What is the Internet?

What is a Home page? When you access a web site through a browser, the first page that appears on your computer screen is called the Home page. This page usually contains hyperlinks to other pages within and outside that site. It is just like the title page of a book or cover page of a magazine. A web site typically consists of several hyperlinked documents starting with the sites Home page. Usually by glancing the Home page, you can tell important products and features of the web site. What is a Web Server? Web documents or pages are stored on Internet-connected computers called Web servers. When a web server receives a request from a web browser, its special software responds to a web browser's request for a page and sends the page to the web browser through the Internet. Web servers are normally more powerful than an average desktop computer, but any computer with the right software can be a web server. When you send a request to a web server through your browser, the server sends a copy of the page back through the Internet to your computer. The copy is stored temporarily on your hard drive so it can be displayed in the browser window according to the HTML formatting instructions. What is e-mail attachment? With your e-mail message, you can also send any file, which is known as attachment. Most e-mail software allow you to send attachments. Usually this is accomplished by simply clicking the Attach File button and then browsing through your hard drive to locate and select the desired file. Attachments can be any file on your computer, regardless of the type. E-mail attachments have become the most common and fastest growing outlet for spreading viruses. So you should be careful before opening an e-mail attachment. Open e-mail attachment only if you trust the sender. It is always better to download and save attachment first and scan them before opening the file. What is a signature file? Signature file is the file that contains the text that goes at the bottom of each message you send. It usually contains your name, e-mail address, office and/or home address, phone numbers and sometimes witty sayings. Signature is optional portion of e-mail message and is usually in a file named .signature or .sig and is automatically included with each message if you have created a signature file. If you want same message to go with each of your e-mails, you need to make a signature file. In Outlook Express, to make your own signature file, select Options from the Tools menu. Then from the Options window, select Signature tab and follow the instructions on the screen. What is Java? Java is a programming language (derived from C++) whose ability to work with most operating systems and Web browsers makes it ideal for the Web. Java language became hit ever since its debut in 1995. It has been developed by Sun Microsystems. What are Java applets? On a web site, the little dancing icons and singing cartoons are Javas applets. Applets are small, simple Java applications (embedded in a web document) that download quickly and easily into a browser. When you visit a web page that has a Java applet, the applet downloads automatically and begins operating. Applets bring life to lifeless pages.

What is e-commerce? E-commerce is the collection of tools and practices involving the Internet technologies that allow a company to create, maintain and optimize business relations with consumers and other businesses. It penetrates into every corner of the modern business. E-commerce or e-business is very much like the conventional business world, with an added advantage that you are just a click away form a competitor. E-commerce is all about selling and buying products and services over the Internet. You can buy just about anything on the Internet. What is MP3? MP3 is a digital technology that makes it possible to store music files on your computer so that it takes up relatively little space on your hard drive while still sounding pretty close to what you hear on a CD. For compressing music files, the MP3 file format is one of the most popular and easy-to-use formats currently available. With MP3 musical artists could bypass the record companies and sell their works over the Internet. The could also sell their songs in single rather than in album format. Similarly, consumers could bypass the record stores by purchasing songs online and either storing them on their computers or on a web server. For listening to music in MP3 format, you need an MP3 player which is a freeware that you can download from the Internet. For Windows Winamp is a popular MP3 player which is available at ftp://209.0.254.40/pub/winamp/winamp223.exe. What is a web TV? WebTV is a way to access the Internet through your TV. You do not need to own a computer and there is no software to load. All you need is a television, a cable connection (or phone line or satellite connection) and a WebTV set-top box (Internet terminal) and you are on the Internet. With the WebTV service you can explore the Internet using your own television. All you have to do is to press buttons of a remote control or infrared keyboard. Web TV is a newly developed technology. It is the first all-in-one, TV-based on-line service to the Internet. This technology is designed to eliminate the complexities and hassles consumers experience when accessing the Internet via a personal computer. Web TV provides fun and an easy way to access the Internet. Because of its simplicity, even children can use it. When you turn on the Internet box placed on your TV, it automatically dials a telephone number, figures out where you are, attaches to a local Internet connection and in moments displays Web Guide and Net directory via its browser. Web TV is not a computer. You cannot download programs and PC software because Web TV does not have a hard drive. Web TV marks the start of a long-term effort to combine the best of the Internet and the best of digital television technology. Philips is worlds largest manufacturer of Internet set-top boxes for televisions. The box is capable of receiving signals from satellite transmission or from cable connection. The cable connection is normally provided by the manufacturer of the set-top boxes. For satellite reception, an 18" directTV dish is required. What is Net2phone? Net2phone are web sites in some countries that lets your Internet-connected computer to dial any telephone number in USA, Canada and some other countries. Thus you can make phone calls from your PC to a telephone in countries covered by Net2phone. Your call travels over the Internet to Net2phones gateway in that distant country, which in turn hands it off to the local phone system, which connects the call with the recipient.

This service is not free, but call charges are far less than regular telephone charges. For this you need a Net2Phone software and register with the company. After registration, you have to prepay to get some usage time (or you can use others account). Others account means if your friend or relative has a Net2phone account in USA or any other country, he can tell you the account number and password and you can use that account. Charges for all your usage will be debited to his account.

What is the Internet? The Internet is latest in communications tools. Today, the Internet is a part of daily life. Even if you don't use it regularly, you hear about it daily. Estimates tell us that in US alone, 40 million computers connect to the Internet, and the number is growing. In India also, the Internet connections are growing exponentially. The Internet has many features common with our telephone network. When we make a phone call a channel consisting of copper wires, fiber optic lines, and perhaps a satellite opens. Voice signals on both sides are converted into an analogue electrical signal, which the phone system manipulates and transmit. A telephone conversation establishes a direct channel between both the parties. The Internet is a world wide "network of networks". It is a loose collection of thousands of smaller networks in different countries around the globe enabling millions of people from diverse cultures to share information and resources. Internet pathways exchange digitized computer data that travel through complex networks. Even the parts of a single E-mail message travel through computers and lines owned by dozens of companies and government entities. Networking fundamentals To learn more about network, let's start with a LAN. A LAN or Local Area Network is a collection of computers, in a room or in a single building, directly linked together usually via cables. This type of connection enables users to share common hardware (like scanner, printer, modem) or software. Many companies use LANs so that their employees can access a common database or a printer. LAN is a means of communicating between PCs (personal computers). Each computer connected to a LAN can share information, communicate with other computers, and use peripherals connected to the LAN. When one or two LANs are connected, you create a WAN or Wide Area Network. The various LANs, which comprise the WAN, may be in different buildings or in different countries. Most WANs are connected via leased (that is, dedicated) telephone lines, or via satellites. WAN is a long distance network for the efficient transfer of voice signals and data between various LANs. In essence, the Internet is a massive wide area network, connecting many hundreds of computer networks worldwide. How are the computers connected? The job of connecting one or more LANs falls on the shoulders of a router (pronounced "r-oww-ter"). A router is a hardware device that makes sure that data sent over a network gets to its intended destination in one piece and as quickly as possible. The reason computers can get along with each other is that they share a common language. This Internet language is called Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). TCP/IP is a standard that regulates how all computers connected to the Internet must act when communicating with one another. It is usually referred to in the context of "TCP/IP software", which is simply a reference to software that complies with the TCP/IP protocols. TCP/IP was a brainchild of the scientists employed by ARPA to design a new network model. Every computer on a network running TCP/IP software knows exactly where on the "network map" it is located. With this knowledge, a computer routes information to the intended recipient via the

fastest route, without having to follow a predetermined path, which might otherwise have been blocked or congested. If it found that a computer is not responding, or was too busy to handle the information, then it consults the network map (referred to as the "network topology") to find another computer, which could pass on the information. This ability to find the best, fastest, most expedient means of sending information and to avoid known problems has been a major step in computer intercommunication. When the TCP/IP protocol was being designed, the scientists were using powerful Unix machines (the life line of the military, due to their raw power and flexibility). The designers expected that all the computers, which would be connected to ARPAnet, would be Unix machines. But as the years progressed, a new breed, the IBM PC, found itself being added to the network. To ensure that all computers connected to ARPAnet could communicate and exchange information, different versions of the TCP/IP software were written for each type of computer connected to it. Thus, if a computer on the network spoke TCP/IP, it did not matter if the machine was a massive Unix machine or a small PC. Any computer talking TCP/IP could join the club. But how does a Unix machine swap information with an IBM or Mac? Different types of computers store and manipulate data in different ways. As it was expected that eventually an amazing crosssection of computers would be accessing and using TCP/IP networks, the scientists came up with software program known as gateways. Information from, say an IBM network, would be passed through a gateway program, which would translate the data into Mac or Unix. That way, a person with an IBM PC could send e-mail to a colleague with a Mac and living in other part of the world. The translation process is invisible to both users and occurs almost instantaneously. Communication through the Internet The Internet is primarily a communications tool. Like telephones, fax machines and citizens band (CB) radios, the Internet is a system that lets people convey their messages across a distance. The main distinguishing feature of Internet communication is its low cost per transmission. For many people, electronic mail (or E-mail) is the primary reason to get on the Internet. With Internet we can instantly exchange electronic mail with friends and family anywhere in the world. Email is an excellent way to stay in touch even with people whom you regularly talk to on phone because it is quick, cheap and easy. Internet users around the world can read a document slipped into the Web, just like they read a book. Because the cost of electronic publishing is cheap, you can find almost any topic imaginable. But, not all of it is worthwhile. Still, with such a large pool to investigate, you are bound to find a few interesting nuggets. Current events, reams of computer-related information and software, sports scores, health tips, tutorials, plans, schemes, investment ideas, and entertaining real-time interviews are all there. A brief history of Internet The Internet was born about 30 years ago as an experiment by the US Department of Defense. In the early sixties, computer networks were very rigid affairs, with hierarchal structures. At the "top" of every computer network was a central computer, which would coordinate the activities of all other computers connected to it. If one computer wanted to talk to another computer, it first needed to get the approval from the central computer. The U.S. Department of Defense was afraid that its computer network could be 'blinded' by a few well-placed Russian nuclear bombs. The prospect of "being blinded" horrified military chiefs and so several brilliant computer engineers were drawn together by the Advance Research Projects Administration (ARPA) to design a new network model that could withstand such attacks. The result of their toils became known as ARPAnet. ARPAnet, a military network, was designed so that each computer on the network was charged with the responsibility of ensuring that its communications were successfully carried out. Each computer knew where every other computer linked to the network was. This was possible by the use of

unique addresses stored on a distributed database, which painted an overall "map" of the network. Every computer was regarded as equal to every other computer, so it did not require the permission of any other computer to talk with the other computers. The system also presumed that every other computer was "unreliable", i.e., it could fail at any time and so the system probed each of them at regular intervals to ensure the lines of communications were still open. If it found that one or more computer were unreachable (because they had been nuked or the telephone lines were down), it would simply note that on its "map" and not use those computers when passing on information until the situation was remedied. To send a message on the ARPAnet, a computer only had to put its data in an envelope, called the Internet Protocol (IP) packet and "address" the packets correctly. The communicating computers itself (not the network) were given the responsibility to ensure that the communication was accomplished. The philosophy was that every computer on the network could talk, with any other computer on the network. The Organization for International Standardization (ISO) had spent years in designing the ultimate standard for computer networking. ISO was quite successful in designing a reliable protocol. Central to the design was the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) software, which regulated how the computers would interact with each other. In the beginning, the network was used to link the military's computers, as well as, a small number of academic sites (to allow further study of the networking principles). The growth of Internet worried the Department of Defense, which separated its computers from the network and started MILNET a network purely for military use, but based on the same network model. The Internet took a leap forward in the 1980s, when the National Science Foundation (NSF) constructed a new, faster backbone network based upon Internet protocols to link colleges and research institutions to five new supercomputing centers located around the United States. As more computers joined the ranks, the value of the network increased, fueling an upward spiral that continues today on a worldwide level. Not every country is connected to the Internet, but the Internet community welcomes all new comers. In the early 1990s, the Internet took another step forward when the easy-to-use World Wide Web sent the number of computers and people accessing it on an exponential curve that keeps climbing higher. In 1995, recognizing the increasingly commercial nature of the Internet, the NSF sold the last parts of its backbone still financed by the government. The present Internet is a broad collection of large networks mostly run by big telecommunication companies. At several major access points, these top-level networks are connected to smaller and mid-level systems, and then to independent service providers. Who Governs the Internet? The Internet has grown quite rapidly from its origin as a small defense network and today spans the globe connecting hundreds of thousands of computers on many different computer networks. But no person or group or government owns or controls it. The owners of each individual network (whether it is a corporate network linking machines in one building to the Internet or a national network providing Internet access for computers across whole of a country) make their own decisions about whether to connect and what services they will allow their users to access. In so connecting, they are responsible for their own little part of the Internet, and the associated costs. There is no single authority figure for Internet as a whole. Accordingly, there is no centralized body that controls or regulates the Internet. Because of this fact, the Internet is considered to be somewhat anarchic. To a large extent that is true. It leads to a lot of duplication of services and means. But it also means that no one person, group or country has the ability to censor or restrict access to the Internet's resources. Who pays for the Internet? Who pays for the Internet? If no one pays for it, then Internet will not be there. Someone must pay for the computers and permanent telephone and satellite connections that allow the Internet to

operate locally, nationally and internationally. Every one pays for his part. Every subscriber to the Internet has to pay money to the local Internet Service Provider generally on the hourly basis. The Internet, by its very nature, requires all computers linked to it to have a permanent connection. These computers are connected by thousands of kilometers of telephone lines and optical fibers, all of which require modems, routers and computers to coordinate the flow of information. Networks get together and decide how to connect themselves and fund these interconnections. Connecting to the Internet It is very simple. Pay monthly or hour fees to an Internet Service Provider. If you are using an educational institution or organization network with access to the Internet, you should not need anything else. The same card that plugs your machine into the LAN will act as your passport to the Internet. From out PC we generally we connect to the Internet by telephone lines. For connecting computers through telephone lines, we require the use of MODEMS. Modem stands for MOdulate-DEModulate. Modem is a hardware device that is connected to your computer (either as a card inside the computer or as an external device that sits on your desk or on top of your computer). Modulation is the process of turning electronic information (in digital form) into analogue tones that can be transmitted over the common telephone lines, and demodulation is the act of reconverting analogue tone into digital data that our computer understands. The speed of telephone lines and modem is always a bottleneck to dial-up users. The Internet actually moves much faster than a modem connection can accommodate. The standard 32.6 KB modem is fine for general use, although sites with a lot of graphics take time. Do I need Internet Connection? If you have any thing to do with computers, then you need Internet. Internal have various uses for individuals and for business. In U.S.A. almost all the universities and schools provide free Internet access to the students, so that they can explore the vast amount of knowledge and information offered through it. The basic services that form the foundation of the Internet are E-mail, telnet, FTP and World Wide Web. With Internet we can instantly exchange electronic mail with friends and family any where in the world. Telnet allows you to connect to and log into a remote computer. You use remote computer over the Internet just as if you are sitting next to it. You can access any of the public services or tools and library databases at the remote site. FTP provides for transferring files across the Internet from one computer to another. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. Thousands of machines on the Internet make archives or collections of files available for you through anonymous FTP. Internet has many uses. For Individuals the most important uses of Internet are E-mail and "surfing the Web". You can read about topics that interest you (like sports, or a hobby) and explore about any country, or place of interest that you may never see. Besides this you can participate in discussions on topics that interest you, through public news groups or bulletin boards. Internet has given us a new forum for discussing that favourite hobby that no one in our neighbourhood is interested in. You can find information about universities and libraries. Universities around the world, schools, college and popular libraries share on-line information. Students applying for admission in various foreign universities can ask for clarification by sending e-mail. Universities usually give prompt replies to e-mail queries as it is an easy job. How Do I Connect to the Internet? For any individual or a small business organization to join the Internet, he needs the services of an Internet Service Provider (ISP). You have to begin by visiting an office of an ISP of your choice in your city or contacting them on telephone. Even the computer dealer/seller in your area will be willing to help you. When you get an Internet account, you will be asked to provide your login and

password. You will be given e-mail address and password. You will also get phone number to be dialed to connect to the ISP and helpdesk phone numbers. An e-mail address from VSNL's Bombay office can be as: rajan@giasbm02.vsnl.net.in. But before you get your own Internet account, it is better to go through this article. Because, before you sign up you will need to know, the type of modem you require and where to get the necessary software and other things. Many educational institutions and organizations are already linked to the Internet. It may be that the computer on your desk in your office has all you need to gain access. Otherwise, you will probably have to get individual access for yourself. What is an Internet Service Provider? An Internet Service Provider (ISP) is a company or group that provides access to users on a pay-peruse basis. ISPs already have a dedicated connection to the Internet and allow users to connect to their computers via modem to obtain access to the Internet. Providing access to the Internet costs money. ISPs have already invested a lot of money in the necessary hardware computers, modems, routers, telephone connections and so on. Then they have necessary software to help their users access their systems. They need staff to keep their machines running and to answer any queries users may have. Therefore, an ISP has to charge you for the access provided through its facilities. For a common person, the Internet access is not cheap. However, it does not cost as much as you might think. The ISPs normally charge for a fixed number of hours. Then for the duration, you connect to Internet; you are using your telephone line (local call) and have to pay Telephone Company for the charges. For local telephone rates, we can send e-mail to a friend or relative in any part of the world. Of course, the friend/relative also must have Internet access. A large number of Indians go to U.S.A. for higher studies. In U.S.A. almost every university provides free Internet access to students. For parents of such students, Internet access has become very useful. Many ISPs provide two types of accounts on Internet Shell Account and TCP/IP Account. The Internet access charges depend upon many factors: (a) the type of account, (b) whether a student or an individual or organization and (c) type of access dial-up or leased line. What are Shell and TCP/IP Accounts? Shell account is a primary level menu based access to the Internet services, such as e-mail; ftp, telnet and text based browsing (Lynx). The access is limited primarily to text-based services. The shell account provides a user with the facility to login to the Internet using a simple VT100 terminal (or equivalent software running on a PC, e.g., ProComm Plus, Telix, Hyper Terminal, etc.). The user does not require any special software on his computer and all the required software is installed on the ISP's machines. For example, for e-mail through Shell access, VSNL has Pine software on its machine. For connecting to the ISP's computer, mostly the software provided along with modem serves the purpose. The TCP/IP account provides full Internet access. With TCP/IP account the subscriber can access text, as well as, graphics. The user requires TCP/IP software to connect on a dial-up or leased line access to the Internet Services. For all Internet services the user has to install a few required software on his machine. An important software required is a Web browser. Two popular Web browsers are Internet Explorer and NetScape Navigator/Communicator. What do I need to get connected? Of course, you will need an Internet access account from your favourite ISP. But before that make sure that you have the necessary hardware and software. Also find out what software are provided free of cost by your ISP. For example, when you get a TCP/IP account from VSNL, they provide you a CD that has software to make the telephone connection for the Internet access. When you get Internet account for the first time, in many cases, it is better idea to get account for a minimum number of hours. Only about a year back VSNL was providing TCP/IP account for only 500-

hours/one year. Previously this account was available for Rs. 15,000 plus registration fee of Rs. 1000. A large number of small companies and individuals paid Rs. 16,000 to VSNL to get this account. Many of these individuals used the account for even less than 100 hours in a year. Some never used the account at all, may be, they could not find out how to use it or did not have required hardware or software. Computer: You will need a fairly new computer. A computer with Pentium processor or 486 processor should be suitable for both the shell account and the TCP/IP account. You can access shell account with a 386 or 286 processor also. For TCP/IP account, you will require some hard disk space in which to store the software you will be using to connect to the ISP and navigate the Internet and to store any information you might download. TCP/IP account requires that you load some additional software in your computer for various services. A software that is a must is a Web browser (either Internet Explorer or NetScape Navigator/communicator). Both these software are suited for surfing the World Wide Web and for e-mail. Modem: A modem is a hardware device, which is connected to your computer (either as a card inside your computer or as an external device that sits on the top of your computer). Basically, a modem is a device, which lets your computer talk to other computers over a telephone line. Generally we connect to the Internet by telephone lines. The word modem stands for "modulate demodulate". Modulation is the process of turning electronic information (in digital form) into analogue tones that can be transmitted over the common telephone lines and demodulation is the act of reconverting analogue tone into digital data that our computer understands. The modem sits between your computer and the telephone line. At the other end, there is another modem, which sits between your ISP's computer and the telephone line. Any data to be sent by your computer over the telephone line is converted to analogue signal by your modem. Your ISP's modem reconverts this analogue signal to digital data that is accepted by the ISP's computer. Similarly, any data coming form ISP's computer to your computer is first converting to analogue signal by the ISP's modem and then this analogue signal is converted to digital signal by your own modem. If you do not already have a modem, you should spend a bit of time shopping. There are a number of different brands of modems on the market, but in essence they all do the same thing. The first thing to look in a modem is the speed expressed in bits per second (bps). For TCP/IP account, a modem should preferably have a speed of at least 28.8 kbps (bits per second). Faster modems are also available in the market. Faster modems are costlier, but they are better and worth its cost if your ISP provides access at that speed. For example, downloading a document at 14,400 bps may take three minutes, but downloading the same document at 2400 bps will take 25 minutes. If your ISP provides TCP/IP access at a maximum speed of 33.6 kbps, then at present you may not require modem faster than 33.6 kbps. VSNL does have a limited access numbers providing TCP/IP access at 33.6 kbps. But for shell account, a 14.4 kbps error correcting modem is good enough. Thus if you plan to buy a high-speed modem, then ask your ISP whether they support this access speed. Of course, a high-speed modem will always accept access at lower speed. It is recommended that for shell account you get a modem with 14.4 kbps and for TCP/IP account you get a modem with 33.6 kbps or 28.8 kbps. It is not a good idea to buy the fastest modem available as in future the prices of modems will fall still further. Telephone Line: A modem needs a telephone line before it can do its work. It can use an ordinary telephone line. Simply unplug your telephone and connect the modem. In fact, a modem requires three connections: 1. Connection with telephone line; 2. Connection with your computer; and 3. Supply lead connected to mains supply through an adapter (or battery eliminator). Most of the modems require 9V d.c. supply. Thus the adapter converts mains supply of 220V, 50 Hz into 9V d.c. supply. When modem connects to the telephone jack and computer and modems power switch is on (for external modem), you can connect to your ISP. This is exactly the same as if you are going to make a telephone call. If someone rings you while you are using your modem, he gets a busy signal. So it is not a good idea to use a modem on an important business line.

