Bits & Bytes

Our first segment on the internet tonight is on its history.

Imagine your computer sitting by itself in your office, bedroom, family room, wherever.  Now imagine you have another computer in another room.  Now imagine you connect that computer to another computer with a cable that runs to a hub from each of the computers.  You now have a network.  Now imagine you take another cable and run it to your neighbor’s house and connect it to their computer.   You then do the same thing to all the houses in your neighborhood that have computers.  Now expand that out over the entire planet.  That’s what the internet is.  That’s not a simplified version.. that’s really it.

So, you may be wondering, if that’s all it is then how did it begin?  This part IS a simplified version of what happened.  You can get a pretty good detailed explanation on Wikipedia.org.

It actually starts out with the Soviet Union launching Sputnik in 1957.  With that launch, the US had fallen behind in the technology war with the USSR.  So, the government created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in February of 1958. In October 1969, the government created a network that used a packet switching technology to send and receive data called ARPANET that connected UCLA and SRI International.  Using that same technology, the British Post Office, Telenet, DATAPAC and TRANSPAC created the first international packet-switched network called the International Packet Stream Service in the UK in 1978.  Over time, more “nodes” were added to ARPANET and IPSS.

In 1983, ARPANET switched from its original protocols to the current TCP/IP that we talked about a little bit last week when we talked about VoIP.  Over the next several years, the National Science Foundation commissioned the construction of a university 56 kilobit/second network backbone.  The next year, they sponsored the development of a higher-speed 1.5 megabit/second backbone.

In 1988, the network was opened to commercial interests including the MCI Mail system and the former online service called CompuServe.  In 1989, three commercial ISPs were created, UUNET, PSINET, and CERFNET.  From there, access continued to grow until the Internet as it is now had evolved.

Stellarium

Ok.. I like geeky things.  I admit it.  I’ve always like astronomy.  I had a telescope when I was younger and I loved every minute of it.  There’s something just majestic about the stars and planets.  So I was excited when I found an open source program called Stellarium.  Stellarium is a free, open source planetarium for your computer.  By default, the program comes with 600,000 stars!  You can download extra catalogs that include up to 210 million stars.

What Google Earth does for the Earth, Stellarium does for the sky.  There are so many ways you can customize it that if you are into this kind of thing you could easily spend hours watching the stars.

After I first installed it, I immediate configured my location as Anderson, IN.  I was greeted with a sky that looks like it should look if I walked outside and looked up.  It was daytime, so I saw a blue sky and the sun hanging there in its normal mid-afternoon spot.  I turned off the atmosphere and saw the stars I would see if we didn’t see the blue of the sky instead.  I turned on the names and boundaries of the constellations and there they were!  You can even select a planet, fly to it, and see the sky as if you were standing on the surface!

To download Stellarium, simply go to http://www.stellarium.org/.  You’ll love it!

We’ve been talking about our “Is It Safe?” test we’ve been conducting for the past couple of weeks.  We are currently testing the coupon printer from www.couponmom.com which was our website of the week a few weeks ago.  We’ve been testing it since then for our “Is It Safe?” segment and we are ready to report!

Here’s how we test:

* First we setup a virtual machine using Microsoft’s Virtual PC.

* On this VM we install Windows XP with SP1.  (We are still using SP1 for the express purpose of not upgrading the security.  We WANT to see the nasties that may install and SP2 and higher has better security.  We also do not upgrade to IE7 or use Firefox for the same reason.)

* We install Spybot, but we do not install any of the resident programs like TeaTimer.  Again, we don’t want anything to stop the nasties!

* We scan using Spybot just in case.

That’s our base system for our tests!

Here’s what we did from there to test the coupon printer:

* We setup a new email account that is solely used for this test.  This email address is not published anywhere and it is on an email server that I control.

* We used this email address to create an account at couponmom.com.

* From the front page of the site, I clicked on “printable coupons” on the menu on the left side of the page.

* I clicked on several of the links to print coupons and signed up with each coupon site.  I opted out of the mailing lists for each site.

* On some of them, I had to go through a ridiculous amount of “offers” to get to the coupons.  I declined or skipped each one.

* So far I have received no spam, only emails requesting verification of my email address.  We will keep checking!  And SpyBot reports no malware on the system.

The final results of our testing is that we are declaring the coupon printer PARTIALLY SAFE!

Why only partially??  Well, I’m a bit concerned about how easy it would be to accept an offer that you didn’t want while signing up for some of the coupon sites.  We will continue to monitor the email and I’ll report back if anything changes.  So for now, the coupon printer at couponmom.com is ok, but just be careful!!

If you have ideas for our “Is It Safe?” segments, leave us a comment on the site!

Need to deal with the federal government? Yeah, we don’t want to either.. But, of course, sometimes you just have to. Well, you can get a plethora of information about the United States government from www.usa.gov.

www.usa.gov is the US’s official web portal, so no matter what you need from whatever department or branch of the federal government, it’s right there within easy reach.  You can get information about grants and loans (so you don’t have to pay that goofy guy with the question marks all over his jacket to get the info!), you can find government forms, you can apply for government jobs, get a passport, and MUCH, MUCH more.

On tonight’s show we are going to talk about the Internet, specifically what YOU need to have a website and how all that stuff works. Tune in to WHBU 1240 AM at 6pm after Sean Hannity.

Our download of the week this week goes with our communication theme.

http://www.operamini.com

Opera Mini is a web browser that you can use instead of Internet Explorer on smart phones.  Opera Mini behaves more like your full browser on your computer then the version of Internet Explorer that comes with Windows Mobile.  Check it out on your smart phone!