The PC Informant » Internet topics

Gopher still lives

Vic Laurie — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:03:31 +0000

Unless you were using the Internet before the World Wide Web came along, you probably never heard of the Gopher protocol or the search facilities called Archie and Veronica. I didn’t realize that Gopher still lived until I saw an Ars Technica post, The Web may have won, but Gopher tunnels on. It brought me back to the days when almost everything was text and modem speeds were a few kilobits/sec. The name “Gopher” came from the University of Minnesota mascot. Here’s an excerpt from Ars Technica:

So it was no surprise that when University of Minnesota researchers developed an early protocol for organizing and sharing documents over the Internet, they named it “gopher.” The initial version of the protocol appeared in 1991; by 1993, it had been codified as a Request for Comment (RFC 1436) that laid out the protocol in some detail.

According to the RFC, gopher was designed as a client-server protocol running over TCP/IP. Much lighter than HTTP and HTML, gopher provided essentially two options: menus and documents, both of which were accessed through port 70. The system was initially text-based, though basic image serving ability came later. There was no decorative markup for menu pages, which all looked basically (and boringly) the same; on the other hand, gopher was quick and consistent.

The post goes on to describe how you can still use Gopher. A few servers remain and Firefox still supports the Gopher protocol. Internet Explorer does not. If you have Firefox, try pasting “gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/world” (without quotes) into the address bar. Note how the term “gopher” is used in the URL instead of “http”.

Google developing new protocol to speed up the Web

Vic Laurie — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 09:52:21 +0000

I have often thought that it is quite remarkable how well the methods have held up that were instituted at the beginning of the Web. Here we are, years later, and we are still basically using the initial designs.

However, the enormous increase in Internet traffic means that some of the old methods need updating. Google has announced that it is working on a way to make the Web faster. It’s rather technical but basically it is a replacement for the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) that Google calls “SPDY”. Google’s description of the research begins:

Today we’d like to share with the web community information about SPDY, pronounced “SPeeDY”, an early-stage research project that is part of our effort to make the web faster. SPDY is at its core an application-layer protocol for transporting content over the web. It is designed specifically for minimizing latency through features such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression.

This project is still in the experimental stage and it’s a long road to becoming an accepted protocol (if it ever gets that far) but it certainly looks interesting.

Is the Internet killing story telling?

Vic Laurie — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:21:08 +0000

Writing at the the Times (UK), Ben Macintyre bemoans the effect of the Internet’s communication methods on our attention span and our ability to concentrate. He says that the constant flow of small snippets of information is changing our capacity to stick with anything for long and that narratives are disappearing in an online blizzard of tiny bytes of information:

Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing.

The information we consume online comes ever faster, punchier and more fleetingly. Our attention rests only briefly on the internet page before moving incontinently on to the next electronic canapé.

Addicted to the BlackBerry, hectored and heckled by the next blog alert, web link or text message, we are in state of Continual Partial Attention, too bombarded by snippets and gobbets of information to focus on anything for very long. Microsoft researchers have found that someone distracted by an e-mail message alert takes an average of 24 minutes to return to the same level of concentration.

The internet has evolved a new species of magpie reader, gathering bright little buttons of knowledge, before hopping on to the next shiny thing.

Google in favor of different password scheme

Vic Laurie — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:19:21 +0000

Having a multitude of passwords for all our different Web activities is a hassle and many people go the unsafe route of one or two passwords for everything. Google is advocating a method it calls “hybrid onboarding”:

Does anyone actually like passwords? Most people can’t stand them because they end up having to keep track of a long (and often memorized) list of usernames and passwords to sign into the websites they visit. Website owners hate them because it’s hard to get people to create a new account on their website, and almost half of those account registrations are never completed. Thanks to the utilization of new technology, we’re now seeing large-scale success in eliminating the need for passwords while increasing the successful registration rate at websites to over 90%. The most visible examples come from Plaxo, Facebook, Yahoo! and Google using a technique the industry calls hybrid onboarding.

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At PC World, Jeff Bertolucci comments:

It’s one of the basic tenets of online security: Never use the same password/username combo for every website that requires one. The logic is sound, of course. A single security breach could expose your most private information — such as banking and credit card numbers — to the bad guys.

Problem is, who can remember multiple passwords and usernames? Many times I’ve signed up for a service, returned to the site a few weeks later, and quickly realized that I couldn’t remember my login details.

Google and other major online players, including AOL, Facebook, Microsoft Plaxo, MySpace, and Yahoo, are pitching a simpler alternative: A single password/username combo, such as your Google or Yahoo ID, for multiple sites. The concept, based on the industry standard OpenID 2.0 protocol isn’t exactly new. In fact, Google announced over a year ago that it would support the single single-in plan.

