E-Commerce

Ecommerce (e-commerce) or electronic commerce, a subset of ebusiness, is the purchasing, selling, and exchanging of goods and services over computer networks (such as the Internet) through which transactions or terms of sale are performed electronically. Contrary to popular belief, ecommerce is not just on the Web. In fact, ecommerce was alive and well in business to business transactions before the Web back in the 70s via EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) through VANs (Value-Added Networks). Ecommerce can be broken into four main categories: B2B, B2C, C2B, and C2C.

• B2B (Business-to-Business)
  Companies doing business with each other such as manufacturers selling to distributors and wholesalers selling to retailers. Pricing is based on quantity of order and is often negotiable.
  
  
• B2C (Business-to-Consumer)
  Businesses selling to the general public typically through catalogs utilizing shopping cart software. By dollar volume, B2B takes the prize, however B2C is really what the average Joe has in mind with regards to ecommerce as a whole.
  
  Having a hard time finding a book? Need to purchase a custom, high-end computer system? How about a first class, all-inclusive trip to a tropical island? With the advent ecommerce, all three things can be purchased literally in minutes without human interaction. Oh how far we've come!
  
  
• C2B (Consumer-to-Business)
  A consumer posts his project with a set budget online and within hours companies review the consumer's requirements and bid on the project. The consumer reviews the bids and selects the company that will complete the project. Elance empowers consumers around the world by providing the meeting ground and platform for such transactions.
  
  
• C2C (Consumer-to-Consumer)
  There are many sites offering free classifieds, auctions, and forums where individuals can buy and sell thanks to online payment systems like PayPal where people can send and receive money online with ease. eBay's auction service is a great example of where person-to-person transactions take place everyday since 1995.

Companies using internal networks to offer their employees products and services online--not necessarily online on the Web--are engaging in B2E (Business-to-Employee) ecommerce.

Internet Protocol

The Internet Protocol (IP) is the principal communications protocol used for relaying datagrams (packets) across an internetwork using the Internet Protocol Suite. Responsible for routing packets across network boundaries, it is the primary protocol that establishes the Internet.

IP is the primary protocol in the Internet Layer of the Internet Protocol Suite and has the task of delivering datagrams from the source host to the destination host solely based on their addresses. For this purpose, IP defines addressing methods and structures for datagram encapsulation.

Historically, IP was the connectionless datagram service in the original Transmission Control Program introduced by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in 1974, the other being the connection-oriented Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). The Internet Protocol Suite is therefore often referred to as TCP/IP.

The first major version of IP, now referred to as Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) is the dominant protocol of the Internet, although the successor, Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) is in active, growing deployment worldwide.

HTTP vs HTTPS

The HyperText Transfer Protocol is an application layer protocol, which means it focuses on how information is presented to the user of the computer but doesn’t care a whit about how data gets from Point A to Point B. It is stateless, which means it doesn’t attempt to remember anything about the previous Web session. This is great because there is less data to send, and that means speed. And HTTP operates on Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) Port 80 by default, meaning your computer must send and receive data through this port to use HTTP. Not just any old port will do.

Secure HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTPS) is for all practical purposes HTTP. The chief distinction is that it uses TCP Port 443 by default, so HTTP and HTTPS are two separate communications. HTTPS works in conjunction with another protocol, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), to transport data safely. Remember, HTTP and HTTPS don’t care how the data gets to its destination. In contrast, SSL doesn’t care what the data looks like. People often use the terms HTTPS and SSL interchangeably, but this isn’t accurate. HTTPS is secure because it uses SSL to move data.

Going Through the Process 

With HTTP, you sit at your browser and interact with data. HTTP’s job is to present that data to you, and browsers are the means of doing so. Mozilla’s Firefox browser, for example, understands HTTP instructions and arranges the data as the site’s designer intended. The browser knows what to do when you click. It uses HTTP to do this. But HTTP cannot do much beyond that. How the data travels from Point A to Point B, or even if it travels at all, is none of HTTP’s concern. This is a great compromise if you want speed and elegance and couldn’t care less about security. One does not require security to view BizTech’s latest online articles, for instance.

