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THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY

What we now call the Internet began in the 1960s, when four university research facilities joined together to form ARPAnet. Their purpose was to share expensive computing resources. After suffering growing pains through the 1970s, ARPAnet evolved into NSFnet in the late 1980s. By the early 1990s, most research and education interests had switched to CSnet, using the TCP/IP protocol. This was the foundation for what became known as the Internet.

Before the beginning of the WWW, all Internet services were text based. Gopher, developed at the University of Minnesota, provided a menu-driven index for finding information on the Internet. Archie and Veronica, two early Internet search tools, greatly eased the pain of finding specific information on the free-form Internet.

Whether Internet activity is done in the context of a small office network or a worldwide internetwork, similar communications resources exist. Major uses made of the Internet include e-mail, conferencing, and Internet relay chat rooms. Although all of these existed on a smaller scale in the all-text world of the Internet, they grew instantly more popular with the advent of the WWW.

________ A protocol that allows the transfer of files between two computers over the Internet.
________ A company that has networks and WWW servers linked to the Internet and allows you to connect to their servers, usually for a fee.
________ A communications protocol that allows multimedia information to be accessed and transmitted via the Internet.
________ A piece of Web software that constantly searches for new Web pages and follows any links found on them.
________ A request specifying what information is to be sought in a search operation.
________ A software program that allows Web pages to be displayed on the computer screen.
________ A collection of related Web pages belonging to an individual or an organization
________ An icon, image or specially marked text located on a WWW page that brings new information on the screen when the user selects it.
________ Programs that are available over the Internet at no cost for the user
________ Criteria to identify and narrow the specific information desired in a search.
________ A computer language consisting of special codes intended to design the layout of a Web page.
________ The starting page of a Web site.

You must sign up with an ISP  ________
The hardware you need includes ________
The software you need includes ________
You must use HTML ________
E-commerce includes ________
You type a query into the text box of a search engine ________
Search engines search their indexes ________
Search engines often use a program called a spider ________
Your queries should be specific and carefully defined ________
You must pay a royalty to the author ________

While email is an excellent tool for interpersonal communication, other tools are emerging onto the scene. While everyone still has the ability to write a 5 page email, no one really wants to. Messages now are reduced in length and are more informal. They adapt to the rhythms of business demands, the importance of the message, and the circumstances for which they are sent. This gives way for other forms of communications like tweets and chats.

The main problem with email is that it was used for everything – even if it was not the best method of communication. Sent to one or more people, its overuse (in assuring no one missed any information) resulted in watering-down its significance. Even though there may be measures to prevent spam, so much of what is received goes directly to the trash.

Email is not adaptable to several different demands of communication, such as wide distribution with the intention of interaction. Email is not made for collaborating or coordinating. Have you ever tried to work on a document without getting confused in the exchanges and made mistakes on the final draft? Have you tried to fix a time for a meeting between several people without having to impose a date because a consensus could not be found?

This is exactly why social professional network provide a significant added-value. In offering search capabilities, coordination, and planning features, the need for email is automatically reduced. You have an announcement? In place of sending it to everyone, you can post it on the community's homepage. You need to organize a meeting? Publish the invitation and follow the RSVP responses. If you need to rework a document, make a wiki (a shared word document) and track the revisions of the collective document.

With around 200 million users sending out the same number of micro-blogs (approximately) every day, Twitter is certainly an effective channel for communication. However, this social networking site is not just for teenagers or celebrities tweeting about their daily activities. The power of Twitter as a marketing tool has been realized by many small business owners, who are using it to help their businesses grow. Considering that it costs very little to market a product on Twitter, small businesses should definitely use this tool for boosting their internet marketing activities.
Here are a few factors that emphasize why Twitter is important for small businesses and how they can benefit from it.

1. ________ Twitter has millions of users and more people are joining it every day, which makes it one of the best places to look for potential customers.
2. ________ Once you have followers on Twitter, you should try to create a positive link with them to grow your business. For this, you should make an effort to post updates and tweets that your customers find interesting and useful.
3. ________ Small business owners, who want more people to know about their product line or brand, should use Twitter to build their brand. People usually prefer to interact with a person than with a logo, unless it is well-known.
4. ________ The main reason that businesses should use Twitter is to connect with potential customers and market their products.
5. ________ News travels faster online than it does through radio or TV.
6. ________ Twitter is an efficient tool for collecting customer opinions about your company's products and services.
7. ________ Whether you are a big brand or a small company, free discount coupon or freebie always attract more people.

DETERMINATION AND INGENUITY

Contrary to popular belief, the great majority of  hacking involves minimal intellectual challenge or computer expertise. Although some system penetrations display incredible ingenuity, most rely on a few basic characteristics: excessive determination on the part of the hacker, reliance on human fallibility, and hours of boring work. Armed with only a minimal set of equipment – a computer, a modem, and some communications software – the cracker intending to cause harm relies heavily on three or four techniques to identify and penetrate new computer systems. By far the easiest technique is scavenging.

From the comfort of his home (over 85% of all known hackers are male), the cracker browses known systems and networks for electronic garbage that might provide some clue into system penetration. Among useful titbits might be descriptions of password systems and security plans, information about corporate hardware and software, even descriptions of successful hacks. The titbits are organised and stored for later use.

Another very common attack technique is password guessing. Computer users are amazingly unoriginal in the selection of passwords. A determined hacker often has to go no further than persistently checking the most commonly used passwords on known user accounts: names or initials of pets, friends, spouses, children; birth dates; sequential strings of letters or numbers and popular "cutesy" words ( e.g., sex, love, word, god, genius).

