new AI model called Movie Gen, capable of generating realistic video and audio clips based on user prompts. Meta stated it would not release Movie Gen for open development, preferring to collaborate directly with content creators and integrate it into its products by the following year. The model was built using a combination of licensed and publicly available datasets. On October 31, 2024, ProPublica published an investigation into deceptive political advertisement scams that sometimes use hundreds of hijacked profiles and facebook pages run by organized networks of scammers. The authors cited spotty enforcement by Meta as a major reason for the extent of the issue. In November 2024, TechCrunch reported that Meta were considering building a $10bn global underwater cable spanning 25,000 miles. In the same month, Meta closed down 2 million accounts on Facebook and Instagram that were linked to scam centers in Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines, and the United Arab Emirates doing pig butchering scams. In December 2024, Meta announced that, beginning February 2025, they would require advertisers to run ads about financial services in Australia to verify information about who are the beneficiary and the payer in a bid to regulate scams. On December 4, 2024, Meta announced it will invest US$10 billion for its largest AI data center in northeast Louisiana, powered by natural gas facilities. On the 11th of that month, Meta experienced a global outage, impacting accounts on all of their social media and messaging applications. Outage reports from DownDetector reached 70,000+ and 100,000+ within minutes for Instagram and Facebook, respectively. In January 2025, Meta announced plans to roll back its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, citing shifts in the "legal and policy landscape" in the United States following the 2024 presidential election. The decision followed reports that CEO Mark Zuckerberg sought to align the company more closely with the incoming Trump administration, including changes to content moderation policies and executive leadership. The new content moderation policies continued to bar insults about a person's intellect or mental illness, but made an exception to allow calling LGBTQ people mentally ill because they are gay or transgender. Later that month, Meta agreed to pay $25 million to settle a 2021 lawsuit brought by Donald Trump for suspending his social media accounts after the January 6 riots. Changes to Meta's moderation policies were controversial among its oversight board, with a significant divide in opinion between the board's US conservatives and its global members. In June 2025, Meta Platforms Inc. has decided to make a multibillion-dollar investment into artificial intelligence startup Scale AI. The financing could exceed $10 billion in value which would make it one of the largest private company funding events of all time. In October 2025, it was announced that Meta would be laying off 600 employees in the artificial intelligence unit to perform better and simpler. They referred to their AI unit as "bloated" and are seeking to trim down the department. This mass layoff is going to impact Meta’s AI infrastructure units, Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research unit (FAIR) and other product-related positions. Mergers and acquisitions Meta has acquired multiple companies (often identified as talent acquisitions). One of its first major acquisitions was in April 2012, when it acquired Instagram for approximately US$1 billion in cash and stock. In October 2013, Facebook, Inc. acquired Onavo, an Israeli mobile web analytics company. In February 2014, Facebook, Inc. announced it would buy mobile messaging company WhatsApp for US$19 billion in cash and stock. The acquisition was completed on October 6. Later that year, Facebook bought Oculus VR for $2.3 billion in cash and stock, which released its first consumer virtual reality headset in 2016. In late November 2019, Facebook, Inc. announced the acquisition of the game developer Beat Games, responsible for developing one of that year's most popular VR games, Beat Saber. In Late 2022, after Facebook Inc rebranded to Meta Platforms Inc, Oculus was rebranded to Meta Quest. In May 2020, Facebook, Inc. announced it had acquired Giphy for a reported cash price of $400 million. It will be integrated with the Instagram team. However, in August 2021, UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) stated that Facebook, Inc. might have to sell Giphy, after an investigation found that the deal between the two companies would harm competition in display advertising market. Facebook, Inc. was fined $70 million by CMA for deliberately failing to report all information regarding the acquisition and the ongoing antitrust investigation. In October 2022, the CMA ruled for a second time that Meta be required to divest Giphy, stating that Meta already controls half of the advertising in the UK. Meta agreed to the sale, though it stated that it disagrees with the decision itself. In May 2023, Giphy was divested to Shutterstock for $53 million. In November 2020, Facebook, Inc. announced that it planned to purchase the customer-service platform and chatbot specialist startup Kustomer to promote companies to use their platform for business. It has been reported that Kustomer valued at slightly over $1 billion. The deal was closed in February 2022 after regulatory approval. In September 2022, Meta acquired Lofelt, a Berlin-based haptic tech startup. In December 2025, it was announced Meta had acquired the AI-wearables startup, Limitless. In the same month, they also acquired another AI startup, Manus AI, for $2 billion. Manus announced in December that its platform had achieved $100mm in recurring revenue just 8 months after its launch and Meta said it will scale the platform to many other businesses. In January 2026, it was announced Meta proposed acquisition of Manus was undergoing preliminary scrutiny by Chinese regulators. The examination concerns the cross-border transfer of artificial intelligence technology developed in China. Lobbying In 2020, Facebook, Inc. spent $19.7 million on lobbying, hiring 79 lobbyists. In 2019, it had spent $16.7 million on lobbying and had a team of 71 lobbyists, up from $12.6 million and 51 lobbyists in 2018. Facebook was the largest spender of lobbying money among the Big Tech companies in 2020. The lobbying team includes top congressional aide John Branscome, who was hired in September 2021, to help the company fend off threats from Democratic lawmakers and the Biden administration. In December 2024, Meta donated $1 million to the inauguration fund for then-President-elect Donald Trump. In 2025, Meta was listed among the donors funding the construction of the White House State Ballroom. Partnerships February 2026, Meta announced a long-term partnership with Nvidia. Censorship In August 2024, Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter to Jim Jordan indicating that during the COVID-19 pandemic the Biden administration repeatedly asked Meta to limit certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, on Facebook and Instagram. In 2016 Meta hired Jordana Cutler, formerly an employee at the Israeli Embassy to the United States, as its policy chief for Israel and the Jewish Diaspora. In this role, Cutler pushed for the censorship of accounts belonging to Students for Justice in Palestine chapters in the United States. Critics have said that Cutler's position gives the Israeli government an undue influence over Meta policy, and that few countries have such high levels of contact with Meta policymakers. Following the election of Donald Trump in 2025, various sources noted possible censorship related to the Democratic Party on Instagram and other Meta platforms. In February 2025, a Meta rep flagged journalist Gil Duran's article and other "critiques of tech industry figures" as spam or sensitive content, limiting their reach. In March 2025, Meta attempted to block former employee Sarah Wynn-Williams from promoting or further distributing her memoir, Careless People, that includes allegations of unaddressed sexual harassment in the workplace by senior executives. The New York Times reports that the arbitration is among Meta's most forcible attempts to repudiate a former employee's account of workplace dynamics. Publisher Macmillan reacted to the ruling by the Emergency International Arbitral Tribunal by stating that it will ignore its provisions. As of 15 March 2025[update], hardback and digital versions of Careless People were being offered for sale by major online retailers. From October 2025, Meta began removing and restricting access for accounts related to LGBTQ, reproductive health and abortion information pages on its platforms. Martha Dimitratou, executive director of Repro Uncensored, called Meta's shadow-banning of these issues "One of the biggest waves of censorship we are seeing". Disinformation concerns Since its inception, Meta has been accused of being a host for fake news and misinformation. In the wake of the 2016 United States presidential election, Zuckerberg began to take steps to eliminate the prevalence of fake news, as the platform had been criticized for its potential influence on the outcome of the election. The company initially partnered with ABC News, the Associated Press, FactCheck.org, Snopes and PolitiFact for its fact-checking initiative; as of 2018, it had over 40 fact-checking partners across the world, including The Weekly Standard. A May 2017 review by The Guardian found that the platform's fact-checking initiatives of partnering with third-party fact-checkers and publicly flagging fake news were regularly ineffective, and appeared to be having minimal impact in some cases. In 2018, journalists working as fact-checkers for the company criticized the partnership, stating that it had produced minimal results and that the company had ignored their concerns. In 2024 Meta's decision to continue to disseminate a falsified video of US president Joe Biden, even after it had been proven to be fake, attracted criticism and concern. In January 2025, Meta ended its use of third-party fact-checkers in favor of a user-run community notes system similar to the one used on X. While Zuckerberg supported these changes, saying that the amount of censorship on the platform was excessive, the decision received criticism by fact-checking institutions, stating that the changes would make it more difficult for users to identify misinformation. Meta also faced criticism for weakening its policies on hate speech that were designed to protect minorities and LGBTQ+ individuals from bullying and discrimination. While moving its content review teams from California to Texas, Meta changed their hateful conduct policy to eliminate restrictions on anti-LGBT and anti-immigrant hate speech, as well as explicitly allowing users to accuse LGBT people of being mentally ill or abnormal based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. In January 2025, Meta faced significant criticism for its role in removing LGBTQ+ content from its platforms, amid its broader efforts to address anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech. The removal of LGBTQ+ themes was noted as part of the wider crackdown on content deemed to violate its community guidelines. Meta's