General Internet Information
The sum of these cooperative efforts is the worldwide Internet, which appears to each user as a seamless universal access network to global Internet resources.
The InterNIC can delegate portions of the address and name space to other international NICs and Internet Service Providers (ISP). Therefore, you may be registered for an address or domain name with the assistance of your ISP.
The technology for electronic commerce is well developed, but it will take time for new fee-based services to develop.
The Internet technology supports interactive voice and video conferencing, but Internet Service Providers typically either do not support general access to voice and video conferencing or they support a limited public voice/video conferencing system called the "MBONE", or Multicast BackBONE.
A home page is a Web document at the beginning of a set of Web documents, or pages, that comprise a single, distinct Web service. People advertise their web home page as the natural starting point for clients to browse their server. Any web server may have many home pages and web pages may be cross-linked in arbitrary ways, but home pages are the signposts of the World Wide Web and the directions that Internet users pass to each other to navigate the Web.
Unlike e-mail, there is no mail involved with newsgroups. Most of the activity occurs while you are online, including reading and responding to messages. For this reason, most people find that newsgroups are more interactive and conversational than e-mail. There are more than 40,000 public newsgroups presently on the Internet.
A domain name is a structured alphanumeric label separated by periods that allows Internet services to be represented by English names instead of hard-to-remember numeric addresses. The Domain Name System (DNS) is a distributed database that allows the Internet system of names to grow very large while being managed by an expanding base of service providers.
Domain names can represent IP addresses, electronic mail servers (the part of your e-mail address after the "@"), and aliases.
Another very important Internet application is Network News, also known as USENET news (after the USENET Unix association that manages the USENET newsgroup hierarchy) and sometimes known by its protocol, the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP).
The most popular current Internet application is electronic mail or e-mail, often referred to by its protocol, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, SMTP. You may also hear of the Post Office Protocol (POP) which is a mail transfer protocol particularly well suited to PC users. Many Internet users send their e-mail to their server using SMTP and retrieve their e-mail on demand using POP.
Advanced WWW browsers are able to communicate via FTP, Telnet, Gopher and HTML, providing a single seamless point-and-click interface to the Internet.
IP is a simple messaging protocol. Each packet contains the destination address so it can be independently routed across the Internet. The job of the Internet router is quite simple: examine the destination of each incoming packet and determine which of several output ports to use to send the message onward. From time to time, routers communicate with adjacent routers to discover the current state of paths in the network, maintaining a table of destination addresses as they relate to output ports.
The network is not required to reliably deliver every packet. The network may drop or discard packets when overloaded. Routers may fail, communication circuits may fail or become overloaded, and the network of remaining routers will adapt their routing tables to the faults and send packets around the faults if paths are available.
TCP is a more complex, Transport Layer protocol which uses the simple, unreliable IP protocol, adding flow control, loss detection and re-transmission, congestion avoidance and congestion control features that provide a reliable path for the transmission of packets from source to destination. The upper layer applications are assured of delivery with each packet properly ordered and with no packets missing.
The innovative combination of a simple, unreliable IP on a network of switches or routers with a suite of higher level protocols including TCP, provides a very flexible set of data transport protocols that can serve a very wide range of applications over a single network infrastructure.
"Firewall" is a term that describes the security between the Internet, and a businesses' own internal network. Through a technology partnership with Sun Microsystems, South Plains Telephone Cooperative Internet Services includes as an option the premier firewall security product: firewall-1 security software.
Encryption refers to special coding (encryption) of data that travels over a network, so that it cannot be de-coded (read) by an unauthorized user. Through an OEM reseller license agreement with Netscape Communications, South Plains Telephone Cooperative Internet Services offers as a dedicated access option Netscape Navigator with its state-of-the-art message encryption.
South Plains Telephone Cooperative Internet Services will install only legitimate software obtained from valid sources on its servers and suggests that customers do the same. Also, stringent host-based security will protect our servers from unauthorized access, thereby protecting them from virus planting by hackers.
As
the Internet becomes more commercialized, the "trust model," that was once a
fundamental part of the Internet will be replaced by a security model, in which encrypted
communication will be embraced.
However, it is true that high growth strains the human capacity to plan and implement, so that from time to time ISPs do experience problems resulting from congestion due to growth.
For the longer term, the IETF is hard at work on a new version of IP with a larger address space and other advanced features. The larger address space is designed to be compatible with the existing, smaller address space, but will provide much more room for future growth.
Many of the world's largest financial institutions use Internet technology for their most important business activities. While this does not mean that one should bet one's business on the performance of any single network service, the Internet is an important and essential part of many businesses' complete strategy for telecommunications, product development, customer support and sales and marketing.