You should know if your phone has pulse dialing or tone dialing. Telephone with pulse dialing should be preferred. If your telephone has tone dialing, it will still work, but it is better idea to write an application to your telephone company to change your telephone to pulse dialing. In some cities of India, telephone companies are making this change. If you have a call waiting facility on your telephone line, it can disrupt your modem communications, whenever, someone rings you. The modem cannot put one caller on hold. The ring sound will interfere with the data being transferred by your computer. Thus if you are using modem on a telephone connection with call waiting facility, it is good idea to disable it. Software: The type of software you need depends very much on the type of computer you are using, the type of Internet access account and what you intend doing on the Internet. For instance, if you only intend connecting to Internet to send and receive the occasional e-mail message (which is basically a text-based service), then for shell access, you do not need any other software except that comes with your modem. Through TCP/IP account for the Internet services, you need your own software. Also if you want to explore the whole gamut of Internet resources, then you need a few special software. You certainly need a Web browser. Dial-up or SLIP/PPP Access? It is useful to know the difference between ordinary dial-up access and SLIP/PPP access. The shell account of VSNL provides you with only the dial-up access, while the TCP/IP account of VSNL provides you with SLIP/PPP access. In Delhi and some other cities, VSNL has completely stopped shell account access. Dial-up access: With dial-up access you connect to your ISP without any special software, except the software, which came with your modem or is already with you (any Widows software, has this facility). It is just like connecting your computer with any other computer via modem and telephone line. For example, it is like connecting computer from home to your office for accessing some documents. The other computer is known as a "remote" host. When you are connected with dial-up access, you can only access programs, which are available on the remote host to manipulate its data. You are a guest of your ISP (remote host) and use its facilities. When you connect to the Internet, the other remote hosts that you connect to would not actually know which machine is requesting the information. The other computers on the Internet cannot directly send information to it, as you do not speak TCP/IP. But your ISP's computer speaks TCP/IP. For normal Internet user, if your ISP provides access to all the Internet facilities, there is nothing wrong with this type of connection. In fact, dial-up connections (shell account by VSNL) are cheaper than SLIP/PPP access. In some cities VSNL does not provide shell account any more. SLIP/PPP access: SLIP/PPP accounts require special software for connecting to your ISP. SLIP stands of "Serial Line Internet Protocol" and PPP stands for "Point-to-Point Protocol". With this type of software you connect to your ISP using either SLIP or PPP software and for the duration of that connection, you are assigned your very own Internet Address (or IP address). Your computer will also be talking TCP/IP, the universal Internet language. Those computers connected to the Internet which share a common language TCP/IP, are able to "see" and communicate with one another. This means is that for the duration of your connection, your computer becomes an "Internet host" and is recognizable by all other hosts, so that they can talk directly to your computer. This type of connection has a number of benefits. Primarily, as your computer is able to interact directly with other computers on the Internet and talk their native language, it means that you can install any number of SLIP/PPP-compatible software programs on your computer and use those programs to access Internet services, regardless of whether those service are offered by you ISP. Essentially, your ISP becomes your springboard to the Internet and you can run any SLIP/PPP compatible software on your computer to access the many resources available via the Internet. ISPs charge you more for these types of accounts. For the added benefits provided by SLIP/PPP access

(TCP/IP account of VSNL), many users consider the additional costs well worthwhile. Also if your ISP were really loaded, this would not affect your connection. Shareware & Freeware There is a great deal of shareware or freeware software available for Windows and Mac computers, which you can use to access the Internet (including SLIP/PPP software). Freeware software available on the Internet can be downloaded, used and redistributed at no cost to the user, whereas, shareware are programs that require a registration fee to be paid after a certain period of time. If you are looking for software, then a few good sites to find freeware or shareware software are: http://www.shareware.com http://www.download.com http://www.hotfiles.com

If you would be using the Internet for the first time, you may not know any thing about downloading, but soon you would find everything very easy. Other Places for Help Most ISPs have a helpdesk, whom you can call or e-mail to discuss problems you might have with their service. Helpdesk is there to help you, but they may not be able to answer many of such questions. No one can have knowledge of every piece of communications software ever written and about every modem ever sold. When you get Internet account, make sure to get helpdesk telephone numbers and e-mail address. There are many books and magazines about Internet. Some of these are quite detailed and technical. One of the best magazines available is "Computers and Internet" by TFY Technical Publications, Delhi. Also, you can always refer to the FAQs. FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions. You can get FAQs from: www.vsnl.net.in. There are a number of these files around covering swag of problems encountered by new users. These can be obtained via Usenet (in the new users newsgroups) or via FTP. Domain Name System & Server The Domain Name System (DNS) is a method by which all the separate and diverse computers and networks linked to the Internet are "addressed". Every time you connect to a computer over the Internet or send e-mail to a colleague, you will be making use of the DNS. A few examples are: giasdl01.vsnl.net.in, vsnl.com, stanford.edu and microsoft.com. A computer does not understand the address in English. Each server connected to the Internet has a numerical Internet Protocol (IP) address. For the server giasbm01.vsnl.net.in the IP address is 202.54.1.18 and for computersandinternet.com the IP address is 209.239.54.62. The domain name system makes it possible for us to think in terms of names in English, whereas, computers think in terms of numeric IP addresses. A computer that keeps track of all the English names and their numeric IP addresses, is called the domain name server. Whenever, we send an e-mail to a computer at other end of the globe, the domain name server translates the address in English into the numeric IP address necessary to make the connection. IP Addresses Computers on the Internet are able to communicate with each other because they use a standard protocol known as TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). A fundamental component of this protocol is a 32-bit numerical IP address that is assigned to every host when it connects to the Internet. The 32-bit address is represented by four eight-bit numbers, which are expressed as decimal numbers in the range of 0-255 (inclusive), separated by periods ("."). Each eight-bit component of the 32-bit address is referred to as an octet. An IP address looks some thing like this:

202.54.1.18 Every host computer connected to the Internet has an address similar to the one above. No other computer has the same address. How does this address get assigned? The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) worries about this problem. It does not actually assign the addresses, but it makes the rules about how to assign addresses. The Internet Architecture Board decides the various standards and rules for allocation of the resources, like IP addresses. This allows different types of computers from different vendors to communicate with each other. Humans remember names better than numbers. So, besides the numeric IP addresses, the computers are also given "English" names (known as domain names), such as: giasbm01.vsnl.net.in. English names are significantly easier to remember than numeric addresses. But computers can only communicate with each other using numerical IP addresses. So that humans can use English addresses that they can understand and the computers can use IP addresses, the two names must be linked or cross-referenced. The DNS takes care of this crossreferencing. When you specify an e-mail or IP address using the "English" domain name, your ISP's computer will first access a database, known as a DNS nameserver which contains both the English and numerical addresses of all computers connected to the Internet. If it finds the domain name you specify, it will lookup the corresponding numerical address and use that to carry out the requested function. As a result, you do not need to memorize the numerical IP addresses. The DNS also imposes a uniform naming system on to an otherwise chaotic network of networks. To allow the diverse computer networks that make up the Internet to act cohesively, they must all recognize each other's existence and be able to pass information between each other without any confusion as to where the information is going. For this reason, every machine on the Internet must have a unique address. Domain Name System (DNS) is like a very tall tree with innumerable roots and branches. At the very top of that tree is the InterNIC the Internet Network Information Centre. InterNIC is an organization in USA. Internet was conceived and developed in USA and it was not anticipated that the Internet would spread to other countries. The function of InterNIC is to maintain a list of every computer connected to the Internet. The list contains both their domain name and IP address. Without this central compilation of addresses, every computer would need to keep track of all new additions to the Internet. With estimates that thousands of people connect to the Internet daily, this would be a difficult and time-consuming task. For this reason InterNIC is assigned that duty. It makes the list available to other Internet users. Every new computer connecting to the Internet must register with InterNIC to receive a unique address, so that other Internet computers can find it. IP address and domain names are not assigned arbitrarily that would lead to unbelievable confusion. An application must be filed with InterNIC either electronically (to hostmaster@nic.ddn.mil) or via regular mail. Thus InterNIC is like a central regulating body for the Internet. To avoid every computer on the Internet having to connect to interNIC's computers each time it wants to locate another computer, a number of other hosts have "mirrored" the information stored on interNIC's databases. These mirror sites are referred to as nameservers. Each nameserver supports (or serves) several immediate computers in the hierarchical DNS tree, each of which is referred to as a top-level domain. More about domain name Domain name tell you the name of the organization that runs a given e-mail site and what kind of site it is and the country it's located in. Large organizations may have more than one computer or gateway tied to the Internet, so you will often see a two-part domain names; and sometimes even three- or four-part domain names. For example, a domain name is giasdl01.vsnl.net.in. In this name, each portion of the domain name is called a domain. The domains are giasdl01, vsnl, net and in.

Top level domains: In a domain name vsnl.net.in, the top-level domains are net and in. The two letter top-level domain is a country code, e.g., in is for India. If an Internet address does not have a two-letter country code, then the site is in U.S.A. In the domain name rice.edu, the top-level domain name is edu and the site is located in U.S.A. There are several top-level domains currently supported by InterNIC: Name com/co edu/ac Description Usually companies or other commercial organization Education institutions (universities etc.), e.g., New York University is named nyu.edu org Usually nonprofit private organizations that do not fit in other classes of domains. Net gov mil int Networks (usually connected to the Internet via a gateway), e.g., vsnl.net Non-military government organizations, e.g., NASA is nasa.gov Military government organizations, e.g., U.S. Air Force is af.mil International organizations

As the Internet grew across the globe, new top-level domains are reserved for every country. A twoletter abbreviation became a standard for every country in the world. The two-letter ISC codes for some countries are: in fr uk India France au su Australia ca Canada ch Switzerland

Soviet Union (still on the Internet) za South Africa

United Kingdom

The top-level domains in India are maintained by National Center for Software Technology (NCST), as they were the first Internet nodes in India. The domains under in are net, ernet and co. Subdomains or second-level domains: Top-level domains in turn have subdomains. Subdomains are referred to as second-level domains, because they are beneath the top-level domains on the DNS tree. Second-level domain names are usually assigned to entire organizations. For example, vsnl.net.in or rice.edu is a second-level domain. We can easily make out that vsnl.net.in is a computer in the India; it is a network connected to Internet via a gateway and it belongs to an organization called vsnl (VSNL). Similarly, rice.edu is a computer in U.S.A. and it belongs to an educational institution called rice (Rice University, Houston, Texas). Most Internet addresses can be interpreted in this fashion. You might find that a domain name has more than three domains in it, such as giasdl01.vsnl.net.in. This is because that particular site might have several computers connected to the Internet, each of which is given a distinctive name (such as giasdl01). But they are all part of the one site, whose domain name is vsnl.net.in. Some computers connected to vsnl.net.in are: giasbm01.vsnl.net.in; giasdl01.vsnl.net.in; giasmd01.vsnl.net.in; giasbn01.vsnl.net.in and giaspn01.vsnl.net.in. An Internet user will never deal with a DNS nameserver or worry about how domain names and IP addresses are assigned, but it is very useful to know that the naming conventions exist for a reason.

Interpreting e-mail addresses Your house address contains house number, street, city, state and pin code. This is the information; the post office needs to deliver mail in a reasonable time. Likewise, an e-mail address has some information about the country, organization, etc. Internet e-mail addresses usually look like this: userid@domain.name.country Notice that above address is all in lower case. There are few exceptions. The best way to read email addresses is from right to left. As with IP addresses, the segments of the domain name are separated by periods ("."). The part of the e-mail address to the right of the @ is called the domain name. This is simply the name of the machine on which the user has an account. These details (owlnet.rice.edu) are sufficient to let any computer connected to the Internet find a particular computer. The part to the left is called the userid. This is the user's account name. Normally it is derived from their actual name. In the example, userid is mikekh. At times, users are allowed to select their own userids, so you might find colourful ones that do not always correlate to that actual user. What is the Internet? The Internet is a world wide "network of networks." It is a collection of thousands of smaller networks in different countries. It links academic, government, military, private and public computer systems together, enabling millions of people from diverse cultures to share information and other resources. The computers all over the world are connected by telephone lines, television cables and satellite links. The Internet a global system of connected computers was once available only to the government, academic and research communities. Now this superhighway is accessible to everyone. Anyone with a computer, modem and a telephone or cable connection can connect to the Internet and share resources. According to a recent survey, about 200 million people have access to the Internet. By 2003, more than 500 million people will be connected to the Internet. How all these computers are connected to the Internet? When computers located in a building or on a floor are connected together, they form a local area network (LAN). When two or more individual LANs located in different buildings or in different cities (or even countries) are connected, they form a wide area network (WAN). In a WAN, individual LANs are connected via leased telephone lines or satellite links. The components or devices that connect the individual networks together are routers and gateways. These devices make sure that data sent over a network gets to its intended destination and even make it possible for computers of different architectures and environments to communicate with each other. In essence the Internet is a massive wide area network connecting many hundreds of thousands of computer networks worldwide, and all these computer networks follow the same protocol - TCP/IP. What is TCP/IP? TCP/IP is an acronym for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. All computers connected to the Internet share this protocol (or language). TCP/IP is a standard which regulates how all computers connected to the Internet must act when communicating with one another. It is usually referred to in the context of "TCP/IP software", which is simply a reference to software which complies with the TCP/IP protocols. Every computer on a network running TCP/IP software knows exactly where on the "network map" it is located. With this knowledge, a computer routes information to the intended recipient via the fastest route, without having to follow a predetermined path (which might otherwise have been blocked or congested). If it found that a computer is not responding or was too busy to handle the information, then it consults the network map (referred to as the "network topology") to find

another computer which could pass on the information. Any computer talking TCP/IP can connect to the Internet. The TCP/IP standard dictates that data sent by any computer over the Internet is broken into pieces called packets. These packets travel as separate entities from the sending computer to the destination computer and may even take different routes. At the destination, these packets are reunited in proper order. A fundamental component of TCP/IP is IP addressing, a 32-bit numerical address, which is assigned to every computer that connects to the Internet. How do I connect to the Internet? To connect to the Internet, you need a computer with required software, a modem, a telephone connection and an account with an Internet Service Provider (ISP). You need a fairly new computer preferably 486 or with Pentium processor. You need a communication software to make telephone connection with your ISP. For TCP/IP access, you also need some additional software for various Internet services. An indispensable software is Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator/Communicator. What is a modem? A modem is a hardware device which is connected to your computer (either as a card inside your computer or as an external device that sits on the top of your computer). Basically, a modem is a device which lets your computer talk to other computers over a telephone line. Generally we connect to the Internet by telephone lines. The word modem stands for "modulate demodulate". Modulation is the process of turning electronic information (in digital form) into analogue tones that can be transmitted over the common telephone lines and demodulation is the act of reconverting analogue tone into digital data that our computer understands. The modem sits between your computer and the telephone line. At the other end, there is another modem, which sits between your ISP's computer and the telephone line. Any data to be sent by your computer over the telephone line is converted to analogue signal by your modem. Your ISP's modem reconverts this analogue signal to digital data which is accepted by the ISP's computer. Similarly, any data coming from ISP's computer to your computer is first converting to analogue signal by the ISP's modem and then this analogue signal is converted to digital signal by your own modem. The speed of a modem is expressed in bits per second (BPS). For TCP/IP account, a modem should preferably have a speed of at least 28.8 KBPS (bits per second). Faster modems are also available in the market. Faster modems are costlier, but they are better and worth its cost if your ISP provides access at that speed. But if your ISP does not provide access at faster speed, it is perhaps not a good idea to buy the fastest available modem as in future the prices of modems will fall still further. For example, downloading a document at 14,400 BPS may take three minutes, but downloading the same document at 2400 BPS will take 25 minutes. What is an Internet Service Provider? An Internet Service Provider (ISP) is a company or group which provides access to users on a payper-use basis. ISPs already have a dedicated connection to the Internet and allow users to connect to their computers via modem to obtain access to the Internet. ISPs have already invested a lot of money in the necessary hardware computers, modems, routers, telephone connections and so on. Then they have necessary software to help their users access their systems. They have staff to keep their machines running and to answer any queries users may have. An ISP can provide access to the Internet through dial-up service (ordinary telephone lines or ISDN), DSL, leased lines or cable connection. The two types of services provided by ISPs are shell access and TCP/IP access. Shell access is a primary level menu based access to the Internet services, such

as e-mail, ftp, telnet and text based browsing (Lynx). The TCP/IP access provides full Internet services with text, as well as, graphics. What is a dial-up service? Dial-up service means that you dial-up your ISP through standard telephone lines. You establish a connection with the ISPs computer system (and to the Internet) on an as-needed basis. For the duration, you connect to the Internet, you are using your telephone line (local call) and have to pay Telephone Company for the charges. For dial-up service you need a modem and a dial-up software such as the Dial Up Networking in Windows 95/98 and a telephone connection. If there is a disturbance in your telephone line, then you can have difficulty in staying connected to your ISP. What is ISDN? ISDN is an acronym for Integrated Services Digital Network. You can make a dial-up connection to your ISP through ordinary telephone lines or through special ISDN lines. ISDN lines are about two or three times faster than ordinary telephone lines and Telephone Companys rates for ISDN lines are much higher than that for ordinary lines. ISDN is a telephone wire technology that allows digital data transmission to coexist with analogue pathways. ISDN replaces slow and inefficient analogue telephone system with a fast and efficient digital communication system. With ISDN lines, you do not need a modem and instead use a device called a terminal adapter. The ISDN is built on two main types of communication channels two B channels and one D channel. B channels can carry voice, data or images at the rate of 64 KBPS and a D channel can carry information at 16 KBPS. The standard ISDN service is called 2B+D. What is a leased line? Leased line refers to a phone line connection that is rented for exclusive use from one computer or network to another or for constant access to the Internet. It is a dedicated connection between your computer and the computer system of your ISP. You do not need to dial your ISP, instead you are permanently connected to your ISP. For a leased line connection you need to pay high initial charges and monthly charges. Usually individuals or small businesses cannot afford a direct leased line connection. With T1 type dedicated telephone line connection, you can transmit digital signal at 1.544 megabits/sec. What is a cable connection for the Internet access? The same cable that plugs into the back of your TV or VCR lets you access the Internet. You are permanently connected to the Internet and do not need any telephone connection. The cable connects to your computer through a cable modem. A cable modem is different from the telephone lines modem. With cable connection your computer is permanently connected to the Internet and you get have same IP address for days and weeks, as long as, your cable connection is not broken. In India cable connection for Internet access is still hardly available. What is DSL? DSL is an Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) modem technology that transforms ordinary telephone lines, also known as "twisted copper pairs", into high-speed digital lines for "Instant Internet Access". This technology is promoting the incredible growth of high-speed data communications and interactive video. DSL is the next best choice if cable connection is not available.