With HTTPS, the story is quite the same. But when security is a must, HTTPS differentiates one sender and receiver from another. SSL takes the data, going or coming, and encrypts it. This means that SSL uses a mathematical algorithm to hide the true meaning of the data. The hope is that this algorithm is so complex it is either impossible or prohibitively difficult to crack.

The encryption begins when the owner of the Web site purchases a time-sensitive certificate from a trusted certificate authority such as VeriSign. You can get a certificate anywhere, or even make your own, but is it trusted? Your browser will let you know. This certificate is a security code created specifically for that one user, or even for that one Web site. The code is so complex that no one else on Earth should have a duplicate.

Getting a certificate can be an involved task. All types of information must be recorded so the issuer of the certificate can be a reliable authority on the certificate’s owner. Information that must be provided includes the name of the site and even the name of the server that hosts the site. Complexity makes counterfeiting incredibly difficult.

This makes the issuer a trusted third party. When your browser sees the secure Web site, it uses the information in the certificate to verify that the site is what it claims to be. Browsers commonly indicate security by presenting a picture of a shiny closed lock at the bottom of the screen. This process is not always perfect because of human error. Maybe 53.com is a valid banking site, but 53RD.com is not. We call that phishing. Unscrupulous people phish for careless people. So be cautious. After the identity of the Web site is accepted, the encryption is negotiated between the browser and the Web server, and the data is all but locked up tight.

*Knowing the difference between HTTP and HTTPS can help users buy with confidence and help businesses get started in electronic commerce.

What is Web 2.0 ?

The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. A Web 2.0 site allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators (prosumers) of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where users (consumers) are limited to the passive viewing of content that was created for them. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, hosted services, web applications, mashups and folksonomies.

The term is closely associated with Tim O'Reilly because of the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in late 2004. Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specification, but rather to cumulative changes in the ways software developers and end-users use the Web. Whether Web 2.0 is qualitatively different from prior web technologies has been challenged by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, who called the term a "piece of jargon", precisely because he intended the Web in his vision as "a collaborative medium, a place where we [could] all meet and read and write". He called it the "Read/Write Web".

Technologies

The client-side/web browser technologies used in Web 2.0 development are Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax), Adobe Flash and the Adobe Flex framework, and JavaScript/Ajax frameworks such as YUI Library, Dojo Toolkit, MooTools, and jQuery. Ajax programming uses JavaScript to upload and download new data from the web server without undergoing a full page reload.

To allow users to continue to interact with the page, communications such as data requests going to the server are separated from data coming back to the page (asynchronously). Otherwise, the user would have to routinely wait for the data to come back before they can do anything else on that page, just as a user has to wait for a page to complete the reload. This also increases overall performance of the site, as the sending of requests can complete quicker independent of blocking and queueing required to send data back to the client....

The data fetched by an Ajax request is typically formatted in XML or JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format, two widely used structured data formats. Since both of these formats are natively understood by JavaScript, a programmer can easily use them to transmit structured data in their web application. When this data is received via Ajax, the JavaScript program then uses the Document Object Model (DOM) to dynamically update the web page based on the new data, allowing for a rapid and interactive user experience. In short, using these techniques, Web designers can make their pages function like desktop applications. For example, Google Docs uses this technique to create a Web based word processor.

Adobe Flex is another technology often used in Web 2.0 applications. Compared to JavaScript libraries like jQuery, Flex makes it easier for programmers to populate large data grids, charts, and other heavy user interactions. Applications programmed in Flex, are compiled and displayed as Flash within the browser. As a widely available plugin independent of W3C (World Wide Web Consortium, the governing body of web standards and protocols) standards, Flash is capable of doing many things that were not possible pre-HTML5, the language used to construct web pages. Of Flash's many capabilities, the most commonly used in Web 2.0 is its ability to play audio and video files. This has allowed for the creation of Web 2.0 sites where video media is seamlessly integrated with standard HTML.

In addition to Flash and Ajax, JavaScript/Ajax frameworks have recently become a very popular means of creating Web 2.0 sites. At their core, these frameworks do not use technology any different from JavaScript, Ajax, and the DOM. What frameworks do is smooth over inconsistencies between web browsers and extend the functionality available to developers. Many of them also come with customizable, prefabricated 'widgets' that accomplish such common tasks as picking a date from a calendar, displaying a data chart, or making a tabbed panel.

