It has been the butt of jokes for years, but the online encyclopedia represents mankind at its very best.

Radia Perlman is an American computer programmer often described as the 'Mother of the Internet' for her invention of the spanning-tree protocol, an algorithm which allowed early networks to cope with large amounts of data. She describes it as a 'simple hack' but it is still in use today.

“For people who want to make sure the Web serves humanity, we have to concern ourselves with what people are building on top of it,” Tim Berners-Lee told me one morning in downtown Washington, D.C., about a half-mile from the White House. 

Barbadian Alan Emtage was 25, and a graduate student based at McGill University in Montreal, when he conceived and implemented what would evolve into one of the World Wide Web’s most transformative tools and paved the way for leading Internet names such as Google and Yahoo!.

During last night’s 22nd annual Webby Awards, Mitchell Baker, chairwoman and co-founder of Mozilla, took home a lifetime achievement award for “decades of leadership at Mozilla and for serving as a fierce champion of open source and the free and open web.”

Today's cybersecurity mess has its roots in decisions a small group of engineers made in the Internet's youth. Axios caught up with one of them, Paul Vixie, on the eve of the annual RSA cybersecurity conference.

Today, the world wide web turns 29. This year marks a milestone in the web’s history: for the first time, we will cross the tipping point when more than half of the world’s population will be online.

When I share this exciting news with people, I tend to get one of two concerned reactions: How do we get the other half of the world connected? Are we sure the rest of the world wants to connect to the web we have today?

John Perry Barlow, a former cowpoke, Republican politician and lyricist for the Grateful Dead whose affinity for wide open spaces and free expression transformed him into a leading defender of an unfettered internet, died on Wednesday at his home in San Francisco. He was 70.

"A balance between filtering speech and censorship must be achieved," writes Vint Cerf in a piece for Wired.

Dr. Paul Vixie helped design the domain name system, is a member of the Internet Hall of Fame, and founded Farsight Security, where he’s chairman and CEO. He tells Federal Drive with Tom Temin what it’s like to be a pioneer in internet technology who has spent at least the past 20 years thinking about cybersecurity.