content moderation policies, which were designed to combat harmful speech and protect users from discrimination, inadvertently led to the removal or restriction of LGBTQ+ content, particularly posts highlighting LGBTQ+ identities, support, or political issues. According to reports, LGBTQ+ posts, including those that simply celebrated pride or advocated for LGBTQ+ rights, were flagged and removed for reasons that some critics argue were vague or inconsistently applied. Many LGBTQ+ activists and users on Meta's platforms expressed concern that such actions stifled visibility and expression, potentially isolating LGBTQ+ individuals and communities, especially in spaces that were historically important for outreach and support. Lawsuits Numerous lawsuits have been filed against the company, both when it was known as Facebook, Inc., and as Meta Platforms. In March 2020, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) sued Facebook, for significant and persistent infringements of the rule on privacy involving the Cambridge Analytica fiasco. Every violation of the Privacy Act is subject to a theoretical cumulative liability of $1.7 million. The OAIC estimated that a total of 311,127 Australians had been exposed. On December 8, 2020, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and 46 states (excluding Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and South Dakota), the District of Columbia and the territory of Guam, launched Federal Trade Commission v. Facebook as an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook. The lawsuit concerns Facebook's acquisition of two competitors—Instagram and WhatsApp—and the ensuing monopolistic situation. FTC alleges that Facebook holds monopolistic power in the U.S. social networking market and seeks to force the company to divest from Instagram and WhatsApp to break up the conglomerate. William Kovacic, a former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, argued the case will be difficult to win as it would require the government to create a counterfactual argument of an internet where the Facebook-WhatsApp-Instagram entity did not exist, and prove that harmed competition or consumers. In November 2025, it was ruled that Meta did not violate antitrust laws and holds no monopoly in the market. On December 24, 2021, a court in Russia fined Meta for $27 million after the company declined to remove unspecified banned content. The fine was reportedly tied to the company's annual revenue in the country. In May 2022, a lawsuit was filed in Kenya against Meta and its local outsourcing company Sama. Allegedly, Meta has poor working conditions in Kenya for workers moderating Facebook posts. According to the lawsuit, 260 screeners were declared redundant with confusing reasoning. The lawsuit seeks financial compensation and an order that outsourced moderators be given the same health benefits and pay scale as Meta employees. In June 2022, 8 lawsuits were filed across the U.S. over the allege that excessive exposure to platforms including Facebook and Instagram has led to attempted or actual suicides, eating disorders and sleeplessness, among other issues. The litigation follows a former Facebook employee's testimony in Congress that the company refused to take responsibility. The company noted that tools have been developed for parents to keep track of their children's activity on Instagram and set time limits, in addition to Meta's "Take a break" reminders. In addition, the company is providing resources specific to eating disorders as well as developing AI to prevent children under the age of 13 signing up for Facebook or Instagram. In June 2022, Meta settled a lawsuit with the US Department of Justice. The lawsuit, which was filed in 2019, alleged that the company enabled housing discrimination through targeted advertising, as it allowed homeowners and landlords to run housing ads excluding people based on sex, race, religion, and other characteristics. The U.S. Department of Justice stated that this was in violation of the Fair Housing Act. Meta was handed a penalty of $115,054 and given until December 31, 2022, to shadow the algorithm tool. In January 2023, Meta was fined €390 million for violations of the European Union General Data Protection Regulation. In May 2023, the European Data Protection Board fined Meta a record €1.2 billion for breaching European Union data privacy laws by transferring personal data of Facebook users to servers in the U.S. In July 2024, Meta agreed to pay the state of Texas US$1.4 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton accusing the company of collecting users' biometric data without consent, setting a record for the largest privacy-related settlement ever obtained by a state attorney general. In October 2024, Meta Platforms faced lawsuits in Japan from 30 plaintiffs who claimed they were defrauded by fake investment ads on Facebook and Instagram, featuring false celebrity endorsements. The plaintiffs are seeking approximately $2.8 million in damages. In April 2025, the Kenyan High Court ruled that a US$2.4 billion lawsuit in which three plaintiffs claim that Facebook inflamed civil violence in Ethiopia in 2021 could proceed. In April 2025, Meta was fined €200 million ($230 million) for breaking the Digital Markets Act, by imposing a “consent or pay” system that forces users to either allow their personal data to be used to target advertisements, or pay a subscription fee for advertising-free versions of Facebook and Instagram. In late April 2025, a case was filed against Meta in Ghana over the alleged psychological distress experienced by content moderators employed to take down disturbing social media content including depictions of murders, extreme violence and child sexual abuse. Meta moved the moderation service to the Ghanaian capital of Accra after legal issues in the previous location Kenya. The new moderation company is Teleperformance, a multinational corporation with a history of worker's rights violation. Reports suggests the conditions are worse here than in the previous Kenyan location, with many workers afraid of speaking out due to fear of returning to conflict zones. Workers reported developing mental illnesses, attempted suicides, and low pay. In 26 January 2026, a New Mexico state court case was filed, suggesting that Mark Zuckerberg approved allowing minors to access artificial intelligence chatbot companions that safety staffers warned were capable of sexual interactions. In 2020, the company UReputation, which had been involved in several cases concerning the management of digital armies[clarification needed], filed a lawsuit against Facebook, accusing it of unlawfully transmitting personal data to third parties. Legal actions were initiated in Tunisia, France, and the United States. In 2025, the United States District court for the Northern District of Georgia approved a discovery procedure, allowing UReputation to access documents and evidence held by Meta. Structure Meta's key management consists of: As of October 2022[update], Meta had 83,553 employees worldwide. As of June 2024[update], Meta's board consisted of the following directors; Meta Platforms is mainly owned by institutional investors, who hold around 80% of all shares. Insiders control the majority of voting shares. The three largest individual investors in 2024 were Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and Christopher K. Cox. The largest shareholders in late 2024/early 2025 were: Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor and Zuckerberg's former mentor, said Facebook had "the most centralized decision-making structure I have ever encountered in a large company". Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes has stated that chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg has too much power, that the company is now a monopoly, and that, as a result, it should be split into multiple smaller companies. In an op-ed in The New York Times, Hughes said he was concerned that Zuckerberg had surrounded himself with a team that did not challenge him, and that it is the U.S. government's job to hold him accountable and curb his "unchecked power". He also said that "Mark's power is unprecedented and un-American." Several U.S. politicians agreed with Hughes. European Union Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager stated that splitting Facebook should be done only as "a remedy of the very last resort", and that it would not solve Facebook's underlying problems. Revenue Facebook ranked No. 34 in the 2020 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by revenue, with almost $86 billion in revenue most of it coming from advertising. One analysis of 2017 data determined that the company earned US$20.21 per user from advertising. According to New York, since its rebranding, Meta has reportedly lost $500 billion as a result of new privacy measures put in place by companies such as Apple and Google which prevents Meta from gathering users' data. In February 2015, Facebook announced it had reached two million active advertisers, with most of the gain coming from small businesses. An active advertiser was defined as an entity that had advertised on the Facebook platform in the last 28 days. In March 2016, Facebook announced it had reached three million active advertisers with more than 70% from outside the United States. Prices for advertising follow a variable pricing model based on auctioning ad placements, and potential engagement levels of the advertisement itself. Similar to other online advertising platforms like Google and Twitter, targeting of advertisements is one of the chief merits of digital advertising compared to traditional media. Marketing on Meta is employed through two methods based on the viewing habits, likes and shares, and purchasing data of the audience, namely targeted audiences and "look alike" audiences. The U.S. IRS challenged the valuation Facebook used when it transferred IP from the U.S. to Facebook Ireland (now Meta Platforms Ireland) in 2010 (which Facebook Ireland then revalued higher before charging out), as it was building its double Irish tax structure. The case is ongoing and Meta faces a potential fine of $3–5bn. The U.S. Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 changed Facebook's global tax calculations. Meta Platforms Ireland is subject to the U.S. GILTI tax of 10.5% on global intangible profits (i.e. Irish profits). On the basis that Meta Platforms Ireland Limited is paying some tax, the effective minimum US tax for Facebook Ireland will be circa 11%. In contrast, Meta Platforms Inc. would incur a special IP tax rate of 13.125% (the FDII rate) if its Irish business relocated to the U.S. Tax relief in the U.S. (21% vs. Irish at the GILTI rate) and accelerated capital expensing, would make this effective U.S. rate around 12%. The insignificance of the U.S./Irish tax difference was demonstrated when Facebook moved 1.5bn non-EU accounts to the U.S. to limit exposure to GDPR. Facilities Users outside of the U.S. and Canada contract with Meta's Irish subsidiary, Meta Platforms Ireland Limited (formerly Facebook Ireland Limited), allowing Meta to avoid US taxes for all users in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and South America. Meta is making use of the Double Irish arrangement which allows it to pay 2–3% corporation tax on all international revenue. In 2010, Facebook opened its fourth office, in Hyderabad, India, which houses online advertising and developer support teams and provides support to users and advertisers. In India, Meta is registered as Facebook India Online Services Pvt Ltd. It also has offices or planned sites in Chittagong, Bangladesh; Dublin, Ireland; and Austin, Texas, among other cities. Facebook opened its London headquarters in 2017 in Fitzrovia in central London. Facebook opened an office in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2018. The offices were initially home to the "Connectivity Lab", a group focused on bringing Internet access to those who do not have access to the Internet. In April 2019, Facebook opened its Taiwan headquarters in Taipei. In March 2022, Meta opened new regional headquarters in Dubai. In September 2023, it was reported that Meta had paid £149m to British Land to break the lease on Triton Square London office. Meta reportedly had another 18 years left on its lease on the site. As of 2023, Facebook operated 21 data centers. It committed to purchase 100% renewable energy and to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 75% by 2020. Its data center technologies include Fabric Aggregator, a distributed network system that accommodates larger regions and varied traffic patterns. Reception US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded in a tweet to Zuckerberg's announcement about Meta, saying: "Meta as in 'we are a cancer to democracy metastasizing into a global surveillance and propaganda machine for boosting authoritarian regimes and destroying civil society ... for profit!'" Ex-Facebook employee Frances Haugen and whistleblower behind the Facebook Papers responded to the rebranding efforts by expressing doubts about the company's ability to improve while led by Mark Zuckerberg, and urged the chief executive officer to resign. In November 2021, a video published by Inspired by Iceland went viral, in which a Zuckerberg look-alike promoted the Icelandverse, a place of "enhanced actual reality without silly looking headsets". In a December 2021 interview, SpaceX and Tesla chief executive officer Elon Musk said he could not see a compelling use-case for the VR-driven metaverse, adding: "I don't see someone strapping a frigging screen to their face all day." In January 2022, Louise Eccles of The Sunday Times logged into the metaverse with the intention of making a video guide. She wrote: Initially, my experience with the Oculus went well. I attended work meetings as an avatar and tried an exercise class set in the streets of Paris. The headset enabled me to feel the thrill of carving down mountains on a snowboard and the adrenaline rush of climbing a mountain without ropes. Yet switching to the social apps, where you mingle with strangers also using VR headsets, it was at times predatory and vile. Eccles described being sexually harassed by another user, as well as "accents from all over the world, American, Indian, English, Australian, using racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic language". She also encountered users as young as 7 years old on the platform, despite Oculus headsets being intended for users over 13. See also References External links 37°29′06″N 122°08′54″W / 37.48500°N 122.14833°W / 37.48500; -122.14833 |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadash%E2%80%93Ta%27al] | [TOKENS: 959] |
Contents Hadash–Ta'al Hadash–Ta'al (Arabic: حداش–جبهة, Hebrew: חד״ש־תע״ל) is a joint electoral list in Israel, composed of two political parties, Hadash and Ta'al. The list was established for the first time in 2003 for the election to the 16th Knesset, and ran again in the elections of April 2019 and 2022. History Hadash–Ta'al ran in the 2003 legislative election and won three seats. In the 2006 legislative election, Hadash ran independently in the 2006 legislative election, while Ta'al ran as part of the Ra'am-Ta'al list. In the 20th Knesset, the parties were part of the Joint List. Ahead of the April 2019 legislative election, Ta'al split from the list, but finally Hadash and Ta'al united once more. At the head of the list was Hadash chairman Ayman Odeh, and Ta'al's chairman Ahmad Tibi was in second place. On March 6, 2019, the Central Elections Committee for the 21st Knesset decided to disqualify the list candidate Ofer Cassif, contrary to the position of the Attorney General. The Supreme Court overturned the disqualification. In the April 2019 legislative election, Hadash–Ta'al won 193,442 votes, six seats in the Knesset. For the following election in September 2019, both parties returned to the Joint List. Ahead of the 2022 legislative election, the Joint List broke up again when Balad decided to submit a separate list from the other parties that were members of the Joint List, and therefore Hadash and Ta'al reached an agreement to run jointly, with Hadash chairman Ayman Odeh in first place, and Ta'al leader Ahmad Tibi in second. Politics and ideology The Hadash–Ta'al alliance consistes of Hadash, a non-Zionist party that promotes Arab-Jewish cooperation, and Ta’al, an Arab party with a moderate nationalist orientation. Both Hadash and Ta'al have expressed support for a two state solution based on the 1967 borders. At the same time, some members of the alliance have rejected the existence of the State of Israel.[citation needed] In 2022, Hadash–Ta'al leader Ayman Odeh and Jewish Hadash MK Ofer Cassif refused to be pictured in front of the State of Israel's official seal and flags. Odeh has been accused by Likud of expressing support for Palestinian violence. In 2022, Odeh refused to condemn Hezbollah as a terror group, instead denouncing Israeli occupation as the source of terrorism in the region. MK Simcha Rothman accused Odeh of describing Latifa Abu-Hamid, the mother of several convicted terrorists, as a "heroine" and "the mother of heroes" in 2022. Members of the Hadash–Ta'al alliance have faced criticism from Israeli MKs for statements made during the Gaza war. In November 2024, the Knesset Ethics Committee voted unanimously to suspend Hadash MK Ofer Cassif from the Knesset for six months due to comments he made during the war. Cassif had signed a petition calling to indict the State of Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, was alleged to have previously in a tweet called Palestinians fighting the IDF in Jenin "freedom fighters", and publicly accused Israeli politicians of advocating for crimes against humanity against Palestinians. Some Knesset members also demanded that Odeh be expelled for saying he was happy about the release of Palestinian prisoners as well as Israeli hostages minutes after three hostages were returned home as part of the January 2025 hostage-prisoner exchange deal. (He said “Happy about the release of the hostages and prisoners. From here we must free both peoples from the yoke of occupation. We were all born free.”) Some members did not condemn the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Ta'al's MKs watched a televised version of a speech via Zoom by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the Knesset rather than joining the Zoom call, and Hadash and Balad did not attend. Hadash's Ofer Cassif said: “Very sad that good leftists are being deceived after false propaganda — and that they even expect my friends and me to toe the line with the lies being fed to us. I do not take sides in unnecessary wars that harm innocent civilians, strengthen those in power, and enrich the lords of war.” References |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judeo-Christian] | [TOKENS: 2053] |
Contents Judeo-Christian The term Judeo-Christian is used to group Christianity and Judaism together, either in reference to a shared history before Christianity split from Judaism, Christianity's recognition of Jewish scripture (constituting the Old Testament of the Christian Bible), or values supposed to be shared between them. The term Judæo Christian first appeared in the 19th century as a word for Jewish converts to Christianity. In the United States, the term was widely used during the Cold War in an attempt to invoke a unified American identity that stood opposed to communism. The term has received criticism, largely from Jewish thinkers, as relying on and perpetuating notions of supersessionism, as well as glossing over fundamental differences between Jewish and Christian thought, theology, culture and practice. Even using the more inclusive term "Abrahamic religions" to refer to the common grouping of faiths which are attributed to Abraham—Islam, the Baháʼí Faith, Samaritanism, Druzism, and other faiths (in addition to Judaism and Christianity)—is also sometimes seen as problematic. History The term "Judæo Christian" appears in a letter by Alexander McCaul which is dated October 17, 1821.[a] The term in this case referred to Jewish converts to Christianity. The term was similarly used by Joseph Wolff in 1829, in reference to a type of church that would observe some Jewish traditions in order to convert Jews. Mark Silk states in the early 19th century the term was "most widely used (in French as well as English) to refer to the early followers of Jesus who opposed" the wishes of Paul the Apostle and wanted "to restrict the message of Jesus to Jews and who insisted on maintaining Jewish law and ritual". Friedrich Nietzsche used the German term "Judenchristlich" ("Jewish-Christian") to describe and emphasize what he believed were neglected aspects of the continuity which exists between the Jewish and Christian worldviews. The expression appears in The Antichrist, published in 1895 but written several years earlier; a fuller development of Nietzsche's argument can be found in the prior work, On the Genealogy of Morality. The concept of Judeo-Christian ethics or Judeo-Christian values in an ethical (rather than a theological or liturgical) sense was used by George Orwell in 1939, along with the phrase "the Judaeo-Christian scheme of morals". According to theologian Richard L. Rubenstein, the "normative Judaeo-Christian interpretation of history" is to treat human suffering, such as a plague, as punishment for human guilt. According to historian K. Healan Gaston, the term became a descriptor of the U.S. in the 1930s, when the country sought to forge a unified cultural identity in an attempt to distinguish itself from fascism and communism in Europe. Becoming part of the American civil religion by the 1940s, the term rose to greater prominence during the Cold War, especially when it was used to express opposition to communist atheism. In the 1970s, the term became particularly associated with the American Christian right. It is sometimes employed in a separate context in political attempts to restrict immigration and LGBT rights. Christian-Judeo Some speakers have taken to the term "Christian-Judeo" for the same concept. Language columnist William Safire noted that it's a linguistically problematic construction, putting the combining form "Judeo" at the end, instead of "Judaic". Inter-group relations The rise of antisemitism in the 1930s led concerned Protestants, Catholics, and Jews to take steps to increase mutual understanding and lessen the level of antisemitism in the United States. In this effort, precursors of the National Conference of Christians and Jews created teams consisting of a