A DSL line where the upload speed is different from the download speed. Usually the download speed is much greater.

 

Broadband is a high-speed connection to the Internet, almost 150 times faster than a typical 56k 'dial-up' modem. It is called broadband because it has a much higher 'bandwidth' – in other words much more capacity to receive and send data. Broadband access is based on Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL), a modem technology that turns an ordinary telephone line into a multi-tasking access medium

 

A BLoGG (coming soon to PLuGG) is a blog, or more accurately a weblog or in plain English it’s a diary – the main difference being that it’s not under lock and key in your sock drawer, but it’s published for all to see and read. So, be careful what you say and how you say it…

The activity of updating a blog is "blogging" and someone who keeps a blog is a "blogger." Blogs are typically updated daily using software that allows people with little or no technical background to update and maintain the blog. Postings on a blog are almost always arranged in chronological order with the most recent additions featured most prominently.

It is common for blogs to be available as RSS feeds.

 

The current state of all information available on blogs and/or the sub-culture of those who create and use blogs.

 

How much stuff you can send through a connection. Usually measured in bits-per-second (bps.)

 

A single digit number in base-2, in other words, either a 1 or a zero. The smallest unit of computerised data. Bandwidth is usually measured in bits-per-second.

 

A set of Bits that represent a single character, there are 8 Bits in a Byte

 

A Client program (software) that is used to look at various kinds of Internet resources.

 

A measurement of how fast data is moved from one place to another.

 

A software program that is used to contact and obtain data from a Server software program on another computer, often across a great distance. Each Client program is designed to work with one or more specific kinds of Server programs, and each Server requires a specific kind of Client. A Web Browser is a specific kind of Client.

 

The most common meaning of "Cookie" on the Internet refers to a piece of information sent by a Web Server to a Web Browser that the Browser software is expected to save and to send back to the Server whenever the browser makes additional requests from the Server.

Depending on the type of Cookie used, and the Browsers' settings, the Browser may accept or not accept the Cookie, and may save the Cookie for either a short time or a long time.

Cookies might contain information such as login or registration information, online "shopping cart" information, user preferences, etc.

When a Server receives a request from a Browser that includes a Cookie, the Server is able to use the information stored in the Cookie. For example, the Server might customize what is sent back to the user, or keep a log of particular users' requests.

Cookies are usually set to expire after a predetermined amount of time and are usually saved in memory until the Browser software is closed down, at which time they may be saved to disk if their "expire time" has not been reached.

Cookies do not read your hard drive and send your life story to the CIA, but they can be used to gather more information about a user than would be possible without them.

PLuGG recommends that you do enable cookies when surfing PLuGG because then we can easily identify you as a PLuGG fan.

 

Transferring data (usually a file) from a another computer to the computer you are are using. The opposite of upload.

 

A method for moving data over phone lines. A DSL circuit is much faster than a phone connection and the wires coming into the subscriber's premises are the same (copper) wires used for phone services. A DSL circuit must be configured to connect two specific locations, similar to a leased line (however a DSL circuit is not a leased line).

A common configuration of DSL allows downloads at speeds of up to 1.544 megabits (not megabytes) per second, and uploads at speeds of 128 kilobits per second. This arrangement is called ADSL: Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line.

Another common configuration is symmetrical: 384 Kilobits per second in both directions.

In theory ADSL allows download speeds of up to 9 megabits per second and upload speeds of up to 640 kilobits per second.

DSL is now a popular alternative to Leased Lines and ISDN, being faster than ISDN and less costly than traditional Leased Lines.

 

The Domain Name System is the system that translates Internet domain names into IP numbers. A "DNS Server" is a server that performs this kind of translation.

 

The unique name that identifies an Internet site. Domain Names always have 2 or more parts, separated by dots. The part on the left is the most specific, and the part on the right is the most general. A given machine may have more than one Domain Name but a given Domain Name points to only one machine. For example, the domain names:  

plugg.co.za
mail.plugg.co.za
blogg.plugg.co.za 

These can all refer to the same machine, but each domain name can refer to no more than one machine.

Usually, all of the machines on a given Network will have the same thing as the right-hand portion of their Domain Names (matisse.net in the examples above). It is also possible for a Domain Name to exist but not be connected to an actual machine. This is often done so that a group or business can have an Internet e-mail address without having to establish a real Internet site. In these cases, some real Internet machine must handle the mail on behalf of the listed Domain Name.

