Mirror Magazine

Mirror Magazine

Privacy on the Internet
The Internet is a rich source of information, and this includes scraps of information about individuals, including you and me. There are many ways to gather information about an individual on the Internet. This means that there are an equal number of measures that you can take to reduce the amount of personal information that is available to others.

Using free dial-up services that provide you with a dynamic IP address and require a limited amount of your personal information makes it more difficult for others on the Internet to determine your identity. Reduce the amount of information that your Web browser gives out (e.g. disable cookies) and the amount of access that your Web browser or e-mail client gives to others (e.g. disable JavaScript, don’t interpret HTML in e-mail). Keep your Web browser and e-mail client updated (vulnerabilities in Web browsers and e-mail clients can allow a malicious individual to damage or pry into your computer).

Additionally, do not run programs or open documents obtained from the Internet. Executables can carry Trojan horse programs, giving an intruder complete remote control of your computer. Word documents can carry viruses that delete information on your computer.

As a precaution, install Anti Virus software, obtain new virus definitions at least once a week, and scan your computer for viruses immediately after obtaining new virus definitions. Also consider installing a personal firewall to protect a personal computer by restricting access to it.

Finally, use encryption whenever possible. For instance, you may have the option to encrypt e-mail messages before sending them and even encrypt data on your disks. Take steps wherever possible to make sure that connections to your e-mail server are encrypted to protect your e-mail password. The same applies to connections to commercial web- sites to protect any personal information you provide. These simple measures that may require a little effort to implement may save you from headaches and sleepless nights.

Get to know Steven Jobs
Steven Paul was an orphan adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, California in February 1955. After school, Jobs attended lectures at the Hewlett-Packard electronics firm as a summer employee. Another employee at Hewlett-Packard was Stephen Wozniak. An engineering whiz with a passion for inventing electronic gadgets, Wozniak at that time was perfecting his “blue box,” an illegal pocket-size telephone attachment that would allow the user to make free long-distance calls. Going to work for Atari after leaving Reed College, Jobs renewed his friendship with Steve Wozniak.

Steve Jobs’ innovative idea of a personal computer led him into revolutionizing the computer hardware and software industry. When Jobs was twenty one, he and his friend, Steve Wozniak, built a personal computer called the Apple. The Apple changed people’s idea of a computer from a gigantic and inscrutable mass of vacuum tubes only used by big business and the government to a small box used by ordinary people. Jobs’ software development for the Macintosh re-introduced the windows interface and mouse technology.

Two years after building the Apple I, Jobs introduced the Apple II. The Apple II was the best buy in personal computers for home and small business throughout the following five years. When the Macintosh was introduced in 1984, it was marketed towards medium and large businesses. The Macintosh took the first major step in adapting the personal computer to the needs of the corporate work force. Workers lacking computer knowledge accomplished daily office activities through the Macintosh’s user-friendly windows interface.

Improve your computer literacy
Real time
Meaning - occurring immediately; the term is used to describe a number of different computer features. For example, real-time operating systems are systems that respond to input immediately. They are used for such tasks as navigation, in which the computer must react to a steady flow of new information without interruption. Most general-purpose operating systems are not real-time because they can take a few seconds, or even minutes, to react.

Real time can also refer to events simulated by a computer at the same speed that they would occur in real life. In graphics animation, for example, a real-time program would display objects moving across the screen at the same speed that they would actually move. Webopedia.com

How search engines work
Search engines are the key to finding specific information on the vast expanse of the World Wide Web. Without the use of sophisticated search engines, it would be virtually impossible to locate anything on the Web without knowing a specific URL, especially as the Internet grows exponentially every day. But do you know how search engines work? And do you know what makes some search engines more effective than others?

There are basically three types of search engines: Those that are powered by crawlers, or spiders; those that are powered by human submissions; and those that are a combination of the two.

Crawler-based engines send crawlers, or spiders, out into cyberspace. These crawlers visit a website, read the information on the actual site, read the site’s Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects to. The crawler returns all that information back to a central depository where the data is indexed. The crawler will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed, and the frequency with which this happens is determined by the administrators of the search engine.

Human-powered search engines rely on humans to submit information that is subsequently indexed and catalogued. Only information that is submitted is put into the index. In both cases, when you query a search engine to locate information, you are actually searching through the index that the search engine has created; you are not actually searching the Web. These indices are giant databases of information that is collected and stored and subsequently searched. This explains why sometimes a search on a commercial search engine, such as Yahoo! or Google, will return results that are in fact dead links. Since the search results are based on the index, if the index hasn’t been updated since a Web page became invalid the search engine treats the page as still an active link even though it no longer is. It will remain that way until the index is updated.

So why will the same search on different search engines produce different results? Part of the answer to that is because not all indices are going to be exactly the same. It depends on what the spiders find or what the humans submitted. But more important, not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices. The algorithm is what the search engines use to determine the relevance of the information in the index to what the user is searching for.

One of the elements that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a Web page. Those with higher frequency are typically considered more relevant. But search engine technology is becoming sophisticated in its attempt to discourage what is known as keyword stuffing, or spamdexing.

Another common element that algorithms analyse is the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By analysing how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about (if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page) and whether that page is considered “important” and deserving of a boost in ranking. Just as the technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated to ignore keyword stuffing, it is also becoming savvier to Web masters who build artificial links into their sites in order to build an artificial ranking.

Sent in by Arshad Ali

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