Home Computing and More Lesson 4
Author’s note: I am posting Lesson 4 ahead of Lesson 3 as
it will appear in the correct order. I also detoured from Lesson 3 as I was
more impassioned with my desire to try and teach technical information rather than
actual computing though, they are interlaced.
Computing for Beginners
Lesson 4
As we learnt in an earlier
lesson, EVERY device has its own digital identity, its MAC, Media Access Code
or address. Just as every human being is unique and society has rules for
identification purposes etc., so our devices differ independently.
This all makes perfect sense and
in a similar fashion, we all live in different places, at different addresses
and we have systems that allow communication between our homes no matter where
we live in the world.
It stands to reason that every
different page we encounter on the Internet, lives at its own, unique address.
This locater address is called a URL – a Uniform Resource Locator.
There is a box on every webpage
where this URL is displayed and you will no doubt have seen them, they look
like these examples that follow: http://www.shoobridgefunerals.co.uk but, could
appear as:
We talked about sending mail
over the Internet and the fact that we have agreed protocols to abide-by to
enable communications? Similarly, URLs follow protocols, in this case, http or,
Hypertext Transfer Protocol and in
this format, the protocol is another text protocol as opposed to a speech
protocol. I mention this because all URLs are dealt with in this fashion for
our purposes BUT, it is not unknown and in fact, it is quite common to see the
URL defined as https://
The ‘s’ is extremely important
and can often be displayed in a green font colour.
With browsers, in-built security
measures are provided by the individual browser company. Due to ‘hacking’, we
suffer the indignation of fixing a crime after it has occurred, been committed
or, identified.
IT (Information Technology)
personnel and programmers usually manage to ‘fix’ these problems and update
their security measures accordingly. One measure of defence is known as SSL and
whilst the acronym stands for Single Socket layer, we are not going to delve
into this area of technology but you may come across the term as well as,
encryption.
Whenever we wish to access
extremely pertinent financial information, make a payment online or perform
online banking actions, we HAVE to be aware that, there is one more ‘layer’ of
security, which can be employed. This ‘extra’ security is again provided by the
browser ‘people’ but is instantly recognisable by the URL - https://
The ‘s’ stands for SECURE –
Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. If you are performing any type of financial
transaction or viewing an online account and the ‘s’ is missing from the URL,
you should NOT continue under any circumstance!
Similarly, you can NEVER be
complacent. You must think like a hacker: if you are going to interfere in any
way with anyone or their information, you are going to hit them where it hurts
– by disrupting their ‘paper’ lives or their monetary situation.
If I ever give you one piece of
advice, and I will give you many over the coming lessons, ALWAYS read what is
on the screen, in front of you! Don’t be paranoid but never take things at face
value. Just because it is a computer, do NOT trust that which you are seeing
WITHOUT first considering perspective. Just because it is written on the screen
in front of you does not make it true or a fact. Who, or what, is behind what
you are viewing? And Why?
Let me give you an answer or,
scenario: we have just learnt about URLs and Secure URLs, we can see them on
the screen and we ‘know’ they are secure so where, if you were a hacker, would
you attack me, the computer user at the end of the line?
Well, if I could convince you
into believing you were somewhere but I could actually take you somewhere else,
that would be interesting?
If I could ‘hack’ your URL for
example? Let’s take a for instance outside of the computer:
If you go shopping in Walmart
but for one day, I kidnap all the staff and bring my own people in and we serve
you all day long and you pay for goods we don’t have but will send you or take
a rain-check on, we walk away with all your money and disappear, overnight. You
now have absolutely no redress and your money has gone. This may not be the
best analogy but you take my point – if I take over your URL somehow and
redirect you to my site which APPEARS to have that URL, you can top up my bank
account all day long – thank you very much!
Of course, this sounds a little
extreme you might think but this actually happens at the http:// level, on
occasions. It is extremely hard if not impossible (??) to do this with https://
but new attacks are constant.
GPS? Marvellous technology.
Infallible? Really? It demands a measure of common sense too. Computing is safe
but no different to a GPS, so use it, don’t trust it 100% but accept the fact
that a degree of cynicism is healthy.
And
On that note, within your emails
you will see notices occasionally from accounts you have and have signed-up to,
a bank statement notification for example; IF it starts with Dear Customer,
DELETE the email immediately and do NOT open it any further or, open an Attachment
that it may contain. Every account that knows you personally for whatever
reason WILL address you as Dear Mr Shoobridge or similarly – if ‘they’ don’t
know who you are, they REALLY don’t know who you are - consider ‘them’ to be,
malicious – more, later.
There is so much to understand I
agree but step-by-step we will progress to more comfortable levels and that
which you don’t remember, is available, very easily, online – again, more,
later.
In a similar way, if ANY email
asked you for personal information to do with security, your log-on details or
passwords, they are malicious - ONE HUNDRED PERCENT! so, DELETE them
immediately.
