What is open source?

In simple terms open source is the free-code available over the Internet. A group of people come together to solve a problem(generally to develop software).This group can have unlimited number of numbers from all over the world. The concept behind open source is that the software developed will be more useful and error-free.This source code is included the complied version, so that further modifications can be done. Any one from all over the world can take part in this modification and customization of the source code.
The basic characteristics that open source software must fulfill are:
•    The program must be distributed freely.
•    The original source must be included with the software.
•    Further modification must be allowed to everybody.
•    After modification software must be redistributed.
Some popular open source software are Linux (operating System), PNG (Graphics file format, getting popular with world wide web), Mozilla (Firefox, Netscape Browser), PERL (Scripting language for web), Wikipedia (online dictionary and other information).

Starting days of Open Source

The roots of current open source software system was established by two different groups in late 70’s and early 80’s.

• First group, on the US East coast, Richard Stallman, a programmer at the MIT AI Lab, resigned, and launched the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation.
• Second group, on the US West coast, the Computer Science Research Group (CSRG) of the University of California at Berkeley was improving the Unix system.

Discussing Netiquette

Netiquette is a code of behavior or simply manners of cyberspace. It describes a set of rules for behaving properly online

Sometimes people write something that other feel offended or vice-versa. Netiquette defines a set of rules to avoid such situations. It especially focuses on people who are new to cyberspace and are not aware of few basic online conventions.
The first and most important rule is as follows:
Remember the human
This rule is based on the thought that you should treat others the way you’d like others to treat you. When we communicate online we just see the computer screen, but we must not forget that we are communicating to people through this screen.
While communicating online we cannot use gestures, facial expression or our voice tone. So the probability of misinterpreting the message increases. All we have are our words, so use words with a great care, as other person may feel offended even if your intentions are not to.
Netiquette delivers the message that we are interacting with real people over the Internet, so we must not write anything that we can’t say to some one’s face. We can send direct mails to famous and well-known people. People become unbelievably rude with these mails and this is the worst thing one could do. If you are afraid to say something to the person’s face, you must not write that in such mails.
Your offensiveness could go against you
The data sent via e-mails or messages might be backed-up somewhere without your knowledge, access or control. Once you have sent a message, you loose control over it because it could be saved, forwarded by the recipient. So, there are hundreds of chances that your words come back to haunt you.
Even if you are not engaged in some criminal activity, you should pay extra care while sending any sensitive or private data over the Internet. You do not have control over where it goes.

promoting my blog entry

Keywords: search engines optimization, crawler, spiders, indexing, ranking of web page, writing query, tips, tricks, search information, working of a search engine, tricking a search engine, web page ranking, meta tags, keywords.

Subject Line: How search engines work
Headline: Knowing search engines

“Getting a high listing in a search engine result-list is not easy, for this you have to know how search engines work”

Content: Creating a website demands a lot of hard work and after months of hard work you must want your web site to recognized. Getting recognized is even much harder because there is over 1trillion URL and everyone out there wants same as you. So to impress search engines you must how they work and the selection criteria they follow.
You did not do it because you did not know it
What if you don’t know anything regarding working and selection criteria of a search engine? To explain this let’s consider a scenario: As a designer you work on each aspect for a great visual impression of your web site and put a lot of relevant content in it. But you did not add a title tag on your web page and as a result your web page goes under millions of untitled pages, which a web crawler would not notice. Here the problem is that you did not enter a title tag because you did know it is such an important issue. So knowing how search engines work is the best way that can help you improve your work. To know more about the working of a search engine visit my Blog entry that explains basic working criteria adopted by search engines.

Sixth sense technology

“Showing information present over internet to taking pictures, u name it and it does for you “

There’s nothing to do with any supernatural powers as someone may interpret from the name. This is actually a device implemented by a student named Pranav Mistry under the supervision of MIT Professor Pattie Maes. This device consists of a camera, a cellphone and a mini-projector. This combination acts as a computer along with a connection to the Cloud(all the data stored on the web).