The DSL modem uses a digital coding technique to get tremendous capacity out of your existing phone line without interfering with regular services. There is no need for any additional dial-up and you can talk on your phone or send a fax at the same time you are surfing the web. There is no interference and no decrease in downloading speed. DSL provides speeds up to 8 Mb/s downstream to the subscriber and up to 1 Mb/s upstream, depending upon telephone line length and other conditions. These speeds are almost 200 times faster than 28.8K modems. DSL is often compared to ISDN, but with DSL you do not have to dial-up every time you want to access the Internet. Also DSL allows both analogue and digital data transmissions rather than digital only transmission through ISDN lines. DSL line connection is provided by the telephone companies and in India it is still hardly available. What is an IP address? Each server connected to the Internet has a numerical Internet Protocol (IP) address. No other computer has the same address. Computers on the Internet are able to communicate with each other because they use a standard protocol known as TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). A fundamental component of this protocol is IP addressing, a 32-bit numerical address, which is assigned to every host when it connects to the Internet. The 32-bit address is represented by four eight-bit numbers, which are expressed as decimal numbers in the range of 0-255 (inclusive), separated by periods ("."). Each eight-bit component of the 32-bit address is referred to as an octet. An IP address looks some thing like this: 202.54.1.18 The domain name system makes it possible for us to think in terms of names in English, whereas, computers think in terms of numeric IP addresses. For example, for the server computersandinternet.com, the IP address is 209.239.54.62. When you want to connect to any server, you normally enter its address in English. A computer that keeps track of all the English names and their numeric IP addresses, is called the domain name server. Whenever, we send an email to a computer at other end of the globe, the domain name server translates the address in English into the numeric IP address necessary to make the connection. Why should I have an Internet connection? Today almost every literate person needs the Internet connection, but many are not aware of what the Internet is all about? The Internet can help you in many ways and in future, it will become impossible for any student, even a school going child, to work without it. Some of the uses of the Internet are: 1. You can find information on any topic you can think of on the World Wide Web. 2. You can read news available from the latest newsgroups. 3. The Internet has become the latest and most economical tool for all types of communications including e-mail and telephony. 4. You can download a large number of freeware and shareware computer programs. 5. You can receive and transfer files including text files, audio files and video files. 6. You can search databases of governments, individuals, universities and organizations. 7. You can browse and search catalogues of goods and services and purchase items on-line. 8. You can get latest weather reports for all parts of the world or see a map of a city or find directions to a location. 9. You can do on-line banking, buy and sell shares and make many financial transactions.

10. You can even book and purchase airline tickets on-line or reserve room in a hotel. 11. You can setup your own or your companys Web site to promote and/or sell services and products. What is a shell access? When you get an Internet account from an Internet Service Provider (ISP), you can get either shell access account or a TCP/IP access account. Normally charges for shell access are less than that for TCP/IP access. A few years back when the Internet access charges were many times the present rate, many persons did opt for shell access. At present, many ISPs provide only the TCP/IP access. Shell account is a primary level menu based access to the Internet services, such as e-mail, ftp, telnet and text based browsing (Lynx). The access is limited to text based services. The shell account provides a user with the facility to login to the Internet using a simple VT100 terminal (or equivalent software running on a PC, e.g., Procomm Plus, Telix, Hyper Terminal, etc.). The user does not require any special software on his computer and all the required software is installed on the ISP's machines. For example, for e-mail through shell access, VSNL (Indias biggest ISP) has Pine software on its machine. For connecting to the ISP's computer, mostly, the software provided along with modem serves the purpose. All those who want to take full advantage of the Internet should go for TCP/IP access. Shell access is meant only for those persons, who have old computers and want to use Internet mainly to send and receive e-mail. What is a TCP/IP access? The TCP/IP account provides full Internet access. The user requires a TCP/IP software to connect on a dial-up or leased line access to the Internet Services. For all the Internet services, the user has to install many required software on his machine. One important software required is a Web browser. Two popular Web browsers are Internet Explorer (http://www.microsoft.com) and NetScape Navigator/Communicator (http://www.netscape.com). With TCP/IP account the subscriber can access text, as well as, graphics. To take full advantage of TCP/IP access, you need a fairy new computer, a fast modem and a good telephone connection. In India, many Internet problems are because of poor telephone connections poorly laid wiring, loose connections and old telephone exchange. Telephone connection with tone dialing and from a latest digital exchange should be preferred. If your telephone connection is giving problems, you should contact your telephone company and ask them to provide you a better telephone connection for Internet access. What is a fax modem? Almost all modems available in the market are also a fax. With a fax-modem you can use your computer to send and receive faxes anywhere around the world. Unlike the normal fax machine, faxes coming into your computer do not need to be printed. You can send a document or graphic from your screen to a normal fax machine. Fax-modems perform, as well as, a regular fax machine and cost significantly less than a fax machine. Should I use internal modem or an external modem? It is your own choice if you want to use an internal modem or an external modem. It is recommended that you switch off your PC while connecting any modem. Internal modem comes in the form of a card and is fitted inside your computer. The internal modem is seated in a slot inside the PC and the telephone line is connected to the jack on the edge of the modem. For an internal modem, PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnection) interface should be preferred to a ISA (Industry Standard Architecture) interface.

The external modem comes in the form of a box that is usually kept on the top of the computer cabinet, so they occupy valuable desk space. It has a power supply connection, a jack for telephone connection and a cable to connect it to a port on the back of your PC. It uses either a serial connection or a UBS interface. Newer models of external modems with UBS (Universal Serial Bus) interface are better than external modems with seral port interface. Once again it is your own choice to choose internal modem or external modem. However, more people use internal modem than external modem. It is easy to configure both types of modems. External modems provide easy access to its on/off switch, which can be used to reset the modem when something goes wrong. What software do I need to go online? The type of software you need depends very much on the type of computer you are using, the type of Internet access account and what you intend doing on the Internet. The first requirement is that you need a communication software to connect to your ISP. For shell access, you do not need any other software except that comes with your modem. For TCP/IP account, to explore the whole gamut of Internet resources, you need special software for different resources. You certainly need a latest web browser. A web browser is the most useful software for the Internet access. Though a web browser can handle many Internet applications. For example, Microsofts Internet Explorer 5 includes Outlook Express 5 e-mail client, Windows Media Player6, Netmeeting 2.11 (conferencing software) and FrontPage Express 2.0 (Web hosting software). Still for many resources you need to install more software. For example, for FTP, chat (both text based and voice), MP3, Internet telepony, etc. you need different software. What is a World Wide Web? The World Wide Web is referred to as simply "the Web", "W3" or "WWW". World Wide Web is now the most significant development in the Internet. At the click of a mouse button or the touch of a key, users can crisscross the global information maze and find information on topic of your interest. It can contain text, pictures, video and sound information. WWW is the best method of electronic publishing and many magazines and newspapers are available on the Internet. WWW is an application for publishing text, graphics and other types of information globally and for browsing by anyone with a Web browser. The Web has spawned an entire industry, with companies like Microsoft, IBM and NetScape Communications producing Web browser and several programs and thousands of other companies publishing information of the Web on their own Web sites. Because Web servers link to other Web servers, the result is a "web" of connections between all the servers around the world. Web provides true links between documents anywhere on the Web. What is a URL? Universal Resource Locators or URLs are the most common and efficient method for identifying specific resources on the Internet. An URL specifies the location of something on the Internet. Some popular URL schemes are: ftp File Transfer Protocol

gopher Gopher Protocol http wais Hypertext transfer Protocol Wide Area Information Servers

news

Net News Transport Protocol

If a URL starts with ftp, then the specified file is available via FTP. If the URL starts with http, then the document is a hyperlinked collection. A few examples of URL are: http://www.computersandinternet.com; ftp://ftp.tidbits.com; In the above examples, www.microsoft.com and ftp.tidbits.com are the IP addresses. After IP address comes the path to directory of the file you desire. Directory names are separated from the machine names by a slash (/). For example, a URL for "Whats New" on Microsofts Web server is http://www.microsoft.com/pages/misc/whatnew.htm The above URL tells us that we should use a Web browser to access this URL; the name of the machine is www.microsoft.com; and the path of file on that machine is /pages/misc/whatnew.htm. In this path /pages is a directory and /misc is a directory inside /pages and whatnew.htm is the name of actual file under the directory /misc. What is a Web site? The server on which a Web page or document reside is called a Web site. A web server may host many different web sites. Usually, these servers are maintained by ISPs. A Web server is usually connected to the Internet for 24 hours a day and anyone can access a web site with a PC, modem and a web browser. Each web site on a server has its unique address or URL, e.g., http://www.computersandinternet.com. The introductory page of a Web site is called home page. The home page is just like contents page of a book and typically contains hyperlinks to the various components of the site. What is a hyperlink? Any web page can have a large number of links. These links are called hyperlinks or hypertext links. A hyperlink points to a file on another Internet machine or on the same machine. It links one web page with another web page on the same site or on a different site. Hyperlinks are usually highlighted or are a different colour than the rest of the text on the page. Clicking a hyperlink causes a web browser to find and display another page stored somewhere on the Internet. What is HTML? HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. A "Markup Language" is a computer language that describes how a page should be formatted. All web browsers are able to understand and interpret this computer language. HTML documents include special codes called tags that tell browsers how to format the page. By adding HTML tags, you can create headlines, add colours, create lists, change fonts, add images and add links to other web sites. What is a web browser? A web browser is a software that connects your PC to a Web site and reads the Web pages. A web browser can interpret an URL and provide users with a graphical interface for accessing and navigating the World Wide Web. Two popular browsers are Microsofts Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator/Communicator. Netscape Communicator 4.7 includes the Navigator browser, Messenger (e-mail), Composer (graphical HTML editor) and AOL Instant Messenger 3.0 (real time messaging). Microsofts Internet Explorer 5 includes Outlook Express 5 e-mail client, Windows Media Player6, Netmeeting 2.11 (conferencing software) and FrontPage Express 2.0 (Web hosting software). What is a search engine?

Search engines are special web sites that take works and phrases typed by users and respond with Web sites and Web pages matching the description. Search engines are the best way to find the information you are looking for on the Web. At present there are over 80 lacs Web sites all over the world. The amount of information on the Web is staggering and sits there in no particular order. Besides this a vast amount of additional information is available in newsgroups. Search engines are the programs that let you make sense of it all. Search engines take a word or phrase and hunt through lists of all the Web pages on the Internet to find ones that seem to match what your are trying to find. Some popular search engines are AltaVista (www.altavista.com), Google (www.google.com), Excite (www.excite.com), Infoseek (www.infoseek.com), HotBot (www.hotbot.com) and Lycos (www.lycos.com). The spider program of most of the search engines scan through millions of Web pages everyday and record the entire text of each page. All the information is then indexed by a program that indexes about a gigabyte of text every hour and every word is linked to the page where it is found. What is E-mail? Internet electronic mail (e-mail) lets you create and send messages from your computer to anyone else connected to the Internet, as well as, receive messages from these same people. Electronic mail is the most common use of the Internet. It is just like sending letters from one place to another without having to trust the Postal Service. You are almost sure that your mail will reach its destination in shortest possible time. It is more beneficial than talking on the phone because if the person is not available, then the computer would store the mail and it would be retrieved whenever the person comes back. It is also easier to respond to the e-mail message because just by pressing a button or two you can get the return address. To receive or send an e-mail you need an e-mail software. All browsers come with e-mail software. Most of the e-mail software have options of sending mail, reading mail, replying to and forwarding mail and address book. The address book has at least three pieces of information for each entry: nickname, complete name, and e-mail address. With E-mail you can even send computer files. Also, you can send a message or a file to a number of people at the same time. What is FTP? This facility provides for transferring files across the Internet one computer to another. The file transfer protocol (FTP) defines the rules governing the way files are transferred. Using this service you can access a FTP server and actually become a user of that distant computer. With FTP, you are only allowed to download or upload files from or to the FTP server. Largest quantity of raw information is available via FTP. This includes tremendous number of freeware and shareware programs, fiction magazines and huge number of files. There are many file transfer protocols including Kermit, Xmodem, Ymodem and top-of-the-line Zmodem. FTP is often the name of a file-transfer program through which you can download files from Web sites. For FTP you need to install a separate software or most of the currently available Web browsers are capable of downloading files from FTP servers. If you want to install an FTP software, then you can download Windows based Inpswitch Inc.s free WS-FTP LE 5.06. It is available at http://www.ipswitch.com. What is telnet? Any computer fitted with a modem and some software can be accessed remotely. Telnet enables your computer to communicate with another computer somewhere else. You can access any other computer (which allows you to operate it) connected to the Internet located any where in the world. For example, if you have an Internet account with VSNL in India, then even from USA, you can read your Internet mail.

At telnet prompt, we give an Internet address (any where in the world) with which to connect. Telnet makes your connection with a remote computer. Once that connection is made, you are using the remote computer over the Internet just as if you are sitting next to it. Telnet allows you to do anything any other user of that distant computer can do including execute programs and send and receive files. You are required to know the user ID. Telnet provides a remote access to thousands of other computer services on the Internet. Libraries of information and huge databases of research material are available through telnet. What is a IRC? Internet Relay Chat (IRC) enables you to chat in real time with other computer users in other parts of the world. This program is a substitution for 'talk'. When you are talking on IRC, everything you type will instantly be transmitted around the world to other users that might be watching their terminals at the time, they can then type something and respond to your messages, and vice versa. The program can be very addictive once you begin to make friends and contacts on IRC. IRC is a multiuser, multichannel chatting network. A group of people can use a channel to exchange messages. Each person sees the discussion as it takes place. How does data from my computer reaches to another computer via the Internet? The sending computer divides the data to be sent into small packets before putting it on the Internet. Each packet passes through many routers and networks before reaching the destination. The various packets may take different routes and may not reach destination in the order the packets have been sent. The receiving computer collects the packets and converts it to the original data. What is electronic publishing? Web publishing means sharing your knowledge or any educational or non-educational material by placing it on a Web site. On the Web you can find information on everything; and if you could not find what you want, then you can create it yourself. Personal web publishing has taken media by storm. Web pages are becoming easier to produce all the time. Most newer versions of popular word-processing programs and web browsers have a built-in HTML editor. This lets even computer novice to share their views. What is a domainname? Every Web site connected to the Internet has its own domainname. The domainname is the address of the Web site or the server. A few domain names are vsnl.net.in, intel.com, cricket.org and stanford.edu. Domainname tells the name of the organization that runs the Web site, the type of site, and the country it is located in. Domainnames ending with com, org, edu and net are meant for servers situated in USA. Domainnames ending with co.in, net.in, ernet.in are meant for servers in India. What is a Domain Name System (DNS) and Domain Name Server? Humans remember names in plain English better than the numbers. But a computer does not understand the address in English. Thus each domainname in English has its own corresponding Internet Protocol (IP) address which is a 32 bit number. For example, for the site computersandinternet.com, the numeric IP address is 209.239.54.62. The method or system of imparting a corresponding IP address to each and every domainname is called the Domain Name System. The computer where this database is stored is called Domain Name Server. When you specify an e-mail or Web site address in English, your ISPs computer will contact a domain name server or DNS server. If the DNS server finds the domainname you specify, it will lookup for the corresponding numerical address. As a result, you would never bother yourself with memorizing numerical IP addresses.

What is a Web site? The way the Internet is effecting our lives, it appears that everyone needs a Web site. Every business, every organization should have its own Web site. Even all famous personalities politician, authors, actors, professionals, etc. need their own Web site. A Web site is one of the best method to reach millions of people all over the world in order to promote your products and services and offer customer support. Also E-commerce transactions are increasing at exponential rate. How do I register a domainname? The domainnames ending with com, net, org and edu are meant for servers situated in USA. Some organizations like Network Solutions (http://www.networksolutions.com), Register.com (http://www.register.com) and Domain Bank Inc (http://www.domainbank.com) can register your domain names. Initially you register the domain name for a period of two years and renew it annually thereafter. Many ISP and companies that help you to host your Web sites, will also be willing to help you to register your domain name. The first step to choose a suitable domain name. Then you need to check if the name is available or someone already owns the name. For this go to the web site of a registrar of domain names and use Search for a Domain name feature to see if the domain name you want is available or not. Domain name ending with co.in, net.in and ernet.in are meant for servers in India and are registered in India. At present, you can register a domainname for free, but your site must be on a server in India. Contact your ISP or companies that provide Web hosting. What is Java & JavaScript? Java is a programming language from Sun Microsystems that was specifically designed for the Internet. The language became hit ever since its debut in 1995. It is a network friendly programming language derived from C++ language. The most important achievement of Java is that makes it possible for a single piece of software to run on many different platforms. In Java terminology, that is "write once, run anywhere" software. A Java platform runs on any computer, but the machine needs a Java Interpreter. All the popular browsers including Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer include Java Interpreter. On a Web site, the little dancing icons and singing cartoons are Javas applets. Applets are small, simple Java applications that download quickly and easily into a browser. Like Java, the JavaScript is also programming language often used when creating Web sites. JavaScript, developed by Netscape is a script language that site developers use to create such items as interactive sites and Web pages that display in a separate browser window. If your browser does not support JavaScript or if it is turned off, you will get JavaScript error. What graphics files should I use on my computer? There are many graphics files that can be displayed by the Web browsers. The two most commonly used types are GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) and JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group). GIF files (extension .gig or .GIF) are primarily used for drawings, buttons and icons. JEPG files (extension .jpg or .JPG) are commonly used for photographs and scanned images. Keep in mind that if graphics take too long to load, your visitors would not wait and may click somewhere else. So try to keep each graphics file to less than 30 KB. In case of JEPG photographs, you should redo them to have maximum 256 colours and a maximum resolution of 500 x 400 pixels. Two popular software to work with JEPG files are Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. What is a cookie?

