Importent Tearms

What are Sitemaps?

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.
Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

What is Flame?
Flame is a complex data stealing Virus that contains about 20 times as much code as Stuxnet about and about 100 times as much code as a typical virus designed to steal financial information.

Spoofing in IT

Making an e-mail message appear to have come from one place when really it comes from another is called spoofing. It is generally used by spammers, who do not want their real address to appear on the e-mails they send. Since the messages they send out have web links in them, they do not care if people click `reply' and send an e-mail to the wrong place. It also makes it a lot harder for ISP to track them down and close their accounts.

Google Panda

Google Panda refers to the change introduced to the search algorithm used by Google in 2011, to give better search results. The change aims to lower the rank of "low quality content sites" in search results and return high-quality sites to its users. CNET reported a surge in the rankings of News websites and Social Networking sites, and a drop in rankings for advertising sites. This change reportedly affected the rankings of almost 12 percent of all search results. According to Amit Singhal, the head of Google's core ranking team; Google Panda is named after an engineer at Google. (wikipedia entry reproduced).

Google Bomb

A Google bomb is an effort to inflate a website's search ranking for a particular term. Google gives importance to pages linking to a particular page for ranking purposes. In case of Google bombing, pranksters use a phrase to link to a particular page from their sites multiple times, to push that page to the top of search results. One of the most (in)famous examples of this was "miserable failure", which placed the official White House homepage of George W Bush atop the search results for that term.

Website Pharming

Pharming involves rerouting the traffic of a particular website to a bogus one. This is done by exploiting the weaknesses of the site's Domain Name System (DNS) server. Pharming poses major concerns to corporates and e-commerce sites. Anti-pharming measures are required to safeguard sites.

Cybersquatting

Cybersquatting is registering a website in the names of popular brands. The word squatting in this context means unauthorised occupation of someone else's property. In the internet domain, techsavvy entrepreneurs register websites in the names of popular brands, whose owners do not have websites of their own. This can lead to misrepresentation in the internet media about the products or services the brand sells in the market. The brand owners naturally would like to buy the domain either to give authentic information about products and services or to stem the ill-effects of such misrepresented sites. The person who first registered the brand name sells the site and makes a profit. The ethical and legal aspects of such practice are ambiguous as the intention of the original owner of the site can either be genuine or fraudulent.

Cyberchondriacs

Much like hypochondriacs who obsess about any small ache or pain they may have, cybercondriacs frequently surf the internet to glean information about anything that affects them. They now form 84% of all adult net users. Cyberchondriacs are even said to discuss what they learnt from the net about a particular ailment with their doctors. The term could also refer to people who imagine they have a disease because their symptoms match those on a health website.

Simputer

The word 'Simputer' is an acronym for 'simple, inexpensive and multilingual people's computer'. It is a small, inexpensive, handheld computer, intended to bring computing power to developing countries. It includes textto-speech software and runs the GNU/ Linux operating systems. The device was designed by the Simputer Trust, a non-profit organisation formed in November 1999. Simputers are generally used in environments where computing devices such as PCs cannot be used.

Digital Nomad

A person who works on the move is called a digital nomad. Such a worker may or may not be on the rolls of a company, and could be a consultant/freelancer/a writer on the move. They are persons with a free spirit who like a remote lifestyle and earn as they move, and believe that with discipline and the correct technology, they can be as productive as a person sitting in office. This is new tribe of people and for them, the economic downturn has brought little distress as companies turn to part-timers to save on costs.

Digital Cleanse

Digital cleanse is a term mooted by John Mayer, musician and avid blogger and tweeter, as a resolution and challenge for the first week of 2010. It means keeping off all digital contraptions — a stop to emailing, texting, social networking, blogging and surfing sites. It is seen as a new health craze, considered good for the body and mind. The basic idea is to unplug and meet people.

Captcha

Captcha refers to Completely Automated Public Turing Test to differentiate between computers and humans. A Captcha Security Code is an image of letters that a person must type in to match the Captcha image they see. It is a type of challenge response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer. This code was created to stop automated computer spam robots from filling out forms and harvesting email addresses and then sending out spam emails. Only a human can type out a code he sees correctly, an automated computer programme cannot.

