Cybrology Essay, Research Paper

CYBROLOGY

Computer communication, it s a virtual world, in which messages and information streak across the continent or around the world at the speed of light. It s a place where you can find a fact or find a job, play a game, publish a poem, meet a friend, pay your bills or do thousands of other things without ever leaving your home or your office. One of the features of computer communication, which provides us with all the above features, is Internet. Through different sources, which include different media s and books, Internet will be thoroughly explained and proved to a very useful and sometimes disadvantageous technological leap.

It is essential to have the correct devices and software to go on the Internet. To get online, i.e. to get on the Internet, the two crucial devices required for the computer, are a modem and a telephone line. Modem converts electronic data or information into analog data or information, which could be carried via the telephone line, and vice-versa. After having the two devices, it is vital to have correct communication software, which is provided from your ISP Internet Service Provider, for efficient and effective use of Internet (Glossbrenner 14 15). Once online, Internet is divided into five categories; consumer online service, Bulletin Board System, Communication-only, Information-only, and Transactions. Consumer online services involve online financing, shopping, auctions, and advertisements. Bulletin board services is involved in answering different questions: troubleshooters, sending and receiving private e-mails on certain topics, uploading and downloading of certain files, sharing of certain files. Communication-only is created for person to person communication, person to group communication, and group to person communication; also, private e-mails can be sent through this category. Information-only is a very resourceful category as, this category saves our time from going to the library, newspaper stand, bookstore, and any other place where we have to wait or pay for information. This category consists of news, current affairs, weather, economics, and every other useful source of information. Transactions, like consumer online services, include online financing. Transactions only handle financing and not shopping, advertisements, researching; unlike consumer online services (Glossbrenner 85 87).

All of the features mentioned above have their advantages and disadvantages. Online financing has made life much easier and faster. More and more people are paying their bills via the electronic bill payment system: 2.5 million households regularly paid bills last year, i.e. 1999, using a personal computer, 4 million are expected to do so this year. There are several ways of paying bills electronically, they range from creditors automatically obtaining money from your account, to instead of receiving bills at home get them collected at a certain web-site and pay them off all at once (Lloyd 67). Through Internet it is very easy to get the wholesale price of a product directly from the manufacturer. In some cases if consumers buy cars online than they do not have to pay the sticker prices; also, some websites offer tax-free products (Eldrige 6B).

Online financing can also create serious problems. There are people, who fear to go through the process of online financing, because their credit card numbers will be floating around in the Internet. Some online users do not agree with the fact that they have to wait for their bills to be paid off, or they are not sure when their bills will be paid off.

George Barto, a research director at Gartner Research Firm, said, 37 percent of respondents who use online banking services said they disliked losing control and not knowing exactly when a bill would be paid, while 14 percent cited trouble coordinating deposits with payments and 11 percent worried that bills would not be paid in time. (Lloyd 67)

Electronic bill payment will save extra fess and postage, but in return it is risk ones whole bank balance.

Internet is an excellent, efficient, and effective means of communication. To communicate from one country to another country is very slow, expensive, and tedious task. There are many international students who find Internet to be very helpful when it comes to stay in touch with their family. In the interview of Juan Lopez, Juan said, I feel as if I m with my parents and am talking with them every day. It takes at least one week for international mail to be received via air-mail, but it takes less than an hour to receive an international mail (Personal Interview #1).

IRC, Internet Relay chat, is like having a virtual community. This virtual community is used for two purposes; daily chats and business chats. Daily chats consists of people chatting with one another just for fun, or getting some information or just staying in touch, making new friends, finding out facts, and other daily activities. Business chats consists of virtual conferences, videoconferences, and file transfers. With the help of virtual conferences one person can actually see other person right in front of him and they both can talk with each other, its like you are with them but you are not. Videoconference takes our digital image and after processing it sends it through the Internet to the target audience and vice-versa. Some times we have huge files on our computer, which would be very hard to copy to a disk and take it to the target audience, for that purpose we have file transfers. To be in one of these chats, first a web server must be selected, i.e. for example, yahoo, after selecting correct web server, the category in which the target audience will be, has to be found. Once the category has been found, browsing through the chat rooms, correct chat room should be found and then begin chatting.

IRC can become disadvantageous, while a daily chat is in progress between two or more different identities, no one knows, whether the other person is lying or telling the truth. Also when chatting, hackers can access IP numbers through which they can virtually control the victim’s system and perform series of illegal tasks. While in business chats it is never know that when someone has got their hands on the confidential material that has been discussed over the virtual chat or video conferences. IRC has also resulted in lot of virus spreading; invasion of privacy, wrongful facts, and other things that should be avoided (The Life on The Internet).

Information is something that is very useful in today s world. Something new, exciting is happening at some place in the world and the fastest way to learn about it is by going online. Asking what kind of information is available online is little like asking what s in the library of congress and other massive library systems. One might as well ask what s available from agencies of he federal government; from leading universities, research centers and think tanks; from large companies, publishing houses and organizations in the business of collecting and disseminating information; from tens of thousands of entrepreneurs who collect and offer information in areas of their interest. What s available also comes from hundreds of thousands of people who use computer networks to communicate with each other everyday through discussion lists, newsgroups, postings to bulletin board, and in variety of different ways. Information includes finding places, finding people, news; current affairs, economics, sports, weather, and other features for which we would need to go to a bookstore or a library.

The online information is gathered and generated through numerous government agencies including the White House, the food and drug administration, national institute of health, department of agriculture, social security administration, and numerous other agencies. Other than e-mail there are news groups, and discussion lists, which are conversation among hundreds or even thousands of people, who are interested in a specific topic. Also scaled down version of magazines and newspaper articles are found on the Internet (Reddick and King 24 26). In The Life on the Internet published by Georgia Public Television, host Scott Simon found a person who had been given to foster parents from a very early age. That person, after a couple of months of learning Internet, found the parents through the Internet. Also after finding the parents the person came to know that there were seven brothers and sisters who were missing and were found on the Internet.

As much as it is useful, on the other hand Internet can be very harmful. Hacking is an exciting and sometimes very scary phenomenon, depending on which side of the battle you happen to be standing. It seems that everyday; some new vulnerability is discovered in the fabric of interlocked systems and software that make up the backbone of today s electronic market place. On one side of the walls, the inside, are the frustrated network managers and security professionals who are responsible for maintaining and building the increasingly important cyber fabric of modern life. On the other side of the walls are motley hordes of hackers, who delight in pointing out every crack in the wall by periodically publicizing holes in the defense of even the high and mighty. The term Hacker means one who tinkers with unfamiliar systems in a selfless effort to gain insight and/or re-engineer it for the better. Cracker, on the other hand, has come to refer to those malicious hackers who break into systems for fun or profit. There are preventions against hacking but hacker and cracker programs are always found on the Internet. The two most common programs are NB: Net Bus and BO: Back Orifice. This two programs can found through the Internet, downloaded and used freely. Because of its simplicity of use there are a lot of young hackers emerging (McClure and Kurtz 29 42).

Internet has proved to be a very useful means of receiving and sending information, files, data, and variety of software. It is also an technological advance for the new generation that is emerging in front of us, as Maritza mentioned it would be beneficial because so much now a days can be done on the Internet that it would help prepare them for the future (Personal interview #2). Also through the surveys taken it could be concluded that more and more people are using Internet for their day to day life. Internet has been a very useful technological advance. This technological advance has also proved to be very harmful by providing free pornographic material, illusion of knowledge, hacking, cracking and various different illegal offenses, which destroy many lives and financial figures (Surveys taken in ELC).