LAST year we passed a milestone marked
3.9 billion. For the first time, more than
half of humanity was connected to the
biggest information-sharing network
the world has ever seen: the internet.
Just 50 years after we first learned to
make computers talk to one another,
many of us can’t imagine life without the
net and the services that exploit it: email,
file-sharing, messaging, the World Wide
Web. We use it to communicate, to learn, to
shop, to broaden our horizons and satisfy
our whims, to make friends and find lovers.
But the internet can be a wild, raw space.
Owned by no one, virtually ungoverned
and practically ungovernable, its promise
of information and connectivity for
all comes with a huge flip side:
misinformation, cyberterrorism
and drastic economic dislocation.
As it celebrates its half-century, the
internet stands at a crossroads. In
this 10-page special
feature, we explore
how the internet
came to be, what it
is today and what
it might become
in the future –
starting with
Donna Lu’s lo o k
at how the internet
was shaped for good
and bad.use Symfony\Component\Mime\Part\DataPart;
use Symfony\Component\Mime\Part\Multipart\FormDataPart;
$formFields = [
‘regular_field’ => ‘some value’,
‘file_field’ => DataPart::fromPath(‘/path/to/uploaded/file’),
];
$formData = new FormDataPart($formFields);
$client->request(‘POST’, ‘https://...’, [
$formData->getPreparedHeaders()->toArray(),
‘body’ => $formData->bodyToIterable(),
]);
$response = $client->request(‘POST’, ‘https://...’, [
// defining data using a regular string
// using a closure to generate the uploaded data
gets the HTTP headers as string[][] with the header names lower-cased
$headers = $response->etHeaders();
34 | New Scientist | 26 October 2019Features Cover story
Everything you need to know about a
technology that has transformed the world