7.3.1 Harmful Information and Communications
The Internet has brought a massive information explosion, but it also has some drawbacks. I am sure that you receive a lot of e-mails with at least 10% percent being spam or garbage e-mail. Some of the information available on the net is also ambiguous and cannot be totally accepted. You can also easily find offensive materials as well such as pornography and recipes for making bombs. Sometimes when you chat using the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) you find that the conversation becomes disrespectful or malicious. The internet can thus be misused easily to harass and discredit others.
7.3.2 Plagiarism and Copyright
With increasing internet access worldwide, plagiarism has also become a major epidemic especially among many institutions (Higgins, Gray, Symeonidis &
Tsintsifas, 2005). The overall trend on plagiarism is that it is serious, rising, prevalent, and chronic. The availability of enormous quantities of electronic texts existing on the Internet has made plagiarism much easier.
Briefly, plagiarism is defined as the act of taking another person's ideas and then using them as one's own. It is a form of cheating as it is truly stealing another person's ideas. For instance, in the United States, if you are charged for public domain material copyright infringement, you can be fined up to USD2500.
7.3.3 Cyber Crime and Cyber Security
Cyber misconduct such as hacking and fraud has been part and parcel of the Internet since its early development. As files are easily downloaded and distributed, dissemination of harmful viruses and worms also spread as quickly.
Various Internet scams and cheating pacts have been roaming the WWW looking for unsuspecting prey. So have fake websites and e-mail (including spam). Just because you can hide your identity on the Internet, it does not mean that you can also cheat and commit cyber crime.
As cyber crime has been dynamically on the increase, we have to admit that the effort to combat cyber crime is a collective one (Team Cymru 2006). We should not get involved in any offensive internet activity. In the United States, the government bodies concerned with this issue are for example the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Council (NSTAC), the National Security Information Exchange (NSIE), and the Cyber Security Industry Alliance (CSIA).
In Malaysia we have CyberSecurity Malaysia (formerly known as National ICT Security and Emergency Response Centre - NISER).
SELF-CHECK 7.3
1. Give examples of harmful information on the Internet.
2. In your own words, explain why fighting the cyber criminal is important and should not to be taken lightly?
Why are companies resistant to report cyber crimes?
According to the FBI and the Computer Security Institute annual survey of 520 companies and institutions (Sukhai, 2004):
More than 60% reported unauthorised use of computer systems over the past 12 months.
57% of all break-ins involved the Internet.
As many as 60% of attacks go undetected.
About only 15% of exposed attacks are reported to law enforcement agencies.
Discuss why we see such a low number of attack reports? Why is cyber security very important? Suggest what should be done to overcome the problem of cyber crimes.
Ć The characteristics of web-based systems are capability of handling database and multimedia contents, good graphical presentation and friendly navigation, and support of proactive user interaction.
Ć Three fundamental concepts in web applications involve the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
Ć A web portal is an access point for Internet information that offers various types of information, databases, and applications.
Ć The wikipedia and blog allow visitors to freely enter and edit their comments on the page, as opposed to traditional websites.
Ć Flickr.com and YouTube.com are web-based systems through which you can upload, view, and share photos and videos.
Ć E-Learning, e-commerce, e-government and e-entertainment are examples of web-based applications.
Ć Issues pertaining to the Web involve harmful information and communications, plagiarism and copyright, and cyber crime and cyber security.
HyperText Markup Language (HTML) HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Plagiarism
Portal
Uniform Resource Locator (URL) Wikipedia
Cheok, A. D., & Yu, G. (2006). Introduction. Comput. Entertain. 4, 3 (Jul. 2006), 7.
Higgins, C. A., Gray, G., Symeonidis, P., and Tsintsifas, A. (2005). Automated assessment and experiences of teaching programming. J. Educ. Resour.
Comput. 5, 3 (Sep. 2005), 5.
Jazayeri, M. (2007). Some Trends in Web Application Development. In Proceedings of conference on future of software engineering, 2007. FOSE '07, 23-25 May 2007, 199 - 213
Lee, J., & Lee, W. (2008). The relationship of e-Learner's self-regulatory efficacy and perception of e-Learning environmental quality. Comput. Hum. Behav., 24 (1), 32-47.
Nov, O. (2007). What motivates Wikipedians? Commun. ACM 50, 11, 60-64.
Sagheb-Tehrani, M. (2007). Some steps towards implementing E-government.
SIGCAS comput. Soc., 37(1), 22-29.
Sukhai, N. B. (2004). Hacking and cybercrime. Proceedings of the 1st annual conference on information security curriculum development, 128-132.
Team Cymru (2006). Cybercrime: an epidemic. Queue 4(9), 24-35.
Tirapat, T., Espiritu, C., & Stroulia, E. (2006). Taking the community's pulse: one blog at a time. Proceedings of the 6th international conference on web engineering, 263, 169-176.
INTRODUCTION
In the previous topic, you learnt about web-based multimedia. In this topic, I will explain how to deliver multimedia files on multimedia communication channels.
First you need to understand the reasons for the sudden increase in requirements for multimedia files on the Internet to be transferred quickly. To understand this, you need to understand the five basic types of communications network for online multimedia communication.
This topic will also help you understand the basics of multimedia compression.
You will learn three basic image and video compression formats.