Internet trivia

8 internet trivia questions, from easy to hard. Tap a question to see the answer. They're real questions from Rubicon, where you type the answer yourself and an AI judge reads what you meant.

This set covers Email, Messaging & Communication Protocols, History of the Internet & ARPANET, Internet of Things (IoT), Network Protocols & Routing, Social Media & Online Platforms, Streaming & Compression, The Web & Browsers and Wi-Fi & Wireless.

Questions and answers

  1. Easy Why did early computer engineer Ray Tomlinson choose the @ symbol for email addresses?

    He picked it because it was rarely used in names, preventing confusion between a person and their host computer.

  2. Easy Why was the World Wide Web originally created at a physics laboratory?

    It was designed to help scientists share documents across different computer systems.

  3. Easy What word completes the common tech term "Internet of ______"?

    The word is "things", completing the phrase Internet of Things, referring to web-connected physical objects.

  4. Medium How does a home router know which gadget requested a webpage when all share one public address?

    The router assigns a unique temporary port number to each connection to track which device sent the request.

  5. Medium Why did Mark Zuckerberg restrict Facebook exclusively to Harvard students when launching it in 2004?

    Limiting access to Harvard students leveraged existing social trust and university email verification to drive intense local adoption.

  6. Medium In what chronological order were the popular audio formats MP3, AAC, and Opus introduced to the public?

    MP3 arrived first in the early 1990s, followed by AAC in the late 1990s, and Opus in 2012.

  7. Hard Why did Apple originally base Safari's WebKit engine on KHTML rather than adapting Mozilla's existing code?

    Apple chose KHTML because its codebase was lightweight, clean, and far easier to embed into Mac OS X.

  8. Hard Why were attackers historically able to kick devices off Wi-Fi networks using deauthentication spoofing before the 802.11w amendment was adopted?

    Management frames were unauthenticated, allowing attackers to easily forge source addresses and disconnect devices.

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