 

Messages, usually text, sent from one person to another via computer. E-mail can also be sent automatically to a large number of addresses.

 

A very common method of networking computers in a Local Area Network (LAN).

There is more than one type of Ethernet. By 2001 the standard type was "100-BaseT" which can handle up to about 100,000,000 bits-per-second and can be used with almost any kind of computer.

 

A combination of hardware and software that separates a Network into two or more parts for security purposes. Only authorised access can be gained if a Firewall is in place.

 

Several meanings. Originally, the web page that your browser is set to use when it starts up. The more common meaning refers to the main web page for a business, organization, person or simply the main page out of a collection of web pages, e.g. "Check out so-and-so's new Home Page."

 

The coding language used to create Hypertext documents for use on the World Wide Web. HTML looks a lot like old-fashioned typesetting code, where you surround a block of text with codes that indicate how it should appear. The "hyper" in Hypertext comes from the fact that in HTML you can specify that a block of text, or an image, is linked to another file on the Internet. HTML files are meant to be viewed using a "Web Browser". HTML is loosely based on a more comprehensive system for markup called SGML, and is expected to eventually be replaced by XML-based XHTML standards.

 

The protocol for moving hypertext files across the Internet. Requires a HTTP client program on one end and an HTTP server program (such as Apache) on the other end. HTTP is the most important protocol used in the World Wide Web (WWW).

 

Generally, any text that contains links to other documents - words or phrases in the document that can be chosen by a reader and which cause another document to be retrieved and displayed.

 

Any time you connect 2 or more networks together, you have an internet - as in inter-national.

Internet (Upper case I)

The vast collection of inter-connected networks that are connected using the TCP/IP protocols and that evolved from the ARPANET of the late 60's and early 70's.

The Internet connects tens of thousands of independent networks into a vast global internet and is probably the largest Wide Area Network in the world.

 

A private network inside a company or organization that uses the same kinds of software that you would find on the public Internet, but that is only for internal use. Compare with extranet.

 

Sometimes called a dotted quad. A unique number consisting of 4 parts separated by dots, e.g.

165.113.245.2

Every machine that is on the Internet has a unique IP number - if a machine does not have an IP number, it is not really on the Internet. Many machines (especially servers) also have one or more Domain Names that are easier for people to remember.

 

The most widely used version of the Internet Protocol (the "IP" part of TCP/IP.)

IPv4 allows for a theoretical maximum of approximately four billion IP Numbers (technically 232), but the actual number is far less due to inefficiencies in the way blocks of numbers are handled by networks. The gradual adoption of IPv6 will solve this problem.

The successor to IPv4. Already deployed in some cases and gradually spreading, IPv6 provides a huge number of available IP Numbers - over a sextillion addresses (theoretically 2128). IPv6 allows every device on the planet to have its own IP Number.

A huge multi-user live chat facility. There are a number of major IRC servers around the world which are linked to each other. Anyone can create a channel and anything that anyone types in a given channel is seen by all others in the channel. Private channels can (and are) created for multi-person conference calls.

A way to move more data over existing regular phone lines. ISDN is available to much of SA. It can provide speeds of roughly 128,000 bits-per-second over regular phone lines. In practice, most people will be limited to 56,000or 64,000 bits-per-second.

Unlike DSL, ISDN can be used to connect to many different locations, one at a time, just like a regular telephone call, as long the other location also has ISDN. It is also rather pricey.

 

An institution that provides access to the Internet in some form, usually for money.

 

A very general term referring to the entire field of Information Technology - anything from computer hardware to programming to network management. Most medium and large size companies have IT Departments.

 

A thousand bytes. Actually, usually 1024 (210) bytes.

 

A computer network limited to the immediate area, usually the same building or floor of a building.

 

A widely used Open Source Unix-like operating system. Linux was first released by its inventor Linus Torvalds in 1991. There are versions of Linux for almost every available type of computer hardware from desktop machines to IBM mainframes. The inner workings of Linux are open and available for anyone to examine and change as long as they make their changes available to other users. This has resulted in thousands of people working on various aspects of Linux and the adaptation of to Linux a large variety of purposes.

 

Noun: The account name used to gain access to a computer system.

Verb: the act of connecting to a computer system by giving your credentials (usually your "username" and "password")

 

 

A web page or site made by automatically combining content from other sources, usually by using material available via RSS feeds and/or REST interfaces.

 

Technically speaking, a million bytes. In many cases the term means 1024 kilobytes.