A cookie is a piece of data sent from a Web site to your browser when your browser requests information from the site. The cookies are stored on your hard drive. Cookies contain some information about you. For example, if you visit a shopping site, then the cookie from that site may contain your customer ID number. So the next time you revisit the site, whatever you buy there is automatically credited to your customer ID number. When you revisit a site that has sent you a cookie in past, a copy of cookie is sent to the server along with your current request. A cookie helps the Web site to recognize you and your personal preferences when you revisit the site. The Web site knows that you have visited the site before. It should be noted that cookies are piece of data and they are not program codes, so they can not do you or your computer any harm. They can not leave virus in your system and they can not find out your name, e-mail address or personal data, unless you have already submitted that to the Web site. Also a cookie sent by a particular Web site is available to the Web site only. What is the difference between a Search Engine and a Web directory? A Search Engine actually searches the entire World Wide Web. For this purpose, it utilizes indexing software agents called robots or spiders. These agents constantly crawl the Web in search of new or updated pages. All the pages are then indexed by a program and it indexes more than a gigabyte of text every hour. Some popular search engines are Lycos (http://www.lycos.com) and AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com). Web directories use humans or editors to compile, index and categorize their information. The Web sites are searched and evaluated and then assigned to an appropriate category or categories. Editors continuously revisit sites and record recent changes to keep directories current. A popular Web directory is Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com). Yahoo! has its database indexed into major categories with each category containing numerous subcategories.

What is the difference between Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer? This is a very difficult question to answer. For many years both have been trying hard to acquire supremacy. But as far as the Web feature is concerned, both are quite similar. Both the browsers are available free of cost. Do Your Homework Before Putting Up Your Web Site A Web site connects the company to a global audience with millions of potential customers and provides 24-hour customer service and technical support. A Web site helps a company test and market new services, products and plans, and even brand names. The Web is huge with millions of web sites, so is the competition with everyone spending money and time to have an attractive and appealing web site. Why should anyone care for your Web site? E-phenomenon is happening. It provides more personalized service than normal business, and has the potential to open doors, and build new alliances. You must take advantage of this new technology otherwise your competitors will capture a major share in the market and may lure many of your customerseven your loyal ones. Launching a Web site without doing homework may, instead of promoting your business, harm your business. A haphazard web design confuses customers and has a negative effectit forces them to conclude that yours is an unorganized business. And if you have a Web site, then evaluate it and improve it. Earlier you do this, better it is. There are many important points to keep in mind when you plan a Web site. 1. Proper Domain Name. If you succeed in getting a suitable domain name, then you have an advantage. A good domain name has minimum letters, and has some meaning, or it points to the name of your organization, or product. Finding a good domain name is a tough job as chances are

that the name you want is already taken. It is important that you spend some time to decide on a few most suitable domain names in order of preference. Remember that your domain name should be your business or products name, as far as, possible. The Web address of Computers and Internet magazine is www.computersandinternet.com. This domain name has a meaning, but the word computersandinternet has 20 alphabets which are too many. Everyone wants a name with only three alphabets, or numbers. But, all possible combinations of three letter domain names have already been taken. So you are left with domain names with four or more letters. Even if you spend a week, or even a month coining a proper domain name, then it is worth it. Remember that some Web names are worth millions of dollars. Many organizations have paid huge amounts to buy suitable domain names from its registered owners. So, if you can grab a good domain name without paying, you are lucky. Also, note that most sought after extension is .com. Other choices are .net, .org, .co.in and .net.in. The extensions .co.in and .net.in are not suited for businesses looking for foreign clientele. 2. What do you want to achieve? After registering a domain name, you must plan, carefully and minutely, before launching the Web site. Do not rush with the Web site. Getting a web site up, and running it requires lot of effort and money. You must decide, what you want to achieve from your Web site. What is your goal? Do you want to improve sales? Do you want to offer customer services? Do you want to promote your brand name? Be very clear, and write it down. Make sure that your aim is logical and attainable. Defining your goal is very important; this solves many problems. 3. What information the site will provide? Next, plan how can you achieve what you want to achieve. Do it just like a school-homework. Decide what information your site will provide. Your site must provide visitors all the valuable information you want them to have. Make a chart, or outline to include all your activities. The chart, or outline must include information about your product or services, as well as, other useful information to attract the surfers. Whatever, information you want to provide should not be in the form of a magazine advertisement, or pages of your printed catalogue? Why should a visitor stay at your site? Every page should be well planned. It is very easy to put up a site that will confuse the customers, and drive them away. You must provide him with some valuable, and if possible, unique information. So make a list of what you want your customers to know about your products, and what other information you want to provide them. But, do not be tempted to include everything that comes to your mind. Ask yourself does this item in the outline meets the sites objectives? Remember, that there are many traditional categories, such as About Us, Our Clients, Our Customer Philosophy, Contact Us, etc. You can always visit your competitors Web sites to have ideas, or review your own ideas. 4. Who will manage your Web site? You can manage your web site yourself. You can setup your own office and hire full-time or part-time specialists. It all depends upon what you want to include on your web site and how big you want your web site to be. Do you want to manage a big database? Do you want to have a newsgroup or discussion group? You may even have to consult a web design and consultancy firm. Otherwise, depending upon your web site, you need to hire professionals with knowledge of SQL, Oracle, HTML and Java. Anyone can put up his own Web site without even knowing HTML. You can use software like Microsoft FrontPage. But to have a real good web site you need someone with good knowledge of HTML. HTML is the language of web and is quite easy to learn. 5. Putting up a good Web site. After deciding who is going to manage your Web site, decide who will host your Web site. You also need to work on other important requirements like office space, computers, office equipments and finance. All this is not simple. (You should read "Elements of ECommerce" in January 2000 issue of this magazine.) In designing your Web site, you need planning. You need to draw a blue print of your site. Study the list of all the contents you would like on the site. Plan each and every page. How would your home page look like? What information and links it would contains? Similarly, you need to work out each and every page of your site.

A blue print helps reduce oversights, repetition and dead ends. A blueprint is just like the table of contents of a book. Each chapter and its contents must be decided before hand. While deciding what should be included, you should constantly visit web sites of all your competitors. Note down their good points and the bad points. The language should be easy and to the point. Avoid repetitions or rephrasing a sentence. Use minimum technical terms unless the page is meant specially for professionals or scientists. 6. The Home Page. For any Web site to be successful, a very important requirement is that the home page is attractive and appealing. It should have graphics to highlight the most important features or products or items on sale. But the home page should not be overloaded with fancy graphics, pictures and maps because it will take long time to download and the visitor may click somewhere else instead of waiting for it to download. It is here creativity is required. The home page of a site can be compared to cover of a magazine. Usually by glancing the cover, you can tell what is most important story in the magazine and pictures are used to highlight important stories. Thus the home page should be appealing, it should highlight your best and most important products or features, but it should not normally take more than 30 seconds to download with a 28 Kbps modem and telephone lines. Your home page should not be overloaded. Do not try to fill each and every available blank space and do not use too small fonts. The page, the size and the contents should be in right proportions based on the objectives of the site. The eye needs to be drawn to the important points on the home page and this is best achieved by properly using the space. 7. Easy to navigate interface. The site must have easy to navigate interface. This is especially important for the home page. A visitor will not like to switch between many pages, before he is able see the actual product he is interested in. Do not assume that visitors will automatically move to the next page. There should be proper directions and reasons for visitor to click to next page. They must feel interested. Preferably, with just one click, the visitor should be able to reach anywhere in the site. There are many ways of creating easy to navigate interface including roll-over menus, table of contents and maps and bars. With roll-over menus, the home page can have many links. When user pauses the pointer on a link, a roll-over menu opens. The user can open any roll-over menu option in just one click instead of two clicks. But one drawback with this approach is that with Java based roll-over, there are increased chances of errors and this may annoy the user. Thus it is important the web site designer pay special attention to the roll-over Java applet. Another method to achieve one click navigation is to give some important links as headings and then under each heading give additional links related to the heading. It is just like table of contents of a book. It is like giving on a single page, names of ten or twelve books along with the list of chapters for each book. Another method to achieve one-click navigation is to include a site map on your site. Give the link to it on the home page and every inside page. Make sure to place the navigation bar in the same place on home page and every inside page, usually the top of the page or along the right. These spots are prime spots for web sites, since they load first. Many visitors will want to click a link, even before full page is loaded, because they have already decided what they want. A navigation bar at the bottom of a page, in general, has less usability. The navigation bar should reflect the same categories established on the home page. For example, if your home page has links such as Our Products, Our Company, Buy Now, Contact Us, Site Map and Search as its headings on the home page, the navigation bars on inside pages should also display them.

8. Avoid overloading of Pages. Just like your home page, all the other pages should not be overloaded. It should not have too much text or too big picture files. Do not try to fill each and every available blank space and do not use too small fonts. The text should be in proper font and font size. Do not use very small font size to fit more text. Also do not use very big size fonts unless your site is for kids. A single web page should always have less than two screens' worth of content. If an article or story cannot be accommodated in this space, then break your page into more pages and give links at the bottom of the pages. 9. Easy-to-Follow Instructions. Your site must have easy to follow instructions for placing orders, etc. What if a visitor decides that he wants a particular item from you, but is not able to understand how to go ahead and place the order? Not everyone is as proficient with the Net as you may want him to be. So where possible, or required, give easy to follow instructions. Feedback from your buyers and visitors can prove useful in finding out if the instructions are clear and easy or not. You can mail a form to the persons who have shopped from you. Here your company needs to use its imagination to device a suitable method. You can announce some rewards scheme; you can offer some prizes to take part in a competition. 10. Consistency is important. You should aim to keep the look of a site consistent throughout. This means a standard use of fonts, colours, image styles, layout styles, navigation style, etc. Do not use many fonts and many colours. For example, if you have an animated gif on the right top corner of a page, then may be it is better to have animated gifs at right hand corners of all the pages. It is true with images, monograms and your companys logo. Your background colours should remain the same throughout and you should pay attention to the little things like keeping the fonts in the text defined in html. Do not mix many fonts even there is temptation. 11. Review Your Web site regularly. Even the best-designed web site plan will need modifying once the site is up. You must regularly monitor your own Web site, as well as, competitors Web sites. There is software that provide, you information about your visitors habit how long they stay, what they looked and from where they clicked away. You can also entrust this job to other professional services. Feedback from the customers and about the customers is very important. Who are the persons that are actually buying or not buying from your Web site? Why are they buying or not buying a particular item? Can they follow instructions easily? There are many ways to achieve this. You can employee the services of the Web sites that keep track of persons on the Web. But constant improvement is a must for any Web site. Update your site regularly. Also if a particular page view is low, it is better to replace that page. If visitors are clicking away from a particular page, either the page is really bad or it has navigational problems. When you update your site, do not change the entire layout. It is just like a showroom. You want to update what is on the shelves but you do not change the whole layout. Also you should regularly note good and bad points of Web sites you visit. Keep your eyes open. If you find anything special, note it down. Note down the points that drove you away from a particular web site. 12. Make sure your customers stay with you. Converting visitors to customers is a difficult job and it points to the success of your Web site. If a visitor has made any purchase from your site, then chances are that, whenever, he is looking for products similar to offered by your site, he will click your site before he clicks another similar site. For building customer loyalty, the most important aspect is the service and convenience provided by your site. So make sure to provide proper aftersales service. Do not annoy your customers. People do look for lower prices, but if they are satisfied by one site, they will not like to do extra searching just to save a few rupees. Of course, if the price difference is too much, then you may lose the customer. The key is to look at the weaknesses of your competitors, and provide better service than the competitors.

Insurgency on the Internet: The Problem of Internet Security (There are widespread security problems on the Internet. Even the large e-commerce sites and the ISPs are vulnerable, despite their best security efforts, though rarely any site admits this. Even when attached, they deny this for the fear of losing the customers. In May 2000, the "I LOVE U" virus wreaked havoc on computer systems of corporations and governments all over the world. Last year, the Mellissa virus and the ExploreZip worm cost billions of dollars in computer downtime worldwide.) Why is the security of the Internet so fragile? Why is it so easy for hackers to attack the Internet? In this article, we explain the reasons behind security problems. We begin with the terminology of the Internet security community to give you a better understanding of why securing the Internet is a hard problem. Hacker The term "hacker" usually means one of these three things: people who break the security of computer networks, people who break the security of application software, and people who create malicious programs like viruses. These three things are not mutually exclusive, that is, some hackers can and do indulge in all of these three activities, but this is a simple way to divide the activities that fall under "hacking." Hackers are not the ordinary persons, but smart computer specialists who would try their skills to break into even the most secured system. Network hackers Network hackers engage in several sorts of activities. Some, like "denial of service attacks" or "mail bombs" are designed to swamp a computer networks ability to respond, and perform its internal functions. For instance, a "denial of service attack" on a Web server floods it with bogus requests for pages. The server spends so much time trying to process these requests that it cannot respond to legitimate requests and may crash. A mail bomb is similar but targets a victims mail server resulting in a huge number of messages that overload, or even crash the users mailer program. Another form of network hacking involves penetrating a secure area by subverting its security measures. Network hackers might accomplish this by setting up programs that try millions of passwords until one is accepted. A hacker may set up "sniffers" programs that check data to find encrypted, or sensitive information. Once they gather the information they can decode it, or if not encrypted, use it directly to find out more about a network, and penetrate it more easily. Firewalls Most corporate networks are protected by specially secured computers or systems of computers called "firewalls." A firewall protects the rest of the corporate network from the outside world. Network hackers often try to subvert the security measures of firewalls in order to access the confidential corporate data contained within the networks being protected by firewalls. Once hackers get onto the machines that host networks, they can alter or remove files, steal information and erase the evidence of those activities. But many hackers break security systems just to see if they can do it. They may enter the system, look at the data within and never go back. For these hackers, it is more a test of skill than an attempt to steal or alter data. Software crackers Application software, such as programs for word processing or graphics, are often expensive. For anything thats useful but expensive, there is always someone who wants to get it free of charge. Thats where software "crackers" (or hackers who break software security) come in. For instance, you have a piece of software that requires a serial number to install. A software hacker does this in much the same way that network hackers attack network security. They may set up a serial number generator that tries millions of combinations of numbers and letters until it finds one that matches. The hacker could also attack the program at the assembly-code level, finding and altering the security measures.

A software hacker is not necessarily a software pirate. A hacker may break the security and use the software, but a true pirate would also replicate and sell the cracked software. Virus builders Some hackers are also virus builders. Viruses, worms, Trojan horses and logic bombs are all forms of programs that can invade a system. Some are malicious and some are not. A virus is a small programing code that may or may not attach itself to a file and replicate itself. It may or may not corrupt the data of the file it invades. It may or may not try to use all of the computers processing resources in an attempt to crash the machine. If that seems vague, it is because viruses are tricky. Different types of viruses work in different ways. They may be simple notes that say "Hello" or they may attack and corrupt the files at the core of the system, causing it to crash. Worms invade a computer and steal its resources to replicate themselves. They use the Internet or networks to spread themselves and can infect every machine connected to the network. The term "worm" refers to how the virus penetrates the systems. Worms can steal passwords, mess up with hard drives, display messages or when your are connected to the Internet secretly send files to a Web site. A Trojan horse appears to do one thing but does something else. The system may accept it as one thing, but upon execution it may release a virus, worm or logic bomb. A logic bomb is an attack triggered by an event, like the computer clock reaching a certain date. It might release a virus or be a virus itself. The Internet Security Problem The reason for weak Internet security is that the Internet was not really designed to be very secure. The IP protocol, which is the basis of the Internet, has very primitive security support. One important issue here is that there is a fundamental tradeoff between how secure we can make a system and how easy it is to use. The designers of the IP protocol made a conscious decision to make IP very simple and easy to use, but as a result it is not very secure. Highly secure systems have to be based on cryptographic authentication and encryption. Classical IP just does not have these properties. This is because crypto-systems are somewhat complicated to use and are also computationally expensive. The two fundamental problems of the Internet are: 1) When a IP packet appears to come from computer A, there is no guarantee that it really came from computer A. 2) Even if the packet did originally come from A, there is no guarantee that no one saw it in transit. The Internet, in its classical form, does not support strong authentication. The second problem is that data transfers on the Internet, in general, are not very private. When taken in combination, these two are the root of all of the security problems of the Internet, including worms, viruses, denial of service attacks, and electronic data theft. Solving the Problem So, how do we solve these problems in the real world. E-commerce sites use password for verification. Instead of this, we may use, a persons facial features (photograph on passport) or his or her fingerprints or blood group or DNA type and so on or some combination of these things. We ensure privacy of communication by encryption, which means translating messages into a code and then decoding them on the other end. In a secure computer network, the same processes work. A crypto-system allows us to authenticate people and to encrypt and decrypt messages. So, what exactly is a crypto-system? A crypto-system is based on the mathematics of keys, which are large (128 bits or more) random combinations of numbers and characters, trapdoor functions and one-way-functions. A one way function (which is often based on computational properties of prime numbers), is easy to compute in one direction and hard to compute in the reverse direction. A trapdoor is easy to compute in the forward direction. It is hard to compute in the reverse direction without the key, but easy to compute if you know the key, i.e., it is easy to encrypt a message but hard to decrypt it (without the key). The most commonly use crypto-system, RSA, use two keys.

One is called the private key, that only you know, and the other is called the public key, which is known to everybody. You can encrypt anything with your private key, and anyone can decode that with your public key. You are probably thinking what is the use of this. This is actually the basis for RSA based authentication. If you can decrypt an encoded message from someone by using his public key into something that makes sense then you can be sure that the message was encoded by a person possessing the correct private key. The RSA crypto-system can also be used to securely exchange keys. We will not describe the details of this in this article. It should however be clear that once we can securely exchange keys, we can use any shared key based encryption/decryption scheme that converts plain text to cipher and visa-versa to ensure privacy of communication. Many algorithms have been developed for shared secret key based encryption/decryption. You may be wondering how the Internet community has been using or planning to use cryptosystems. The Internet community has been working to formalize IPSec, a protocol that sits on top of IP and uses a crypto-system to provide authentication and privacy of communication. The full description of the working of IPSec is beyond the scope of this article. We will simply say that it is roughly based on the description of a crypto-system presented above. How Safe is Your Internet Connection Everyone wants a fast and permanent Internet connection. Now you have choice of T1 connection, cable connection or fast DSL line. With fast connection files transfer in a blink and Web pages download within seconds. T1, DSL and cable connections are always on. Even if your browser or email program are not loaded, you have a permanent online presence. This makes it easier for others to find your PC and wreak havoc. Someone can remotely crash your PC; copy your data files; run applications and find about all your personal financial informations including passwords and credit card numbers. Someone can download a destructive virus in your computer. In an office network setting, you have various types of securities to protect your computer and the network. But home and small-office users with DSL or cable do not have such protections. DSL and cable security breaches are hard to come by, but everyone knows that PCs have been repeatedly probed, scanned and hacked. The standard DSL modem included with your account typically lacks any kind of security features. Connection Basics When you have a dial-up connection, you are relatively safe. You are one of millions of dial-up customers accessing the Net. Your PCs hostname and IP address are temporarily issued more or less at random and they remain yours only as long as you are online. No one can anticipate when you will be online or easily track down your system. With always-on DSL and cable, you have a fixed IP address and host name so your electronic door is always open. When you are connected to the Internet, the Internet is also connected to you. This is with every Web site and e-mail server in the world. The difference is that commercial sites are built with security in mind. Each site is protected behind a few routers and is monitored 24 hours a day by a staff of network professionals. On the contrary, your DSL or cable modem offers little or no protection to the computer connected to it. How Big is the Problem? How big is this problem? It is certainly big but IT companies are corporations and ISPs do not want to talk about this. Corporations do not reveal if their networks or e-commerce sites have been compromised, for the fear of driving away customers. Same is the case with ISPs. Individual users and small companies typically do not get much attention.

