2.1 What is information? Information comprises the meanings and interpretations that people place upon facts, or data. The value of information springs from the ways it is interpreted and applied to make products, to provide services, and so on. Many modern writers look at organisations in terms of the use they make of information. For instance, one particularly successful model of business is based on the assets that a firm owns. Assets have traditionally meant tangible things like money, property, plan
13 How do you protect children online? There is a lot of information available on how to protect younger members of the household, but quite often children know more than their parents and are able to bypass the protection that parents might have installed. You may view the computer as a major source of information, help, shopping, news, etc. Children like to use it for entertainment, downloading music, accessing chat rooms, playing games (and sometimes even homework). So when considering children's protection the Internet h
12.1 Home page hijackers A home page hijacker is malicious code, quite often attached to a web page, that resets the home page on your browser to one designated by the writer of the code rather than the one you chose. Although this is a low security threat, at the very least these hijackers cause inconvenience, and may give offence. Because of the covert way in which the hijackers are installed it is difficult to reset your home page to your original choice. Every time you re-start your computer and open the br
9 Adware and spyware The previous sections of this topic have been concerned with email, but the Internet provides yet more problems, in the form of adware and spyware on the Web. You may have seen pop-up messages on your browser screen offering services or products. What you may not realise is that if you respond to these messages, extra software may be installed alongside other programs without your knowledge. Adware Adware is ‘free’ software that is subsidised by displaying adverts
6.1 Identifying hoaxes The hoax message relies on the naivety of users in order to mislead them.
Do learn more about hoaxes: follow the links below and examine the messages you find. See how convincing they look. The Good Times Virus hoax The JDBGMGR.EXE hoax Both of these messages come from the Electronic Ephemera website, which allows you to search for hoaxes by name or keyword. Users who fall for these hoaxes can cause problems,
3.2 What do we mean by patches? Microsoft Windows is an example of an operating system (OS). These operating systems contain millions of lines of code, and inevitably there will be some errors in that code. Some malware writers set out to find these errors, or holes, in the code and exploit them to their own benefit. Whenever holes are found (by IT security people or groups, malware writers or the software developer) the operating system manufacturer will issue a fix for the particular problem. These fixes are referred to a
2.1 What is a virus? A virus is a piece of computer code – a program – that has been written to gain access to files or programs on your computer. The virus may enter your computer via floppy disk, by email or by your Internet connection. It will look at the files on your computer and infect some of them if it can.
Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions) and is used under licence. All materials included in this unit are derived from content originated at the Open University.
4.5 What's going on when searching for your ancestors You have seen how general purpose search engines work. In this section we consider some of the additional techniques that are important to genealogical searches.
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. 8.1 Introduction This section continues with the work started in Section 7. Here you will build on your research to look at some recent applications of RFID and some of the issues surrounding its deployment. 4.9 Bluetooth The driving force for the development of the Bluetooth standard was to eliminate the need for connecting wires between local ICT 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 wit 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. 1.3 Skimming – an example We'll shortly be asking you to skim an article which appeared in the Spring 2003 issue of a journal called IEEE Technology and Society Magazine. ‘IEEE’ is usually referred to as ‘i-triple-e’ and stands for ‘Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ – a professional association based in the USA. 1.1 Getting an overview This section starts with an article from a technical journal – the sort that is read by academics and professionals working in a related technical field. It sets the scene for some of the technologies and issues that you will be encountering later in this unit. We're not going to ask you to read the entire article, but we would like you to get an idea of the article's contents, the kind of points the author is making, and the range of issues that it throws up. With this aim in mind, w 2 2 Conclusion The versatile tiny transistor is now at the heart of the electronics industry. In the video clips you have seen the history of the incredible shrinking chip, its Scottish connections, and an explanation of the physics that make chips work as well as a reconstruction of making a transistor using the crude techniques of yesteryear. 6 A look to the future So what will computers do for you next? Perhaps they will be the key to solving transport problems. Driverless cars, controlled by computers, are under development. If these ever come to fruition perhaps they could help to reduce the number of road traffic accidents by automatically reducing their speed when they come too close to another car. Or perhaps journeys could be made faster and less frustrating because cars will use communicating computers to analyse traffic density and move along t Introduction There is more to computers and processors than simply PCs. In fact computers are ubiquitous in everyday life. This unit challenges how we view computers through the examples of processors in kitchen scales and digital cameras, as well as a work of art that, at heart, is a computer. This unit is from our archive and is an adapted extract from Computers and processors (T224) which is no longer taught by The Open University. If you want to study formally with us, you may wish to explore ot
Activity 24
Activity 17: exploratory
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