 

Generally speaking, "to mirror" is to maintain an exact copy of something. Probably the most common use of the term on the Internet refers to "mirror sites" which are web sites, or FTP sites that maintain copies of material originated at another location, usually in order to provide more widespread access to the resource. For example, one site might create a library of software, and 5 other sites might maintain mirrors of that library.

 

A device that connects a computer to a phone line. A telephone for a computer. A modem allows a computer to talk to other computers through the phone system. Basically, modems do for computers what a telephone does for humans.

 

The etiquette on the Internet.

 

Derived from the term citizen, referring to a citizen of the Internet,or someone who uses networked resources. The term connotes civic responsibility and participation.

 

A code used to gain access (login) to a locked system. Good passwords contain alph numeric characters, or letters and numbers and should not just be a simple combination such as “hello7”. A good password might be:

            5%hg(31)

But don't use that one!

 

Derived from the sound that a sonar systems makes in movies, you know, when they are searching for a submarine! Used to test if a system is working or available.

 

Software add on that adds features to a larger piece of software. Common examples are plug-ins for the Netscape® browser and web server.

 

A form of audio broadcasting using the Internet, podcasting takes its name from a combination of "iPod" and broadcasting. iPod is the immensely popular digital audio player made by Apple computer, but podcasting does not actually require the use of an iPod.

Podcasting involves making one or more audio files available as "enclosures" in an RSS feed. A pod-caster creates a list of music, and/or other sound files (such as recorded poetry, or "talk radio" material) and makes that list available in the RSS 2.0 format. The list can then be obtained by other people using various podcast "retriever" software (such as iTunes) which read the feed and makes the audio files available to digital audio devices (including, but not limited to iPods) where users may then listen to them at their convenience.

 

Two commonly used meanings:

A Point of Presence usually means a city or location where a network can be connected to, often with dial up phone lines. So if an ISP says they will soon have a POP in Cape Town, it means that they will soon have a local phone number in Cape Town and/or a place where leased lines can connect to their network.

 

Meaning 1: a place where information goes into or out of a computer, or both. E.g. the serial port on a personal computer is where a modem would be connected.

Meaning 2: On the Internet port often refers to a number that is part of a URL, appearing after a colon (:) right after the domain name. Every service on an Internet server listens on a particular port number on that server. Most services have standard port numbers, e.g. Web servers normally listen on port 80. Services can also listen on non-standard ports, in which case the port number must be specified in a URL when accessing the server, so you might see a URL of the form:

    gopher://peg.cwis.uci.edu:7000/

This shows a gopher server running on a non-standard port (the standard gopher port is 70).

Meaning 3: Finally, port also refers to translating a piece of software to bring it from one type of computer system to another, e.g. to translate a Windows program so that is will run on a Macintosh.

 

Usually used as a marketing term to describe a Website that is or is intended to be the first place people see when using the Web. Typically a "Portal site" has a catalogue of web sites, a search engine, or both. A Portal site may also offer email and other services to entice people to use that site as their main "point of entry" (hence "portal") to the Web.

Example: http://plugg.co.za

 

A single message entered into a network communications system.

 

The most common protocol used to connect home computers to the Internet over regular phone lines.

Most well known as a protocol that allows a computer to use a regular telephone line and a modem to make TCP/IP connections.

On the Internet "protocol" usually refers to a set of rules that define an exact format for communication between systems. For example the HTTP protocol defines the format for communication between web browsers and web servers, the IMAP protocol defines the format for communication between IMAP email servers and clients, and the SSL protocol defines a format for encrypted communications over the Internet.

Virtually all Internet protocls are defined in RFC documents.

 

A Proxy Server sits in between a Client and the "real" Server that a Client is trying to use. Client's are sometimes configured to use a Proxy Server, usually an HTTP server. The clients makes all of it's requests from the Proxy Server, which then makes requests from the "real" server and passes the result back to the Client. Sometimes the Proxy server will store the results and give a stored result instead of making a new one (to reduce use of a Network). Proxy servers are commonly established on Local Area Networks.

 

The name of the result and the process for creating a standard on the Internet. New standards are proposed and published on the Internet, as a Request For Comments (RFC). The proposal is reviewed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (http://www.ietf.org/), a consensus-building body that facilitates discussion, and eventually a new standard is established, but the reference number/name for the standard retains the acronym RFC, e.g. the official standard for e-mail message formats is RFC 822.

 

A special-purpose computer (or software package) that handles the connection between 2 or more Packet-Switched networks. Routers spend all their time looking at the source and destination addresses of the packets passing through them and deciding which route to send them on.

