Day 25: spam outline

My group consists of Dawn, Julia, and Me. We are Team 6- Spam. Our presentation will look something like this:
-Julia- what is spam? who clicks on spam? what money is made from spam? famous spammers?
-Me- is spam legal? recent cases in the news. difference between spam and junk snail mail.
-Dawn- Spam in relation to telemarketing. How do you find out who is sending the spam? (using the url). How do you get rid of spam? ways to protect against it.

We will each expand on our areas and add anything from new areas we find. My best sources so far are:
http://www.spamhelp.org/articles/economics_of_spam.pdf

http://www.spamlaws.com/spam-laws.html

http://spam.abuse.net/faq/

http://www.publaw.com/spam.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/183389/court_orders_spam_network_to_pay_152_million.html

http://pcmike.com/2009/11/25/spam-king-smiling-all-the-way-to-prison/

These sources cover both the legality of spam, and recent spam court cases. I will sort through the information, grab the most important pieces, and incorporate them into the talk.

Spam

My group's topic for mondays presentations is Spam. There are many different types of spam- through emails, instant messaging, and online games. It is basically sending unsolicited bulk messages that users most likely do not want to see. Most of the people making spam do not have many costs other than the list they send spam to, and it is hard to hold these mailers accountable. Spam is also known as "junk mail" that shows up in your inbox. Spammers get addresses from chat rooms, email addresses listed publicly on the web, and directories of large e-mail hosting companies. Spam filtering software can help you avoid Spam, which also helps reduce the bandwidth that spam eats up. Spam costs a lot less than physical junk mail- instead of using paper and postage, a spammer can send an email to thousands of people without costing much at all. Overall, spam is very annoying for those who receive it, but makes money easily for those sending it.

How does email work?

Email is one way-a very popular way, to use the internet. It is a piece of text sent from a user to a recipient. This peice of text that you type is usually broken down into packets that are then transported through the mail server. One email is usually sent in steps, or "hops". There are a few thigns you must need to send the email. first, you need to be connected to a mail server that is able to transfer your message. Also, the address you send to must have a valid name and domain, which the server will locate. The client that receives the email puts the packets back together into a form a person can understand. Email is actually very similar to snail mail. You must have a way to send your mail (post office), and a destination (recipient address). However, email is much faster and is broken down during travel, but the two concepts are actually very similar.


http://www.allbusiness.com/technology/computer-software-productivity-applications/1395-1.html

http://ksnn.larc.nasa.gov/webtext.cfm?unit=email

http://www.ehow.com/how-does_4815237_email-work.html

Day 18

-Network Neutrality is basically a principle that says all internet access should be equal- without anything being blocked or limited by the internet provider.
-Limited discrimination without teiring= United States lawmakers have introduced bills that would allow quality of service discrimination as long as no special fee is charged for higher-quality service.
-limited discrimination and teiring= This approach allows higher fees for QoS as long as there is no exclusivity in service contracts. According to Tim Berners-Lee: "If I pay to connect to the Net with a given quality of service, and you pay to connect to the net with the same or higher quality of service, then you and I can communicate across the net, with that quality of service.""[We] each pay to connect to the Net, but no one can pay for exclusive access to me."
-Many major internet companies are advocates of neutrality, including: Google, Yahoo, Vonage, Amazon
-some engineers oppose neurtrality. they have a website called Hands Off the Internet, which is funded by AT&T
-http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-10357806-266.html
-AT&T opposes network neutrality- government should stay out of regulation. companies must limit certain elements
-AT&T is one of the largest holding companies in the world by revenue. serves 78.2 million customers. more than 16.9 internet subscribers. had a net income of $2.4 billion in 4th quarter of 2008. $3.2 billion in 1st quarter of 2009. serves individuals and small businesses
-smiliar feelings about wireless neutrality as Verizon
-AT&T has called google a hypocrit and says they violate their own terms about net neutrality http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-10362148-266.html

Day 17

My current IP address is 152.33.48.254.
I looked up the company my dad works for on networksolutions.com. His website is www.bottles.com, and when I searched this is could see his company Custom Bottle, Inc. They registered the domain in 1996 and it expires in 2010. The link to this information is http://www.networksolutions.com/whois-search/bottles.com. One of the employees is also listed as the contact person.