This device is so handy that you can use it anywhere and at anytime. You can make calls, take pictures, check your flight schedules, read newspapers, surf internet and much more. You can use the projector against any surface like on your hands, on a wall, on a piece of paper , on a couch and it obeys gestures of your hands.

The real power of this TED(Technology, entertainment, Design) device lies on its potential to connect the real world with the Internet, and overlaying the information on the world itself.

Types of copyright symbols

“Know copyright symbols for better understanding”

1)    ©: Circle around C is the most commonly used copyright symbol.  This symbol is always on the baseline. This symbol was originated in US copyright law. People often use C in parenthesis instead of © but this is not a legal sign to indicate copyrights. Instead you can use “copyright” if not using © sign.
2)    ®: Circle around R (registered trademark). Registered trademark symbol can either be on baseline or subscripted. This mark can only be used after federal registration of the mark.
3)    TM and SM: TM is for trademark and SM is for service mark. Trademark symbol is always subscripted. These marks can be used without federal registration as these indicate that you claims rights or federal registration is in process.

Shortcuts for typing in the symbols

For ©:  “option and g” on mac and  Ctrl+Alt+C for windows.

For ®: “option and r” on mac and ALT 0174 for windows.

For TM: “option and 2″ on mac and ALT 0153 for windows.

Why we need copyright

Copyright is very important, especially if you are posting your information online. Copyrighting gives you the authority to own your work whether it is some painting, research work, book writing or anything that belongs to you. If your work is not copyrighted anyone can edit it, earn money from it and so forth.Copyrighting gives you authority, moral rights and monetary rights for your data.

How it work?

Copyright laws are different for different countries but basic criteria is more or less similar in most of the countries.After getting your work copyrighted you own all rights for it.You can prevent people using your work and if someone wants to use your work he/she must have a permission from you and you can also ask for royalty if you want.

Copyrights are not forever. Generally coptrights are for the 50years more than the life of the person who owns the copyrights.If the work belongs to more than one person then, coryrights last for 50years after the person who dies last.After this period of time work is considered as “public” unless someone renews the copyrights.

What cannot be copyrighted?

There are restriction to copyrights, which means there are certain things that are not protected by copyrights:

• Facts.
• Names.
• Methods of doing things.
• Characters of a story.
• Titles.

What is Encryption?

In my previous post I talked about securing data with the help of encryption, today I will explain what exactly encryption is. Before going into detail lets know about basics terms used in encryption.

Cipher Text: Cipher text is the data that has been encrypted. We cannot read cipher text without the key, which is used in the process of encryption. With the help of key cipher text is converted into readable plain text.

Public Key: Public key is the series of characters that is used to decipher the encrypted text. The generator of cipher text provides public key and distributes this key to selected receiver (he/she want to share data).

Private Key: Private key is the series of characters used to create cipher text. The generator knows Private key only. Without private key cipher text cannot be generated.

Explaining Encryption: In simple words encryption is the process to convert plain readable text into unreadable cipher text. The concept of encryption is very old, in early days encrypted text was used to transfer confidential information during wars to prevent it from enemy. In today’s world use of encryption is more common, it can be use to send sensitive data (like credit card info), to discuss agenda of an organization over the Internet, by government agencies to secure confidential data.

Now a day’s computers are used to generate cipher text. Computer generates a key with the help of encryption algorithms. Encryption algorithms are widely divided
into two groups:
A) Asymmetric Algorithms (Uses 2keys(Public and private)) for encryption and encryption resp.)
B) Symmetric Algorithms (Uses only one key to encrypt and decrypt text)
To share encrypted data it is important for the sender and receiver to have secure path to share keys. Because if keys are not share data can be written and read by anyone who knows keys.

E-mails secure or not!!

Your E-mail account is Secure?

