WWW Security

The Web has become criminals' preferred pathway for spreading malware. Cybercrime carried out on the Web can include identity theft, fraud, espionage and intelligence gathering. Web-based vulnerabilities now outnumber traditional computer security concerns, and as measured by Google, about one in ten web pages may contain malicious code. Most Web-based attacks take place on legitimate websites, and most, as measured by Sophos, are hosted in the United States, China and Russia. The most common of all malware threats is SQL injection attacks against websites. Through HTML and URIs the Web was vulnerable to attacks like cross-site scripting (XSS) that came with the introduction of JavaScript and were exacerbated to some degree by Web 2.0 and Ajax web design that favors the use of scripts. Today by one estimate, 70% of all websites are open to XSS attacks on their users.
Proposed solutions vary to extremes. Large security vendors like McAfee already design governance and compliance suites to meet post-9/11 regulations, and some, like Finjan have recommended active real-time inspection of code and all content regardless of its source. Some security vendors like Commtouch monitor new threats and provide reporting tools for malware outbreaks, spam, and zombie trends along with real-time outbreak monitors.
Some have argued that for enterprise to see security as a business opportunity rather than a cost center, "ubiquitous, always-on digital rights management" enforced in the infrastructure by a handful of organizations must replace the hundreds of companies that today secure data and networks. Jonathan Zittrain has said users sharing responsibility for computing safety is far preferable to locking down the Internet.

Read more »

Posted in: World Wide Web(WWW),WWW prefix,WWW Privacy,WWW Security

WWW Privacy

Computer users, who save time and money, and who gain conveniences and entertainment, may or may not have surrendered the right to privacy in exchange for using a number of technologies including the Web. Worldwide, more than a half billion people have used a social network service, and of Americans who grew up with the Web, half created an online profile and are part of a generational shift that could be changing norms. Facebook progressed from U.S. college students to a 70% non-U.S. audience, and in 2009 estimated that only 20% of its members use privacy settings. In 2010 (six years after co-founding the company), Mark Zuckerberg wrote, "we will add privacy controls that are much simpler to use".
Privacy representatives from 60 countries have resolved to ask for laws to complement industry self-regulation, for education for children and other minors who use the Web, and for default protections for users of social networks. They also believe data protection for personally identifiable information benefits business more than the sale of that information. Users can opt-in to features in browsers to clear their personal histories locally and block some cookies and advertising networks but they are still tracked in websites' server logs, and particularly web beacons. Berners-Lee and colleagues see hope in accountability and appropriate use achieved by extending the Web's architecture to policy awareness, perhaps with audit logging, reasoners and appliances.
In exchange for providing free content, vendors hire advertisers who spy on Web users and base their business model on tracking them. Since 2009, they buy and sell consumer data on exchanges (lacking a few details that could make it possible to de-anonymize, or identify an individual). Hundreds of millions of times per day, Lotame Solutions captures what users are typing in real time, and sends that text to OpenAmplify who then tries to determine, to quote a writer at The Wall Street Journal, "what topics are being discussed, how the author feels about those topics, and what the person is going to do about them".
Microsoft backed away in 2008 from its plans for strong privacy features in Internet Explorer, leaving its users (60% of the world's Web users) open to advertisers who may make assumptions about them based on only one click when they visit a website. Among services paid for by advertising, Yahoo! could collect the most data about users of commercial websites, about 2,500 bits of information per month about each typical user of its site and its affiliated advertising network sites. Yahoo! was followed by MySpace with about half that potential and then by AOL–TimeWarner, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and eBay.

Read more »