Day 16

The word I was sent is Willywaw. According to yourdictionary.com, willywaw is a noun meaning a sudden, violent, cold wind blowing down from mountain passes toward the coast in far northern or southern latitudes, as on the Alaskan coast and Aleutians, and in the Strait of Magellan. It can also mean a state of extreme confusion, turmoil, or agitation. The word I was trying to send is cudweeds, which are any of several composite plants with silky or woolly foliage.

It took me a very long time to send my message. It seemed that someone always spoke right as I was about to, or I would get into a collision when trying to send my message. I was one of the last people to successfully send my entire message. I thought it was much easier to receive a message than send one. When receiving, you need to pay attention but the person sending me a message was very good at talking slowly and getting the message through clearly. There were so many collisions that sending the message was very hard. I also had to be careful when saying my message to make sure I spoke slowly enough for the person receiving it.

Some problems were that everyone spoke at the same time. You also had people who would get into a collision but would keep trying rapidly, not elaving anyone else time to send their message It seemed there were a few people who were very prominent in trying to get their message through loudly and aggressively. Another problem was that people spoke too quickly for their receiver. I thought the best way to solve this was to go in a circle around the room. That way, everyone would get a turn to say and recieve their message. No matter what, there may be issues or collisions, but this is probably the most efficient way to get messages across.

Networking problems

In a bus topology, addressing and communication conflicts are complicated but must be solved. With the problem of addressing, one solution could be to name each computer distinctly with a number. This would help with sending a message to a certain computer. It would be important not to repeat numbers, so that your message could be delivered to the correct destination.

Communication gets complicated because the wires in the network must handle many different tasks at once. To help prioritize what messages gets transfered first, you could assign priority to each computer. Each computer would have a number as their name, which also could correspond to how important they are or how fast their messages get sent. For example, in a classroom, the teacher's computer would be named number one becasue it is most important and probably needs to do the most work. Adding more wires so that more information can flow would also be helpful.

day 9- Triumph of the Nerds part 3

1. Steve Jobs was refering to how Microsoft stole apple's GUI. This quote is actually a stab at microsoft. He means you need some skill to steal and make something sucessful rather than just copy it. some innovation is needed to be agreat artist, but either way, there is a negative connotation and you can tell Jobs was really mad that his idea was ripped off.

2. The lawsuit was filed by Apple against Microsoft and basically said Microsoft had taken Apple's GUI elements and tried to pass them off as their own. Apple did not win the lawsuit, but it was a major controversy.

3. I think Jobs was definitely talking about his situation with microsoft, and that the great artist was Microsoft. I think he meant they got away with stealing his ideas and were able to profit from them, making tehm a great artist rather than a copy-cat that was not successful.

4. Mac's market share has continued to rise. Here is a link to a picture I found:
http://k-line.org/9/images/March09LinuxMarketShare.jpg
You can see Windows owns the majority, but is very closely followed by Mac. This picture is from April 2009.

Day 7 Labs

Lab 1: We looked at new ways to store information on a punch card, rather than the system that is already being used. The new way looks at each column as a separate character and uses a letter's binary code to determine what letter gets punched. For example, to make an A you would punch the number 9 because A's binary code is 00000001. A is the first letter in the alphabet, and therefore it is assigned number 1. Each letter in the alphabet has a number according to when it comes in the alphabet. You find what this number is, then figure out how you would make it in binary, then punch the appropriate numbers in each column. When starting the word Lorem, you would punch 6 and 7 in the first column to make the letter L, since in binary 12 is 00001100. This may seem confusing to decribe in words, but this way of storing data is a good alternative to the one already established.