priest, a rabbi, and a minister, to run programs across the country, and fashion a more pluralistic America, no longer defined as a Christian land, but "one nurtured by three ennobling traditions: Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism....The phrase 'Judeo-Christian' entered the contemporary lexicon as the standard liberal term for the idea that Western values rest on a religious consensus that included Jews." In the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, "there was a revolution in Christian theology in America. […] The greatest shift in Christian attitudes towards the Jewish people since Constantine converted the Roman Empire." The rise of Christian Zionism, religiously motivated Christian interest, and support for the state of Israel increased interest in Judaism among American evangelicals. This interest is especially focused on areas of commonality between the teachings of Judaism and their own beliefs. During the late 1940s, evangelical proponents of the new Judeo-Christian approach lobbied Washington for diplomatic support of the new state of Israel. From the 1990s, continuing through the first two decades of the 21st century, interest in and a positive attitude towards America's Judeo-Christian tradition has become mainstream among evangelicals and (to some extent) the political conservative movement in the United States. American Christians, particularly those aligned with the Christian Right, have historically extended strong support to the State of Israel. This support is rooted in conservative Protestant theology, which views Jews as God's chosen people with a special biblical status and role. However, this perspective is paradoxical, as it also considers Jews in need of conversion to Christianity for salvation. Beyond theological reasons, liberal Christian and secular organizations have also played significant roles in advocating for Jewish migration to Palestine and the establishment of Israel, often citing humanitarian concerns. This multifaceted support has influenced U.S. foreign policy towards Israel, reflecting the complex interplay between religious beliefs and political activism within the American Christian community. In contrast, by the 1970s, mainline Protestant denominations and the National Council of Churches were more supportive of Palestinians than Israel. Natan Sharansky observed in 2019 that, for the first time, he was encountering the situation of nations with ample governmental support for Israel but disinterest and even overt hostility by the Jewish populace. The scriptural basis for this new positive attitude towards Jews among evangelicals is found in Genesis 12:3, in which God promises that he will bless those who bless Abraham, and curse those who curse them. In the evangelical interpretation this promise includes the descendants of Abraham. Other factors in the new philo-Semitism include gratitude to the Jews for contributing to the theological foundations of Christianity and being the source of the prophets and Jesus; remorse for the Church's history of antisemitism; and fear that God will judge the nations at the end of time based on how they treated the Jewish people.[citation needed] Moreover, for many evangelicals Israel is seen as the instrument through which prophecies of the end times are fulfilled. The use of the term "Judeo-Christian" in 21st century discourse has been criticized for equating two different faiths and being a vector for Islamophobia by exclusion. Jewish responses The Jewish community's attitude towards the concept has been mixed. In the 1930s, "In the face of worldwide anti-semitic efforts to stigmatize and destroy Judaism, influential Christians and Jews in America labored to uphold it, pushing Judaism from the margins of American religious life towards its very center." During World War II, Jewish chaplains worked with Catholic priests and Protestant ministers in order to promote goodwill, addressing servicemen who, "in many cases had never seen, much less heard a Rabbi speak before". At funerals for the unknown soldier, rabbis stood alongside the other chaplains and recited prayers in Hebrew. In a much-publicized wartime tragedy, the sinking of the Dorchester, the ship's multi-faith chaplains gave up their lifebelts to evacuate seamen and stood together "arm in arm in prayer" as the ship sank. A 1948 postage stamp commemorated their heroism with the words: "interfaith in action". In the 1950s, "a spiritual and cultural revival washed over American Jewry" in response to the trauma of the Holocaust. American Jews became more confident in their desire to be identified as different. Two notable books addressed the relationship between contemporary Judaism and Christianity, Abba Hillel Silver's Where Judaism Differs and Leo Baeck's Judaism and Christianity, both motivated by an impulse to clarify Judaism's distinctiveness "in a world where the term Judeo-Christian had obscured critical differences between the two faiths". Reacting against the blurring of theological distinctions, Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits wrote that "Judaism is Judaism because it rejects Christianity, and Christianity is Christianity because it rejects Judaism." Theologian and author Arthur A. Cohen, in The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition, questioned the theological validity of the Judeo-Christian concept and suggested that it was essentially an invention of American politics, while Jacob Neusner, in Jews and Christians: The Myth of a Common Tradition, writes, "The two faiths stand for different people talking about different things to different people." Law professor Stephen M. Feldman looking at the period before 1950, chiefly in Europe, sees invocation of a "Judeo-Christian tradition" as supersessionism: Once one recognizes that Christianity has historically engendered antisemitism, then this so-called tradition appears as dangerous Christian dogma (at least from a Jewish perspective). For Christians, the concept of a Judeo-Christian tradition comfortably suggests that Judaism progresses into Christianity—that Judaism is somehow completed in Christianity. The concept of a Judeo-Christian tradition flows from the Christian theology of supersession, whereby the Christian covenant (or Testament) with God supersedes the Jewish one. Christianity, according to this belief, reforms and replaces Judaism. The belief, therefore, implies, first, that Judaism needs reformation and replacement, and second, that modern Judaism remains merely as a "relic". Most importantly the belief of the Judeo-Christian tradition insidiously obscures the real and significant differences between Judaism and Christianity. See also Notes References Further reading External links |
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File:Habitable Worlds 2.jpg Summary Licensing File history Click on a date/time to view the file as it appeared at that time. File usage The following page uses this file: Global file usage The following other wikis use this file: Metadata This file contains additional information, probably added from the digital camera or scanner used to create or digitize it. If the file has been modified from its original state, some details may not fully reflect the modified file. |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maor_Farid#cite_ref-16] | [TOKENS: 1458] |
Contents Maor Farid Dr. Maor Farid (Hebrew: מאור פריד; born April 20, 1992) is an Israeli scientist, engineer and artificial intelligence researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, social activist, and author. He is the founder and CEO of Learn to Succeed (Hebrew: ללמוד להצליח) for empowering of youths from the Israeli socio-economic periphery and youths at risk, a regional manager of the Israeli center of ScienceAbroad at MIT, and an activist in the American Technion Society. He is an alumnus of Unit 8200, and a fellow of Fulbright Program and the Israel Scholarship Educational Foundation [he]. Dr. Farid was elected to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list of 2019, and won the Moskowitz Prize for Zionism. Early life Maor was born in Ness Ziona, a city in central Israel, as the eldest son for parents from immigrating families of Mizrahi Jews from Iraq and Libya. Maor suffered from Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) from a young age, and was classified as a problematic and violent student. His ADHD issues were diagnosed only after he began his university studies. However, inspired by his parents' background, he aspired to excel at school for a better future for his family. During elementary school, Maor attended local quizzes about Jewish history and Zionism, which significantly shaped his identity and national perspective. Farid graduated high school with the highest GPA in school. Later he was recruited to the Israel Defense Forces and drafted to the Brakim Program [he] – an excellence program of the Israeli Intelligence Corps for training leading R&D officers for the Israeli military and defense industry. Maor graduated the program with honors and was elected by the Israeli Prime Minister's Office and Unit 8200, where he served as an artificial intelligence researcher, officer, and commander. During his Military service, he received various honors and awards, such as the Excellent Scientist Award, given to the top three academics serving in the Israel Defense Forces. In 2019, Farid completed his military service in the rank of a Captain. Education and academic career As part of the (4 years) Brakim Program, Maor completed his Bachelor's and Master's degrees at the Technion in Mechanical Engineering with honors. Then, he initiated his Ph.D. research as a collaboration with the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) in parallel to his duty military service. The main goals of his Ph.D. research were predicting irreversible effects of major earthquakes on Israel's nuclear facilities, and improving their seismic resistance using energy absorption technologies. The mathematical models developed by Farid were able to forecast earthquake effects on facilities with major hazard potential, and predicted the failure of liquid storage tanks due to earthquakes took place in Italy (2012) and Mexico (2017). The energy absorption technologies used, increased in up to 90% the seismic resistance abilities of those sensitive facilities. The research results were published in multiple papers in peer-reviewed academic journals and presented in international academic conferences. Later, this research expanded to an official collaboration between the Technion and the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center, which aims to implement the findings obtained on existing sensitive systems, and won funding of 1.5 million NIS from the Pazy foundation of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission and the Council for Higher Education. In 2017, Farid completed his Ph.D. and as the youngest graduate at the Technion for that year, at the age of 24. In the graduation ceremonies, he honored his parents to receive the diplomas on his behalf. At the same year, he served as a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University in an original course he developed as a solution for knowledge gaps he identified in the Israeli defense industry. In 2018, Dr. Farid served as an artificial