Tag: Web-based Internet services

Log out properly of GMail by clicking “Sign Out”

A common situation that affects most home users is the existence of a desktop, laptop or tablet computer used by many people of the household. This computer may not just be used by members of the household but also by the household’s guests. I was infact talking about this with someone who had come in from overseas and was using a commonly-used iPad to work a few Web-based services like his GMail and Facebook accounts. Here, he and I were underscoring the need to properly log out of these services when done with them as well as clearing Web-browser history on these devices.

Log out properly of Facebook by clicking “Log Out” in Settings

But as one operates their Web-based email, social-networking and other services using these computers, it can be easy to leave a session of these services going especially if you are called away for some reason. This could lead to other members of the household snooping around your account or doing something on that account in your name like playing a practical joke.

A wise practice with these computers is to make sure you log off your Web-based services as soon as you have finished with these services and before you leave the computer. To do this properly, you have to click or tap the “logout” or “sign out” button on the Web-based service’s user interface, which causes the service to log you out as far as it is concerned while cleaning up any cookies and other data held on your machine relating to that session.

Familiarise yourself with the option to remove your Web-browsing history on your browser

Similarly, clearing your Web browser’s history especially when finished using these commonly-used computers is also a wise practice. This avoids other users “tracking back” in to previous sessions for Web-based services or having people snoop on what previous users been browsing the Web for. The latter situation could either cause some nasty gossip to float around or, at worst, put the user in danger.

Use of multiple logins

Some operating systems like Windows and Android 4.2+ tablet implementations allow for the creation of separate accounts on that system so that each user can have their own operating environment. This can be beneficial because you can avoid the situation where someone can “snoop” around your Web history or someone’s Web email or social-network session that hasn’t been logged off properly.

Here, you could use one login as a “common-user” login while creating separate logins for the computer’s regular users. The regular users then use their own logins when they use the computer so they don’t have to worry about this kind of issue. Similarly, the separate logins can be personalised with wallpapers, “favourite Website lists”, customised colour schemes and the like as well as supporting application-level links to various social-network and other sites.

Windows 8 and 8.1 also implement a login setup which can be ported and synced across multiple computers thus allowing you to carry your computing environment between, say, a desktop and a laptop or to operate your computing environment on both your personally-used machine and a commonly-used machine.

Here, it is still a good practice to log off these accounts or enforce a lockout on them when you have finished at the computer so you can keep them private and less at risk of being meddled with.

Once you get in to the habit of logging off Web-service or user accounts on commonly-used computers and clearing Web history lists on these computers, you can avoid placing yourselves in a vulnerable position with your Internet use.

Articles

World Wide Web turns 20, finally shakes that acne problem | Engadget

The Web Is 20 Years Old Today | TechCrunch

My Comments

What happened in computing before the Web

Since the home computer came on the scene in the 1970s, there were previous efforts to present information on these computers in a navigable form. This was achieved through the use of dedicated computer programs that were written for this task. These programs became important when the modem, which facilitated computer-to-computer communications over the telephone, came on the scene through 1980.

The main examples of these were the bulletin-board systems and “videotex / viewdata” systems which used the computer as a terminal. They typically provided a forum functionality and an information display which allowed people to bring up pages of information. But they were often difficult to operate unless you were a diehard computer nerd.

Apple was one of many companies who tried to popularise the concept of hyperlinking information where one could click on an item of information and be led to another related item of information. They did this with a program called “HyperCard” which allowed the user to link between various “cards” of information, whether in the same deck or another deck.

There were even attempts to provide indexable information for computer systems, including networked computers by using indexing software like “Isys”. These programs crawled collections of word-processing documents, spreadsheets and the like and created an index which could be searchable and the results viewed in an elementary form.

The establishment of the Web

After 1991, various universities worked towards establishing two standards that were critical to the establishment of the Web. These were “HTTP” (HyperText Transport Protocol), an efficient file-transfer protocol which allowed text to be delivered as a stream suitable for hyperlinking; and “HTML” which was a way of marking up text files to permit formatting or hyperlinking of information.

These worked hand in glove with the Internet and there was a clear advantage that one could link to information using a standard “Uniform Resource Locator” or “URL”. This link could point to file on any computer in the world on the Internet. All it required was the use of a program called a “Web Browser” and the first of these was “Lynx” which worked with text-based terminals. With this one, users had to enter a number pointing to the desired link they wanted to follow.

But, as the Internet became popular, there was the rise of the graphical Web browser which was in the form of Netscape Navigator. This became more intense with Windows 95 having integrated Internet functionality and Microsoft releasing Internet Explorer for this platform.

The Web as an integral part of computing

This led the World Wide Web to become the Internet’s killer application in a similar vein to how pre-recorded video movies being available for hire through video stores became the video cassette recorder’s killer application in the 1980s. We now started to talk of home pages and of “surfing the Web” or “surfing the Net” as an activity.

The Web has also provided support for a universal interface for every sort of computer-driven activity, whether browsing and searching for information, managing one’s email or doing one’s banking and shopping online. It had then led to the boom-bust cycle that was known as the “dot-com” era where companies could set up behind a Web page with a “dot-com” name and make money out of the domain names or the goods and services they could sell online.