Posted in: World Wide Web(WWW),WWW prefix,WWW Privacy,WWW Security

WWW prefix

Many domain names used for the World Wide Web begin with www because of the long-standing practice of naming Internet hosts (servers) according to the services they provide. The hostname for a web server is often www, as it is ftp for an FTP server, and news or nntp for a USENET news server. These host names appear as Domain Name System (DNS) subdomain names, as in www.example.com. The use of such subdomain names is not required by any technical or policy standard; indeed, the first ever web server was called nxoc01.cern.ch, and many web sites exist without a www subdomain but most established websites prefer to use them, or they use some other name such as "www2", "secure", etc. Most web servers are set up such that both the domain root (e.g., example.com) and the www subdomain (e.g., www.example.com) refer to the same site; others require one form or the other, or they may map to different web sites.
www is a very useful tool for load-balancing incoming web traffic by creating a CNAME record that point to a cluster of load balancing servers. Since only a subdomain can be cname'ed the same result can not be achieved by using just the domain root.
When a user submits an incomplete website address to a web browser in its address bar input field, some web browsers automatically try adding the prefix "www" to the beginning of it and possibly ".com", ".org" and ".net" at the end, depending on what might be missing. For example, entering 'microsoft' may be transformed to http://www.microsoft.com/ and 'openoffice' to http://www.openoffice.org. This feature started appearing in early versions of Mozilla Firefox, when it still had the working title 'Firebird' in early 2003. It is reported that Microsoft was granted a US patent for the same idea in 2008, but only for mobile devices.
The scheme specifier (http:// or https://) in URIs refer to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol and to HTTP Secure and so define the communication protocol to be used for the request and response. The HTTP protocol is fundamental to the operation of the World Wide Web, and the encryption involved in HTTPS adds an essential layer if confidential information such as passwords or banking information are to be exchanged over the public Internet. Web browsers usually prepend this scheme to URLs too, if omitted. Berners-Lee has acknowledged that the two forward slashes (//) were originally unnecessary.
In overview, RFC 2396 defines Uniform Resource Indicators to have the following form:

<scheme>://<authority><path>?<query>#<fragment>

Here <authority> is for example the web server (e.g., www.example.com), <path> identifies the web page on that server, from just '/' for the root page to longer paths in the form common on Unix-like operating systems. The web server processes the <query>, which can be data sent via a form, e.g., terms sent to a search engine, and the returned page present the result. Finally, <fragment> is not sent to the web server. It identifies a tag to which the browser positions the page.
In English, www is pronounced by individually pronouncing the name of characters (double-u double-u double-u). Although some technical users pronounce it dub-dub-dub this is not widespread. The English writer Douglas Adams once quipped in The Independent on Sunday (1999): "The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for," with Stephen Fry later pronouncing it in his "Podgrammes" series of podcasts as "wuh wuh wuh." In Mandarin Chinese, World Wide Web is commonly translated via a phono-semantic matching to wàn wéi wǎng (万维网), which satisfies www and literally means "myriad dimensional net", a translation that very appropriately reflects the design concept and proliferation of the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee's web-space states that World Wide Web is officially spelled as three separate words, each capitalized, with no intervening hyphens.

Read more »

Posted in: World Wide Web(WWW),WWW prefix,WWW Privacy,WWW Security

World Wide Web(WWW)

The World Wide Web, abbreviated as WWW and commonly known as the Web, is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, adsense, Google adwords, adwords and other multimedia and navigate between them by using hyperlinks. Using concepts from earlier hypertext systems, English engineer and computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, now the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, wrote a proposal in March 1989 for what would eventually become the World Wide Web. At CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, Berners-Lee and Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau proposed in 1990 to use "HyperText [...] to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will", and publicly introduced the project in December.
"The World-Wide Web (W3) was developed to be a pool of human knowledge, and human culture, which would allow collaborators in remote sites to share their ideas and all aspects of a common project."

The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used in every-day speech without much distinction. However, the Internet and the World Wide Web are not one and the same. The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks. In contrast, the Web is one of the services that runs on the Internet. It is a collection of interconnected documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs. In short, the Web is an application running on the Internet. Viewing a web page on the World Wide Web normally begins either by typing the URL of the page into a web browser, or by following a hyperlink to that page or resource. The web browser then initiates a series of communication messages, behind the scenes, in order to fetch and display it.
First, the server-name portion of the URL is resolved into an IP address using the global, distributed Internet database known as the Domain Name System (DNS). This IP address is necessary to contact the Web server. The browser then requests the resource by sending an HTTP request to the Web server at that particular address. In the case of a typical web page, the HTML text of the page is requested first and parsed immediately by the web browser, which then makes additional requests for images and any other files that complete the page image. Statistics measuring a website's popularity are usually based either on the number of page views or associated server 'hits' (file requests) that take place.
While receiving these files from the web server, browsers may progressively render the page onto the screen as specified by its HTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), or other page composition languages. Any images and other resources are incorporated to produce the on-screen web page that the user sees. Most web pages contain hyperlinks to other related pages and perhaps to downloadable files, source documents, definitions and other web resources. Such a collection of useful, related resources, interconnected via hypertext links is dubbed a web of information. Publication on the Internet created what Tim Berners-Lee first called the WorldWideWeb (in its original CamelCase, which was subsequently discarded) in November 1990.
These days you can make a website of your own freely.

Read more »

Posted in: World Wide Web(WWW),WWW prefix,WWW Privacy,WWW Security