 

A commonly used protocol for syndication and sharing of content, originally developed to facilitate the syndication of news articles, now widely used to share the contents of blogs. RSS is an XML-based summary of a web site, usually used for syndication and other kinds of content-sharing. There are RSS "feeds" which are sources of RSS information about web sites, and RSS "readers" which read RSS feeds and display their content to users.

 

Spam is electronic junk mail or junk newsgroup postings. Some people define spam even more generally as any unsolicited e-mail. However, if a long-lost brother finds your e-mail address (it wasn’t us – that’s not our policy!) and sends you a message, this could hardly be called spam, even though it's unsolicited. Real spam is generally e-mail advertising for some product sent to a mailing list or newsgroup.

 

A (usually web-based) system for searching the information available on the Web.

 

A computer, or a software package, that provides a specific kind of service to client software running on other computers. The term can refer to a particular piece of software, such as a WWW server, or to the machine on which the software is running, e.g. "Our mail server is down today, that's why e-mail isn't getting out."

A single server machine can (and often does) have several different server software packages running on it, thus providing many different servers to clients on the network.

Sometimes server software is designed so that additional capabilities can be added to the main program by adding small programs known as servlets.

 

A small computer program designed to add capabilities to a larger piece of server software.

Common examples are "Java servlets", which are small programs written in the Java language and which are added to a web server. Typically a web server that uses Java servlets will have many of them, each one designed to handle a very specific situation, for example one servlet will handle adding items to a "shopping cart", while a different servlet will handle deleting items from the "shopping cart."

 

The main protocol used to send electronic mail from server to server on the Internet.

 

A somewhat vague term generally referring to software that is secretly installed on a users computer and that monitors use of the computer in some way without the users' knowledge or consent. Most spyware tries to get the user to view advertising and/or particular web pages. Some spyware also sends information about the user to another machine over the Internet. Spyware is usually installed without a users' knowledge as part of the installation of other software, especially software such as music sharing software obtained via download.

 

A computer program that is either hidden inside another program or that masquerades as something it is not in order to trick potential users into running it. For example a program that appears to be a game or image file but in reality performs some other function.

A Trojan Horse computer program may spread itself by sending copies of itself from the host computer to other computers, but unlike a virus it will (usually) not infect other programs.

 

UGC is stuff that our talented users create, and share for the world at large (other PLuGG users or their friends and family) to explore and have fun.

Transferring data (usually a file) from the computer you are using to another computer. The opposite of download.

 

An easily recognisable address for resources available on the Internet. Example:

 

A chunk of computer programming code that makes copies of itself without any conscious human intervention. Some viruses do more than simply replicate themselves, they might display messages, install other software or files, delete software of files, etc.

A virus requires the presence of some other program to replicate itself. Typically viruses spread by attaching themselves to programs and in some cases files, for example the file formats for Microsoft word processor and spreadsheet programs allow the inclusion of programs called "macros" which can in some cases be a breeding ground for viruses.

 

Used to allow making telephone calls over IP networks, especially the Internet.

Just as modems allow computers to connect to the Internet over regular telephone lines, VOIP technology allows humans to talk over Internet connections.

Costs for VOIP calls can be a lot lower than for traditional telephone calls. Because the IP networks are packet-switched this allows for vastly different ways of handling connections and more efficient use of network resources.

 

The entire collection of web pages and other information (such as images, sound, and video files, etc.) that are made available through what appears to users as a single web server. Typically all the of pages in a web site share the same basic URL, for example the following URLs are all for pages within the same web site:

The term has a somewhat informal nature since a large organization might have separate "websites" for each division, but someone might talk informally about the organizations' "website" when speaking of all of them.

 

A popular term for a form of wireless data communication, basically Wi-Fi is "Wireless Ethernet".

 

A worm is a virus that does not infect other programs. It makes copies of itself, and infects additional computers (typically by making use of network connections) but does not attach itself to additional programs; however a worm might alter, install, or destroy files and programs.

 

World Wide Web (or simply Web for short) is a term frequently used (incorrectly) when referring to "The Internet", WWW has two major meanings:

Meaning 1: loosely used: the whole constellation of resources that can be accessed using Gopher, FTP, HTTP, telnet, USENET, WAIS and some other tools.

Meaning 2: the universe of hypertext servers (HTTP servers), more commonly called "web servers", which are the servers that serve web pages to web browsers.