There are NO free lunches out
there. There are NO fortunes coming your way by gift or winnings, no holidays
without a catch and, no matter how tempted you are, DON’T!
If you do? You may want to
recall this advice before ‘crying’ about your losses – you have been warned –
this practice is called Phishing and that is accurate terminology.
If you are in any doubt, there
are websites which clearly state all the scams and we have all heard of
Nigeria. Urban Legends, Snopes are two such websites so you DO have control
and, responsibility – if it’s too good to be true, it’s a SCAM!
Before we leave emails, again,
you WILL receive lots of emails from sources that are totally unfamiliar to
you. This is quite ‘normal.’
The Internet exists because of
money. Money is generated by the result of sales from advertising and the cost
of companies to actually advertise on the Internet.
Some access is provided by
consumers when signing-up to newsletters. Some is provided unfortunately,
inadvertently, by your friends and families (emails). Similarly, when you
access wi-fi hotspots in airports or fast-food chains, you often have to
sign-up to gain access to the ‘free’ wi-fi. Guess what? You just signed-up! Of
course, you can unsubscribe if you remember and most companies will honour
your, ‘unsubscribe’ request but ultimately, all these different methods are
recorded or logged and ‘mail-out’ lists are compiled by companies operating,
effectively in the background.
These lists are ‘sold’ to
companies for direct emails access to your email address, to you the consumer,
to entice you into buying their products.
Cleverly, this forwarding type
of operation is so ‘mechanically’ (digitally), easy it is performed by unmanned
computers, robotically.
ISP recognise lots of malicious
and nuisance types of email, commonly known as spam or junk mail and filters it
out at their server level, never passing it on to a ‘wiser’ consumer client
base but not everything is recognised and ‘junk’ or ‘spam’ is subjective –
sometimes we want notifications and newsletter despite what they may contain
additionally – we can ‘train’ our own mailboxes accordingly – we have options.
We will be dealing with search
engines presently but everybody has heard of Google without a doubt? Google
searches the Internet for sites and locations for us along with other giants
from Microsoft like Bing. Yahoo is another big player and they all perform
multi-functions – they track our Internet habits!
Shopping, research, software,
music, videos, good habits and bad habits are ALL recorded, logged or noted in
some fashion. Little tracking devices are attached behind the scenes within the
programs called ‘cookies’ and surfing is almost impossible without ‘cookies
enabled.’
This is not ALL bad. There are
numerous good reasons to track us. We like the idea that criminal activity CAN
be tracked. We are pleased that paedophile prosecution can be supported by computer
file evidence; some people might not be happy to know their pornographic habits
are tracked but once child-pornography is the subject, opinions change.
The point is, there is good
tracking and bad tracking.
From a shopping perspective,
Google, who receives money from their advertisers, send us offers and special
offers that reflect our earlier shopping or surfing habits – we are being
selectively targeted. (Remember that MAC address?)
Companies like Walmart,
Superstore and Tesco simply love us shopping online. They target us with
coupons we are likely to use and not ones we are not. They tempt us and
continue the subliminal onslaught ferociously. We are constantly being
monitored in some way; by our credit and debit card usage, where we buy our
petrol/gas and how often – it is laughable when we talk about big-brother as
the government when the government has very little interest in our daily habits
unless of course, terrorism is involved; big-brother is/are, those institutions
we have actually welcomed into our lives! Openly!
In summary, there is no escape!
LoL. We are or can be, our own worse enemies or best friends. We actually have
lots of choices hence my advice to read the computer screen and examine just
what exactly we are reading and why then, how could anyone else could use this
information or data to good or not-so-good if not, bad?
The digital age is upon us –
like everything, progress is subjective to the recipient. For every progressive
step forward, we tend to ‘give-up’ something else, even our freedom.
We always have responsibility,
choices and, consequences – it’s life.
Somewhat out-of-step, I am going
to explain a little about digital information.
If you don’t know the shape of a
sine wave (analogue), it doesn’t matter. Suffice it to say that we are in a
digital age and though sine waves are generated electrically quite naturally by
scientific processes, we have learned how to change this shape into a square
wave form as mentioned in an earlier lesson.
The square wave suits our
purpose tremendously as we can break it down into minuscule divisions and
attach information to those divisions as we decide. This can take the form of
text data, music data, video indeed, ANYTHING we choose, literally.
When we initially started
breaking down or dividing the wave form, advances were slow and for our
purpose, let’s imagine breaking a single unit into 32 parts or, bits. The more
clever we got, the more we sub-divided; 64 bits, 128 bits, 256 bits for example.
The expansion is virtually, exponential.
We can also vary this square
wave by two methods; we can make the wave travel faster and also make it a
bigger volume. Now, the sky is the limit well, sound is and no doubt, light
speed will come in the form of laser technology.
Add to this a little process
called compression. As with our MoDem, our modulator – demodulator, we can
attach things (transmit) to carrier waves so long as we can devise a method to
interpret the information at the receiver end or simply code it for
transmission and decode it for reception and, we can.