On the server side, Web 2.0 uses many of the same technologies as Web 1.0. New languages such as PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python and JSP are used by developers to output data dynamically using information from files and databases. What has begun to change in Web 2.0 is the way this data is formatted. In the early days of the Internet, there was little need for different websites to communicate with each other and share data. In the new "participatory web", however, sharing data between sites has become an essential capability. To share its data with other sites, a website must be able to generate output in machine-readable formats such as XML (Atom, RSS, etc.) and JSON. When a site's data is available in one of these formats, another website can use it to integrate a portion of that site's functionality into itself, linking the two together. When this design pattern is implemented, it ultimately leads to data that is both easier to find and more thoroughly categorized, a hallmark of the philosophy behind the Web 2.0 movement.

In brief, Ajax is a key technology used to build Web 2.0 because it provides rich user experience and works with any browser whether it is Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or another popular browser. Then, a language with very good web services support should be used to build Web 2.0 applications. In addition, the language used should be iterative meaning that the addition and deployment of features can be easily and quickly achieved.

Wide Area Network

A wide area network (WAN) is a telecommunication network that covers a broad area (i.e., any network that links across metropolitan, regional, or national boundaries). Business and government entities utilize WANs to relay data among employees, clients, buyers, and suppliers from various geographical locations. In essence this mode of telecommunication allows a business to effectively carry out its daily function regardless of location.

This is in contrast with personal area networks (PANs), local area networks (LANs), campus area networks (CANs), or metropolitan area networks (MANs) which are usually limited to a room, building, campus or specific metropolitan area (e.g., a city) respectively

Local Area Network

A local area network (LAN) is a computer network that interconnects computers in a limited area such as a home, school, computer laboratory, or office building. The defining characteristics of LANs, in contrast to wide area networks (WANs), include their usually higher data-transfer rates, smaller geographic area, and lack of a need for leased telecommunication lines.

ARCNET, Token Ring and other technology standards have been used in the past, but Ethernet over twisted pair cabling, and Wi-Fi are the two most common technologies currently used to build LANs.

Great Hacker War

I'm not suggesting anyone to be a hacker, just to inform about their GROUP NAME and be careful when you are online. Hehehe... ;)

The Great Hacker War was a purported 1990–1991 conflict between the Masters of Deception (MOD) and an unsanctioned splinter faction of the older guard hacker group Legion of Doom (LOD) , and some smaller subsidiary groups. Each side attempted to hack the other's computers across Internet, X.25, and telephone networks.

In a panel debate of The Next HOPE conference, 2010, Phiber Optik re-iterated that the rumored "gang war in cyberspace" between LOD and MOD never happened, and that it was "a complete fabrication" by the U.S attorney's office and some sensationalist media. Also, Archangel, (of the PHIRM) stated on Art Bell's "Coast-to-Coast" radio show, in 1999, stated that "It never happened, at least not the way most people say", additionally two other top members of the LOD confirmed that the "Great Hacker War" never occurred and that all that existed was a typical-of-the-age competition of one-upsmanship.

It is important to note that the Great Hacker War was not limited to LoD and MoD, but involved twenty or so Hacker Groups, including Extasyy Elite, Fargo 4A, IBM Syndicate, Metal Communications, The Administration, The Nihilist Order, and The P.H.I.R.M. Tensions between these groups had been building as early as 1984, and hundreds of BBS boards were involved as the events played themselves out.

Bus Width

You might have heard the term “bus” in connection with computers. A bus is a connection or channel between the chip set on your motherboard and the different parts of your PC, such as the processor, memory, expansion cards, etc.

There is the processor bus which connects the chip set to the CPU, the memory bus which connects the chip set to the memory, local buses such as the PCI bus (Peripheral Component Interconnect), expansion buses such as the ISA bus (Industry Standard Architecture), and more.

Each bus consists of two parts, the data bus, which transfers the actual data, and the address bus, which transfers information about where the data is supposed to go to.

Every bus runs at a certain clock speed, which is expressed in MegaHertz (MHz). For example, the old ISA bus runs at a whopping 8 MHz, the PCI bus runs at 33 or 66 MHz, and the AGP bus runs at 66 MHz.

