4.1 Introduction Section 2 explained that information is an important asset to an organisation. In this section you will study, in some detail, the characteristics of information assets that make them valuable, and so worth protecting. In recent years, a combination of computerised processing systems and electronic communication technologies has made possible new forms of working and trading based on the electronic exchange of information. Such activity is called e-business or e-commerce.
12.3 Further security issues The problems discussed so far can have major implications for users. They may: slow your PC; cause the loss of important data; damage your reputation by sending false information or viruses via email; access the Internet without permission, and in the process use up bandwidth; be time-consuming to remove; cause loss of private information; have financ
11.4 Controlling cookies in Firefox Open your browser. On the top menu bar of the browser choose Tools > Options. Then choose Privacy in the left panel and expand the Cookies heading. 8 How to protect yourself against spam People and organisations can only send spam if they have a collection of email addresses to send to. They 'harvest' these addresses: from legitimate company databases; from web pages; from chat rooms; by guesswork; from people who use an unsubscribe option. To minimise the spam you receive: Check whether you can set rules on y 5 Firewalls Another tool that you could use, especially if you access the Internet using broadband, is a firewall. Firewalls can be software or hardware, single packages or complete computers. A firewall in a building is designed to stop the spread of fire; an Internet firewall prevents the spread of harmful files. A firewall is a filter that has been trained to look for malicious acts that may endanger users' computers. As with antivirus software it needs to be updated regularly. In it 3.1 Patches and antivirus software In this section we will look at two of the ways in which you can protect yourself from malware: Ensure that your computer has the latest patch from Microsoft or your operating system vendor. Install antivirus software that will protect you from these problems, and ensure that you keep it up to date. (Later in this course we will discuss firewalls, which you can also use to protect your computer.) Acknowledgements Cover image: Eric Norris in Flickr made available under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence. The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions) and is used under licence. All materials included in this cours 5.2 Evaluating the quality of information on the Web The quality of the information you will find on the Web varies enormously as there is no editorial control. Anybody can establish a website, claiming to be whoever they want to be. As Mark Twain put it: A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. So how can you judge the reliability and quality of the information you find on the Web? If you think in t 3.6 Tracing your family tree In order to show some of the possibilities provided by the Internet, we have gone straight to searching for material online. A careful family historian would take a more measured approach, starting with the evidence to hand within their own family, and researching offline materials as well. Tracing your family tree involves repeating these steps: start with what you know record it decide what to pursue next 3.3 Focused search sites An alternative to using general purpose search engines is to make use of focused search engines that only index known genealogical sites. For example, the Genealogical Society of the UK and Ireland (GenUKI) provides a search engine. 8.2 RFID applications As we pointed out in Section 7, the driving force for RFID development is coming from major retailers who want to track goods as they travel through the supply chain. Their purpose is to reduce the manual checking necessary, thereby cutting down on labour costs and reducing human error. 4.9 Bluetooth The driving force for the development of the Bluetooth standard was to eliminate the need for connecting wires between local IT devices such as keyboards, monitors, printers, PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), cell phones and headsets. This was already possible using infrared technology, but the requirement for line-of-sight positioning between the communicating interfaces limits infrared's usefulness. Because Bluetooth uses radio waves, Bluetooth devices can communicate with each other with 4.7 WiFi data rates and operating range Just as for Ethernet, developments in technology have increased the achievable data rates since the first WiFi standard was developed in 1997. At the time of writing, the latest WiFi standard to be published – IEEE 802.11g – defines a data rate of 54 Mbps. 3.3 Wired network configurations Network nodes can be connected together in different arrangements known as topologies. We are going to describe four common topologies that you may come across. 1.2 Skimming to get an overview A well-structured document usually contains a number of clues about its contents. Skimming is the practice of finding and using these clues. These are: visual clues such as a document's title, headings, subheadings, figures and figure captions; words in boldface and italics; and numbered and bulleted lists; verbal clues such as the introduction and conclusion or summary, and the first (or sometimes the last) sentence in each paragraph Learning outcomes After studying this course, you should be able to: understand and use correctly terms introduced in this course in relation to communication networks understand general principles involved in data exchange between IT devices work with numbers expressed in scientific notation, and use the Windows calculator to perform calculations on these numbers. 1 The incredible shrinking chip Two Scottish computer engineers with little or no physics knowledge set out to make a semiconductor transistor. This was 50 years ago, and their efforts gained them the Nobel Prize. The versatility of that transistor is now at the heart of the electronics industry. Millions of transistor switches are shrunk down into the microprocessors that are found in computers, mobile phones and almost everything else electrical. The first transistor took years to plan and make; today more are made 7.3 Using flowcharts to describe a task Application programs are designed to perform specific tasks. These tasks range from the relatively simple to the extremely complex. In this section you will look at what is involved in planning a program to perform some simple tasks. In order to write a program, the task the program will perform has to be first written as a list of actions. The actions have to be given in an order that will ensure the task is carried out successfully. 7.3 Quality of customer service This is probably the key determinant of customer satisfaction. Most online transactions go through flawlessly. But some don't. Goods fail to arrive, or are delayed, or delivered to the wrong address. Or what is delivered doesn't match what you ordered. With a real-world bricks-and-mortar retailer, the solution is obvious: you phone or turn up at their premises and speak to a human being. But what do you do if an online order goes wrong? Whom do you phone? And where is the number for customer 4.4.1 Voltage, current and resistance
Voltage (or, more correctly, electromotive force, emf – but I shall follow common practice and just say voltage) is a measure of the force with which electricity is 'pushed'. Nothing happens, however, unless there is an electric circuit, which is a path from one terminal of a voltage source (the battery, in this case) to the other, along which the electricity can flow (Author(s):
Activity 24
Activity 17: exploratory
Author(s): 