Many commercial sites have been hacked. Hackers have been able to copy customer names, addresses and credit card numbers. You may not be as big a target after all, because commercial sites store thousands of credit card numbers, while your DSL or cable-connected PC only holds a handful. But even a single attack can be devastating. Your personal web site can be defaced or your e-mails can be manipulated. If any one attacks your computer are reads your files, you may even not know about it. Instead, you may think that it is your computers problem or a bug in your Windows operating system. Most desktop operating systems are not equipped to detect and prevent these attacks. There are sophisticated cyber criminals who are after corporate, banking or government information. They may be even from an enemy country. They attempt to infiltrate banking, credit card and government sites, but they are seldom successful. Which is why they may turn to your PC or small network. Although a large commerce site offers greater treasures, your PC still has something to offer. Tips you should follow Here are a few tips that you can use to save your computer: 1. Till you learn how you should protect your PC, it is a good idea to disconnect the DSL or cable connection when you are not actually using the Internet. 2. Switch to Windows 2000. Windows 95 or 98 do not have enough security feature. Windows 2000 or Windows NT are relatively safe. 3. Turn off file sharing if you are not sharing files with other computers. To ensure file sharing is off, right-click Network Neighborhood and click Properties. Click the button labeled "File and Print Sharing" so that it is not selected. 4. Set up file sharing carefully if you need to use it. Right-click Network Neighborhood, choose Properties and click "File and Print Sharing." Check the box next to "I want to give others access to my files." Next, pick or create a specific folder you will let people access, such as c:\My Documents\Shared File. In Windows Explorer, right-click the folder and pick Sharing from the context menu. In the dialog box that appears, click the radio button next to Shared As: and enter a name for the folder in the field to the right. 5. You can monitor your shared folders using the Windows Net Watcher utility. The application displays all the users currently connected to shared folders and lets you disconnect them if necessary. The utility is not part of Windows 95 or 98's default installation, but you can install it from your Windows CD-ROM by following these steps: (a) Click Start, Settings, Control Panel and open Add/Remove Programs. (b) Click the Windows Setup tab. In Windows 98, scroll down the list of setup categories and double-click System Tools. In Windows 95, find and double-click Accessories. (c) Check the box next to Net Watcher, and click OK twice to exit the dialogs. (d) Windows will install Net Watcher. After your system's rebooted, choose Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Net Watcher to launch the utility. 6. Download system patches. Windows 98 users can head to the Windows Update Web site to automatically download security-related patches for their operating system. If you are still using Windows 95, you will have to download each Security Update patch manually at the Windows 95 Downloads page. Develop good Computing Habits

There are a few tips you can use to protect your computer from hackers. Besides this, it is important that you develop good computing habits. You should follow all the tips required to save your computer from viruses: You should use anti-virus software. Open e-mail attachments only when you trust the sender. Do not download files and software from untrusted sources. Protect your passwords. Do not divulge passwords to anyone. We specially careful if someone asks you for password on-line or over the phone. Protect your on-line transactions by using secure browser.

Top Hints to Save Your Computer from Viruses E-mail attachment E-mail attachments are the most common and fastest growing outlet for spreading viruses. Be wary of e-mails from unfamiliar senders. Open e-mail attachment only when you trust the sender. If you double-click an attachment from an unknown source, then your risk of getting a virus are high. Do not double-click on E-mail attachments. Either delete the E-mail or download and save attachments first. Have them scanned after they are saved. Downloading from unfamiliar sites Know the source when downloading files, otherwise, you may be downloading a virus. Another alternative is to have on-access scanning activated during the downloading process. Current versions of most of the popular antivirus software have this facility. Keep your Antivirus software current As viruses adapt to current antivirus software and enter homes and businesses in new ways all the time, it is important to be prepared by keeping software current to keep up with the constantly changing threats. Most antivirus software updates are free, included with the purchase price of the original software. Turn on Macro Virus Protection Microsoft Office Suite options enable a protection device, which warns you if there are any macros in an incoming document or spreadsheet. This option is found under Tools/General, and called "Macro Virus Protection."

Be cautious with free downloads Useful free downloads are available on the Internet, but some may be wolves in sheep's clothing. If selecting a download, discuss the choice with IT professionals or take the time to think about whether or not the program is worth the risk. Guard your personal and financial information Do not provide your important personal information unless you know exactly who is asking for it and that it is necessary for a transaction. Protect your personal computer It is fairly common to contract a computer virus at home and spread it via a workplace network or to catch something at the office and end up bringing it home. Practice these safety tips on both computers to ensure that infection of one does not automatically mean infection of the other. Protect your passwords Be particularly careful not to divulge passwords to anyone who asks on-line or over the phone. A common ruse is to pose as a representative of an on-line company who needs your password for "verification." Never give out a password or account information unless you have initiated contact with the service, and choose a password that is difficult for someone else to guess. Teach children on-line safety tips Tell children about these tips, taking special care to let them know not to give personal information on-line. Teach them to ask permission before responding to on-line surveys or offers. Protect on-line transactions by using a secure browser When using your browser, check that you are using the protocol Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which encrypts data sent over the Web. This can be done by checking to see if the key in the lower left corner of your browser is complete in Netscape, or if the lock is locked in the lower middle of the screen in Internet Explorer.

Elements of E-Commerce? What is E-commerce? Today, it is better to ask, What is not E-commerce? E-commerce penetrates into every corner of the modern business. It promises reduced costs, more efficient operations and higher profits. Who could fail to embrace it? The Internet is a perfect tool for a lot of the business objectives that businesses and customers have today. Anybody with a really good idea and a good business plan and the consistent approach of listening to the customer and an understanding of what the Internet enables you to do can really succeed in this market. E-business is very much like the business world, with an added advantage that you are just a click away from a competitor. To begin with, the company must have a product or service to offer. Then they need a well designed web site and system to get people to visit their web site. You need a method billing, accept payments and delivering goods. You also need a good customer relationship. Is your product suitable for E-business? E-business offers much more personalised service than normal business. You know your costumer, what he needs and can offer him item that suits him the best. You can advertise your product on the Internet. You can also sell your product online, but all products are not suitable for sales online. A big drawback of online business is clear from this example. When you get into a normal shop and want to buy a pair of shoes but find they do not fit you right, you are already there so you are going to give a second opportunity to the salesman. But if you get into a Web site and it is difficult to navigate or there is no way to interact with them or to provide feedback, you just click away. That is the thing that I would say they hate most, the difficulty in finding what they are looking for or the inability to communicate with you when they are supposed to do so. TOOLS & PRACTICES E-commerce is the collection of tools and practices involving Internet technologies that allow a company to create, maintain and optimize business relations with consumers and other businesses. All this appears very simple, but breaking into E-commerce or understanding how it works, can have you going in circles. This article is a guide to E-commerce and what all it involves. To understand exactly how e-commerce works, refer to figure 1. E-commerce can be partitioned into three concentric circles: 1. The Inner Circle; 2. The Magic Ring; and 3. The Outer Circle. 1. The Inner Circle

The Inner Circle in figure 1 shows the basic infrastructure needed to get started in just about any form of E-commerce. The infrastructure includes both the hardware and the software. The inner circle consists of routers, firewalls, servers, storage systems, databases and backup. (a) Routers: Routers connect networks segments and provide reasonably good network traffic management. They are the backbones of any network, but they need special consideration in a web space. (b) Firewalls: Depending on the kinds of web usage and applications, a router may not provide all the security you need for E-commerce. A firewall can offer greater security and flexibility.

(c) Servers: For a web site, it is the riskiest job to choose a server as you will never be able to get a reliable prediction for the load it is going to carry. What you can be sure of is that once an Ecommerce site goes up, any little glitch is going to cause great problems. So you need to look at fault-tolerant or redundant hardware solutions. (d) Mail Server: E-commerce can greatly inflate both the magnitude of e-mail and the functionality needed from the mail server, so it is not safe to assume that the solution you have will stand up to the job. (e) Web Servers: This is the software that serves the web content to the user's browser. The major players all have about the same functionality. You will see vendor offerings for "Commerce Servers." These are web servers enhanced with support for certain commerce activities. (f) Storage Systems: What is said about the servers is true about the storage systems. Again, the requirements of reliability and continual uptime may cause you to investigate different models from the ones you are used to. (g) Databases: Databases can present special challenges in a few ways. While the OLTP model is important, many web sites require that information be sliced, diced and extracted in ways that do not easily fit the relational model. Also, the rate at which they are hit can exceed what you have seen in traditional IT applications. (h) Backup: Even something as basic as backup (and recovery!) needs a special consideration for a web site. There is the need for redundancy at all levels. In the traditional IT approaches, there is overnight window for periodic back up. But with a web site, there is no overnight window for periodic backup. Also in case of a web site, the delays of hours in reloading a database can not be tolerated. To meet the business needs of a web site, you require a combination of software, hardware and network approaches. 2. The Magic Ring

The Magic Ring includes the tools and applications needed for a web site. Some important tools are applications are: Security and Certification, Development, Testing, Content Management, Ad serving, Traffic Reporting, Data Mining, Personalisation, Messaging, Relationship Management, Extranet and Search. These are what really puts the squeeze on the middle layer of e-commerce. A few years ago the tools and applications were thought of as goals in themselves, but they are now the foundational elements in designing their web strategies. Unlike the Inner Circle, there is no one clear path here in the Magic Ring. Any particular site strategy might call for a different subset of these functions and might require them to be implemented in any order. (a) Security and Certification: Beyond security at the router and firewall level, there are other considerations such as encrypting credit card and other personal data, digital signatures and, in general, proving to customers on a real-time basis that they are dealing with whom they think they are. (b) Development: Starting from simple HTML editors to complete web page development environments, there are a wide range of tools from simple forms to complicated Java applets or Active-X components, that can come into play during the construction of a web site. (c) Testing: For a web site, there is never a time to test its speed. Put it up first and then find the problems; if performance is slow, throw on another server. Those who are uncomfortable with this approach or who want to have an approach more organized, will want to invest in tools that test content accessibility, basic functionality, and behavior under controlled load. For the rest, there is stress testing. (d) Content Management: If managing network configuration files and software versions is getting routine, Content Management may prove a bit more interesting. At the low end, there is the problem of the size. A web site can throw up hundreds of pages per week on an ongoing basis, but

those doing the throwing may be writers or marketing types who have never thought about the problems of cleaning out dead files and tracing the chain reaction caused by small changes. At the highest end, companies whose business is content may be interested in tighter control of style and format. There are high price-tag applications that do Content Management on a corporate basis. (e) Ad Serving: Ad Serving is a critical technology for almost any web site. Even if your site is not serving ads, one needs to pay attention to this technology. We are starting to see products that support your advertising on other sites. Even though your ad agencies will support your advertising efforts, there may be some technology issues involved with bringing the reports and the control to the right desktops. (f) Traffic Reporting: Traffic Reporting is an important aspect of a web site. This may be the one piece of web technology that everyone on the business side will use and scream about when the reports are late or inconsistent. In theory, the basic reports could be developed from the web server logs by an intern, but you will find that many different departments want different kinds of packaging and details. Traffic reports are their clue to what works and what does not work. The faster they can find out about a page that is too boring for people to read or one that is a grabber, the faster one can make changes. These changes have a direct or indirect effect on revenues. (g) Data Mining: Data Mining means a data warehouse approach that is, quick inquiries into a wealth of information. It is built on traffic logs, advertising reports and some kind of real-time analysis that captures information about user behaviour that the other sources miss. It is an area that is intimately associated with Personalization. (h) Personalization: This is in part the flip side of Data Mining. Personalization refers to serving ads or reordering content in real time to match these behaviours and get people to stay on the site, click on ads or buy. Given detailed knowledge about how individuals behave, how can we personalize their experiences. When a site requires registration or uses other methods to identify anonymous visitors, the potential for using mined data increases many fold. (i) Messaging: How many ways can E-commerce create a message? Automated responses, targeted newsletters, fax blitz, groupware, IP telephony, paging and who knows what else. Communication is still the foundation of a business and the Web multiplies it. (j) Help Desk: An efficient Help Desk is a necessity for any business over the web. Naturally, the people at the desk will need tools for accessing the various databases used by the web site, including the data about user behaviour and purchasing. (k) Relationship Management: Part Help Desk, part Personalization, the term refers to customizing of user experience for managing more direct contacts with customers and vendors. (l) Extranet: An Extranet can be an important way to create a secure, closed network between you and your business partners. (m) Search Function: At the very least you will need a search function to help people find things on the site. There are various options. Some sites supplement their content with links to related material that is found by searching the web. 3. The Outer Circle

The Outer Circle is all about applications and functions that define the web site. Some important aspects are given below: (a) Survey: A web site is a great way to gather information about things that interest you. Just post a survey and get a few (hundred) thousand responses. Posting the results on the web site for users to see generally adds more page and ad views.

(b) Community Creation: Many web sites support forums (bulletin boards as they used to be called) and chat. A good way to pull in visitors and sell ads especially if your site does not mind people exercise their free speech. The technology here can be very flat or allow users to create animated characters to represent them in chat space. (c) Catalogues and Directories: Although there are no firm distinctions here, a catalogue is generally a product list that leads to a purchase, where as a directory is a searchable database that leads to information or links. (d) Storefronts: If you are selling to consumers, the Storefront is where you do it. Storefront software will probably include support for building a product catalogue and handling credit card transactions. (e) Auction: It is not all that long ago that eBay burst upon the scene and already there are packaged software that lets you put an auction on your own site. (f) Marketplace: A marketplace brings buyers and sellers together. For a company that has a presence in both camps, this could be an option for new revenue opportunities. (g) Payments and Billing: The E-commerce is all about payments and billings. In a consumer environment it is a relatively simple matter of accepting credit card numbers and passing them on to a processor, and possibly interfacing with an e-money or wallet vendor. (h) Human Resources: There is every incentive for a company to do more recruiting on the web. Placing ads on web sites or in newsgroups is just the tip of the iceberg. The more that resumes can be accepted from e-mail or forms submissions and processed automatically, the faster they can be in managers' hands. When you say "We have got to do E-commerce", there is a lot of territory to cover. But a careful approach, starting with corporate and IT strategies, always has been and always will be, the best chance for success. Tips while designing your website If you have any product or service to offer you must have a web site. It lets you find global audience with millions of potential customers. It also lets you provide 24-hour customer service and technical support. Web sites let a company test and market new services, products and plans and even brand names. Besides, it is the fastest method to reach millions of people all over the globe. The World Wide Web is huge. There are millions of web sites. There are always a number of web sites offering same products. There is huge competition around. Everyone is spending lot of money and time to have an attracting and appealing web site. Then why should anyone care for your web site? Even if someone happens to click your web site, he will not stay there unless he is attracted by your home page. You need to keep some basic tips in mind while designing your web site. There are many good sites on the web. Find out for yourself which sites attract you and why? Whenever, you are surfing, if you find anything special about any web site, note it down. A better way to save favourite pages is to store them with your browsers bookmark function. You need to work constantly for the improvement of your web site. There are many bad sites on the web. If you happen to come across a bad site, then observe why you find the site bad. Keep your observations in mind while working on your own web site. 1. What do you want to accomplish? Before you start on a web site, be very clear what you want to accomplish. Do to rush with the web site. Take time to define your goal. Based on what on want from your web site, you need to choose a proper domain name. Make sure that your domain name is your business or products name, as far as possible. In any case, keep it simple. This is not an easy job as most of the names you will like to have already been registered.

2. Space: First most important point is how to use your home page space. Just do not fill each and every white space. People often make the mistake of making these things very big. They don't have to be. The eye needs to be drawn to them and this is best (and most professionally) achieved by the use of space. Do not clutter your home page with unnecessary text and images around the main areas, since they detract from the important bits. What you are aiming for is to draw attention to the important bits - the message, the navigation system or whatever is the main thrust of the page. Do not make the mistake of thinking that if there is an unfilled space in your page, you should fill it with something. Just have the bits that are necessary. You may have many important "things" that you may like to put on the home page. You may find that you are short of space. But still, you should keep some space free between the "things". As a rule, maybe only 75% of your page should be covered with images and text. How you do this? This is for you to figure out. You should give separate pages for some of your important "things". 3. Consistency: You should aim to keep the look of a site consistent throughout. This means a standard use of fonts, colours, image styles, layout styles, navigation style etc. Do not use many fonts and many colours. On some other web site, you may get attracted by an animated gif. That does not mean, that you should add the gif on your web site. On your web site, it may appear as out of place. But if you have an animated gif on the right top corner of a page, then may be it is better to have animated gifs at right hand corners of all the pages. Same is true with images, monograms and your companys logo. Your background colours should remain the same throughout and you should pay attention to the little things like keeping the fonts in the text defined in html. Do not mix fonts too much, even if your are tempted to do so. Header images for sections ought to have the same style as each other, which should in turn be related to the main look of the logo (colours, fonts. etc.). 4. Colours: Do not pick colours that clash. Think about what the colours. It is just like choosing colour for your living room and then wondering if you would like to spend a lot of time there! Define your link colours in the body tag to match your colour scheme as well. 5. Backgrounds: One of the main culprits for a bad-looking site are these multicoloured background image tiles. They also tend to have a definite pattern to them, which can make text really hard to read. Try to go for a flat colour background or for a large image (min 800 x 600 pixels) which is faded so that you can easily read the text on top of it. If you choose a large image, be careful about the file size. Big fadey text always looks cool, as do black and white photos that have been faded out. Another trick is to blur these backgrounds, since this makes the sharp text on top much easier to read. 6. Scrolling Text: If you have a page of scrolling text, try to split it up into sections on different pages, and add a navigation system for it. It is good idea and keeps the user from getting lost on the page. Avoid dead ends. 7. Images: You so often see sites that have jagged images on them. There is no need for this and you do not need really expensive software to get around it. Limit the size and amount of graphics and colour. Web pages that take long time to download do not get read. For creating images use Adobe Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro 5 for PC, which is shareware. Paint Shop Pro 5 is great and imports layered Photoshop files quite happily.

GIFs (.gif - the main web image format) are indexed colour, but you should always create the image in RGB mode. This avoids the "jagging" that we all hate and you end up with nice, non jagged GIFs on export. If you only have a GIF to start with, but need to resize and edit it, then change it to RGB mode first, otherwise, it will look gross. JPEG format (.jpg) is used most often for photos, since this is where it excels. This is an RGB format anyway, so no worries there. Watch the file size. But in order to reduce the file size, do not make images look horrible on export or avoid them. Find a happy compromise. You should not normally have an image file bigger then 30k anywhere. Select images pixels so that they stay on even the smallest screen. 8. Layout: The trick with layout is to use tables to provide focus. They also resize to an extent with the browser size. Think about the layout of a magazine it has columns and areas with background colours to provide focus. The same applies here. You can pull quotes out of a body of text and make them the focal point for it. They also break up a big lump of text really well, which is always a good thing. 9. The Last Word: These are the basics of avoiding the pitfalls of web site design. There are many more, but follow these guidelines and you will be most of the way there. Web Browsing Tips to Save Your Time and Money Only thirty years ago, one computer spoke to another for the first time. Now we have the Internet the network of networks. The era of the Internet technology that has transformed business and changed the way millions of people shop, invest and communicate. But do not let the World Wide Web become a world wide waste of your time and money. Enhance the browsing productivity with these helpful tips. 1. Use the latest Web browser. The easiest way to improve your browsing experience is to use the latest web browser. Updating your browser. Every new version of a software has many features designed to increase productivity of the users all over world. Best of all, all the updates are free. To obtain the latest browsers visit the Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Communicator web sites at http://microsoft.com/IE or at http://netscape.com/products 2. Access Numbers. Keep the list of all the access numbers of your Internet Service Provider (ISP) handy. If you have problem connecting with one number, then try another. Also do not get your Internet account from any Internet Service Provider (ISP). Make sure that ISP has a number of access numbers and it is not difficult to get connected. 3. Your modem and computer. An easy way to increase your browsing speed is to use a fast modem. If you are using 28.8 kbps modem, then get a 33.6 kpbs modem. A latest computer with enough RAM, will improve your browsing speed. 4. Time of access. Use the web at off-peak times. Mornings always tend to be less busy than evenings. Keep a track of the times when you experience the fewest browsing delays and plan accordingly. 5. Check Spelling. Make sure you enter the universal resource locator (URL, Web address) correctly. A misspelled address will take you to a dead-end loop or the wrong destination. 6. Increase Cache. Locating a site on the WWW takes at least a second time, even on the fastest Internet connections. To save time, your browser automatically stores all the recently visited sites in a cache on the hard drive. When we try to access a web site say i.e., www.microsoft.com, the browser will search the cache to see if you have visited the site recently. If yes, then it delivers the

cached data immediately on to the screen. Remember that the browser can recall information from the cache faster than it can download it from the Web site. The default settings on most browsers are adequate for an average browsing needs, so to maximize the benefits of cache, increase the size of cache, so as to accommodate more sites. Steps to increase the cache in Internet Explorer 4.x: a) Select Internet Options from the View Menu. b) Click on Settings Button. c) Choose Temporary Internet files on the General Page. d) Slide the bar under Amount of Disk Space to the Right, to the desired Cache capacity. e) Also select Every Time You Start Internet Explorer under the heading Check for Newer Versions of Stored Pages. f) Click View Files Button, this will allow you to view a directory of the files in your hard disk cache.