Each bus also has a certain width which brings us finally back to our topic, because the bus width is expressed in bits, indicating how many bits can be transferred simultaneously over the bus. Physically, this means how many wires are in the bus. The ISA bus width ran from 8 to 32 bit, the PCI bus is either 32 or 64 bits wide, and the AGP bus is 32 bits wide. Naturally, this means the wider the bus, the more data can be transferred at the same time, the faster the bus is.

FAT 16 vs. FAT 32

When you partition a new, clean hard drive, one of the things you do is decide what file system to use. Until a few years ago, FAT16 was the main file system for home PCs. It’s main limitation was that it could handle only partitions up to a size of ca. 2 GB. The reason for this was that it used a 16-bit number to index each cluster.

Let’s do some math to understand the difference between FAT (or more exact FAT 16) and FAT 32. When you partition and format the drive, it is being organized into a lot of cubby holes, so to speak. Those are called clusters, which are numbered by the FAT to keep track of them and what’s in them. FAT 16 uses a 16 bit number to number them, and the highest number you can display using 16 bits, is 2^16 = 65,535.

The biggest possible size each cluster can be is 32,768 Bytes. Therefore, if you take the maximum number of clusters – 65,535 – times the maximum cluster size – 32,768 Bytes -, you get the maximum hard drive size FAT can handle – 2,147,450,880 Bytes, or 2 GB.

In contrast to that, FAT 32 uses a 32-bit number, and therefore can handle up to 2 TeraBytes

Bits vs. Bytes

Ok, now that we understand the binary system and how binary numbers work, let’s take a closer look at how your computer uses this system. Earlier we talked about 1 and 0 being binary digits. That’s an ugly phrase to use, so let’s abbreviate it by combining the two words into a nice short term: Bit. Sound familiar? Thought so.

In our earlier example, we used the binary number 10101110. This number has 8 binary digits, or 8 bits. This is not a coincidence, because if you take a group of 8 bits, you have a byte. The reason we have to group bits is that if you are being fed a continuous stream of bits you have no idea where one piece of information ends and the next one starts. But if you receive groups of defined length, e.g. a byte containing 8 bits, it’s easy to interpret them. A good example is how ASCII code (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) works. Any character you type on your keyboard is interpreted by your computer as a byte, an 8 digit binary number. For example, the letter “A” is expressed as the ASCII code 65. But 65 is a decimal number, so if you convert it to a binary number, you get 01000001. These 8 digits, or one byte, are known to your computer as the letter “A”.

It is very important to know the difference between a bit and a byte because these two can get easily confused. One good example is monitoring data transfer speed. When you download a file from the Internet, you probably have noticed that your browser indicates the transfer rate in KBps. Please note that the letter “B” is capitalized. This means the transfer rate is shown in Kilo Bytes per second. For example, your download might arrive at a rate of 3.5 KBps. Now, if you are using a 56K modem, why is that rate so low, shouldn’t you see something closer to 56? No, because 56K is short for 56 Kbps. Note the lower case “b”, it means Kilo Bits per second. And since we know that 8 bits equal one byte, we divide 56 by 8 and get a theoretical maximum of 7 Kilo Bytes per second.

A GigaByte does not necessarily equal a GigaByte

Here’s another situation where you can look really smart if you paid attention and know the difference between the binary and the decimal system. This question is asked over and over again:

“I bought a 8.4GB hard drive, but when I formatted it, Windows tells me that I have only 7.82 GB available. Did they sell me the wrong drive?”

No, they sold you the correct drive, but it was not labeled quite correctly. The marketing department of the drive manufacturer doesn’t know too much about bits and bytes and the binary system. To make it easier to calculate, they assume that 1 KB is 1000 Bytes, 1 MB is 1000 KB, etc. which is wrong. So when they have a drive that can hold 8,400,000,000 Bytes, they just call it 8.4 GB and say that’s close enough for government work. Not so.The multiplication factor is not 1000 since we’re not using the decimal system, it is 1024 instead (2 to the power of 10).

To figure out the correct size of that drive, divide 8,400,000,000 Bytes by 1024 and you’ll get 8,203,125 KB. Divide that by 1024, and you get 8,010 MB. Divide that by 1024 and you get 7.82 GB which is the actual size of your hard drive in GB as reported by your operating system.

