A lot of people get confused over the difference between the internet and the World Wide Web. Aren’t they interchangable? Aren’t they the same thing?

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They aren’t, but the difference is largely ignored, and which ever term you use, most people know what you mean. Still, there is a difference, and for those who are interested, here’s the easiest way to remember the distinction that I’ve come across.

The internet is the network connecting online computers. Just like your home network, built around a modem and router, the internet is a series of routers and servers (computers that serve files and web pages) that form an international network of connected computers. In the 1970s and 80s the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) created the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), the means by which the vast majority of computers connect to and navigate the internet.

The World Wide Web is the content being offered on the internet. It consists of web pages, files, web services and applications. For example, Amazon is a part of the World Wide Web that you can access via the internet. Tim Berners-Lee invented the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) in 1990 as a means to link to documents and files stored in servers around the world connected to the internet.

Internet: a network of connected computers.

World Wide Web: the content you can access on the internet.

By now your home/small business router is pretty secure. No one can find your network by searching for available wireless networks because the SSID isn’t being broadcast. If they do happen to find it, they’ll find they have to provide a key phrase at least 8 characters long to access it.

Let’s say you had a party at your house and someone was able to watch you log into your network, or an ex-employee is still using his credentials to log in and download movies on your office network. How can we keep people out who know their way around the castle walls?

There are two settings in your router that will help.

Look for an option that provides MAC (Media Access Control) filtering. It’s usually on the Security or Filter tab. Every electronic device that connects to your network, wired and wireless, has a quasi-unique MAC address. This is nothing more than an identifying number, expressed as six groups of two hexadecimal digits, separated by hyphens or colons, in transmission order, e.g. 01-30-45-65-87-ab, 01:30:45:65:87:ab.

Your router can tell you the MAC address of each device on your network. MAC filtering limits access to the network to only those machines with pre-approved address. If you create a filter that allows only 01-30-45-65-87-ab to access your network, all other machines with different MAC addresses will be locked out. This again isn’t foolproof, MAC addresses can be spoofed. But few people would bother to go to the trouble of doing that just to gain access to the typical home/small business network.

Another way to prevent abuse of your wireless network is to schedule availability. This is usually listed as Access Control. If you shut off all internet traffic between, for example, midnight and 7 AM, no one will be able to use your network to access the internet while you’re asleep or your business closed. This also limits the opportunities for hackers to attack your network from the internet side.

Let’s recap: Your router’s SSID is unique and not being broadcast, you’ve changed the router’s password and IP address. Only machines with registered MAC addresses are allowed on your network, and the network itself is only available from 7 AM to 11 PM. You are using WPA2 for security with a pre-shared key at least eight characters in length.

While there are other more obscure steps you can take to further tie down your network, the above will provide you with enough security to keep out all but the most determined intruders.

Tomorrow we’ll begin discussing securing your laptop. Portable computers these days have just as many important files and documents as home computers. Once again I have to say that it is virtually impossible to absolutely secure the information stored on your laptop’s hard drive should you lose your computer. But we can take steps that will make the task sufficiently difficult that most people stealing or misappropriating your laptop will simply toss your hard drive away and install their own. You will still be without your computer but at least you’ll be reasonable assured that the information it contains hasn’t been accessed.

Recently, on another blog, I posted a couple of stories about the increased risks computers and networks face from external penetration. Whether this is being done by the government or the hacker down the street, it’s an unwelcome violation of your right of privacy.

I’d like to share what I’ve learned working for both Gateway computers and D-Link help desks. Because I’m blogging from work, I’m going to break these tips into small blocks. Each tip is independent from the others, so don’t hesitate to put one tip into practice while waiting for me to post the next. I hope to post one a day until done.

A wired network, one which has ethernet cables running from the modem to the router and from the router to each device connected to the network, is inherently secure. Only someone with physical access to a computer wired to the network can gain access.

Wireless networks, on the other hand, are inherently insecure. Anything sent over radio waves can be intercepted. For this reason security specialists advise us to never conduct banking or shopping transactions that involve sharing our credit card number or other sensitive personal information over a wireless or cell phone or over a wireless network.

Yet there are a few simple steps that we can take to provide a modicum of safety for both our home or small business network and the computers we connect to that network wirelessly.

Security settings on a wireless router are hardly ever set up by default. You have to go into your router’s settings and make a few changes to ensure that no unauthorized computers can access your network or the other computers on the network.

The username and password you need to access your routers settings will vary from model to model. If you’ve forgotten yours, this list may help. Because those are so well known to everyone, the first step we want to take is to change the default router settings.

Open your browser and type in the address bar the IP address of your router. It’s usually 192.168.1.0 or 192.168.0.1. Check your router’s documentation if you aren’t sure, or try a couple of variations (192.168.1.1, 192.168.0.0) until you get a log in window. Here’s where you enter your username (admin, root, etc.) and the default password. The first page you see will most likely be the general settings page. Look for the router’s IP address (the same one you typed in the address bar).

We’re going to change that to a less popular private IP. It has to be an IP address not used on the internet. So it has to be either 10.x.x.x, 172.x.x.x or 192.x.x.x. For this example we’ll use 172.16.1.1. Enter the new IP address in the box where the old one was and select “apply”. Now look for the router password. Change this to a password you think up. Now reboot the router (there should be a button that will do this for you or you may have to power off the router for 15 seconds then power it back on.)

Once the router reboots, to access the configuration utility again you’ll have to enter the default username (most routers won’t let you change this) and your new password.

In the next few posts we’ll continue to secure your router, then move on to securing your laptop.

Via Yahoo’s Tech News:

The US space agency NASA said it successfuly conducted a first test of a deep space communications network modeled on the Internet.

“This is the first step in creating a totally new space communications capability, an interplanetary Internet,” Adrian Hooke, NASA’s manager of space-networking architecture, technology and standards, said in a statement.

The US space agency said Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers used software called Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN, to transmit dozens of space images to and from a NASA spacecraft some 20 million miles (32.4 million kilometers) from Earth.

NASA said the software protocol, which must be able to withstand delays, disruptions and disconnections in space, was designed in partnership with Vint Cerf, a vice president at Internet search giant Google.

DTN sends information using a method that differs from the normal Internet’s Transmission-Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP, communication suite, which Cerf co-designed, NASA said.

Unlike TCP/IP, DTN does not assume a continuous end-to-end connection, NASA said, noting that glitches can happen when a spacecraft moves behind a planet, or when solar storms and long communication delays occur.

It said the delay, for example, in sending or receiving data from Mars takes between three-and-a-half minutes and 20 minutes at the speed of light.

NASA said that if a destination path cannot be found, data packets are not discarded but kept by each network node until it can communicate safely with another node.

Eventually, it said, the information is delivered to the end user.

A more detailed description can be found at the IEEE website:

The authors give an overview of current work on delay- and disruption-tolerant networking and review the overall architecture proposed by the Internet Research Task Force’s Delay Tolerant Networking Research Group. Their approach to networking makes no assumption that nodes will have end-to-end connectivity, which could be missing with extremely high-latency connections, if the nodes are only in contact with one another infrequently or if contacts are being continually disrupted. They also describe the main protocols the group is developing and give examples of some pilot networks that use these protocols.