In this digital world all of us have e-mail accounts and even more than one. While creating an account we choose our password with a lot of care, but does choosing a strong password  guarantee that our accounts are secure and private to us? The answer might be NO. Although it is not easy to intercept some one’s message; because messages are divided into pieces or packets before they are sent and this makes it difficult for intruders to intercept your private messages. But what if someone has access to your account itself. When we send our messages over the Internet using POP protocols/servers, it is sent in plain text (non-encrypted) and anyone can view our user name and password if they have “listen in” ability. Once our user name and password is disclosed intruders can view, send and receive our private messages. So, try not to send any information over the Internet which you don’t want other to know or view.

How can you Secure it?

If you still want to send important data over the Internet then how can you make sure it is safe? The answer is use encryption to make it more secure. One of the popular methods to encrypt your e-mail is “Pretty Good Privacy” method. It is a free program available over the Internet. You can encrypt and decrypt your messages and even can add digital signatures to your messages to enhance the security of your data.
Other method could be to use an account provider that offers encryption in your messages.

How Search Engine Works

There is tons of information available about each single topic one could think about on Internet. And whenever we want to search for a particular topic we start our search from a search engine.  In simple words a search engine is a program that searches the most relevant pages available on the Internet for us. But how does a search engine know which pages to select from thousands of available pages related to that topic. Well a brief detail about it is as follows:

Spider visits your page

Process Starts Here
Search engine searches information available on the Internet and makes an Index of it. To visit a large number of pages search engines use Web Crawlers or Spiders. A spider goes through each page containing keywords that user puts in the search and then to the different links present in those pages. It checks the Meta Tags (this is the information given by owner of a page to specify key words and concepts under which the page will be indexed). And based on this collected information a Spider selects a page to be included in the search.

After Spiders complete their collection of pages, search engine start the ranking of these pages. One search engine could simply store the keyword and URL of the page and other can assign a weighted value to the keywords used in the web pages (more weighted keywords in the headings, subheadings and on the page, more chances to be on top of search results). Different search engines use different approaches to assign ranking to these pages and this the reason that a user gets different list of pages from different search engines with similar search keywords. However, there is no guarantee that you get the most relevant page on the top of the search result every time.

You can’t trick search engines
If someone wants his/her page in the top search results and tries to fool the search engine by adding a number of Meta Tags and repeated use of keywords in the heading and subheading, then this is not that easy to do so, because these Spiders are smart enough to catch such tricks. A Spider collects the keywords, heading, Meta tags and other information available on the pages and correlates this data and if it finds that Meta tags are not related to information written on the pages then it discards the Meta tag. So if you want your page to be on the top result list then you need to add a lot of relevant information, links and Meta tags with proper use of definition and information.

Writing a Query

To build a search one could use a one single word/phrase or can generate a more complex query with use of more Boolean operator (and with + sign, not with – sign), quotation marks, with specific file extensions and so forth.

my first post

I find it real hard to begin my first post in my very first blog. I have done my Bachelor’s degree in information technology so; finally, I decided to explore this word information:

According to simplest definition: Information is a collection of facts from which we can draw some conclusions. But in this modern time whole world depends on this simple word called Information. According to Albert Einstein” Know where to find the information and how to use it, that’s the secret to success”. And because of this reason, I guess, corporate world is spending a great amount of money to collect information on different possible issues.

Many people are getting a handsome income by just filling forms of surveys conducted by many organizations and these organizations will use this information to understand the needs and expectations of society, which in turn help them to improve their products and raise the turn over.

Many of us enjoy taking aptitude tests on various social networks (or groups) but may be many less of us know that companies buy our answers to make their databases. Then they process these databases and use results for various needs such as which product will be successful in which region of world and for what age group, to hire their employees and so forth. Some political parties set their agenda for election based on these set of information.

Taking other perspectives in consideration, whole world is like one small village because of the vast amount of information available on air. Travelling has become so easy because of Google earth, GPS etc. We students collect a lot of information about different colleges or programs prior to taking admission, which helps us to make the best-suited information. By writing our blogs we are creating new set of information and this could serve a quality service to some other information seekers. So information is the key of all locks present in this world.