intelligence researcher at a Data Science team of Unit 8200, where he developed machine learning-based solutions for military and operational needs. In 2019, Farid won the Fulbright and the Israel Scholarship Educational Foundation scholarships, and was accepted to post-doctoral position at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he develops real-time methods for predicting earthquake effects using machine learning techniques. In 2020, Farid was accepted to the Emerging Leaders Program at Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At the same year, he received the excellence research grant of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities for leading his research in collaboration between MIT and the Technion. Social activism Farid social activism focuses on empowering youths from disadvantaged backgrounds from an early age. In 2010–2015, he served as a mentor of a robotics team from Dimona in FIRST Robotics Competition, a mathematics tutor in "Aharai!" [he] program for high-school students at risk in Dimona and Be'er Sheva, and a mentor and private tutor of adolescence and reserve duty soldiers from disadvantaged backgrounds. In 2010, he initiated "Learn to Succeed" (Hebrew: ללמוד להצליח) project, for mitigating the social gaps in the Israeli society by empowering youths from the social, economical, and geographical periphery for excellence, self-fulfillment and gaining formal education. In 2018, Learn to Succeed became an official non-profit organization. At the same year, Farid led a crowdfunding project of 150,000 NIS in order to expand the organization to a national scale. In 2019, he published the book "Learn to Succeed", in which he describes his struggle with ADHD, the violent environment in which he grew up, and the changing process he went through from being a violent teenager to becoming the youngest Ph.D. graduate at the Technion. The book was given to more than two thousand youths at risk and became a top seller in Israel shortly after its publication. Maor dedicated the book to his parents and to the memorial of his friend Captain Tal Nachman who was killed in operational activity during his military service in 2014. The organization consists of hundreds of volunteers, gives full scholarships to STEM students from the periphery who serve as mentors of youths, both Jews and Arabs, from disadvantaged backgrounds, runs a hotline which gives online practical and mental support to hundreds of youths, parents and educators, initiates inspirational activities with military orientation to increase the motivation of its teen-age members for significant military service, and gives inspirational lectures to more than 5,000 youths each year. In 2019, Maor initiated a collaboration with Unit 8200 in which tens of the program's members are being interviewed to the unit. This opportunity is usually given to students with the highest grades in the matriculate exams in each class. In 2020, Dr. Farid established the ScienceAbroad center at MIT, aiming to strengthen the connections between Israeli researchers in the institute and the state of Israel. Moreover, he serves as a volunteer in the American Technion Society. Honors and awards Personal life Farid is married to Michal. Interviews and articles References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Internet_registry] | [TOKENS: 553] |
Contents Regional Internet registry A regional Internet registry (RIR) is an organization that manages the allocation and registration of Internet number resources within a region of the world. Internet number resources include IP addresses and autonomous system (AS) numbers. The regional Internet registry system evolved, eventually dividing the responsibility for management to a registry for each of five regions of the world. The regional Internet registries are informally liaised through the unincorporated Number Resource Organization (NRO), which is a coordinating body to act on matters of global importance. There are five regional registries: Internet Assigned Numbers Authority Regional Internet registries are components of the Internet Number Registry System, which is described in IETF RFC 7020, where IETF stands for the Internet Engineering Task Force. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) delegates Internet resources to the RIRs who, in turn, follow their regional policies to delegate resources to their customers, which include Internet service providers and end-user organizations. Collectively, the RIRs participate in the Number Resource Organization (NRO), formed as a body to represent their collective interests, undertake joint activities, and coordinate their activities globally. The NRO has entered into an agreement with ICANN for the establishment of the Address Supporting Organisation (ASO), which undertakes coordination of global IP addressing policies within the ICANN framework. Number Resource Organization The Number Resource Organization (NRO) is an unincorporated organization uniting the five RIRs. It came into existence on October 24, 2003, when the four existing RIRs entered into a memorandum of understanding (MoU) in order to undertake joint activities, including joint technical projects and policy coordination. The youngest RIR, AFRINIC, joined in April 2005. The NRO's main objectives are to: The NRO is formally affiliated with ICANN in its role as ICANN's Address Supporting Organization (ASO). According to the ASO website, its purpose is "to review and develop recommendations on Internet Protocol (IP) address policy and to advise the ICANN Board on policy issues relating to the operation, assignment, and management of IP addresses." The ASO is made of up of representatives from each of the five regional internet registries. It nominates two members of the ICANN board of directors. Its members make up the Address Council. Local Internet registry A local Internet registry (LIR) is an organization that has been allocated a block of IP addresses by a RIR, and that assigns most parts of this block to its own customers. Most LIRs are Internet service providers, enterprises, or academic institutions. Membership in a regional Internet registry is required to become a LIR. See also References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yigal_Allon] | [TOKENS: 2466] |
Contents Yigal Allon Yigal Allon (Hebrew: יגאל אלון; 10 October 1918 – 29 February 1980) was an Israeli military leader and politician. He was a commander of the Palmach and a general in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). He was also a leader of the Ahdut HaAvoda and Israeli Labor parties. He served briefly as acting Prime Minister of Israel between the death of Levi Eshkol and the appointment of Golda Meir in 1969. Allon was the first non-European-born Israeli to serve as Prime Minister of Israel (the first elected, non-European-born Prime Minister would later be Yitzhak Rabin in 1974). He was a government minister from the third Knesset to the ninth inclusive. Born a child of pioneer settlers in the Lower Galilee, Allon initially rose to prominence through his military career. After the outbreak of the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, he joined the Haganah and later the Palmach. He commanded a squad and organized key operations in the Jewish Resistance Movement such as the Night of the Bridges. During the 1947–1949 Palestine war, Allon commanded the conquest of the Galilee, Lod and Ramla, as well as the entire Negev up to Eilat as Head of the Southern Command. Allon entered politics after a forced relief from command by then-Premier David Ben-Gurion. During his political career, he served as foreign and education minister, deputy prime minister, and briefly as acting prime minister. He was one of the architects of the creation of the Labor Party, advocating for the merger of Ahdut HaAvoda with Mapai. In 1967, he devised the eponymous Allon Plan, which proposed next steps for Israel after the Six-Day War. While the plan was not officially adopted, it served as a guideline for the next decade of Israeli settlement. He also took part in the Sinai Interim Agreement in 1975. In 1980, Allon died unexpectedly of cardiac arrest while campaigning for the leadership of the Labor Party. Early years (1918–1931) Yigal Peikowitz (later Allon) was born on 10 October 1918 in Kfar Tavor, then a part of the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration. His father, Reuven, immigrated to Palestine in 1890 along with his father and elder brother from Belarus, then a part of the Russian Empire. His mother, Haia Shortz-Peikowitz, came from a Jewish family in Safed. Her father was a founding member of Rosh Pinna. Reuven originally planned to name his son "Yigael", meaning "he will be redeemed", but decided the name was too passive and instead chose "Yigal", which means "he will redeem." When Allon was five years old, his mother died, and his older brothers left home. As the youngest child, he remained with his father. Kfar Tavor was an isolated area that experienced frequent raids and thefts by neighboring Arab and Bedouin communities. After his bar mitzvah at age 13, Allon was given a gun by his father to protect the family crops from thieves. In 1934, at the age of 16, Allon enrolled at the Kadoorie Agricultural High School. He found his education lacking compared to his urban peers, and his teachers encouraged him to improve. In his autobiography, he wrote about the school director's influence on his social values. During school, Allon became a Labor Zionist. After graduating in 1937, Allon and a group of Labor Zionists established Kibbutz Ginosar on land leased to the settlement of Migdal by the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association. There, he became known as a local leader and formed a friendship with Berl Katznelson. Military career (1931–1950) Allon joined the Haganah in 1931 and later commanded a field unit and a mobile patrol in northern Palestine during the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine. While working in the fields of the kibbutz during the revolt, Allon was summoned by Yitzhak Sadeh to take a command position in the Haganah. After completing a squad command course, he was appointed to lead the Mobile Guards. In this role, he participated in the expulsion of Arabs who brought their flocks onto Jewish fields and became known for planning ambushes against infiltrating gangs. During this time, Allon also took part in operations with the Special Night Squads (SNS) under the command of Orde Wingate and Bala Bredin. In 1941, he became one of the founding members of the Palmach. From 1941 to 1942, he served as a scout with British forces in Syria and Lebanon. In 1945, Allon became Commander in Chief of the Palmach. On June 22, 1948, during David Ben-Gurion's confrontation with the Irgun over the distribution of weapons from the Altalena, Allon commanded the troops ordered to shell the vessel. During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, he led major operations across three fronts, including Operation Yiftach in the Galilee, Operation Dani in the central region, and Operations Yoav and Horev in the Negev. Allon's final major military roles as commander were in October and December 1948: Operation Yoav toward the Hebron Hills and Operation Horev along the southern Egyptian front. As Operational Commander of the Southern Command, Allon was responsible for security along the borders with Egypt and parts of Jordan. On June 4, 1949, he declared an 8 kilometres (5 mi) wide closed military zone along the border. Allon's successes in the war are often credited to his intuition and foresight, though these traits sometimes led to military failures. On October 18, 1949, during an official visit to Paris, Allon was informed by his French hosts that Ben-Gurion had decided to replace him with Moshe Dayan as Operational Commander. Many of Allon's staff officers resigned in protest. Allon retired from active service in 1950. Political career (1950–1980) In January 1948, Allon helped form the Mapam party. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, leader of the rival governing Mapai party, told Allon to dissociate himself from Mapam, considering it too left-wing and a potential threat to the State of Israel's security. In December 1948, Mapam co-leader Meir Ya'ari criticized Allon's use of tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees for strategic purposes. From 1950 to 1952, Allon studied philosophy and history at St Antony's College, Oxford. After concluding his military career, Allon entered public politics. He became a key figure in Ahdut HaAvoda, which had split from Mapam in 1954, and was first elected to the Knesset in 1955, where he served until his death. He was a member of the Economic Affairs Committee, Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, Education and Culture Committee, Joint Committee on the Motion for the Agenda Regarding Sports in Israel, and the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Allon served as Israel's Labor Minister from 1961 to 1968, where he focused on improving the state employment service, expanding the road network, and promoting labor relations legislation. From 1968 to 1969, he held the positions of Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Immigrant Absorption. Following the death of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol on February 26, 1969, Allon briefly served as interim Prime Minister until March 17, 1969, when Golda Meir was elected leader of the Labor Party and became Prime Minister. In Meir's government, Allon served as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education and Culture, a role he held until 1974. During the September 1970 crisis in Jordan, Allon supported aiding King Hussein against the Palestine Liberation Organization. In 1974, he participated in negotiations related to the Separation of Forces Agreement, In 1974, Allon was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs, a position he held until 1977. At the time of his sudden death in 1980, he was a candidate for the leadership of the Alignment, challenging the incumbent leader, Shimon Peres. Allon was the architect of the Allon Plan, a proposal for a partial Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank after the Six-Day War, aiming to facilitate a negotiated partition of the territory. The plan was presented to the cabinet in July 1967. Although it was never formally adopted, the Allon Plan influenced Israeli settlement policies in the following decade. According to the plan, Israel would retain approximately one-third of the West Bank, focusing on the Jordan Valley, where a strip of settlements and military installations would be established. The heavily populated mountain ridge to the west of the Jordan Valley, populated by Palestinians, was envisioned as part of a confederation with Jordan. Additional areas, including land flanking the Jericho-Jerusalem road, Gush Etzion, and parts of the Hebron Hills, were to be annexed to Israel. Minor territorial adjustments were proposed along the Green Line, particularly near Latrun. The plan also included proposals for the development of Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, the rehabilitation of the Jewish Quarter in the Old City, and the annexation of the Gaza Strip, accompanied by the relocation of its Palestinian population to other areas. Death and legacy Allon died of heart failure in Afula on 29 February 1980. He was buried in the cemetery of Kibbutz Ginosar in the Northern District on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. The funeral was attended by tens of thousands of mourners, with condolences extended by many world leaders, including Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Explaining the growing admiration for Yigal Allon three decades after his death, Oren Dagan of the Society for the Preservation of Israel Heritage Sites said, "people wish to live in the kind of state Yigal Allon dreamed of, for example on the Arab-Jewish issue. This isn't a post-Zionist approach, neither hesitant nor apologetic. It's an approach of safety and security that says, 'Our place is here,' but still emphasizes the importance of dialogue, and never through condescension or arrogance. Allon extended a hand in peace, and that's the approach we want leaders to adopt today." Personal life Allon married Ruth, who immigrated to Palestine from Germany in 1934, a year after the installment of the Machtergreifung. They had three children. Their eldest daughter Nurit (Hebrew: נוּרִית) was on the autism spectrum and could not speak until age 5. Nurit was eventually institutionalized in Scotland, where Allon visited her once a year. After the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Allon changed his surname from "Peikowitz" to "Allon" (Hebrew: אלון), meaning "oak tree". In the 1950s, the Allons helped their neighbors adopt a child, Tziona Heiman, from a hospital in Jerusalem. This event was later linked to the broader Yemenite Children Affair, during which many Jewish babies, primarily from Yemen, were put up for adoption in Israel. Heiman expressed that she was treated with love and care by her adoptive family. In an interview, Allon's wife stated they had no knowledge of Heiman's origin. As of 2016, Heiman's origins remained unclear. Published works References Further reading External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tat_people_(Iran)] | [TOKENS: 305] |
Contents Tat people (Iran) The Tats (Tati: Irünə Tâtün, ایرون تاتون) are an Iranian people living in northern Iran, especially in Qazvin province. The Tats of Iran are mainly Muslim and number about 300,000.[unreliable source?][verification needed] Etymology Starting from the Middle Ages[clarification needed], the term Tati was used not only for the Caucasus but also for northwestern Iran, where it was extended to almost all of the local Iranian languages except Persian and Kurdish.[citation needed] Language The Tats of Iran use the Tati language, a group of northwestern Iranian dialects which are closely related to the Talysh language. Persian and Azerbaijani are also spoken. Currently, the term Tati and Tati language is used to refer to a particular group of north-western Iranian dialects (Chali, Danesfani, Hiaraji, Hoznini, Esfarvarini, Takestani, Sagzabadi, Ebrahimabadi, Eshtehardi, Hoini, Kajali, Shahroudi, Harzani) in Iranian Azerbaijan, as well as south of it in the provinces of Qazvin and Zanjan. These dialects have a certain affinity to the Talysh language, Mazanderani language and may be descendants of the extinct Old Azari language. Notable Tats See also References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zazas] | [TOKENS: 4149] |
Contents Zazas The Zazas (Zazaki: Şarê ma, lit. 'Our people'), are an Iranian people who speak Zaza, an Iranian language belonging to the Indo-European language family. Zazas live primarily in the Eastern Anatolia and Southeastern Anatolia regions of Turkey. They live in parts of Bingöl, Elazığ, Erzincan, Erzurum, Malatya, Muş, Bitlis and Tunceli provinces in Eastern Anatolia and Adıyaman, Diyarbakır and Şanlıurfa provinces in Southeastern Anatolia. There are also found Zaza communities in provinces such as Kars and Ardahan in Northeastern Anatolia, Kayseri, Sivas and Aksaray in Central Anatolia and Tokat and Gümüşhane in Black Sea regions of Turkey. Outside Turkey, there exists a Zaza diaspora in Western Europe, particularly in Germany. Zazas are mainly Muslims and mainly belonging to two sects: Sunni Islam and Alevism. This sectarian difference is reflected in the dialectal differences of the Zaza language; the northern dialect of the language is spoken by Alevi Zazas, the southern dialect by Hanafi Zazas, and the central dialect by Shafi Zazas. Zazas have a population of approximately 2-3 million. The language of the Zazas, the Zaza language belongs to the Northwestern Iranian branch of the Iranian languages and is closely related to Tati, Talysh, Sangsari, Semnani, Mazandarani and Gilaki. Etymology and naming The terms Dımli or Dımıli are often used for the Zaza people and their language. One theory claims that these terms evolved from the term Daylam or Daila. Alternatively this region is termed as Dailäm, Daylâm or Dailâm. Thus it is argued that the origin of the Zaza people lies in the province of Dailam or Daylam in ancient Persia and modern northern Iran, close to the southern Caspian Sea. According to Encyclopædia Iranica the endonym Dimlī or Dīmla was derived from Daylam region in Northern Iran, and appears in Armenian historical records as delmik, dlmik, which was proposed to be derived from Middle Iranian *dēlmīk meaning Daylamite. Scholars such as Friedrich Carl Andreas, Oskar Mann [de], Karl Hadank, Ely Bannister Soane, Arthur Christensen, Richard N. Frye, Vladimir Minorsky, Ehsan Yarshater, Gernot Ludwig Windfuhr, Ferdinand Hennerbichler, William Burley Lockwood, David Neil MacKenzie and Garnik Asatrian are the proponents of the Daylam origin of Zazas and the Daylam thesis has been the most popular thesis regarding the origins of the Zaza people and the Zaza language since the first researchers of the Zaza language. Among their neighbors, the people are known mainly as Zāzā, which meant “stutterer” and was used as a pejorative. Hadank and Mckenzie attribute relative abundance of sibilants and affricates in Zaza language to explain the semantic etymology of the name. However, significant historical and social evidence stands against this hypothesis. This hypothesis, initially proposed as a possibility and commonly used to distinguish the Zazas from the Kurds, does not account for the origins of other names such as Dunbuli or Dumbeli, from which the term Dimilî originates. This connection is supported by several evidences, including the use of the terms Dummel or Zaza in Kurdistan to refer to the Azerbaijani Dunbuli tribe, historical records of the Dunbuli tribe migrating to Dersim during the reign of Shah Ismail, and documented evidence that the Dunbuli tribe in Palu spoke Zazaki. In some regions, the term Dunbuli is still used to refer to the Zazas. The term Dimilî derives from the name of the Dunbulî (also spelled Dumbulî), a Kurdish tribe documented since the 12th century. The name Dımli/Dımıli and its derivations, is mainly used for southern Zaza. Zazas living in Aksaray, Şanlıurfa, Siverek, Diyarbakır, Çüngüş, Adıyaman, Gerger and Mutki name themselves as Dımli/Dımıli, and their language as Dımılki/Dımıli. Zazas living in Elazığ, Palu, Maden, Çermik, Bingöl and Koçgiri regions name themselves as Zaza and their language as Zazaki. The endonym Zaza is found in all dialects of the Zaza language. While almost all Zazas