Team rebuilding world's first website

 Twenty years ago, a team of researchers shared the Webwith the world. Now they want to show a generation that grew up online what it was like in its earliest days.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN,is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the date it released, for free, the technology and software needed to run a Web server.

In honor of the anniversary, a team has been assembled to recreate a working version of the first website, a how-to guide hosted by the project's creators.

The organization issued a statement on April 30, 1993, that announced the release of that Web to the public.

British physicist Tim Berners-Lee created and named the Web (also commonly called "W3" for short in those days) in 1989 at CERN. Originally, it was designed as a way for scientists at different universities and other institutes to share information.

"Vague, but exciting," Berners-Lee's supervisor wrote on the cover of a proposal while greenlighting the project.

See a 1993 copy of the first website

By 1993, there were roughly 400 known Web servers. But the World Wide Web accounted for only about 1% of Internet traffic. The rest was remote access to computer networks, e-mail and file transfers from one computer to another.

Since then it has, obviously, become a constant presence in the lives of people around the world. Today, there are somewhere around 630 million websites.

"There is no sector of society that has not been transformed by the invention, in a physics laboratory, of the Web," said Rolf Heuer, CERN's director-general. "From research to business and education, the Web has been reshaping the way we communicate, work, innovate and live. The Web is a powerful example of the way that basic research benefits humankind."

The first website was, not surprisingly, devoted to the Web project itself, describing how to use it and set up a Web server. It was hosted on Berner-Lee's NeXt computer -- the product developed at a company founded by Steve Jobs before he returned to Apple.

That computer is still at CERN's headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. But it no longer hosts that first website.

CERN's team aims to change that, restoring the earliest versions of files that were on the site as well as making it a home for stories about those formative days. They'll be combing CERN's servers for data preserved from that time.

Now, track gunfire with your smartphone

WASHINGTON: Researchers have developed a new device which helps users track gunfire with their smartphones, popping a map of the neighbourhood on its screen pointing in the direction the shot came from.

Computer engineers from Vanderbilt University's Institute of Software Integrated Systems has made such a scenario possible by developing an inexpensive hardware module and related software that can transform an Android smartphone into a simple shooter location system.

The technology takes advantage of the fact that all but the lowest powered firearms produce unique sonic signatures when they are fired.

First, there is the muzzle blast - an expanding balloon of sound that spreads out from the muzzle each time the rifle is fired. Second, bullets travel at supersonic velocities so they produce distinctive shockwaves as they travel.

As a result, a system that combines an array of sensitive microphones, a precise clock and an off-the-shelf microprocessor can detect these signatures and use them to pinpoint the location from which a shot is fired with remarkable accuracy.

Like the military version, the smartphone system needs several nodes in order to pinpoint a shooter's location. As a result, it is best suited for security teams or similar groups.

In addition to the smartphone, the system consists of an external sensor module about the size of a deck of cards that contains the microphones and the processing capability required to detect the acoustic signature of gunshots, log their time and send that information to the smartphone by a Bluetooth connection.

The smartphones then transmit that information to the other modules, allowing them to obtain the origin of the gunshot by triangulation.

The researchers have developed two versions. One uses a single microphone per module. It uses both the muzzle blast and shockwave to determine the shooter location. It requires six modules to obtain accurate locations.

The second version uses a slightly larger module with four microphones and relies solely on the shockwave. It requires only two modules to accurately detect the direction a shot comes from, however, it only provides a rough estimate of the range.