LM8 – Internet & WWW

Lecture Recordings located at bottom of page.

We recognize we are presently observing the Information Revolution but to understand where we are going or where we need to go, it is necessary to understand where we have been so  consider this from American History.

It is easy to forget that one of the contributing factors of the American Revolution was our communication system that was more advanced than communication systems in other parts of the world.  Postmaster General Benjamin Franklin had created a network of horse riders that rode through the night to deliver mail and newspapers. When the Boston Massacre took place word spread throughout the colonies before word reached England and Europe.  Now couple this with the colonist’s high literacy rate and belief that they should have access to information stemming from their largely puritanical common ancestry and it is easy to see the result.  Now consider that we see similarities to today’s Internet and net neutrality and social computing effects. Recall my continual presentation that we need to assess everything we do from the business-IT-society triangle perspective.  In this case, the early American communication system drove changes in society => Revolution.  We again saw the impact of communication where Facebook served as the early communications mechanism for the Egyptian Revolution.

IT => focus shift from Technology to Information due to Machine Learning.

Social media provides a trove of communications/data and recall we have seen a focus shift of IT from Technology to Information.  What this means is Information has become more important than the Technology as Machine Learning (Deep Learning Algorithm) of Big Data and Dark Data can reveal previously unknown relationships.  As an example consider the CDC began using Social Media to forecast flu outbreaks.  Historically doctors would report influenza but we must recognize that only 1/2 of flu patients may even see a doctor and then there is the flu incubation time and the time it takes to get a doctor’s appointment further distorting this historical process’s data.  In contrast consider what people report on social media in real time (e.g. I don’t feel well, my daughter is sick or has a runny nose or sore throat, etc.).  This information reveals symptoms associated with sickness in real time days before a person may get a doctor’s appt.  Where is all this information being reported/captured => Social Media.

History of Internet & WWW

Now, please read the following Internet and WWW history as this drives home the difference between the Internet and WWW.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web

Standards

Standards  are necessary to ensure functionality and inter-operability across platforms.   We have already learned about the device drivers that provide a standard interface to the OS from devices and the OS which provides a standard interface to users and applications.  Last week in networking we learned about the TCP/IP  protocol stack which standardizes Internet/network communications however the WWW  must also be standardized  and this is accomplished with W3C  compliance. Standards will also become even more important with the emergence and evolution of the IoT. The World Wide Web  Consortium (W3C)  is located here: http://www.w3.org/

Now  if you are a Web  designer you should be testing your pages on all platforms and browsers.  A nice way to test all platforms is through virtualization  as you can maintain legacy OSs  and their browsers.

N-Tier Architecture

Today’s Web 2.0 is characterized by a n-tier architecture. Typically this is a 3-tier architecture comprised of a database core,  middle tier business logic (programming) and a Web server. When  a user requests a webpage,  the middle tier business logic accesses information from the database core and constructs a webpage which is  sent out by the Web server.  For one of the CISS 100  Final Projects,  you will have an option to implement this architecture using the LAMP (Linux, Apache Web server, MySQL database and PHP programming for the middle tier business logic).

Domain Name Service (DNS)

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers on the Internet. DNS facilitates abstraction allowing us humans to use Domain Names or URLs that contain Domain Names as part of the address rather than remembering numeric logical IP addresses. The DNS protocol maps Domain Names into IP addresses which of course must be resolved to physical addresses for end to end delivery. When your computer receives its IP address (often using DHCP) it also receives the name/location of a DNS server to use.  Note DNS uses the user datagram protocol (UDP) in contrast to TCP so it is connectionless.

Search

First let’s understand search from the user’s perspective so please see the sub-menu on Search.  Then we need to understand how the Web is indexed (Web crawlers/spiders) and Web page rankings (see sub-menu).  Later in the course  we will look at the need for organizations to optimize their ability to be found through search (i.e. Search Engine Optimization or SEO => Web Design & E-Commerce)).

HTTP is a Stateless Protocol (from Wikipedia)

In computing, a stateless protocol is a communications protocol that treats each request as an independent transaction that is unrelated to any previous request so that the communication consists of independent pairs of request and response. A stateless protocol does not require the server to retain session information or status about each communications partner for the duration of multiple requests (saves memory). In contrast, a protocol which requires keeping of the internal state on the server is known as a stateful protocol.

How do we facilitate sessions in HTTP => cookies

HTTP Cookies are necessary for session management (e-commerce, social networking, etc.) but they can also compromise your privacy.

Privacy

Privacy and security are huge and we will look at these in more detail in upcoming Security LMs but let’s initially be aware of profiling and location based services.

Profiling

Have a look at your Google Ads Preferences to see what the online world deduces about you.  Then look at my Chrome Collusion plugin and its results and with this basis you may wish to opt-out and prevent cookie setting (see Lecture Captures for what I use).

Location based Services & GEO Tagging

This of course provides great usability and functionality but search the Emergent Topics (Tags: Location and geo-tagging) for emergent privacy concerns.

Deep Web

Please see sub-menu

Internet of Things (IoT) quickly evolving into the Internet of Everything

Please see sub-menu but note the IoT has been facilitated by the move from IPv4 (32 bit addressing) to IPv6 (128 bit addressing).

Lecture Recordings

 

Ok, we know where we’ve been but now it time to define where we should go by Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Additional Resources