7. Save Your Cache. A bigger cache is one thing, but a full cache is another. When the cache is full, it tends to slow down the computer system and may cause a system crash. To prevent a cachecaused crash, always empty the cache on a regular basis and after a session of heavy web browsing. 8. Pictures are worth a thousand words. It is a known fact that graphics slow down the Web browsing. But not everyone is aware that most web browsers let you disable the graphics-loading feature. This feature can be used, if you are doing research. Text loads much faster than graphics. Steps to disable the cache in Internet Explorer 4.x: a) Select Internet Options from the View menu. b) Click on Advanced Tab. c) Scroll down to Multimedia. d) Deselect the box option of Show Pictures. (Other box options too can be deselected). e) Scroll up to Java VM Listing. f) Deselect the Java JIT compiler Enabled box.

9. Multiple Tasks. You have only one Internet connection, but it does not mean you can accomplish only one online task, at a time. Multiple tasks can be accomplished like check E-mail, download Microsoft Instant Messenger, browse your favorite web site, open multiple browser windows and view more than one site at a time. 10. Tracking Web Addresses. The browser keeps track of where you have been during each Internet session. So it is not necessary to re-enter the URL, if you have visited the site during a current Internet session. You can use Back and Forward buttons to return to sites you have visited recently on both the Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. These browsers also provide mini-history list of the addresses you have visited during your session.

The history folder, makes it convenient to return to recently visited sites. But if the folder gets full, it becomes an impediment instead of an expedient of progress. So always remember to clear the History folder on a regular basis. Steps to Clear the History Folder in Internet Explorer 4.x: a) Select Internet Options from the View Menu. b) Click on Clear History button on the General Page. 11. Freshen Up. While browsing the Internet, it tends to hiccup quite frequently, then the sites you might want to access many not reach your PC. For example, the graphics do not appear or the text is unreadable. Click the corresponding button on your browser i.e., Refresh on Internet Explorer 4.x and Reload on navigator 4.x. 12. Cookie. Most users instinctively keep away from Cookies. Cookies is a small piece of software some Web sites implant in your browser to keep track of information about your habits, passwords or personal preferences as you do not have to re-enter that information every time you access various web sites. You can tell the browser to warn you, whenever, you are being sent a cookie. Steps to modify Cookie Preferences in Internet Explorer 4.x: a) Select Internet Options from the View menu. b) Click on Advanced Tab. c) Scroll to the Security Section. d) Select your Cookie Preference. 13. Save the hyperlink without viewing. It is possible to save the web contents on to a file without browsing it. Right-click the hyperlink that points to the file you want and select Save Target As (in Internet Explorer 4.x) or Save Link As (in Navigator 4.x). All you need to specify which location it needs to be stored on a storage device. Then you can access the file at leisure at any time, when you are not connected to the Internet. 14. Bookmark your favorites. Make it easy to access frequently visited Web sites by setting bookmarks that point to them. One can organize Favorites depending on ones needs and creativity. Steps to Create a Book Mark in Internet Explorer 4.x: a) Click Favorites menu. b) Click on Add to Favorites. 15. Send in your Subscription. Internet Explorer and Netscape lets you keep track of any favorite page that has changed while your are not browsing that Web site. Explorer call this feature Subscribing to a Web page. Steps to Subscribe to a Web Page in Internet Explorer 4.x: a) Select Favorites menu. b) Click on Add to Favorite. c) Select Option to Notify you when the pages changes and automatically download the updated page for off-line viewing. 16. Password and username. As a Web content information becomes more valuable; many sites request users to log in using a password or username. Best way to minimize confusion is to let browsers (Internet Explorer 4.x) to remember the password and username for you. Bookmark the

site, then press CTRL-B to open the Bookmarks menu. Right-click the bookmark for which you intend to enter the password. In the pop-menu choose Bookmark Properties. In the resulting window, enter all the required information. 17. Stop Typing. Internet Explorer 4.x makes it easy to enter Web addresses. There is no necessity to enter a complete address like http://www.sitename.com or enter the three-letter domain extension as .com, .edu or .gov. If your need to access Computers and Internet magazine online all you need to type computersandinternet in the address field and site is accessed immediately. 18. Spinning Globes. Internet Explorer and Netscape browsers have in-built signals that indicate whether the browser is receiving data or not. In Internet Explorer the browser signal is a small globe in the upper right of the browser window. In Navigator 4.x the signal is a constellation of a shooting stars, located in the upper right of the browser window. If the Globe is not spinning or stars are not shooting, it indicates that the browser is not receiving data. So to resolve click "Refresh" or "Reload" buttons. It is also the case when, Globe spins continuously or stars keep shooting then, click the "Stop" button and "Refresh" or "Reload" the Web page again. 19. Safe Shopping. Today you can shop online, just by the click of your fingers. But remember, to make online purchases with only those sites that are protected by an accepted security standard. The best way to determine if a site is safe for online purchases is to look at the key or lock that appears in the lower right or lower left of a browser window. If the key is broken (in Internet 4.x) and lock is broken (in Netscape 4.x) then the site is insecure. Both browsers guard against security breaches using techniques like Encryption and Certificates. Encryption uses mathematical algorithms to encode private information like, credit card number, home address and telephone number. Certificates are files that use encryption, but cross examine the people and web sites sending you the information, like who they say they are. Steps to assign Security levels in Internet Explorer 4.x: a) Select Internet Options from the View menu. b) Click on Security Tab. c) Select a Zone. d) Click the button marked Add sites and type the specific addresses. 20. Use Right-Click often. The release of Windows 95 has led the users to access popular browsing commands, just with a click of the mouse. Position the pointer over a graphic, text, empty area or an hyperlink and then right-click, the resulting pop-up menu lets you perform a series of common task. 21. Protect yourself from viruses. A download from a net, if not taken care off can lead to a system crash. As soon as a download file is opened or a download program is activated, any viruses attached to it will swarm your PC. Always remember to download, with a virus scan, before you use them. 22. E-mail Alerts. News letters, E-mail Alerts are a common feature adopted by many Web sites to communicate with the registered users. So take advantage of this and save time on searching for information. 23. Reduce eyestrain change font settings. While browsing the Web, users put undue strain on their eyes, due to lack of awareness to improve the readability of data on the computer screen. It is important to manipulate the size, shape of the characters by resetting the font size. Steps to change the Font Settings in Internet Explorer 4.x: a) Select Internet Options from the View menu.

b) Click on General Tab. c) Bottom of the Dialog box lists all the buttons labeled Colors, Font and Accessibility. Select Accessibility. d) Accessibility option lets you select whether your personal appearance setting should override the settings contained in the Web pages Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). e) Rest options are self-explanatory. 24. Narrow down your search. Today search engines (like Yahoo, Excite, Infoseek, or Lycos) are buzzwords among user community. Most engine work in a similar way: You enter a word or phrase, and the search engine throws our a list of matching sites. For example, if you want to know about "Computers", then one could perform a simple search using the keyword "Computers". Simple searches tend to find too many sites. To be more effective, use Boolean commands, including "and", "or" and "not". 25. Its Greek to me. The Web is worldwide. Both browsers i.e., Netscape and Explorer can display different languages. Steps to change to different language in Internet Explorer 4.x: a) Select Internet Options from the View Menu. b) Click on General Tab c) Click Languages d) Browser will List Languages in order of preference. 26. Print a Page Print all matter from the web and read at leisure. Internet Explorer provides unique printing capabilities. One can print a web page by pressing CTRL-P or by selecting Print option from the Main Menu. Users can choose to print frames, the independent window panes that divide some Web pages into section. One can print a listing of all pages contained in a web site by clicking the box labeled Print Table of Links. You can also print the entire web site by checking the box labeled Print all the Linked Documents. Tip: Ensure that you have plenty of paper at your disposal. 27. Instant Messenger. The fastest way of communicating instantly online with friends or members of family across the world is by using Instant Messengers. If you are connected to Internet Explorer 4.x, then users can download Microsoft Instant Messenger (MSN) from Microsoft, all for free. To obtain free copies go to http://www.microsoft.com and download the same on a storage device. On installation it will remain active, until you shut down your the PC or the MSN. 28. Do not waste time. The Web has a lot to offer. It is very easy to get lured from one site to another by intriguing hyperlinks. So remember, before you click ask yourself, if the information you are about to receive will contribute to a task on hand. Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) Most of the people connect to the Internet through ordinary telephone lines. In India, telephone companies are also providing ISDN connection. ISDN is abbreviation of Integrated Services Digital Network. ISDN are special telephone lines that support both digital data transmission and analogue transmission. The ISDN is built on two main types of communication channels two B channels and one D channel. B channels can carry voice, data or images at the rate of 64 kbps and a D channel can carry information at 16 kbps. The standard ISDN service is called 2B+D.

In some countries cable companies are providing cable connection for the Internet. The same cable that connects to your television connects you to the Internet, provided this service is being offered by your cable company. You need a cable modem to connect cable to your computer. With cable connection your computer is permanently connected to the Internet and you get have IP address for days and weeks, as long as your cable connection is not broken. In USA and some other countries, now they have DSL for fast data and images communication. DSL is the next best choice is cable connection is not available. What is DSL? DSL is an Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) modem technology that transforms ordinary telephone lines, also known as "twisted copper pairs" into high-speed digital lines for fast Internet access. The DSL modem uses a digital coding technique to get tremendous capacity out of your existing phone line without interfering with regular services. You can talk on your phone or send a fax at the same time you are surfing the web, without any interference or any decrease in the downloading speed. How fast is DSL? DSL provides speeds up to 8 Mb/s downstream to the subscriber and up to 1 Mb/s upstream, depending upon telephone line length and other conditions. These speeds are almost 100 times faster than 56K modems. DSL provides dedicated service over a single telephone line, whereas cable modems offer dedicated service over shared media. Cable modems have greater downstream speeds, but the bandwidth is shared among all the users on a given system, and therefore the performance decreases as the number of users on-line increases. Also, cable modem upstream traffic is often slower than ADSL. For high-speed access, ADSL technology the most practical solution for the future. Today's analog modems have probably reached their practical limit at 56Kb/s. ISDN can increase this to 128 Kb/s but neither can compare to ADSL speeds of between 1.5 Mb/s and 8 Mb/s. The DSL makes it possible to quickly download massive graphics and even video applications over the Internet. Besides, the data security offered by the DSL exceeds that of other technologies. How Safe is Your Internet Connection? Everyone wants a fast and permanent Internet connection. People connect to the Internet through ordinary telephone lines (dial-up connection), special leased telephone lines, DSL connection, cable connection, or wireless connection. The speed of the Internet connection depends upon the type of connection, and out of these choices the dial-up connection is the slowest. Connecting the PC to the Internet through the telephone lines, cable connection, or wireless requires a modem, except for a DSL connection that does not require a modem. The same cable that connects to your television, connects you to the Internet provided this service is being offered by your cable company. Just as the Internet operates over the existing cable network, the DSL operates over existing telephone lines. The DSL connection to the Internet is provided by your local telephone company, however it is not available in all the areas, because the of the limitation of the distance from the place where the DSL equipment is located. With fast connection files transfer in a blink and Web pages download within seconds, however except for the dial-up connection all other types of access to the Internet are always onyou have a permanent online presence. This makes it easier for others to find your PC and wreak havoc. Someone can remotely crash your PC, copy your data files, run applications, and find about all your personal financial informations including passwords and credit card numbers. Someone can download a destructive virus in your computer. In an office network setting, you have various types of securities to protect your computer and the network, but home and small-office users with DSL or cable do not have such protections.

Though, the DSL and cable security breaches are hard to come by, but everyone knows that PCs have been repeatedly probed, scanned, and hacked. The standard DSL modem included with your account typically lacks any kind of security features. Connection Basics When you have a dial-up connection, you are relatively safe. You are one of millions of dial-up customers accessing the Net. Your PCs hostname and IP address are temporarily issued more or less at random and they remain yours only as long as you are online. No one can anticipate when you will be online or easily track down your system. With always-on DSL and cable, you have a fixed IP address and host name so your electronic door is always open. When you are connected to the Internet, the Internet is also connected to you. This is with every Web site and e-mail server in the world. The difference is that commercial sites are built with security in mind. Each site is protected behind a few routers and is monitored 24 hours a day by a staff of network professionals. On the contrary, your DSL or cable modem offers little or no protection to the computer connected to it. How Big is the Problem? How big is this problem? It is certainly big but IT companies are corporations and ISPs do not want to talk about this. Corporations do not reveal if their networks or e-commerce sites have been compromised, for the fear of driving away customers. Same is the case with ISPs. Individual users and small companies typically do not get much attention. Many commercial sites have been hacked. Hackers have been able to copy customer names, addresses and credit card numbers. You may not be as big a target after all, because commercial sites store thousands of credit card numbers, while your DSL or cable-connected PC only holds a handful. But even a single attack can be devastating. Your personal web site can be defaced or your e-mails can be manipulated. If any one attacks your computer are reads your files, you may even not know about it. Instead, you may think that it is your computers problem or a bug in your Windows operating system. Most desktop operating systems are not equipped to detect and prevent these attacks. There are sophisticated cyber criminals who are after corporate, banking or government information. They may be even from an enemy country. They attempt to infiltrate banking, credit card and government sites, but they are seldom successful. Which is why they may turn to your PC or small network. Although a large commerce site offers greater treasures, your PC still has something to offer. Tips you should follow Here are a few tips that you can use to save your computer: 1. Till you learn how you should protect your PC, it is a good idea to disconnect the DSL or cable connection when you are not actually using the Internet. 2. Switch to Windows 2000. Windows 95 or 98 do not have enough security feature. Windows 2000 or Windows NT are relatively safe. 3. Turn off file sharing if you are not sharing files with other computers. To ensure file sharing is off, right-click Network Neighborhood and click Properties. Click the button labeled "File and Print Sharing" so that it is not selected. 4. Set up file sharing carefully if you need to use it. Right-click Network Neighborhood, choose Properties and click "File and Print Sharing." Check the box next to "I want to give others access to my files." Next, pick or create a specific folder you will let people access, such as c:\My

Documents\Shared File. In Windows Explorer, right-click the folder and pick Sharing from the context menu. In the dialog box that appears, click the radio button next to Shared As: and enter a name for the folder in the field to the right. 5. You can monitor your shared folders using the Windows Net Watcher utility. The application displays all the users currently connected to shared folders and lets you disconnect them if necessary. The utility is not part of Windows 95 or 98's default installation, but you can install it from your Windows CD-ROM by following these steps: (a) Click Start, Settings, Control Panel and open Add/Remove Programs. (b) Click the Windows Setup tab. In Windows 98, scroll down the list of setup categories and doubleclick System Tools. In Windows 95, find and double-click Accessories. (c) Check the box next to Net Watcher, and click OK twice to exit the dialogs. (d) Windows will install Net Watcher. After your system's rebooted, choose Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Net Watcher to launch the utility. 4. Download system patches. Windows 98 users can head to the Windows Update Web site to automatically download security-related patches for their operating system. If you are still using Windows 95, you will have to download each Security Update patch manually at the Windows 95 Downloads page. Develop good Computing Habits There are a few tips you can use to protect your computer from hackers. Besides this, it is important that you develop good computing habits. You should follow all the tips required to save your computer from viruses: 1. You should use anti-virus software. 2. Open e-mail attachments only when you trust the sender. 3. Do not download files and software from untrusted sources. 4. Protect your passwords. Do not divulge passwords to anyone. We specially careful if someone asks you for password on-line or over the phone. 5. Protect your on-line transactions by using secure browser. Find what you are looking for on the World Wide Web You can find information on nearly every-thing the mind can imagine on the World Wide Web (WWW). This vast information is available to everyone, but it sits there is no organised way. Trekking through the Internets dense jungle of information, can sometimes be a daunting endeavor. With so much of tremendous knowledge floating around the World Wide Web, searching for general information can bury the user with umpteen number of site listings, sometimes many of which are almost irrelevant to your search. There are search engines and directory services that help you find information on the topic or word you enter in the search field. But instead of simply typing a word or a string of words, then clicking the search button, users should understand the features offered by many of Webs search engines and Web directories. So, first lets understand the difference between Engines and Directories? Engines Vs Directories