Lab 2: This string translated to "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine". I admit I put the string into a conversion calculator, but what the computer is doing to decode it is somewhat simple to do. Each letter or symbold is a different binary code. So, each 8 numbers in the string represents a letter of text. Each capital, lowercase, and symbol has a different binary code. For example, the first 8 numbers of the string are 01000010, which makes a capitol B in ASCII code. Using a conversion chart, you can decyfer each byte and find its meaning in text. The link to the converter I used is : http://www.livephysics.com/ptools/binary-text.php

Day 6- How to Read a Punch Card

Reading a punch card is not as difficult as you may think once you have the steps down. First, you will need to have a format key to know what punches make what letter. You will be comparing the key to the punch card you are trying to read. The picture I used was: http://www.diycalculator.com/imgs/paper-05.gif

Basically, every column that has a punch or punches is a single letter, number, or symbol. For example, if I saw that the top row and the 4 were punched out in one column, I would use my key to see that this is the letter D. Go from left to right, decifering each column one by one. This is basically a matching game- comparing the key with your card to match up the punches and see what the card reads. There are different forms of punch cards, though, so you must make sure your key and punch card are the same format and have the same number of columns. A good site to read more about this is:http://www.scribd.com/doc/6915598/IBM-Punch-Cards . This site also has a good key to compare your card to.
Reading a punch card may take some time, but it is not as hard as you may think it is at first glance. Just look at each column that has a punch separately, and use a key to see what those punches mean.

Reverse Engineering

Reverse engineering is the concept of seeing how something works after it has already been created by someone else. You are basically copying something that you already know. For example, if you take apart an electronic device such as a CD player, then constructing a smiliar one from the same components, this is reverse engineering. In the case of the movie, Compaq took apart IBM's computer to see how it worked, then created a replica of their own.

Legally, some forms of reverse engineering are ok. However, reverse engineering often violates copyright laws. Some software specifically makes reverse engineering illegaly in their liscensed use laws. However, in many cases, reverse engineering is legal and seen as a way of discovery and inspration of ideas. In is seen as a way to advance technology, rather than just steal and duplicate. For instance, congress has protected reverse engineering in some cases when inventing chips- by re-making and figuring out how old chips work, people can invent new ones that are even better. The line is a bit different with software and hardware, but there is not a clear answer to the legality of reverse engineering.


http://searchcio-midmarket.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid183_gci507015,00.html
http://www.chillingeffects.org/reverse/faq.cgi#QID195

Day 4

I answered Dawn's question about what people are buying to increase their gaming experience.
The link to this post: http://csc111dawn.blogspot.com/2009/09/day-two-hardware.html?showComment=1252953970199#c1928733645396921269

What I hope to find out in this class

I cannot think of one burning question I have for this class, but a couple areas I would lik to know more about include the actual monitor and how video is shown, and how the computer is able to store so much memory. I've wondered how graphics can be presented so well on the computer, especially when watching a movie or playing a game. It also surprises me that computers are able to store so much information, while their actual insides are extremely small. I'd like to know more about both these concepts.

Triumph of Nerds

The first stereotype I noticed was that most "nerds" are male, not female. Another stereotype was that they all wear glasses (huge glasses at that). A third stereotype was that they start to learn about computers when they are young, even little kids.

I think most of these stereotypes have faded. Most people still think more boys are good with computers rather than girls, but this is rapidly changing if not existent at all. The stereotypes about glasses and starting to become obsessed as a child are not still relevant. If I was to make a movie, I don't think I would add any stereotypes. Any type of person in today's society can be skilled with computers, boy or girl. Stereotypes still do exst, but they are not as much of a reality.

My First Post

My name is Emily Allen. I am a sophmore from a small town in Connecticut. I have two older siblings, both of whom are in college as well. I am still undecided abuot my major, but am hoping to declare by the end of this semester. This summer I had an internship with a small company, during which I used excel and other computer programs daily. I am definitely looking forward to this class and this semester as a whole.