If you observe my writing, the
text above, it is easy to see that the space I use is extremely, wasteful. IfIwroteinthisfashionwithnospacescommasorperiods
It would be confusing to you. Digital information is NOT confusing to a digital
medium certainly if once it is received, we can, decode it. I can further this
cause by making the size of the letters a third of what they are currently;
this process is a simple illustration of, compression; there are numerous
methods of compression and they are ‘media’ targeted.
Media simply refers to things
like music, video, SMS – text messages and so on. The way we compress photographs
is different to how we compress video and music.
Some familiar forms of
compression, as with music are MP3 and MP4. Video files depend where, to a
certain extent, they were created – a Windows application will give rise to a
.wmv file whereas an Apple constructed video would likely be an .avi file.
There are indeed so many compression mediums that converters have been created
in software programs in order for us to view each other’s creations.
If we look at a camera
specification, we see that they are classed on one front by their capacity to
take detail, so many mega-pixels. The larger the number, the better the
capability to capture the detail but the slower the process. For professionals
that depend on advertising or photography for a living and possibly need to
enlarge a photo to a poster size for an advertising campaign, this detail is
very important.
For the average person, such a
photo (.raw) serves no other purpose than to hinder our experience by slowing
down our camera’s processor. There is, of course, a solution to this problem –
compression. Again, there are numerous types of compression but the most
popular by far in use today, is JPEG - Joint Photographics Experts Group.
I reminisce at CDs. A large disc
containing music and the most popular form of replaying such since the cassette
tape. LPs; EPs; 45RPM; 33RPM; 78 RPM – in short, Vinyl, have all but
disappeared too?
MDs? What the heck are/were
they? An MD is the equivalent of a ‘compressed’ CD.
Our audible range, as we know,
is limited. We do not hear the low
frequencies and we do not hear the high frequencies and there are more high
frequencies we don’t hear than compared to the low ones however, our CD
marketers told us that CD’s were what we needed and CDs, we duly accepted. The
MD or mini-disc however was extremely clever. It essentially recorded and
reproduced ONLY the frequencies we can actually hear and cut-off, the rest.
As with VHS as opposed to
BetaMax or Phillips 2000, and Blueray as opposed to Red laser reproduction
mediums, the marketers decided what was best for us and we adapted, CDs despite
this obvious waste of inaudible information.
Compression is the sensible way
to reduce and speed up everything we want these days so long as we can maintain
quality and speed. We therefore encode it then decode it. With security, we
encrypt and decrypt.
You can see the limitless and
infinite variety of measures that we can attach and detach to our square wave
form; this was not possible with analogue configurations.
As I have indicated, for every
piece of information I give you, birth is given to ten pieces of detail I am
not dealing with but, like any expert student, there are courses designed for
information technology at various levels; my aim is to get you ‘street-smart’
to a practical level of understanding that you will be comfortable with in our
society and to that which offers practical help in your everyday practice using
a multiple range of IT devices.
Computers have also altered over
the years. Apart from processor speed increases, we have taken a side-ways
step. Wouldn’t it be nice to have one home computer which encases two processors,
three processors or four processors even?
Let’s accept one thing first -
for no reason explained here. In a digital world, numerals tend to double in
quantity from the whole number; therefore we have values like
1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,500 and 1000 – we don’t deal in 3,7,9’s etc..
Taking a small step backwards,
processors would be 1, 2 or 4 in number then 8 of course and so on.
Practically speaking, having 4
processors would be complicated and costly so what if we split one processor
into two cores or four cores?. Of course, we would need to give them more
ability to operate in conjunction and separately so if we could increase their
resources, RAM – Random Access Memory, we could reduce our impatience at the
keyboard and on the screen and get results quicker and more efficiently.
Welcome to modern computing.
This would have been almost
unheard of 15 years ago and almost beyond our wildest dreams and that’s just
computers; we are also developing mobile devices at the same levels hence, LTE
(media downloads) and Smart phones.
To complete this lesson,
computer processors have also increased in efficiency and one of these advances
is developing processors that can deal with the ‘bit’ technology of the data we
are interested in. For the longest time, our processors were designed to cope
with and process 32 bit technology. Ten years ago, the design was 64 bit which
is perfectly adequate for our present needs though doubtless, a no-limit
situation is developing constantly.
Incidentally, processor
temperature is a vital factor in computer processing. Reducing component size
is all well and good for portability and to enable us to facilitate multiple
computers in the same location but power and heat are two of the biggest
problems we will encounter.
Making a computer more powerful
but smaller means increasing the problem four-fold or, exponentially (not quite
an accurate definition). Power means heat. If we could reduce the heat and
increase the power and decrease the heat again, we could move into the realms
of a ‘super-computer!’ Not for home use of course but as a study of interest,
that is where the industry is heading and, they exist already.
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