So it’s a single sign-in but with some additional safety over just using the same password everywhere. However, Bertolucci doesn’t think Microsoft and others will buy it:

OpenID is a great idea, but wider acceptance is needed for it to become truly useful. I suspect that Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google aren’t truly comfortable with a single sign-in approach for their key properties. Today, for instance, I can’t use my Yahoo ID to sign into my MSN account, nor can I use my Windows Live ID to enter Yahoo Mail.

More bad news on infected sites

Vic Laurie — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:42:20 +0000

The number of Web sites hosting dangerous links and scripts keeps growing. ZDNet reports:

More than 640,000 websites and about 5.8 million pages are infected with malware, according to Dasient, which was founded by former Googlers to offer services to help websites stay malware-free and off blacklists.

RIP GeoCities

Vic Laurie — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:16:24 +0000

I have never understood the management of Yahoo. It seems to be a company that is less than the sum of its parts. It has always had a collection of nice Web features and applications but they never seem to get connected to one another. And Yahoo never seems to do much to develop their potential. Yahoo is still the biggest email provider but I wonder how many of its clients are aware of all the other things that Yahoo offers. They are there but hard to find.

Then there are the bad deals. Aside from the bungling of the negotiations with Microsoft, today is the culmination of another wasted opportunity. The venerable Web site provider GeoCities is being shuttered. Many an individual got started with a GeoCities Web page. It was also an online community before Facebook and the like. Yahoo bought it for $3.57 billion during the dotcom mania and then let it just sit there. Nothing was done to realize its value. Now it’s dead.

Internet language change

Vic Laurie — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:28:58 +0000

Showing its roots in America and Western Europe, the Internet still has an address system based on a Latin alphabet. As the Internet has become truly world wide, a need for the ability to have addresses in other language forms has developed and ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has proposed that domain names in Asian and other names be allowed. BBC reports on the ICANN plans:

The body said it that it was finalising plans to introduce web addresses using non-Latin characters.

The proposal – initially approved in 2008 – would allow domain names written in Asian, Arabic or other scripts.

The body said if the final plans were approved on 30 October, it would accept the first applications by 16 November.

It is thought that the new type of names would be in place by mid-2010.

The Internet makes you smarter?

Vic Laurie — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:53:05 +0000

There are many who cry that the Internet is dumbing us all down. Now comes a study that says the contrary, at least for an older age group. Actually, it is not the content of the Internet but the intellectual activity of searching on the Internet that is supposed to sharpen us up:

Could it be that the Internet actually — gasp! — makes you smarter?

That’s the word from a team of scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, who reported this week that new Internet users between the ages of 55 and 78 improved their scores on decision-making and complex reasoning tests after just seven days online. The researchers said they found that surfing the Web seemed to stimulate neural activity and possibly enhance cognitive functioning in those mature Internet beginners.

Just a week online increased brain activity twofold in the oldest Internet users studied, according to the scientists.

“The results suggest that searching online may be a simple form of brain exercise that might be employed to enhance cognition in older adults,” said Teena D. Moody, a UCLA senior research associate, in a statement.

So fire up your browser and Google away.

The first real browser

Vic Laurie — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:25:43 +0000

The Web is so much a part of our lives today that it is hard to remember that not long ago we managed without it. One thing that was instrumental in the development of the Web was the Netscape browser. It was just 15 years ago that this first example of a popular browser was released. Microsoft may have eventually killed it but Netscape deserves a place in Internet history. InfoWorld takes a look back.

How to tell if an Internet address is a phish

Vic Laurie — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:30:10 +0000

Did you ever wonder what the different parts of an Internet address or URL actually signified? Some years ago I wrote an article over at my education site that explained what each of the various pieces of an URL meant. I also mentioned how rarely used portions of a standard URL could be used to mask or obfuscate addresses. With phishing rampant, it has become a very good idea to be able to understand Internet addresses so that you can detect when a phishing link is not what it purports to be. Then, if an email says it’s from your bank but careful attention to the header (see this previous post) shows that it came from a foreign country, you can know you’re being phished.

You can also check out links within an email but be very careful not to actually open a link. Right-click a link you want to investigate and choose “Properties” from the context menu. Then you can read what the link actually is. Note that what appears to be the link in the text of an email can say anything. What counts is the actual underlying HTML and that is what you can read by right-clicking. Whatever you do, don’t enter sensitive personal information into any form opened from an email unless you are 100% sure of its origin. Instead of using an email link, go to the Web site of your bank or whatever institution directly.

How can you tell if an URL is a phish once you read it? Check every component very carefully. Phishers are clever at placing pieces of what seems like legitimate destinations in an URL. But something will always look suspicious. For example, check the country code. Does your bank send emails from China?

A number of anti-malware programs now have link scanners that you can use to check if a link is legitimate. However, these scanners depend on some sort of database and the database may not be up to date. Phishers often use a link for a few hours only and then abandon it for a new one. So a clean bill of health from a link scanner is not definitive.

In addition to my article on the components of a link that is mentioned above, you can look at a recent post from SEOmoz, called SEO Cheat Sheet: Anatomy of A URL