Putting the Internet to Work for You

Internet security: Password

admin — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 12:03:37 +0000

One of the most important things for interntet business is security. The nature of banking transactions has changed dramatically since the advent of the automated teller machine and the personal identification number (PIN). A PIN, a secret four- or more digit number, is used in combination with an ATM card to verify that the person withdrawing cash from the automated teller is authorized to do so. Without the PIN, the card is useless. Simple but effective.
Computer systems offer a similar security strategy through account passwords, with which users can identify themselves as owners of authorized accounts.
Unlike an ATM system, however, computer users are sometimes free to choose not to have passwords or to select passwords that are not very secure. (For example, how secure would you feel if your PIN for your checking account was an easily-guessible 1234 or worse, wasn’t even needed to use your bank card?). Choosing a poor password or not having any password at all is a bad idea, and we strongly urge against this practice. It’s like playing Russian roulette with your company’s data: The single most effective way to foil Internet intruders is to require a password to enter your computer system.
Nevertheless, for reasons that inevitably seem ridiculous after a break-in, users and systems managers frequently ignore or circumvent this important aspect of system security. Others, not realizing the danger, use vendor-supplied passwords that come with the system, choose a password and never change it, or even write down the password and tape it to their computer!
Here are some road-tested tips for choosing passwords that are both easy to remember and secure:
■ Use a password that is at least six characters long.
■ Use both digits (numerals) and letters.
■ Mix upper- and lowercase letters.
■ Make sure the password isn’t in the dictionary.

■ Change passwords at least every sixty days.
■ Make sure a password is not a name or word associated with you or the account.
Examples of easily guessed passwords would include your birthday, your social security number, your license plate number, your dog’s name, or any word that might appear in a dictionary. Better passwords are those that combine characters and digits in a mnemonic fashion that’s easy for you to remember but difficult for intruders to guess. For example, hi2all and 21ogIN! are impossible for a program to guess, whereas lindal and XcatX are okay but could be better.

Staying Off The Internet

admin — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 12:00:04 +0000

Without a doubt, the safest way to avoid Internet security problems is to stay off the Internet completely—to send e-mail and other vital data either through a wide area network routed through a major telecom carrier or to rely on a commercial online service such as CompuServe, America Online, or MCI Mail.
You can also send and receive Internet mail through commercial online services. These networks are considered fairly safe because they only offer gateways to the Internet—doors that periodically open and close for e-mail only.
Another important difference between a centralized online service and an Internet access provider is that, on a centralized system such as CompuServe, you can send e-mail to another user—without ever leaving the CompuServe system. On the Internet, unless the other user is on the same system as you are, the message or data travels through a variety of machines, forcing you to rely on the security of the systems through which it passes.
Because the Internet isn’t a single network but really a network of networks, some portions of the route are safer than others. Jeffrey Shapard of University of California Berkeley says the academic networks are notoriously full of security holes, encompass open access subnetworks (once you’re connected to one machine you automatically have access to all), poorly administered systems, and, as he phrases it, “lots of eyes and ears that can tap into your bitstream without a great deal of cleverness.” But, he adds, ” commercial Internet providers such as Performance Systems International (PSI) have tight central network management, careful routing, extensive training available for customers on security mechanisms, and even enhanced services with encryption built-in.”
As we explained earlier, security considerations and administrative control are important criteria in selecting an Internet access provider. Most of the larger access providers provide continual monitoring, frequent spot checks, and explicit usage guidelines. All services should be able to help you ensure maximum security for your business, too.
Another approach is to keep your company’s computer system “off the Net” by signing up for an inexpensive dialup account. This way, your company transmits and accesses Internet data through a UNIX line-oriented interface, or “shell,”
rather than connecting to the Internet directly through a SLIP connection or a leased line. Still another approach is to limit your use of the Internet to e-mail. Because e-mail is not interactive due to its store-and-forward nature, it’s hard for “crackers” to use it to transmit viruses or worms.
The drawback to these strategies, of course, is that you greatly reduce your access to the Internet and its many tools and features.