A search "Engine" actually searches the entire World Wide Web. For this purpose, it utilizes indexing software agents often called robots or spiders. These agents are programmed to constantly "crawl" the Web in search of new or updated pages. All the pages are then indexed by a program that indexes more than a gigabyte of text every hour. The popular search engine is AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com). In contrast to a search engine, an individual, who actually profiles a submission, creates "Directories". Sites are submitted and then assigned to an appropriate category or categories. Directories often provide much more targeted results than search engines. A popular directory is Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com). The Parts of A Search Engine Search engines have three key elements. First is the "Spider" which is also called the "Crawler". The spider visits a Web page, reads it and then follows links to other pages within the site. This is what it means when someone refers to a site being "spidered" or "crawled." The spiders work constantly for all the twenty four hours of a day. Moving at that rate many search engines does not allow site information to remain out of date for long. Every month, the spider returns to the sites to look for any changes. The second part of the search engine is the "Index" which is a repository of data that is been spidered. The index, sometimes referred also as catalog, is like a giant book containing a copy of every web page that the spider finds. If a web page changes, then this book is automatically updated with new information. But in most cases, it can take a while for the new pages or changes that the spider finds to be added to the index. Thus, a web page may have been "spidered" but not yet "indexed." Until it is indexed (meaning added to the index) it is not available to those searching with the search engine. The search engine "software" is the third part. This is the program that shifts through the millions of pages recorded in the index to find matches to a search and rank them in order of what it believes is most relevant. Search Logic: Using Boolean Operators in Search Strategies "Boolean" searching draws its name from George Boole, a mathematician and logician from the 19th century. He developed Boolean algebra, which is the basis for this form of structured search technique. Boolean logic is used to construct search statements using logical operators and specified syntax. These are combined into Boolean expressions, which always are either true or false when evaluated. Once you decide on your search tool, however, you must decide on a particular way to phrase your research questions called a "query" or "search strategy". Vast majority of search tools support search queries that include boolean operators, a group of small, simple words used to define the relationship between the words of your query. Anyone can search through the traditional databases by using the most common boolean operators, which are: Boolean operator OR When used between two words, the OR operator instructs the search tool to retrieve any records containing either of the words. The OR operator is useful for the first phases of a search, when you are not exactly sure what information is available on your topic or what words are used to categorize it. For instance, the search query typing Computer OR Internet in the search field. This search query would return pages that use at least one of the two words Computer or Internet. This search would return most hits (items meeting the search criteria). Search criteria containing OR, are very broad and many times return items that are not relevant to your subject. Boolean operator AND The AND operator is useful when you need to narrow your search criteria. AND operator, limits results to those sites that contain both (or all) of the search terms in your query. For instance, the

search query Computer AND Internet. This search query would return a much smaller set of hits than the query Computer or Internet. With AND operator, the items would be more applicable to the field of Computers and the Internet. Boolean operator NOT The NOT operator is used to eliminate records containing a particular word or combinations of words from your search results. For instance, the search query Management NOT Accounting. This search would return all items containing the word "Management" and exclude those sites that also contain the word Accounting. Search Strengths As most of the Webs engines and directories share some similar characteristics in the art of searching and each one also offers its own strengths and features. Lets us try and understand the functionality of two major search engines. Yahoo! Yahoo! Is one of the top search tools, in terms of number of users and its also the most friendliest search engines. The Web directory will rank the hits of your search by placing the pages with more matching keywords higher than ones with few keywords. Users also have the option of searching for their topic among news articles and Net events. Yahoo! directory search is made up of 14 main subjects, including Arts and Humanities, Business and Economy, Computers and Internet etc. Every site listed by Yahoo! is contained somewhere within these 14 major categories. Each one of the main categories is made up of sub-categories, all organizing information from the general to the specific. Commercial or Non-Commercial? Yahoo! always distinguishes between commercial and non-commercial sites. If you are searching for information, which is any way commercial, meaning a commercial site promotes, sells goods and services or promotes a company that sells goods and services. If you want to search for a Company information, then the site belongs somewhere in the Business and Economy of Yahoo!, more likely within Business and Economy: Companies category. Lastly, when you browse and search your way through Yahoo! you should look for the appropriate category. Everything is available on WWW. AltaVista AltaVista search is one of the most powerful tools on the Internet. AltaVista help pages enables surfer to get the maximum results for their search query. The AltaVista search service helps you find Web pages, news, discussions, product images or audio clips. Enter search keywords, phrases or questions in the search box. The search service respond by giving you a list of all the Web pages, news, discussions and products in the index relating to those products. The most relevant content will appear at the top of your results. Final Word: Tips The Internet does provide numerous Web pages for the searcher to look for information. A surfer can easily get confused and leave lot of relevant information. The best thing is to use focused search strings. In cases when a search has resulted in a few results then, check the spelling for the keywords, rephrase keywords, caution while using capitals in keywords other than proper nouns, e.g., Mahatma Gandhi and separate proper nouns with commas; otherwise, the engine will include all

names as a single search. Also search through different collections, listed under categories that are relevant to your search. Lastly, understanding of information contained in the Internet is an on-going learning process. But, by focusing on search goals and becoming familiar with a few search engines and its features, finding data you need does not have to be a frustrating experience. Registering Your Own Domainname To have your own Web site, it is not necessary that you register your own domain name. Many ISPs and popular Web sites, let you post your own Web pages on their site. However, if you prefer to have your own domainname that is easy to remember, then you can get a suitable and proper domainname by registering the desired name with domain name registration service. The domainnames ending with com, org, edu or net are meant only for servers situated in USA. At one time, only InterNIC co-creator Network Solutions was responsible for registering domainnames. Recently, this has changed and now many organizations register these domains. Network Solutions (http://www.networksolutions.com) is still the leading registrar of this domain. Some other registrars are Register.com (http://www.register.com) and Domain Bank Inc (http://www.domainbank.net). Initially you register the domain name for a period of two years and renew it annually after that. Some of these organizations and ISPs even provide free parking for your domain name. This means that they will host your sites home page for free for a limited period of time, till you sign up with an ISP for server space. Domainnames ending with co.in, net.in and ernet.in are meant for servers in India and are registered in India. The registering authority is National Centre for Software Technology (NCST), as they were the first Internet node in India. At present you can register a domainname for free, but your site must be on a server in India. Also no Indian company is providing free domain name parking. Some new ISPs may be willing to do so. The domainnames ending with com, org, edu and net are initially registered for a period of two years and the charges for two years are $70. Up to a year back, you had to send bank draft directly to Network Solutions. The name must be unique. Now you can pay in Indian rupees through agencies. Network Solutions now has some partners in India who accept payment in rupees. If you are interested in your own domain name, then you should call or e-mail one of these partner and ask for information about registering your domain name. Also find out if they are willing to provide free parking. In India, You can contact one of the following partners: 1. Cyberweb Global Services, Tel: 22-8642711, e-mail: hiten@cyberwebglobal.com, http://www.cyberwebglobal.com 2. Delhinet, Tel: Delhi 11-6282000, e-mail: sales@delhinet.com Tel: Calcutta 98310-59042 e-mail: calcutta@delhinet.com 3. Datcom Services Tel: 11-2161227 e-mail: sales@dotcos.com

http://www.dotcos.com 4. Indialinks, Tel: 22-8649346 e-mail: sales@indialinks.com http://www.indialinks.com 5. Innovative Creations, Tel: 22-8340787 e-mail: info@worldindia.com http://www.worldindia.com 6. Planet India Website Limited, Tel: 11-6962129 http:// planetindia.net 7. Satyam Infoway Limited, Tel: 44-4353221, 4326301 e-mail: domainreg@satyam-infoway.com http://www.satyamonline.com 8. WebIndia Internet Services (Chennai) Pvt Ltd, Tel: 44-6422616, 6448294 e-mail: info@webindia.com 9. Web Works, Tel: 22-4330314 e-mail: info@wwindia.com http://www.wwindia.com The first step for registering a domain name is choosing a proper domain name. A good domain name has minimum letters and has some meaning or points to the name of your organization or product. Finding a good domain name is a tough job as the chances are that the name you want has already been registered. It is very important that you spend some time to decide on most suitable domain names in order of preference. The next steps is to go to Network Solutions Web site (or any other site you choose) and use Search For A Domain name feature to see if the domain name you want is already in use. In this search you do not need to enter .com, .org or .net. The search screen will tell you if any of these three is available. It should be noted that most sought after extension is .com. And if you are able to register a good name, then you have already made a profit. Some Web names are worth millions of dollars. Cash in Domain Names Recently the domain name business.com was reportedly sold for $7.3 million. The interesting part is that the seller had just purchased it from the original buyer for just $100,000! Thus he makes a profit of just $7.2 million in three months period. If you have some interesting domain name, you can try your luck. There are sites that specialise in selling domain names. One popular site is Greatdomains.com. There are some auction sites also. The domainname should have minimum number of alphabets and should have useful meaning. For example, listen.com is a music directory. The domainname computersandinternet.com tells readers that the site is about Computers and the Internet but it is too long.

Internet Telephony: Creating a revolution in communications Only about two years back, the only method available to make a long distance call was to pick up the telephone receiver, dial the number, and your voice was carried Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). Now the the Internet has changed the scene. When the Internet appeared, in the beginning, it was used mainly to share data and communicate via e-mail. Eventually, the Internet got better and faster, and it became possible to send other kinds of data including voice. Voice over IP (VoIP) is the technology used to send voice data over the Internet or an intranet that relies on the Internet Protocol (IP). This new telephony is called IP telephony. IP telephony is changing the ways we communicate with each other, making it cheaper and easier to communicate with persons and machines all over the globe. IP telephony is also called the Internet telephony if some part of these calls are routed over the Internet itself, whereas it is called online telephony if it uses a network like intranet to route the calls. The IP telephony differs from the regular PSTN telephony because unlike PSTN telephony, the IP telephony does not require a dedicated connection from one end to the other end. Telephone companies using PSTN technolgoy had to invest a large amount of money for these dedicated lines, whereas Internet telephony does not require any such investment. Also, IP telephone technology is different from PSTN technology becaue it does not transmit voice signals as analog signals, instead the voice data is digitized, broken into packets, and sent over an IP network. The packets are reassembled at the receiving end to tranform it into the original voice of the sender. The cost is significantly lower than that of regular long-distance calls. In the initial stages of IP telephony, the voice quality was a poor and there were skips. In last one or two years, the quality has improved considerably. Now VoIP ranges from programs that can connect two individual PCs over the Net, to sophisticated corporate software and hardware that can connect office PBXs around the globe, place either via the public Internet or via the organization's wide area network-cum-intranet. The VoIP technology is helping companies save money on long distance calls and faxes, but there is a limitaion on whom and where you can call. This is mainly because there are no agreed-upon standards for IP telephony. The VoIP communications involves proprietary software and hardware. Therefore if you want to talk to someone over the Internet, both sides must use the same software, they must be on-line at the same time, and in some cases use the same hardware. With corporate VoIP solutions, every office must have its own gateway hardware and from the same vendor. With the PC-to-PC telephony connections, you can talk to friend anywhere in the world, providing both of you are connected to the Internet, have the same VoIP software, and have PCs equipped with a sound card, speakers, and a microphone. The voice quality is coherent only if both side have fast Internet connections, but it still does not match that of Telephone Network. With branch office connections, every office on your private phone system must have its own gateway, otherwise if you do not want to invest of gateways, you can use the services of gateway companies. Some gateway companies (such as ITXC: www.itxc.com) have already established VoIP gateways in major cities around the world. You simply call the services local gateway (a local phone call over the PSTN), which would route your call from over the Internet to the gateway in another country, e.g., from USA to London. From the gateway in London, your call would be transferred to the PSTN to make the local connection. ITXCs charges are far less than regular PSTN charges. The VoIP companies has the ability to pick up your telephone and call anyone in the world, and then have that call routed over the Internet. Eventually, IP telephony is expected to replace your long distance carrier completely, however it is not yet ready and at present you can use it to augment your regular phone setup. The two main hurdles are that no universal standard exists and everyone uses proprietary software and hardware, and that the voice quality over VoIP still cannot match everyday telephone service. Various type of VoIP communications

VoIP communication can range from PC-to-PC chat to telephone to telephone call. Let us see what VoIP has to offer. But it should be noted that these facilities are not available in India though many individuals and companies do use them in one way or other. 1. PC to PC Chat or Phone Call For a voice-enabled chat both computers need a fast modem (28.8Kbps or faster), dial-up connection, multimedia PC with Pentium CPU, speakers, microphone and full-duplex sound card. Both parties must have the same telephony software (like Microsoft NetMeeting) and be on-line at the same time. At times the sound quality is good and at times it falls substantially. Also if your microphone is near the speakers or the sound from speakers is too loud, you will hear echo. To have some improvement you can use a directional microphone. It is much better idea to use headset instead of speakers and microphone. The Microsoft NetMeeting allows for audio conferencing, also text-based chat, video conferencing and an electronic whiteboard. Multitudes Firetalk 1 (www.firetalk.com lets you create a voice-chat community at your Web site on the spot. Visitors just download the free software, click the names in their personal contacts list to talk or join a group chat in progress. If the person you want to talk to is off-line, then Firetalk can send him/her an immediate e-mail invitation to join in. The PC to PC VoIP lets you call another person over the Internet. Some chat products, such as Firetalk, let you bypass public chat rooms and call PC-to-PC. Both parties must be on-line at the same time and use the same software. You can use ICQ software to know when your buddy is online and you can call him. At times may have to call him with a regular telephone, tell them to get on-line, hang up, go on to the Net and connect with him via your Internet telephone software. That may be fine for talking with a pal, but it is not the proper way to make a business call. Some PC-to-PC VoIP programs include Softfone for Internet V3 (www.pak.net/softfone.htm) and MITs free PGPfone (web.mit.edu/network/pgpfone/pgpfone-form.html) even let you send video along with your voice. But over a typical dial-up line, your video will look robotic and grainy. If you have a T1 connection or a cable connection or a DSL line, video will appear far more smoothly. Both chat and PC-to-PC VoIP programs require some tweaking of your microphone and speaker settings via Windows Multimedia control panel and the recording/playback levels via the VoIP program. 2. Web site telephone calls The VoIP technology allows you to call your customers from your Web site. With Web calling the visitors at your site can click a button and talk to a sales representative or technician. Web calling is all the rage in the e-commerce world. The requirements are customer dial-up connection, multimedia PC; merchant/server software running on dedicated server or single-purpose gateway device and fast Internet connection. This involves installing, maintaining and operating in-house gateway hardware. You can get rid of these hassles if you use third-party services that charge you a monthly or per-minute basis. Programs such as VocalTecs Surf&Call (www.vocaltec.com), give you a link of HTML code that you can paste into your Web page. The code creates a button on your site that users press to establish an immediate voice connection. The only thing visitors need is a free plug-in for their browsers. Web sites must purchase and install the VocalTec Telephony Gateway and software to route Web calls to employees via the regular phone network. Another provider is Callmefree.com (www.callmefree.com), which for a small monthly flat, lets you take unlimited calls from anywhere. 3. Direct Internet Gateways VoIP lets you place calls between branch offices over the Internet or your intranet WAN. Your company can be its own long distance carrier. The requirements are dedicated VoIP gateway hardware or software running on dedicated server, T1 or Ethernet connection. The sound quality is

good over the Internet and excellent over private IP network. The biggest hassle is setup and maintenance and initial cost. With IP gateway hardware installed at PBXs at every branch office, workers merely pick up the phone and dial to make long distance calls to any office. The call is picked up by the PBX and passed to the gateway, which routes it over the Internet to another offices gateway, where the process is then reversed. There are no long distance charges, but setting it up requires an experienced telecom person. However, many gateway vendors do set everything up, leaving you with a turnkey solution that most network administrators can maintain. Inter-Tels InterPrise 400 gateway (www.inter-tel.com) can accept voice from a standard PBX, key system or central office telephone switch and convert it into data packets. It works with existing telephones and it boasts a user-friendly interface, so you do not need an expert to maintain it. 4. PC to telephone calls The VoIP technology lets you place calls from your PC to a telephone. The per-minute charges are far less than traditional long distance carrier. The companies such as Net2Phone (www.net2phone.com) have VoIP gateways in countries all over the world. You need is a Net2Phone software and register with the company. After you have set an account, you have to prepay to get some usage time. To place a call, you simply dial the phone number of the person you want to talk to. Your call travels over the Internet to Net2phones gateway in that distant land, which in turn hands it off to the local phone system, which connects with your recipient. 5. Voice mail Several companies offer Web-based voice mail services, where callers can leave messages for you and you can retrieve them via phone or Web from anywhere in the world. For example, Qmessage (www.qmessage.com) is a voice mail service that works with your ICQ pager. If someone calls and leaves a voice mail, a message is sent to your pager. To listen to the voice mail (via RealAudio), you simply surf over to the Qmessage.com Web site and retrieve the voice data. Pros and Cons of VoIP Communication Making an Internet voice call is not just picking up the phone and dialing. It has many hassles and many persons will still like to use the services of regular telephone company. Internet telephony needs installing the VoIP software; which is though simple and automated. You need duplex sound card. Then you have to adjust your speakers and microphone (or headset). Once on-line, you surf over to a server operated by the VoIP software vendor. If you are connecting offices with your own VoIP gateway products, it not so easy to set up. However, products like MultiTechs MultiVoIP (www.multitech.com/voip) gateway are becoming increasingly plug-and-play. According to the company, you just hook the unit to your PBX and network, map phone numbers to PC and Mac IP addresses on your network and start dialing. It also has some intelligence if network traffic peaks, voice can be given priority over data. And there is a range of management tools to make the IS departments life easier remote management via Web browser, usage and call reports and more. Once your gateways are installed and connected to each branchs PBX, all you do is pick up the phone and dial. The PBX will recognize that you are dialing a number that should be routed over the Internet and will transparently route that call through the gateway and make the appropriate connection. Unlike IP telephony, the traditional phone system dedicates an entire wire to your conversation. This provides the highest level of quality, but it leaves a lot of bandwidth unused. IP transmission is packet based networking and lets you send multiple transmissions simultaneously over the same wire, because each packet of information has address information that is used at the receiving end to reassemble the data.

In packet-based networking, the packets do not typically arrive in order and reassembling them causes some delay or latency. If there is line noise or heavy traffic on the Internet, some packets may be lost or corrupted and have to be retransmitted. That adds a few more milliseconds of delay. And since IP uses packets of varying size, packets carrying voice could get stuck behind a series of large, low-priority packets, causing even further delay. Such delays (in milliseconds) are not a problem with static computer data, but with voice or video it makes a big difference. The voice you hear on the other end may be fuzzy or jittery. If the delay in one direction is more than a quarter of a second, you will also get echo or feel vibrations. ATM Technology Networking technologies, such as ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) provides solution to many IP telephony problems. Like the PSTN, an ATM connection creates a fixed channel. Since it uses IP set of rules, the data, voice and video are sent in packets, but in small packets that are the same size. This means no one data type can hog the channel. On the downside, ATM is not very flexible when network traffic swells, it is expensive to implement and quite complicated. ATM is not fit for small businesses with just a few branch offices. There has been constant progress in improving VoIP quality, but the quality of sound still depends upon your own PC, your modem, your sound card and your ISP. Besides this there are few agreedupon standards in the IP telephony market. Your e-mail: Tips for busy persons For a busy person, here are some useful tricks that he should follow to improve his efficiency, and make the job easier while handling e-mail messages. 1. Read e-mails only when it is convenient to you

You may read e-mails a few times a day, but you should do this only when it is convenient to you. If you are on your computer and and get a new e-mail, this is no reason for you to immediately read your new mail. Do not worry about missing an urgent e-mail. Many people now use answering machines and ignore ringing telephone, when they are busy. Only when they get time, they listen to the phone call messages. When they call back, they first assemble information they need to answer questions. Use same approach with e-mail messages. 2. You need not read all the e-mail messages

You will get lot of Spam messages. You do not need to read those messages, unless you are interested. In some e-mails, the subject line is enough and in some cases subject line give you enough idea about the importance of the message. If you exchange much e-mail with your friends and colleagues, then you can agree on codes to put in the subject like to differentiate between things that are vital or important to know. 3. Print long e-mails that are important

When you are reading your e-mails, you may find some of the e-mails that are important for you but they are not urgent. Maybe, it is better idea to print them and read them later. 4. Organise your e-mails

For filing important papers, everyone uses a filing system different files for different purposes. Similarly, for the e-mails that you save, you should set up folders.

If you are using outlook express, then you should have many folders in your Inbox folder, e.g., friends, relatives, jokes. For creating a new folder, from the File menu select Folder and then select New. You will see "Create Folder" dialog box on the screen. In "Folder Name:" field, enter the name of new folder and select the folder in which you want to create the new folder and then click OK. Open your Inbox and then drag and drop mails to new folders. You can do this job of organising files, even when you talk on a phone, surfing the net or even printing something. 5. Hundreds of old e-mails

Your Inbox may already have hundreds of e-mails. You find it hard to organise them. Better create an Archive folder in your Inbox and drop all the old mails in that folder. Now put all your future emails in proper folders. Do not wait. Keep in mind "if I dont do it now, I never will." If you get time, then try to organise your Archive folder. If you find, that you have not used it in last two or three months, then delete them if you can bear to do so. 6. Set time limits for surfing

The Web is huge and has so much to offer, but you should not explorer the Internet for more than a limited time; set a time limit. When you are surfing, be very clear what you are looking for, otherwise, you can spend time zipping from one link to another, wasting lot of your valuable time. You can easily get lost. 7. Unsubscribe many e-mail newsletter If you do lot of surfing, you will end up getting lot of communications from some of the sites you have visited. Most of them have a method to unsubscribe and you should do that for most of the sites. 8. Learn to use your tools Set aside at least 10 minutes every day to learn one or two new things about your computer or other gadgets. For example, if you are using Internet Explorer, it pays to get really proficient in using Internet Explorer. This is true with your e-mail software and other applications that you use regularly. Besides, learning about your computer, you should learn to use other useful tools such as cellular phone, answering machines and electronic personal organizers.