Of Pits and Grooves

A CD stores data using the binary system in the following matter: When writing data to a CD, the laser does nothing else than following a spiral-shaped “guide groove” while burning the data as a long string of pits into a reflective dye layer on the CD. When the CD is read later, a laser follows the same spiral and reads either a pit where the light does not get reflected very well, or a smooth area called land where the light reflects very well. This system is nothing else but our good old binary system, using only two possible states, pit or land, to read and record data in binary format, 0 or 1.

Magnetic storage

Storing data on a magnetic media, such as a hard drive, also uses the binary system. In a very simplified manner of speaking, each data bit gets stored on a drive as a tiny magnetic field. Each magnetic field has two poles, North and South. When the disk spins around and data is read by the read head, the magnetic field either has the North or the South pole aligned first. Again, only two possible stages, North or South, 0 or 1.

Binary System

What is the binary system?

The word “binary” describes a system that has only two possible digits. To understand this, let’s first compare this to a system you’re probably more familiar with, the Decimal system.

The word “decimal” describes a system that has ten possible digits. These are the digits 0 through 9. Every number expressed in the decimal system is a combination of these ten digits. You use the decimal system every day, it comes naturally, we all have 10 fingers and 10 toes (unless your family tree doesn’t fork, but let’s not go there), and some of us use those 10 fingers and toes extensively to help with every day addition and subtraction.

The binary system works essentially the same way, with the only difference that it only has two digits. These are visually expressed by the digits 0 and 1. Every number expressed in the binary system is a combination of these two digits.

Why do we need the binary system?

The binary system is essential in technology. The reason is that any electronic circuit can have only two possible states, on or off. A simple example is the light in your room. The switch has only two options, on or off. Another example of a binary system would be Morse code. It also works with only two digits, a dot or a dash. Anything expressed in Morse code is done with these two digits. Electronic circuits work the same way, they are either on or off. And every sequence of these two signals has a certain meaning. Every communication that takes place inside your computer uses this binary system.

How does it work?

If you’re not used to them, binary numbers look pretty strange. Here’s an example:

1 0 1 0 1 1 1 0

So what is this number in the decimal system? Converting binary numbers to decimal numbers is not that difficult if you know the secret

The secret of the binary system?

The first thing to know is that you read binary numbers from right to left. The second thing you need to understand is that each digit is based on a power of the number 2. Check this out:

2 to the power of 0 equals 1
2 to the power of 1 equals 2
2 to the power of 2 equals 4
2 to the power of 3 equals 8
2 to the power of 4 equals 16
2 to the power of 5 equals 32
2 to the power of 6 equals 64
2 to the power of 7 equals 128
…

See the pattern? Now let’s take these numbers to use them as a template while remembering that binary numbers are read from right to left:

128

64

32

16

8

4

2

1

Now let’s use this template on that ugly binary number from our earlier example. At the top is our template, at the bottom is our binary number:

128	64	32	16	8	4	2	1
1	0	1	0	1	1	1	0

Now we use simple multiplication and addition. If the binary number is a 1, it means this digit is “on” or “true” and we add the corresponding number from the template, if it is a 0, it means the digit is “off” or “false”, and we do not add the corresponding number from the template.

In our example, the digits for 128, 32, 8, 4 and 2 are true, so we add

128 + 32 + 8 + 4 + 2 = 174

You could also express it as

128*1 + 64*0 + 32*1 + 16*0 + 8*1 + 4*1 + 2*1 + 1*0 = 174

This means our binary number 10101110 is the number 174 in the decimal system.

Data Warehouse

A data warehouse (DW) is a database used for reporting and analysis. The data stored in the warehouse is uploaded from the operational systems. The data may pass through an operational data store for additional operations before it is used in the DW for reporting.

A data warehouse maintains its functions in three layers: staging, integration, and access. Staging is used to store raw data for use by developers. The integration layer is used to integrate data and to have a level of abstraction from users. The access layer is for getting data out for users.

This definition of the data warehouse focuses on data storage. The main source of the data is cleaned, transformed, catalogued and made available for use by managers and other business professionals for data mining, online analytical processing, market research and decision support (Marakas & O'Brien 2009). However, the means to retrieve and analyze data, to extract, transform and load data, and to manage the data dictionary are also considered essential components of a data warehousing system. Many references to data warehousing use this broader context. Thus, an expanded definition for data warehousing includes business intelligence tools, tools to extract, transform and load data into the repository, and tools to manage and retrieve metadata.