Another popular technique requires a special feature to the cracker's communication system. Called an auto-dialler, this program will systematically dial all possible combinations of telephone numbers within a given numeric range. While the hacker eats, sleeps or watches TV, his computer dials all numbers in the target area, one at a time. Most of these calls will be answered by people or answering devices or fax machines, but a few will reach the carrier tone of another computer's system. Those numbers are stored, and the cracker can later get to work accessing that system.

A potentially lethal new type of cracker attack is a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. A programmer secretly embeds a tiny software routine into a large number of computers. At a designated command or time the infected host computers all send messages to a single target network server, so that the Web site becomes inaccessible to legitimate Net surfers. The greatest problem is that the identity of the cracker is masked by the confusing flurry of e-mail causing the shutdown. In addition, the person launching an attack often has no association with the programmer who invented the software. Hackers who develop attack tools enjoy the challenge of writing the program but seldom launch their own attack. Instead, they post the tools on hacker Web sites for others to use.


1. ________ Specialised software that systematically dials all possible telephone numbers within a given range.
2. ________ Rubbish, unwanted things or waste material.
3. ________ Related to business corporations
4. ________ A certain amount of something that suddenly appears and moves in a quick way
5. ________ Small pieces of information
6. ________  To fix something firmly and deeply  in a mass of  surrounding matter
7. ________ Searching through electronic garbage for clues that may unlock the secrets of a target computer system.
8. ________ It helps you to find an answer to a problem or mystery
9. ________ Activity of people that are able to use or change the information in other people's computer systems without their knowledge or permission
10. ________ Pretty and sentimental

2. Indicate if the statements are true or false.

Protect Yourself
10 ways to more secure cyber safety

1. ________
Hackers comb the Internet looking for vulnerable computers, in some cases trying to steal credit-card numbers and personal information. You should use firewall software as well as install virus protection .
2. ________
Don't send sensitive information, like your home address or phone number, to strangers over the Internet. If you want to post pictures of yourself or your family online, do it on a hosting site that allows you to set up a password access. And keep in mind that any postings you make on Internet discussion groups will be archived, and can be easily retrieved.
3. ________
Harmless-looking e-mail enclosures can contain spy ware. To be safe, never download anything unless you know and trust the sender, and have confidence that the file being sent won't hack your computer.
4. ________
When you give out your e-mail address to strangers, consider using a secondary e-mail account from a free service such as Hotmail or Yahoo Mail. Reserve your primary e-mail account for friends and people you trust.
5. ________
Your name and e-mail address may be embedded in your browser. Websites can then take them from your browser and make a permanent record of your visit. To prevent this, you can go into your browser's preferences menu and delete this information or replace it with a false name and a dummy e-mail account.

6. ________
Check the privacy policies of websites you visit. Many are ³opt out,² meaning that unless you tell them otherwise, they reserve the right to share your data with third parties.
7. ________
You will probably want to accept cookies — code stored on your computer that identifies you — since it's hard to shop, among other things, without them. But you can reject unwanted cookies by resetting your browser preferences or using software like Cookie Crusher.
8. ________
Before sending credit-card numbers and other financial information over the Internet, be sure the transfer is encrypted — that is, scrambled to prevent unauthorized access. Protected websites will tell you that the transfer is encrypted, and your browser will usually display a symbol, often a lock, confirming that the transfer is secure.
9. ________
Since websites keep a record of your visits and may be able to identify you by name, you might want to hide your identity with anonymizers like www.anonymizer.com.
10. ________
Your computer keeps a memory cache, effectively a log, of sites you visit. Anyone with access to your computer can see your trail. Hide these digital footprints with cache-deleting functions in your browser's preferences or tools menu.
And bear in mind ... Encryption can be cracked. It's not always easy to know if spy ware has been installed on your computer, at work or at home.

The Internet ________ (originate) in the late 1960s when the United States Defense Department ________ (develop) ARPAnet (Advanced Research Projects Agency network), an experimental network of computers designed to withstand partial outages such as a bomb attack. The agency ________(seek) to create a web of computers that could continue to communicate with each other, even if some of the computers were disabled. In the mid-1980s, when desktop computer workstations ________ (become) increasingly popular, organizations ________ (want) to connect their local area networks (LANs) to ARPAnet. If computers could link together and share resources, everyone would benefit.

To help speed the connections, the National Science Foundation (NSF) ________(establish) five super computing centers in 1986, creating the NSFnet backbone. In 1987, the NSF ________ (sign) a cooperative agreement to manage the NSFnet backbone with Merit Network, Inc., and by 1990, ARPAnet had been phased out. NSFnet ________(continue) to grow, and more and more countries around the world ________(connect) to this Internet backbone.

1991 ________(be) a big year for the Internet: The National Research and Education Network (NREN) was founded and the World Wide Web was released. The Internet is still dominated by scientists and other academics, but begins to attract public interest. With the release of the Mosaic Web browser in 1993 and Netscape in 1994, interest in and use of the World Wide Web ________(explode). More and more communities ________(become) wired, enabling direct connections to the Internet. In 1995, the U.S. federal government ________ (give up) its management role in the Internet and NSFnet ________ (revert) back to being a research network. Interconnected network providers are strong enough now to support U.S. backbone traffic on the Internet. However, the presidential administration encourages continued development of the U.S. backbone of the Internet, also knows as the National Information Infrastructure (NII) – and, most commonly, as the "Information Superhighway".