In the past, two different technologies emerged enabling 56K communication. They are K56flex and x2. In addition, there is a new, international standard for 56K data communications known as v.90.
In actual practice, the theoretical maximum speed is rarely achieved. See below for an explanation of the factors that can influence the speed that your computer connects at.
v.90 is a new international standard which will replace x2 and K56flex as the standard for 56K data communication.
Recently, some modem manufacturers have been selling x2 and K56flex modems with the promise of a free or for-a-fee upgrade to the universal v.90 standard when the software to upgrade the modem is available. Also, some v.90 modems may be backward-compatible with either one of the older standards – but not both!
If you have questions about whether your modem is compatible with or upgradable to any of the 56K standards, your modem manufacturer or computer dealer will know the answer – please contact them.
(Want to know why it's called "Spam"?)
While industry analysts are still trying to figure out how to make money on the Internet, the Spam artists think they've found the answer, and are busy churning out junk e-mail. So the bad news is that junk e-mail or Spam is a growing problem, but the good news is that the Internet community is rising to the challenge.
Here's the current Internet community "recommended" procedure for dealing with junk e-mail:
1. Don't Get Mad -- Get Even
Here are a couple of lists on what NOT to do.
- The "Stop Junk E-mail" list
- The "Help Stamp Out Spam" list
2. Find Out Who To Complain To
It's a little tricky tracking down the culprit since much of the mail header information can be faked, but again, there are several excellent sites that can walk you through the process (and even connect you to some helpful tools). Unfortunately, it's usually not worth trying to complain to the guilty party, but you have a better chance of getting a response if you complain to their service provider (or their service provider's service provider).
- Detailed directions on how to decipher mail headers from the "Stop Junk E-mail" folks
- Good overview from the "Help Stamp Out Spam" site
- Another good tutorial is on the "Get That Spammer" site
3. How To Complain
Here's some help for finding the right person to complain to and some examples of effective complaints that don't degenerate into name calling (because we're above that, right?)
- Good advice from the "Stop Junk E-mail" folks on who should get your complaint and what to say.
- The "Help Stamp Out Spam" list of who to contact at responsive service providers (We're proud that we're listed as one of the "good guys").
- Complaint example from the "Get That Spammer" site
4. Good Luck!
What Can I Do To Prevent Spam?
If your e-mail software has filtering capability, use it! For example, Eudora and Pegasus software allows you to filter out known spam domain names. Netscape Navigator Version 4, which is supported by South Plains Telephone Cooperative Internet, also has this feature.
Posting to news groups makes it more likely you will receive junk e-mail since there are programs that scan the postings to collect e-mail addresses. But don't give up on participating, we suggest that in the name line you put:
userid@REMOVE_TO_REPLYsptc.net
This way, a human can correctly modify your address, but an automated process will just send it to an invalid address.
You may not use your account to send unsolicited bulk or commercial messages (Spam). This includes, but it not limited to, bulk mailing of commercial advertising, informational announcements, charity requests, petitions for signatures, and political or religious tracts. Such messages may only be sent to those who have explicitly requested it.
We aggressively investigate all complaints about South Plains Telephone Cooperative Internet Services customers who are violating this policy and will disconnect customers who violate this policy. Any complaints about South Plains Telephone Cooperative Internet Services customers should be directed to support@sptc.net.
South Plains Telephone Cooperative Internet Services is now rejecting e-mail from service providers known to tolerate or support the distribution of unsolicited commercial e-mail (AKA rogue domains). Our list of Banned Domains is updated frequently based on complaints we receive from our customers. If you receive an unsolicited message from a domain which you believe should be added to our Banned Domains list, please send a copy of that message to support@sptc.net. Please be sure to include the complete headers on any message you forward to the Policy Department.
Four bills have been introduced in Congress which seek to restrict or regulate spam. You may read these bills at the following URLs:
ftp://ftp.loc.gov/pub/thomas/c105/h1748.ih.txt
The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (CAUCE) favors the Smith Bill. They present their analyses of all four bills at the following URL:
In addition, a member of the California Assembly has recently introduced a bill similar to the Smith Bill. Unfortunately, this proposal is not yet available online, but you can read an article about the proposal at the following URL:
South Plains Telephone Cooperative Internet Services has not yet adopted an official position on any of these legislative initiatives. However, we urge you to form your own opinion and write your representatives.
Much of this information was provided to me from unknown sources. If this material belongs to you or someone you know, please let us know so we may recognize such individuals.