DSS

A decision support system (DSS) is a computer-based information system that supports business or organizational decision-making activities. DSSs serve the management, operations, and planning levels of an organization and help to make decisions, which may be rapidly changing and not easily specified in advance.

DSSs include knowledge-based systems. A properly designed DSS is an interactive software-based system intended to help decision makers compile useful information from a combination of raw data, documents, personal knowledge, or business models to identify and solve problems and make decisions.

Typical information that a decision support application might gather and present are:

• inventories of information assets (including legacy and relational data sources, cubes, data warehouses, and data marts),
• comparative sales figures between one period and the next,
• projected revenue figures based on product sales assumptions

What is MIS ?

A management information system (MIS) provides information needed to manage organizations efficiently and effectively. Management information systems involve three primary resources: people, technology, and information. Management information systems are distinct from other information systems in that they are used to analyze operational activities in the organization. Academically, the term is commonly used to refer to the group of information management methods tied to the automation or support of human decision making, e.g. decision support systems, expert systems, and executive information systems.

The successful MIS supports a business's long range plans, providing reports based upon performance analysis in areas critical to those plans, with feedback loops that allow for titivation of every aspect of the enterprise, including recruitment and training regimens. MIS not only indicate how things are going, but why and where performance is failing to meet the plan. These reports include near-real-time performance of cost centers and projects with detail sufficient for individual accountability.

End User

An end user is the person that a software program or hardware device is designed for. The term is based on the idea that the "end goal" of a software or hardware product is to be useful to the consumer. The end user can be contrasted with the developers or programmers of the product. End users are also in a separate group from the installers or administrators of the product.

To simplify, the end user is the person who uses the software or hardware after it has been fully developed, marketed, and installed. It is also the person who keeps calling the "IT guy" with questions about why the product isn't working correctly. Generally, the terms "user" and "end user" mean the same thing.

Communications Network

A collection of terminals, links and nodes which connect together to enable telecommunication between users of the terminals. Networks may use circuit switching or message switching. Each terminal in the network must have a unique address so messages or connections can be routed to the correct recipients. The collection of addresses in the network is called the address space.

The links connect the nodes together and are themselves built upon an underlying transmission network which physically pushes the message across the link.

Examples of telecommunications networks are:

• computer networks
• the Internet
• the telephone network
• the global Telex network
• the aeronautical ACARS network

Computer Hardware

Personal computer hardware are component devices which are typically installed into or peripheral to a computer case to create a personal computer upon which system software is installed including a firmware interface such as a BIOS and an operating system which supports application software that performs the operator's desired functions. Operating systems usually communicate with devices through hardware buses by using software device drivers.

Software

Computer software, or just software, is a collection of computer programs and related data that provide the instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it. In other words, software is a conceptual entity which is a set of computer programs, procedures, and associated documentation concerned with the operation of a data processing system. We can also say software refers to one or more computer programs and data held in the storage of the computer for some purposes. In other words software is a set of programs, procedures, algorithms and its documentation. Program software performs the function of the program it implements, either by directly providing instructions to the computer hardware or by serving as input to another piece of software. The term was coined to contrast to the old term hardware (meaning physical devices). In contrast to hardware, software is intangible, meaning it "cannot be touched". Software is also sometimes used in a more narrow sense, meaning application software only. Sometimes the term includes data that has not traditionally been associated with computers, such as film, tapes, and records.

System software

System software provides the basic functions for computer usage and helps run the computer hardware and system. It includes a combination of the following:

• Device drivers
• Operating systems
• Servers
• Utilities
• Window systems

System software is responsible for managing a variety of independent hardware components, so that they can work together harmoniously. Its purpose is to unburden the application software programmer from the often complex details of the particular computer being used, including such accessories as communications devices, printers, device readers, displays and keyboards, and also to partition the computer's resources such as memory and processor time in a safe and stable manner.

Programming software

Programming software usually provides tools to assist a programmer in writing computer programs, and software using different programming languages in a more convenient way. The tools include:

• Compilers
• Debuggers
• Interpreters
• Linkers
• Text editors

An Integrated development environment (IDE) is a single application that attempts to manage all these functions.