who speak the central dialect of Zaza define themselves as Zaza and name their language as Zazaki, in places such as Palu, Bingöl and Dicle, the endonym of Kırd, along with Zaza, is also found to a limited extent. A part of Alevi Zazas name themselves as Kırmanc and name their language as Kırmancki, even though the endonym Dımılki is also known among the older generation Alevi Zazas. A second part of Alevi Zazas living in regions such as Bingöl, Erzurum and Varto, instead of a special naming, name the Zaza language as "zonê ma" which means "our language" and they define themselves as "şarê ma", which means "our people". History One of the most important theories regarding the origin of the Zazas is that they are originally Daylamites from the Daylam region. According to this theory, the Zazas migrated from the southern shores of the Caspian Sea to Eastern Anatolia along with other communities. Linguistic evidence put the urheimat of the Zaza language to Northern Iran, especially around the southern Caspian region due to the similarities between Zaza, Talysh, Gilaki and Mazanderani languages. The etymology of the endonym Dimlī and the historical records of migration from Daylam to Central Anatolia in Armenian sources are also cited as an evidence of Daylamite origins of the Zaza people. Academics propose that this migration event happened in 10th to 12th centuries AD. However, a study from 2005 does not support the Northern Iranian theory and rather proposes a closer link between Kurdish and Zaza-speakers compared to Northern Iranian populations. Kurmanji-speaking Kurds and Zazas have for centuries lived in the same areas in Anatolia. Arakelova states that Zazas had not claimed a separate ethnic identity from Kurds and were considered a part of the Kurds by outsiders through history, despite "having a distinct national identity and ethnic consciousness". The Zaza minstrel tradition goes back to the medieval period, when Zaza-speaking bards composed works both in their mother tongue and in Turkish. The earliest surviving literary works in the Zaza language are two poems with identical titles, Mawlūd, dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As part of the denial of Kurds by Turkey, Zazas were referred to as "Highlander Turks" by the state, whereas Kurmanji Kurds were referred to as "Mountain Turks". In the 1920s and 1930s, Zazas played a key role in the rise of Kurdish nationalism with their rebellions against the Ottoman Empire and later the Republic of Turkey. Zazas participated in the Koçgiri rebellion in 1920, and during the Sheikh Said rebellion in 1925, the Zaza Sheikh Said and his supporters rebelled against the newly established Republic because of its Turkish nationalist and secular ideology. Many Zazas subsequently joined the Kurmanji-speaking Kurdish nationalist Xoybûn, the Society for the Rise of Kurdistan, and other movements, where they often rose to prominence. In 1937 during the Dersim rebellion, Zazas once again rebelled against the Turks. This time the rebellion was led by Seyid Riza and ended with a massacre of thousands of Kurmanji-speaking Kurds and Zaza civilians, while many were internally displaced due to the conflict. Sakine Cansız, a Zaza from Tunceli, was a founding member of Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), and like many Zazas joined the rebels, including the prominent Besê Hozat. Following the 1980 Turkish coup d'état, many intellectual minorities, including Zazas, emigrated from Turkey towards Europe, Australia and the United States. Demographics and geographical distribution The exact number of Zazas is unknown, due to the absence of recent and extensive census data. The last census on language in Turkey was held in 1965, where 150,644 people ticked Zaza as their first language and 112,701 as their second language. More recent data from 2005 suggests that the Zaza-speaking population varies from approximately 2 to 4 million. According to a 2015 study that examined the demographics of the voting-age population in the Kurdish inhabited areas in Turkey (Northeast, Central East and Southeast Anatolia statistical regions, n=1918) 12.8% of the people ethnically identified as Zaza, which made Zaza the biggest ethnic identity after Kurdish (73%) in the region. Zaza speakers were more numerous (15%) compared to people who identify with the Zaza ethnic identity, showing that some Zaza speakers identified as other ethnicities, primarily Kurds. Following the 1980 Turkish coup d'état, many intellectual minorities, including Zazas, emigrated from Turkey towards Europe, Australia and the United States. The largest part of the Zaza diaspora is in Europe, predominantly in Germany. Culture Zaza is the ancestral language of the Zaza people and belongs to the Northwestern Iranian branch of the Iranian languages. Zaza language is classified as a macrolanguage by international linguistic authorities. SIL International classifies Zaza language as a macrolanguage, including the varieties of Southern Zaza (diq) and Northern Zaza (kiu). Other international linguistic authorities, the Ethnologue and the Glottolog, also classify the Zaza language as a macrolanguage composed of two distinct languages: Southern Zaza and Northern Zaza. In terms of grammar, genetics (diachronic) and core vocabulary the Zaza language is closely related to Tati of Iran, Talysh, Semnani, Sangsari, Gilaki and Mazandarani languages spoken on the shores of the Caspian Sea. It is spoken in the east of modern Turkey, with approximately two to three million speakers. There is a division between Northern and Southern Zaza, most notably in phonological inventory, but Zaza as a whole forms a dialect continuum, with no recognized standard. A study published in 2015 that demographically analysed voting-age adults in the Kurdish inhabited regions of Turkey (excluding diaspora) concluded that 96.2% of people who identified as Zaza, but not Kurdish in the region spoke Zazaki as their mother tongue. On the contrary only 58.4% of the surveyed Zaza people declared that their primary home language was Zazaki, and Turkish was the second most popular home language with 38.3% of Zazas speaking it at their homes. 1.9% of the surveyed people who identified as Zaza expressed that their home language was Kurdish. Around 1.4% people belonging to Kurdish ethnic identity also spoke Zazaki as their mother language. Concerning Alevis, which were separately analysed, c. 70% spoke Zazaki, but Turkish (70%) was the dominant household language. Ziflioğlu states that many[quantify] Zazas only speak Kurmanji.[dubious – discuss] The first written statements in the Zaza language were compiled by the linguist Peter Lerch in 1850. Two other important documents are the religious writings of Ehmedê Xasi of 1898, and of Osman Efendîyo Babij; both of these works were written in Arabic script. The state-owned TRT Kurdî airs shows in Zaza. During the 1980s, the Zaza language became popular among the Zaza diaspora, followed by publications in Zaza in Turkey. Predominantly Zazas adhere to Sunni Islam. According to a 2015 study that examined the voting-age adults of the Eastern and Southern Anatolia 75.4% of the people who stated that they were ethnically Zazas belonged to the Shafiʽi school of Islam, similar to Kurdish groups, but in contrast to local Turkish and Arab people who were majority Hanafi. Shafi‘i followers among the Zaza people are mostly Naqshbandi. Alevism is the second largest Islamic sect among Zazas with 14.8% adhering it, and Zazas had the highest Alevi percentage among any group by far, being followed by Turks (5.4%) and Kurds (3.1%). It was also reported that around 70% of the Alevis spoke Zazaki as their mother language. Zaza Alevis predominantly live around Tunceli Province. Hanafism, which is the biggest Islamic school in both Turkey and among the Turkish and Arabic people in the region, is being adhered by 9.8% of the Zaza population. Historically, a small Christian Zaza population existed in Gerger. According to Kehl-Bodrogi and Arakelova, "in spite of their distinct national identity and ethnic consciousness, Zazas never claimed their separate existence, as they have for centuries been surrounded by the Kurds, the people with a homogenous language and close culture. Therefore, in the ‘outer world’ they have always been under the shadow of the Kurdish ethnic and national prevalence, and during the last century and a half, it has been totally suppressed by the Kurd’s political strivings manifested in numerous movements". According to some studies, Zazas generally consider themselves Kurds, and are described as Kurds by some scholars. However, many Zazas do not see it that way and emphasize their own identity distinct from Kurds. And various scholars consider Zazas as distinct ethnic group, distinct from the Kurds, and treat them as such in their academic work. According to a national survey conducted by KONDA Research and Consultancy in 2019 around 1.5% of the population state "Zaza" as their ethnic identity, thus forming the fourth largest ethnic identity in the country. According to a 2015 survey conducted in Turkish Kurdistan among voting-age adults, the majority of the Zazaki-speakers ethnically identified as "Zaza" in contrast to other options such as Kurdish, Turkish and Arabic. Politics Politically, Zazas belonging to Alevism and Sunnism generally hold widely different views from each other. Since 2002 elections Sunni Zazas mostly voted for ruling Justice and Development Party both nationally and locally, meanwhile Alevi Zazas have shown wide support for left-wing or Kurdish-oriented parties, namely HDP and CHP. For the presidential elections Sunni Zazas were reported to be voting for Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in contrast to the Alevis who mostly supported HDP's candidate Selahattin Demirtaş. Alevi-majority Tunceli is the only province in Turkey that has ever elected a mayor belonging to the Communist Party of Turkey. Many Zaza politicians are also to be found in the fraternal Kurdish parties of the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) and Democratic Regions Party (DBP), like Selahattin Demirtaş, Aysel Tuğluk, Ayla Akat Ata and Gültan Kışanak. On the other hand, Zazas who have publicly stated that they do not consider themselves Kurdish include Hüseyin Aygün, a CHP politician from Tunceli. Especially in recent years, Zaza language and cultural associations have become widespread, the establishment of the Federation of Zaza Associations and the establishment of the Democracy Time Party have started to adopt Zaza identity more. Selahattin Demirtaş is also Zaza and can speak fluent Zazaki, and identifies as a Zaza Kurd. His brother, Nurettin Demirtaş, is a senior PKK member. The first Zaza-oriented political party in the history of Turkey was established in 2017 under the name "Zaza People's Party" and later changed its name to Democracy Time Party (Turkish: Demokrasi Zamanı Partisi) due to legal restrictions on ethnicity-based parties. Zaza nationalism is an ideology that supports the preservation of Zaza people between Turks and Kurds in Turkey. Turkish nationalist Hasan Reşit Tankut proposed in 1961 to create a corridor between Zaza-speakers and Kurmanji-speakers to hasten Turkification. In some cases in the diaspora, Zazas turned to this ideology because of the more visible differences between