Snowballing data and the misinformation avalanche
It's 1999. Our personal computer at home at the time, a Pentium III has just been upgraded to Windows 98. Its startup sound feels like the kind of music that would greet you at the pearly gates of Heaven. Dave and Doom consume a bulk of my rationed play time and the browser to which Firefox traces its roots, is my browser of choice. Right now however, statistically, there's a fairly high chance that you're reading this on Chrome, a web browser developed by Google. Since its inception almost 11 years ago, it has come to dominate the web browsing space with an almost monopolistic hold over the market. As of February, out of every 100 connected devices, 62 are purported to be running Chrome. A plethora of factors have contributed to its meteoric rise, some controversial but that is perhaps a story for another day. When we took a look back at the 90s, we begin to realize how much simpler things were. What would retroactively be known as the dot-com bubble had not yet exp...