Application software

Application software is developed to aid in any task that benefits from computation. It is a broad category, and encompasses software of many kinds, including the internet browser being used to display this page. This category includes:

• Business software
• Computer-aided design
• Databases
• Decision making software
• Educational software
• Image editing
• Industrial automation
• Mathematical software
• Medical software
• Molecular modeling software
• Quantum chemistry and solid state physics software
• Simulation software
• Spreadsheets
• Telecommunications (i.e., the Internet and everything that flows on it)
• Video editing software
• Video games
• Word processing

HTML5

HTML5 is a language for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web, and is a core technology of the Internet originally proposed by Opera Software. It is the fifth revision of the HTML standard (created in 1990 and standardized as HTML4 as of 1997) and as of November 2011^[update] is still under development. Its core aims have been to improve the language with support for the latest multimedia while keeping it easily readable by humans and consistently understood by computers and devices (web browsers, parsers, etc.). HTML5 is intended to subsume not only HTML 4, but XHTML 1 and DOM2HTML (particularly JavaScript) as well.

Following its immediate predecessors HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1, HTML5 is a response to the observation that the HTML and XHTML in common use on the World Wide Web is a mixture of features introduced by various specifications, along with those introduced by software products such as web browsers, those established by common practice, and the many syntax errors in existing web documents. It is also an attempt to define a single markup language that can be written in either HTML or XHTML syntax. It includes detailed processing models to encourage more interoperable implementations; it extends, improves and rationalises the markup available for documents, and introduces markup and application programming interfaces (API)s for complex web applications. For the same reasons, HTML5 is also a potential candidate for cross-platform mobile applications. Many features of HTML5 have been built with the consideration of being able to run on low-powered devices such as smartphones and tablets.

In particular, HTML5 adds many new syntactical features. These include the <video>, <audio>, <header> and <canvas> elements, as well as the integration of SVG content that replaces the uses of generic <object> tags. These features are designed to make it easy to include and handle multimedia and graphical content on the web without having to resort to proprietary plugins and APIs. Other new elements, such as <section>, <article>, <header> and <nav>, are designed to enrich the semantic content of documents. New attributes have been introduced for the same purpose, while some elements and attributes have been removed. Some elements, such as <a>, <cite> and <menu> have been changed, redefined or standardized. The APIs and document object model (DOM) are no longer afterthoughts, but are fundamental parts of the HTML5 specification. HTML5 also defines in some detail the required processing for invalid documents so that syntax errors will be treated uniformly by all conforming browsers and other user agents.

HTML

• Hypertext Markup Language, a standardized system for tagging text files to achieve font, color, graphic, and hyperlink effects on World Wide Web pages
• HTML is the code that tells browsers how to display a page on your screen. This code, sometimes called "markup", uses "tags" that instruct a browser to make text a certain size or style, display an image, or link to another page or web site.

XHTML

• Extensible Hypertext Markup Language, an HTML system for tagging text files to achieve font, color, graphic, and hyperlink effects on World Wide Web pages, incorporating user-defined elements.
• (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) is a family of XML markup languages that mirror or extend versions of the widely used Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the language in which web pages are written.

Information Technology

Definition - acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications.

Information Systems

Definition - a set of interrelated components work together to collect, retrieve, process, store and disseminate information for the porpose of facilitating planning, control, analysis, coordination and decision making in business and other organizations.

STID 1013 (Notes)

Week 1 and 2

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Week 3

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Week 4

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Week 5

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Week 6

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Week 7 1

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Week 8

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Week 9

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Week 10

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Facebook Chat Virus

Have you clicked a link in FaceBook chat and now your computer is infected? Have you received a strange message with a link in FaceBook chat and you don't know what is it? This is a good starting point to find more about.

How the virus works

Since December, there is a virus crawling through the FaceBook Chat: a worm, to be more accurate

What is this virus?

Pretty easy: like almost all the infections you can get through a social network, it is just a simple message you'll receive in FaceBook Chat. One of your friend will send you this message, which is something like "foto :-)", "pic :)" and a link to the photo itself. Presumably.

DON'T click it.

Whatever thing could happen, don't click that link. Never.