them and Kurmanji-speakers. Zaza nationalism was further boosted when Turkey abandoned its assimilatory policies which made some Zazas begin considering themselves as a separate ethnic group. In the diaspora, some Zazas turned to Zaza nationalism in the freer European political climate. On this, Ebubekir Pamukchu, the founder of the Zaza national movement stated: "From that moment I became Zaza." Zaza nationalists fear Turkish and Kurdish influence and aim at protecting Zaza culture and language rather than seeking any kind of autonomy within Turkey. According to researcher Ahmet Kasımoğlu, Zaza nationalism is a Turkish and Armenian attempt to divide Kurds. Genetics A 2005 study genetically examined three different groups of Zaza (n= 27) and Kurmanji speakers in Turkey and Kurmanji speakers in Georgia. In the study, mtDNA HV1 sequences, eleven Y chromosome bi-allelic markers and 9 Y-STR loci were analyzed to investigate lineage relationship among these Iranian-speaking groups. According to study 8 different Y-DNA haplogroups have been identified among the Zaza speakers; I* (33.3%), R1a1a (25.9%), E* (11.1%) and R1* (11.1%) being the most prevalent ones. Haplogroups P1 and J2, which were found to be prevalent among differing Kurdish populations, were absent in Zaza speakers. Y chromosome data showed somewhat different patterns, indicating some effect of geography. Kurmanji speakers and Zaza speakers in Turkey, who are geographic neighbours, were found to be closer to each other compared to the Georgian and Turkmen Kurds according to Y-DNA data. MtDNA data indicates close relationships among Zaza speaking groups from Turkey and Kurdish people from Georgia, Iran and Eastern Turkey, meanwhile the examined Kurmanji speakers in Turkey and Turkmenistan were different from these groups and each other maternally. Geographic neighbours of Zazas from South Caucasus are also found to be similar concerning mtDNA results. It was stated that there was no clear geographic or linguistic pattern concerning matrilineal origins of examined Iranian-speakers. Another phenomenon found in the research was that Zazas are closer to Kurdish groups (matrilineally South Caucasian groups, patrilineally Kurmanji speakers in Turkey) rather than peoples of Northern Iran, where ancestral Zaza language hypothesized to be spoken before its spread to Anatolia. It was also stated that "the genetic evidence of course does not preclude a northern Iranian origin for the Zazaki language itself." See also References Bibliography Further reading |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_speakers] | [TOKENS: 314] |
Contents Computer speakers Computer speakers, or multimedia speakers, are speakers marketed for use with computers, although usually capable of other audio uses, e.g. for a shelf stereo or television. Most such speakers have an internal amplifier and consequently require a power source, which may be by a mains power supply often via an AC adapter, batteries, or a USB port. The signal input connector is often an analog 3.5 mm jack plug (usually color-coded lime green per the PC 99 standard); RCA connectors are sometimes used, and a USB port or Bluetooth antenna may supply a digital signal to an onboard DAC (some of which work only on computers with an appropriate device driver). Battery-powered wireless speakers require no cables at all. Most computers have speakers of low power and quality built in; when external speakers are connected they disable the built-in speakers by default. Altec Lansing claims to have created the computer speaker market in 1990. Computer speakers range widely in quality and in price. Computer speakers packaged with computer systems are typically small, plastic, and have mediocre sound quality. Some computer speakers have equalization features such as bass and treble controls. More sophisticated computer speakers can have a subwoofer unit to enhance bass output. The larger subwoofer enclosure usually contains the amplifiers for the subwoofer and the left and right speakers. Some discrete computer displays have rather basic integrated speakers, or accommodations for mounting matching satellite speakers or a soundbar externally. Laptop computers have built-in integrated speakers, usually small and of restricted sound quality to conserve space. See also References |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Uniform_Resource_Identifier&action=history] | [TOKENS: 68] |
Uniform Resource Identifier: Revision history For any version listed below, click on its date to view it. For more help, see Help:Page history and Help:Edit summary. (cur) = difference from current version, (prev) = difference from preceding version, m = minor edit, → = section edit, ← = automatic edit summary |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kijimuna] | [TOKENS: 457] |
Contents Kijimuna The kijimuna (Okinawan: キジムナー, romanized: kijimunaa, lit. 'wood spirit') are mythological creatures said to inhabit the island of Okinawa. They are described as resembling around a three or four-year-old child with wild red hair. About The kijimuna are small wood spirits according to Okinawan mythology. The kijimuna are said to live in trees, but the most common one is the 'gajumaru' or banyan tree. Their name, derived from the Okinawan language, translates to "child of the tree" or "tree ghost". They are often described as being child-sized, with red hair covering their bodies and large heads. They are also known to be excellent fisherman, able to catch many fish, but then only eating one of the eyes of the fish before leaving the rest of it. The Kijimuna festival in Okinawa is named after them. Another name for the kijimuna is "bunagaya," which means roughly "Large-Headed." The Kijimuna are known to be very mischievous, playing pranks and tricking humans. One of their best-known tricks is to lie upon a person's chest, making them unable to move or breathe. This is known as "kanashibari." Even though the Kijimuna are tricksters, they have been known to make friends with humans. However, these relationships often go sour. A kijimuna may offer to carry a human on its back as it leaps through the mountains and over the seas. The kijimuna dislike people passing gas on their backs, however, and will immediately throw the human off, no matter where they were at the moment. The kijimuna also hate octopuses. Stories The kijimuna are a common subject in Okinawan folk tales. Many of their stories begin with the kijimuna becoming a human's friend and then ending with the relationship going bad. One story tells of a kijimuna's friend burning down his tree, so the kijimuna fled to the mountains. See also References |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Hewish] | [TOKENS: 947] |
Contents Antony Hewish Antony Hewish (11 May 1924 – 13 September 2021) was a British radio astronomer who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974 (together with fellow radio-astronomer Martin Ryle) for his role in the discovery of pulsars. He was also awarded the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1969. Early life and education Hewish attended King's College, Taunton. His undergraduate degree, at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, was interrupted by the Second World War. He was assigned to war service at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, and at the Telecommunications Research Establishment where he worked with Martin Ryle. Returning to the University of Cambridge in 1946, Hewish completed his undergraduate degree and became a postgraduate student in Ryle's research team at the Cavendish Laboratory. For his PhD thesis, awarded in 1952, Hewish made practical and theoretical advances in the observation and exploitation of the scintillations of astronomical radio sources, due to foreground plasma. Career and research Hewish proposed the construction of a large phased array radio telescope, which could be used to perform a survey at high time resolution, primarily for studying interplanetary scintillation. In 1965 he secured funding to construct his design, the Interplanetary Scintillation Array, at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory (MRAO) outside Cambridge. It was completed in 1967. One of Hewish's PhD students, Jocelyn Bell (later known as Jocelyn Bell Burnell), helped to build the array and was assigned to analyse its output. Bell soon discovered a radio source which was ultimately recognised as the first pulsar. Hewish initially thought that the signal might be radio frequency interference, but it remained at a constant right ascension, which is unlikely for a terrestrial source. The scientific paper announcing the discovery had five authors, Hewish's name being listed first, Bell's second. Hewish and Ryle were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974 for work on the development of radio aperture synthesis and for Hewish's decisive role in the discovery of pulsars. The exclusion of Bell from the Nobel prize was controversial (see Nobel Prize in Physics controversies). Fellow Cambridge astronomer Fred Hoyle argued that Bell should have received a share of the prize, although Bell herself stated "it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them". Michael Rowan-Robinson later wrote that "Hewish was undoubtedly the major player in the work that led to the discovery, inventing the scintillation technique in 1952, leading the team that built the array and made the discovery, and providing the interpretation". Hewish was professor of radio astronomy in the Cavendish Laboratory from 1971 to 1989 and head of the MRAO from 1982 to 1988. He developed an association with the Royal Institution in London when it was directed by Sir Lawrence Bragg. In 1965 he was invited to co-deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture on "Exploration of the Universe". He subsequently gave several Friday Evening Discourses and was made a Professor of the Royal Institution in 1977. Hewish was a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He was also a member of the Advisory Council for the Campaign for Science and Engineering. Hewish had honorary degrees from six universities, including Manchester, Exeter and Cambridge, was a foreign member of the Belgian Royal Academy, American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy. The National Portrait Gallery holds multiple portraits of him in its permanent collection. Other awards and honours include: Personal life Hewish married Marjorie Elizabeth Catherine Richards in 1950. They had a son, a physicist, and a daughter, a language teacher. Hewish died on 13 September 2021, aged 97. Following his death, Hewish's Nobel Prize medal and other prizes were donated to Churchill College, Cambridge by his family. Hewish argued that religion and science are complementary. In the foreword to Questions of Truth, Hewish writes, "The ghostly presence of virtual particles defies rational common sense and is non-intuitive for those unacquainted with physics. Religious belief in God, and Christian belief ... may seem strange to common-sense thinking. But when the most elementary physical things behave in this way, we should be prepared to accept that the deepest aspects of our existence go beyond our common-sense understanding." References Further reading External links |
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