Understanding the World Wide Web

We read and hear daily about the Internet or the "Net". And associated with the Internet, everyone talks about "surfing the Web" and "cruising through cyberspace", which refer to "exploring the World Wide Web." The term World Wide Web, or WWW, or Web is a computer application that is bringing masses to the Internet. This application has made it possible for any computer user to find information on anything the mind can imagine. Before you begin to explore the Web, it is helpful to know some basics about the Web. The Web and the Internet

The Web and the Internet are two separate entities that work together. The Internet is a global system of connected computers. The Web is a collection of electronic documents stored on computers worldwide, which means on the Internet. The Internet was born in 1960s as an experiment by the U.S. Department of Defense. The Department developed a network of computers in which the individual computers of the network did not depend wholly of the main or central computer and could communicate with each other without the help of the central computer. The aim was to achieve a network in which if the central computer was blinded by enemy attack, the communication between remaining computers could still be carried out. The networking model developed by U.S. defense became popular. Since then, the "Net" grew into a vast global network linking thousands of smaller computer networks, which connected over 100 million computers. The "Net" became the "Internet". These computers, scattered throughout the world, connect the Internet via a system of telephone lines, satellite links, and other transmission methods. The Internet technology makes it possible for these computers to understand each other's electronic language and thus exchange information on a worldwide scale. The World Wide Web is a collection of information available through the Internet. Its a collection of electronic documents stored on the computers worldwide. At the click of a mouse button or the touch of a key, the users can crisscross the global information maze without requiring any technical understanding of how, where, why, or by whom. The computers connected to the Internet can send and receive these Web documents easily. A vast amount of information is added daily on the World Wide Web. The Web is exciting because computer users have access to millions and millions of Web pages from all over the globe containing all kinds of information. The Web accepts text (with all different fonts, sizes and styles), graphics, animation, sound, and movies. Graphics are photos, colors, and other design elements that make the Web interesting. The term graphics include animation and even sound and movies. The text, the graphics, the animation, the sound and the movies are all interconnected with hyperlinks. The hyperlinks make it easy to navigate by allowing users to jump from one document to another with a simple mouse-click. The Web browser The Web began its rise in 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee, a consultant at the Swiss research laboratory CERN, used it to share research data with other physicists. Berners-Lee and CERN developers wrote a program that ran on many types of computer systems, enabling scientists everywhere to access research documents via the Internet. This program became known as a Web browser. In fact, the popularity of Web rose only after the creation of Mosaicthe first well-known graphical Web browser. It was developed by the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and was distributed freely over the Internet. A Web browser is software that lets users gain access to and navigate the Web. A Web browser can interpret the links embedded in the documents and access the related documents on demand. Mosaic has become a model for new versions of all graphical Web browsers. In 1994, some of the Mosaic team, led by Marc Andreessen, left NCSA to create their own for-profit ventureNetscape Communications Corp. From this new company the Netscape Navigator Web browser was born. Netscape includes some more advanced features not incorporated in Mosaic. One special feature is its ability to begin navigating within a Web page even before its contents are completely downloaded to the client. Noticing Netscapes success, Microsoft Corporation got into the act with its own Microsoft Internet Explorer. Mosaic, Netscape and Internet Explorer made the Web easy to access for any computer owner equipped with a modem and an Internet connection. A modem is hardware that lets computers transmit and receive information over telephone lines. For the Internet connection, you need the services of Internet Service Provider (ISP). Web sites began busting out all over the Internet as the

number of computers storing Web documents soared and the number of people accessing the Net kept a similar pace. Universities, colleges, libraries, businesses, research institutions all began putting more and more information on their Web sites. Thanks to user-friendly browsers, the Web has not looked back since. In about five years, the Web has changed the way people all over the world communicate with each other. What started as an experiment has grown to include information on everything the mind can imagine. The Web publishing On the Web you can find information on everything. And if you could not find what they want, then you can create it yourselves. Personal Web publishing has taken the medium by storm. Web pages are becoming easier to produce all the time. Most new versions of popular word-processing programs have a built-in HTML editor. This lets even computer novice to share their views. Most new versions of popular word-processing programs such as Microsoft Word and WordPerfect now contain programs that allow everyday people to quickly and easily create Web documents. Because of this, information is being added daily on the Web from all corners of world. Surfing the Web is as easy as clicking the links that join documents together. These links and this easy connectivity are what gave the Web its name. Hypertext The Web Links The WWW has evolved around the concept of hypertext. What is hypertext? To learn about hypertext, let us review how do we read a printed book. In a printed reference book, you can read sequentially through the text, or manually skip through the pages to locate information of specific importance to you, usually with the aid of an index or table of contents. The same applies when information is displayed in electronic form. While reading a text, you can get additional information about a specific word or paragraph by following the links provided in the text. Imagine reading a passage of text and a word (or concept) attracts your attention. Occasionally, you might continue reading through the text, waiting patiently until the concept is developed later on. But more likely you may want to move on and read the connected passage, before eventually returning to where you left off. Hypertext software allows information to be displayed and accessed in a manner that responds to the process. Keywords are linked to the other passages. These keywords are displayed on screen in a different colour, italicized or underlined, allowing them to be readily identified by readers. By moving the cursor or mouse pointer to the highlighted keyword and clicking, readers are taken to the related information. Hypertext is a term created to describe nonlinear text in which you follow associative paths. Hypertext is a software-based tool which enables text to be displayed in a manner we read books. This is achieved by incorporating links in texts, which enable us to jump to another part of the document, which contains related information, and then return to where we left off. A link points to a file on the same or another Internet machine at a different location. Any Web page can have a large number of links. Let us say you were interested in finding information about cars. In a document that you find online about cars, you notice that the name of each model is highlighted in a certain way (different colour, in italics, etc.). If you want to find more information about any of those highlighted models, you need to move your cursor or mouse pointer to that highlighted text, and click on it. Your screen will then display a secondary document about that model, which itself might contain highlighted words, allowing you to access more specific information about that model. The documents might also have links to other information on related topics, such as combustion engines or car import regulations. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)

The World Wide Web connects people to more than 100 million Web pages from all over the globe containing all kinds of information. The thread pulling it all together is Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the standard code used for creating and formatting Web pages. HTML is a text-based markup language that all the Web browsers are able to understand and intercept. HTML is a way of representing text and linking that text to other kinds of information such as graphics, animation, sound and multimedia and allowing different kinds of data to be displayed together. HTML documents include both the text you see on a Web page along with formatting tags that give browsers commands such as which words to display in bold, where graphics go, and how tables should look. At present there are over 8 million Web sites. The Web is so huge that you need the services of a Search engine to help you search information on a specific topic or word. Search engines help you shift through more than 100 million Web pages on the Internet. Search engines are the best way to find the information you are looking for on the Web. A search engine is a special kind of Web site used to find other Web sites. Search engines take a word or phrase and hunt through lists of Web pages to find ones that seem to match what you are trying to find. Some popular search engines are AltaVista, Yahoo!, Infoseek, Hotbot and Lycos. URL Universal Resource Locator Most importantly, HTML tags also designate which words and graphics in a document are hypertext links and which page is to be loaded when those links are clicked. Each hypertext link (also called a hyperlink or simply a link) points to a certain Universal Resource Locator (URL, also called a Web address), which is like an address of a document on the Internet. URLs are standardized shorthand method of locating documents on the Internet. With the correct URL, your Web browser can find and display any Web page anywhere in the world. An example of URL on Web is http://www.economictimes.com First http part tells that the information is in hypertext format and you need to use a Web browser to access this information. Next part www.economictimes.com is the host machine that is running the Web server. For fast access to a Web site when you know the URL, you can type it directly into your browsers Address box. The newest versions of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer do not even make you type in the "http://" part of the address. The program automatically assumes that part of the address, saving you some work. The Web sites Web pages are organized into a Web site. Think of sites as booklets or pamphlets. A site often contains several pages, all linked to that Web siteit is just like the pages of a booklet. Most Web sites start out with a home page that introduces the site to the world. This home page is similar to the front cover of a pamphlet or its table of contents. The home page typically contains links to other pages within the site and often links to other sites. You might think of these links a bibliography or reference section. By clicking these links, as you can view other information stored somewhere else on the Net. All the documents accessible through the Web are woven together by this system of hyperlinks, which act as pointers to other sites or pages. Clicking a link tells the computer to locate and load the site referenced in the HTML code. To make things simple for users, hyperlinks are often distinguished by a different text color, are underlined, or are highlighted words and graphics. When the arrow cursor stops on a hyperlink in most Web browsers, an icon of a tiny hand appears. Thats the signal that a link awaits. Pages linked to a particular document do not have to be located on the same server, or host computer, on which the site lives. In fact, the linked page might be on any computer connected to the Internet anywhere.

Regardless of the physical location of a site you want to visit, you can access them all from your home with no additional long-distance telephone charges. It is a little like traveling the world for free. Hopping from link to link this way is what people mean when they speak of "surfing" the Web. The Web servers At your end "surfing the Web" is as simple as clicking mouse, but what you cant see is that there are many computers labouring to make those hyperlinks work. Web documents are stored on Internet-connected computers called Web servers. Clicking a hyperlink causes your Web browsing program to send a request to the Web server in question via the Internet. The server receives the request and sends a copy of the page back through the Internet to your computer. The copy is stored temporarily on your hard drive so it can be displayed in the browser window according to the HTML formatting instructions. When a request is sent to a server, you do have to wait for some time for the server to respond and for all of a pages data to arrive at your computer. Web browsers cannot speed up things for you. A browser is just a tool for viewing Web files that have arrived at your computer. They can only display information available to them. Of course, popular browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer also do a lot of other Web tasks that make using the Internet simple. One of the handiest features is the bookmark or favourites list. With this tool, you can create shortcuts to places you like on the Web to call them up again later. Marking pages this way puts them in a special drop-down menu all you have to do is click and youre there. The World Of The Web The Web offers an amazing amount of information on each and every topic. Opportunities are infinite. Companies and business are offering more and more services through the Web. Sitting in your home, you can check your bank account statement or ask your bank to make a payment. You can make travel reservations. You can invest in stock of your choice or send a flower-bouquet to your relative or friend in almost any part of the world. Here are just a few of the types of information you can find on the Web. 1. The latest news. Almost all popular newspapers of the world have their own Web sites. It is possible to access breaking news almost as it happens. Worlds foremost news channel CNN is online and is generally as up-to-date as the televised version. Several local newspapers & magazines are on-line including Hindustan Times, The Hindu, Times of India, Economic Times, and India Today. Whatever your news hankering is, there is a fix for you online. For sports lovers there is ESPN. There are separate Web sites for cricket, horse racing, football, wrestling, etc. 2. Any kind of information. The Web is a terrific tool for research. Universities, libraries and government institutions all use the Web as a means of putting information before the public. If youre doing a research paper, you need not be limited to the resources in your college/university library. Millions of documents exist on the Web and you can fetch them in very short time. You can get latest knowledge about almost any medical problem what is happening and where? 3. All sorts of software. If you are having difficulties with your computers software, chances are that you will find the help you need on the Web. Most major and many minor software companies have Web sites where you can find the software needed by you. Also there are plenty of other users, who love to share the remedies. A basic search for the product name should pop up several options. 4. In many communities, you can jump on your computer and reserve a book at the local library, request a form from a college/university or a government/business organization.

5. The worlds largest mail-order catalogue. Cannot find what you need around? Someone on the Web probably sells it. The Web allows any small business to market itself to a global audience. Buying something on the Web is almost as easy and fast as picking it up at the local shopping centre. 6. Publish your own ideas. One of the most powerful resources the Web has to offer is the global soapbox. Never in the history of oration has there been such a powerful medium. Now computer users all over the world can easily create their own Web pages, giving them the opportunity to share their thoughts, opinions, and visions with the rest of the online world. 7. On-line electronic forms. A new concept of WWW is the on-line electronic forms that you can fill in. With Internet this is a very powerful feature as it makes possible all sorts of application, survey forms and also to order on-line reservations and many other applications. Java and the Web Web sites are beginning to do more than simply make all these types of information available to the Internet community. Programming languages such as Java, has added life to lifeless Web pages. Some Web sites have animated sequences, sound clips, scrolling banners or flashing messages. The little dancing icons and singing cartoons are applets. These are small Java applications that download quickly and easily into a browser. Java is a special computer language formulated by Sun Microsystems to work over the Internet. The special feature of Java is that it runs on many different platforms. This is very important as far as Web sites are concerned. When you are making you own Web page, you do not know which machine is going to download it. So if you introduce small software written in Java in your Web page, then it is in universal language that is understood by almost all types of machines. Some Web pages include small programs written in Java that do things such as add animations and other complex tasks. Web pages also are becoming more sophisticated when it comes to multimedia. Although moving video and sound can take a long time to download over modem connections, a growing number of sites are incorporating these elements into their designs. One interesting development that actually works at todays slow download speeds is streaming audio, a sort of Internet radio that allows users to hear sound recordings without waiting for long downloads. Multimedia and Java-like applets are certain to show up in more and more Web sites as computing ability grows and home user connection speeds increase. The Web is already one of the most diverse mediums available, and new technologies such as these and more that we cant yet imagine are bound to push it into even more directions. WEBTV: Internet Surfing with a TV WebTV is a way to access the Internet through your television set. You do not need to own a computer and there is no software to load. All you need to explore the Internet is a television set, a phone line, and a WebTV Internet terminal. Now all you have to do, to connect to the Internet and surf, is to press a few buttons on the remote controller or infrared keyboard supplied along with WebTV terminal. It provides a fun and easy way to access the internet. Web TV is a newly developed technology an all-in-one, TV-based on-line service to the Internet. This technology is designed to eliminate the complexities and hassles consumers experience when accessing the Internet via a personal computer. When you turn on the Internet box placed on your TV, it automatically dials a telephone number, figures out where you are, attaches to a local Internet service provider and in moments displays the Web TVs Net directory via its browser. Not every one has a computer. Even in USA, only 30% of the people own a computer and 70% of these computers are obsolete. Only 19% of the computers owner are on the Internet. In the past two years, the Internet business has grown by 147,000%. This industry is predicted to create $300 billion in revenue by the year 2000. Web TV was introduced with an idea to provide a simple and

affordable means for the other 81% to access the Internet. It does not interrupt regular television services. Web TV is not a computer. You cannot download programs and PC software because Web TV does not have a hard drive. Web TV marks the start of a long-term effort to combine the best of the Internet and the best of digital television technology. Web TV immediately transforms your TV into an easily accessible information highway. It can be used as an educational tool for the whole family. Students can easily find information to finish reports and homework. Many computer users own Web TV because they can now send and receiver e-mails. You can actively participate in Chat Groups and Forums. It is very easy to operate. No computer, no modem and no software are necessary. Only a Web TV internet terminal, television and telephone line are required. The Web TV internet terminal supports up to six users with no additional charge. The Web TV internet terminal was designed to compete or replace the personal computer. The internet terminal provides access to D-1 studio master (broadcast quality) quality images. Users can communicate through e-mail. It provides easy access to the internet. Web TV multimedia extensions provide for animation, video special effects, transitions and TV-specialized layout. An onscreen options bar makes common functions accessible. A flash ROM auto-update keeps the Web TV browser current with the latest extensions and plug-ins. Other features include: Excite Search capability, parental control interface to block childrens access to undesirable material, European font compatibility (French, Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, etc.), built in help system, automatic URL completion and large text size option. Web TV is a great way to send and receive e-mail, which will make purchasing a keyboard necessary. Since there is no local storage, your mail is stored on Web TVs servers. Families can configure up to five personal accounts, with separate passwords and e-mail boxes. The costs of buying Web TV are substantially less than buying a personal computer. Most complete packages will not cost more than $300. Sony offers a Web TV box for $299, which includes a remote. For another $29, you can buy a keyboard and an optional printer adapter for $79. Philips Magnavox offers the Web TV box for $249.99. TV owners can buy a desktop attachment at much lesser cost.

Information on a Web site typically ranges from company products and services to in-depth technical information. E-commerce is growing rapidly and many merchants are keen to benefit from this new technology. Internet is a different sales medium and marketers will have to learn new skills and attitudes to be successful. In the global market, E-commerce is no more in its nascent stage. A number of E-com sites have been looking at exploring the new utilities to promote sales and traffic on their sites. Ever come across web sites covering a live event or construction company sites taking their clients for a live viewing of the site? Well, close your eyes for a moment and imagine, while sipping a cup of hot coffee in your household comforts you can tour your sons prospective campus, get a visual update on the traffic in your locality or watch your valuables and loved ones during the most hectic working schedules, life would be so easy. Sounds great!!! Well, it is a reality in many parts of the globe today and will not take long to be a regular feature on the Web.

Webcam is one of the latest techniques that promise to give a major facelift to the traditional brick and mortar business and enhance online shopping. Webcams are everywhere and their number has grown six times in the past three years. Webcams produce frequently updating images on the Internet. Since it does not need a special browser plug-ins or software to view these live images it has a vast potential to generate a near-unlimited number of simultaneous users to tune in. Because of the sheer ease of installation and use of Webcams, these little Internet marvels are fast becoming the medium of choice for digital information on the web.

A WebCam can be used to get live images of people, things and places around the world with a camera pointing to, at that particular instant of time. A Webcam produces a web page which hosts images or even live video streams served by a digital Camera attached to a computer. Earlier, only a few had the technology and the resources to keep a camera refreshing an image 24 hours a day and to face bandwidth consumption problems. Now, for less than $100 and an Internet dial-up connection, you can set up your own camera on the Internet. The appeal of a video is to hook a visitor with interactive, live product or event, rather than a static catalogue. See it and buy it is the camera approach. Live video is also the best way to complete a transaction specially when visitors are in the store and wants to consult their spouses who are in a remote location. Applications of Webcams. Webcam definitely improves your shopping experience and adds some life to you commercial website. Apart from this, you can keep in touch with your family, watch your children at the daycare center, keep an eye on your possessions, or travel the world from your desktop. They also have more important uses like remote surveillance and monitoring events and places.

A WebCam is a camera system producing a video image that can be viewed on the web. This process consists of two events:

1. Capturing the video 2. Putting the captured video on a server. The physical parts of the system include a camera, digitizing hardware, and hardware for the physical bandwidth connection. Software is included to capture, process, and publish the image. Setting up such a system is simple. The camera is connected to the computer, which then connects to the bandwidth using a modem or a router. User specific information is entered into the system configuration and when all the elements are in place, you will be broadcasting to the Internet or "web casting" as it is known. Hardware Requirement: The hardware required for capturing and digitizing video, and to connect the capture equipment to the Internet is fairly simple to acquire and setup, even for the novice computer user. Basic video capture requires a camera, a capture device, a computer, and software to "digitize" or "encode" the video into a web compatible format. The digitized video image is then moved to a web server over an established Internet connection via modem or router configuration. The most basic WebCam cameras plug into an existing PC port. Some use a parallel port or a serial port, and some newer cams use a USB port. Simply attach the camera to the appropriate port, install the associated software, and you are on your way to broadcasting Software Requirement: Software is necessary to put the entire web casting hardware in action. Webcam software communicates with the camera, catches a video frame and processes the frame to a web-friendly specification. The digitized video image is then moved to a web server using one of several methods: FTP CGI HTTP

Programs can run on the encoding machine, the server, or both. So next time you take a look at those amazing sites which feature live video be sure that the Webcam is doing the job.