What to do, then? The first thing is "Don't panic". Until now, nothing bad happened: you've only received a message with a potential virus, but the virus is not in your computer, yet. Simply close that chat window and everything will be fine. And DON'T click the link.

As a second step, I'd suggest you to write a message to your friend, the one who sent you the link with the virus. It's not mandatory, but it's a nice thing from you. DON'T copy the link in the message: just write "I got a strange link from you" and explain what happened and everything will be fine. If you got the link from his/her Facebook profile, this means that your friend is already infected by that virus and now the virus itself is trying to spread, without your friend ever notice it. If you inform him/her, you'll surely do him/her a favour and you'll help avoiding that other friends will be infected by the virus

Now, what happens if you click the link?

First of all, you made a really bad move. But well, it can happen. Maybe you involuntarily clicked it, or you really trusted your friend, who knows. It would be better to be more cautious in the Web, but by now you did it. Time to find a solution. Let's see.

If you click the link, you'll be send to a fake FaceBook page, which says that the picture you were looking for has been moved, for whatever reason. If you want to see the picture, you must click on a button, which looks exactly like a common FaceBook button, like the one you usually click in order to activate an app. Have you clicked it? Great! Now, your computer has just won a new virus.

Clicking on that fake button, you haven't activated any app and you haven't seen any picture, since no picture ever existed! It was a trick, made by the one who programmed the virus: a bait, in order to make you click and install the virus in your computer. Maybe the virus has a name, which looks like a real photo from FaceBook, but the truth is that it's not a photo: it's an executable file, which will install itself in your computer as soon as you click and accept.

This kind of virus is usually called "Worm": it is a virus often hidden in a fake web page, which spreads itself through the Web, from a computer to another. Those pages are clearly fake, but very similar to an original page and they can deceive an inattentive user. After infected your computer, this virus will keep working, trying to spread through all of your contacts, using the same trick which already worked with you: fake links and fake pages.

A worm virus works like this. Their name comes exactly from it: worm, since they crawl from a computer to another, digging through fake pages.

How to remove it

You got yourselves infected. And now?

And now you must clean up your computer, in order to erase the virus and bound the damages it already did.

First of all, you must scan you whole hard disk with a good and updated antivirus. All the hard disk, folder after folder. You can never be too cautious about it.

Usually this is not enough. You need a specific software, in order to remove this kind of virus. There are many of them, as for example Malwarebytes, which is also downloadable in a free version. You can download it by clicking the link.

Notes : When you click the 'Download Now' button on the website, it will automatically go to Cnet Download page : http://download.cnet.com/

It is safe, just proceed to download it ! Trust Me :)

Download it, install it and scan all your computer with it, too: then, follow the instructions. Next time, please be more careful and avoid to blindly click any link you find.

One last thing, but very important.

Once you have removed the virus and your computer is clean, change all of your passwords. Change the answers to the questions for recovering your passwords. You can't be sure whether your passwords have already been stolen or not, but it's better to play safe. For sure, someone had a chance for putting his nose inside your computer, potentially finding and copying all of your data stored inside of it, passwords included. Maybe he did it, or maybe not, but why should you risk?

Change your passwords and you'll be safer.

New password-stealing virus targets Facebook

The emails tell recipients that the passwords on their Facebook accounts have been reset, urging them to click on an attachment to obtain new login credentials, according to anti-virus software maker McAfee Inc.

If the attachment is opened, it downloads several types of malicious software, including a program that steals passwords, McAfee said on Wednesday.

Hackers have long targeted Facebook users, sending them tainted messages via the social networking company's own internal email system. With this new attack, they are using regular Internet email to spread their malicious software.

A Facebook spokesman said the company could not comment on the specific case, but pointed to a status update the company posted on its web site earlier on Wednesday warning users about the spoofed email and advising users to delete the email and to warn their friends.

McAfee estimates that hackers sent out tens of millions of spam across Europe, the United States and Asia since the campaign began on Tuesday.

Dave Marcus, McAfee's director of malware research and communications, said that he expects the hackers will succeed in infecting millions of computers.

"With Facebook as your lure, you potentially have 400 million people that can click on the attachment. If you get 10 percent success, that's 40 million," he said.

The email's subject line says "Facebook password reset confirmation customer support," according to Marcus.


SO PLEASE BEWARE OF ANY SUSPICIOUS EMAIL !