E-mail Apnea

Email apnea is the stress caused by the inability to process emails and connect even as mails flood the inbox. It is marked by a suspension of breathing, shallow breathing or hyperventilating while checking mail. Researcher Linda Stone coined this term after realizing that many people go through this process every morning, the mind whirling from mail to mail, filing, forwarding etc. She also found the effect of this kind of apnea on general health to be negative in the long term.

Software Entropy

The tendency, over time, for software to become difficult and costly to maintain is known as software entropy. A software system that undergoes continuous change, like new functionality added to its original design, will eventually become more complex, losing its original design structure, and may even become disorganized as it grows. In theory, it may be better to redesign the software in order to support the changes rather than build on the existing programme.

Cookies

A cookie is a text string that is included with Hypertext Transfer Protocol requests and responses. Cookies are used to maintain information as we navigate different pages on a website or return to the website at a later time. Cookies cannot be used to run code (programmes) or deliver viruses to computer. One of their primary purposes is to provide a convenience feature that one can use to save time — it tells the web server that you have returned to the page. If you personalize web pages or register for products and services, a cookie helps the page server recall your specific information, like billing address, shipping address.

Why the symbol @ used in e-mail is addresses?

An e-mail address identifies a location to which e-mail messages can be delivered. Ray Tomlinson needed a way to separate, in the email address, the name of the user from the machine the user was on. He wanted a character that would not, under any conceivable circumstances, be found in the user's name. He looked down at the keyboard and chose the @ sign among various punctuation marks available on his Model 33 teletype keyboard, without an idea that he was creating an icon for the internet world. A general format for an e-mail address is: username@computer_name. The part before the @ sign is the local part of the address, the user name of the recipient, and the part after the @ sign is the domain part which is a host computer name.

The `@' symbol indicates that the user can be reached on the Internet by giving the email address(also called the User's Uniform Resource Locator (URL)).

In 1973, the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) was designed and in 1983 it became the standard for communicating between computers over the Internet. In 1976, US Presidential candidate Jimmy Carter and running mate Walter Mondale used email to plan campaign events. In the same year, Queen Elizabeth sent her first email, becoming the first state leader to do so. In 1982, the term "Internet" was used for the first time.

How do search engines work?

A search engine does not search the entire Internet, but databases of Web pages. When a designer contacts a search engine for the addition of his website in the database, a program called Spider visits the site, reads the pages, indexes the contents and follows links to move on. Search engines like Google use algorithms to find pages with matter relevant to the keywords entered by the user. If the title or headings of the page contain the keywords, then it gets higher preference. Google also uses a patented algorithm called PageRank system that ranks a website based on how many sites have links to it and their ranks as well. 

What are Beta testing and Alpha testing?

Software testing is to test a software or software code to find bugs and errors. There are basically of two types: alpha testing and beta testing. The first is done at the developer end, while the second is at the user end. A beta tester is the customer itself and notes down defects and reports them to the developer. The user/ customer is called a 'beta tester' because he is the second one to carry out the testing. The term is derived from the fact that beta comes after alpha in the Greek alphabet.

Digital Versatile Disc (DVD)

Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) is also an optical storage device that looks the same as a compact disc but is able to hold about 15 times as much information and transfer it to the computer about 20 times as fast as a CDROM. The CD and DVD have the same dimensions.

DVDs come in two formats: the DVD-Video and the DVD-ROM (DVD Read Only Memory) format. The DVD-Video format is used for home movie entertainment through a DVD player.

What is difference between Cold Boot and Warm Boot?

We actually perform a Cold Boot every time we turn on the power switch of our computer. To "boot'' the computer means to start it up and reset the memory and BIOS. Sometimes, the programme running hangs and we press the ctrl-alt-delete keys simultaneously. This is called Warm Boot. So, when a computer stops responding because of memory problems or the "blue screen of death'' appears, we need to do a warm boot. The latest operating system Windows 7 responds with task manager when we press the ctrl-alt-delete keys simultaneously. We can choose the not responding programmes to close and continue. However, if the warm boot fails to restart the computer, we need to resort to a cold boot by shutting off the power switch, waiting few seconds and then turning it back on.