Searching For Data With Gopher

admin — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 11:50:29 +0000

Telnet is a terrific tool, but it requires a fair amount of knowledge about the Internet. In particular, you’d need to know a lot of computer names to be able to exploit fully the many services available. This is doubly true for FTP, and even with the Archie service, it’s still quite difficult to find information on the Internet.
The computer services group at the University of Minnesota found the same problem when they began to make online documentation available to their students. As a result, they invented Gopher, a menu-based front-end to documents, information, and services available on the Internet.
Gopher is a one-stop shopping source for Internet information. A menu-driven document-delivery service, you can use Gopher to browse the Internet’s resources, read text files, and access information of all kinds. With Gopher, you “burrow” through a series of nested menus to find the information you need on any computer system connected to the network and running Gopher software.
As does FTP, a variety of Gopher programs offer access to the data through Mac, PC, or dialup systems. All the software is free, and we will show the dialup service again, so you can see how to step through menus and then show the same information on TurboGopher (the Mac Gopher client) and Winsock Gopher, a shareware Windows client.
The most powerful aspect of the Gopher service is that any system can include a variety of links to other Gopher servers. The result is a network-wide information source called Gopherspace.
Gophers also provide gateways to other Internet information systems such as World Wide Web, WAIS, Archie, and Whois and to network services such as telnet and FTP. When you access a Gopher site, the files you see listed on the menu in front of you could be housed anywhere on the network-on your local server or on a computer system thousands of miles away. By simply choosing an item from the menu on your screen, you can access that information within minutes.

Accessing Archives with Archie

admin — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 11:49:03 +0000

For all the advantages of the FTP system, there’s also a basic problem: how do you know what files are available where? Indeed, this is part of a more fundamental problem on the Internet that has to do with the missing road maps and still-unfinished highways that we’ve been talking about through this site.
A group of students at the McGill University school of computer science recognized the problem and, with some ingenuity and skillful programming, solved it by creating an FTP database system called Archie. The Archie system automatically gathers and indexes the hundreds of FTP archives available and then distributes the comprehensive index to a variety of Archie sites through the Internet.
With Archie, you can locate any file available through FTP. The downside is that there really isn’t much information contained in the Archie database. Archie filenames don’t tell you much about the contents of the file, and, unfortunately, that’s all you have to work with.
Nevertheless, you can often infer some information about a file by its location, which may offer some assistance. Let’s take a look at directory naming that can help you find what you’re looking for. A directory such as pub/archives/mac/ business/stocks, for example, is a likely place to find stock-market-related files and applications. You can use this to help your searches. In this case, if we search for mac and stocks, we could match the files in this directory.
Archie’s Internet archives database contains an entry including the name, location, host system, size, and file type of more than 2,250,000 files at more than 1,000 anonymous FTP archive sites. To give you some sense of how popular Archie has become, public Archie servers currently receive more than 50,000 queries each day. With more than 2,000,000 files available, you won’t be surprised to find that the Archie database is massive, far too massive to be found on lots of different sites on the Internet. Fortunately, that’s not a problem because a number of computer systems offer public access to Archie for anyone who can use telnet (see preceding section on telnet) to connect to their machines.

Moving Files With FTP

admin — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 11:45:28 +0000

Telnet is a great way to access remote computers or let Internet users access yours (you will need it very often in your business practice), but it doesn’t help disseminate files, documents, press releases, or software. That’s where file transfer protocol (FTP) comes in.
There are two basic ways of working with FTP. For confidential information distribution, files can be deposited in a specific account with a secret password. If the information is intended for the general public, you can make it available through a service known as anonymous FTP, in which users don’t need an account to connect, search available files, or download them to their computers.
Many computer companies, including Digital, Apple, Sun Microsystems, and Silicon Graphics, use FTP to enable their customers to download software fixes, press releases, and other informational files.
Unfortunately, the FTP program that is available through most dialup Internet access providers is very primitive and remains one of the most difficult Internet tools to use. Thankfully, a number of attractive graphical interfaces are now available for DOS, Windows, and Macintosh systems, and many are available for free or little cost. In this section, we’ll demonstrate how to work with the UNIX-based FTP program because that’s what your dialup account will probably require you to use. We’ll also show how the same collection of files would appear within the Mac Fetch and a Windows-based FTP program.
To transfer a file using UNIX FTP, you need to connect to the remote computer, enter the word anonymous or FTP as an account and, by tradition, your e-mail address as password. Then you need to change to the directory where the desired file is stored and use the get command to download that file to your local account. By default, all files are transmitted as if they are text, which usually works.
If the file you want to download is a program file or another type of file that mustn’t be altered in transmission, you can switch into binary mode by using the binary command. By contrast, if you’re sure what you seek is text-a document, for example- you might use the ascii command. ASCII is the set of characters used by most Internet computers; it stands for American Standard for Computer Information Interchange.
Suppose that while reading a recent article in a technology-oriented business magazine, you notice a note at the end of the story that says, “The text of the intellectual property portion of the North American Free Trade Agreement is available via FTP fromwiretap.spies.com as file NAFTA/17.intellect.” Based on that description, it’s a pretty safe bet that NAFTA/17. intellect is a text file.