As the Web matured, the ability to provide snazzier presentation on the Web sites allowed media companies to work on snazzier home pages, which ended up becoming “portals” that featured news and other information. These became the jump points for people to start their Web-browsing sessions from and they ended up also offering task-specific features like Web-based mail and messaging.

It also led on to the growth of the “Social Web” which is driven by the end user. This is in the form of Web logs or “blogs” which are effectively micro-journals; or social networks like Facebook where one can interlink with other like-minded people.

Even the way the Web is viewed has changed from since it first started. Previously, it was viewed on a regular desktop or laptop computer. Now the last five years has seen the Web being viewed on mobile phones, especially smartphones like the Apple iPhone; tablet computers like the Apple iPad and now the television screen with the new generation of “smart TVs” and video peripherals like Blu-Ray players or games consoles.

Conclusion

The World Wide Web has become one of the major cornerstones for the connected lifestyle by popularising access to online information and commerce, and simply popularising the Internet iteself.

Happy 20th Birthday World Wide Web

The computer press have been running articles regarding the use of Flash or HTML5 in highly-interactive Web sites such as video sites.

It has started off with Apple wanting to move iPhone and iPad towards HTML5 / H264 video by proscribing Flash runtime engines from these platforms and forcing developers to move to the HTML5 / H264 platform. This caused Google to write YouTube client-side apps for these platforms and develop an HTML5 site. Then Microsoft and others worked towards implementing HTML5 in their next browser issue, with some browsers being equipped with HTML5 interpreters.

The debate about HTML5 vs Flash has been more “video-centric” because Adobe Flash was mainly used by YouTube to display the many videos hosted on that site.

It is worth noting that the FLV files used in YouTube and similar Flash applications are container files with the video and audio encoded using the H.263 video codec. The HTML5-based video applications will use FLV, MOV or AVI container files with H.264 video codecs which are becoming the standard for high-resolution video.

Applications beyond video

Adobe Flash has been used for applications beyond video. Primarily it has been used for high-interactivity applications like games such as Farmville on Facebook or the casual games on MiniClip because it offers a quick-response user interface and easy development that these applications needed. Here, it has offered a “write-once run-anywhere” platform for these Web-centric applications with plenty of “rapid-application-development” tools.

It is also worth knowing that most of these games refer to back-end databases and / or “client-local” cookie files to persistently store game-state and other user-generated data. These programs will then have to work with the different data stores as they are used.

Web-based runtime environments for partially-linked programs

HTML5 has a variety of inherent elements that allow for vector-graphics and interactivity for highly-interactive applications. It also may be of benefit to open-source software developers and Linux advocates/

But there are some developers, most notably games developers, who want to keep their source-code closed in order to control reuse of that code. These developers also want to provide programs in a manner where the target machine doesn’t have to interpret or compile code before it is of use, which will benefit high-interactivity applications where quick response is desired.

These developers typically want to provide these programs as either an executable file or a “p-code” (partially-linked) program file which is run by an interpreter or just-in-time compiler program, known as a runtime module, that works with these files on the target platform. At the moment, there isn’t a mechanism for delivering a compiled HTML5 file in a “write once, run anywhere” manner.

Java

An interactive-applications developer could work with the latest version of Java to develop these kind of applications in a “write-once run-anywhere” platform. This platform is natively supported by the Blu-Ray Disc system as part of providing interactive video from discs and/or the Internet through that system. It could then lead to someone writing a games disc that runs classic games types on any old Blu-Ray Disc player without the player being a games console.

The main issue with this is that not all platforms, especially tablet and handheld platforms, support Java natively. As well, desktop support for Java may require the Java runtime software to be downloaded separately from Sun.

Microsoft Silverlight

As well, Microsoft is wanting to advance their Silverlight runtime platform for client-executed Web applications but this platform has not yet been ported for anything outside general-purpose computers running the Windows operating-system family. Again, this is another platform for Web-based highly-interactive content that requires the client machine to work with a “runtime module”.

Apple’s control over what runs on their platforms

One of the main cornerstones in this debate is what Apple wants out of the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch platforms. They want to maintain control over programs and highly-interactive content that runs on this platform and preserve the requirement that all such content is obtained through the iTunes App Store. The practice of supplying a “runtime module” for pre-compiled “p-code” software available elsewhere, such as what happens with Java and Flash, works against this ideal because Apple can’t see the program’s code before it runs on an iPod or iPhone. Therefore Apple have proscribed the creation of such modules for this platform.

Some Apple skeptics may also have a fear that Apple may change their desktop platform away from the Macintosh (MacOS X) platform where their is a “free-for-all” for software development towards a platform not dissimilar to the iPhone or iPad platform with a controlled development environment. This is like how they retired the Apple II platform in the early 90s in order to focus on the Macintosh platform.

The open question

Therefore, there is an “open question” concerning Web-based software development. It is whether the likes of Farmville or Bejewelled should be developed using HTML5 and in a vulnerably-open manner or whether they should be packaged as “p-code” and delivered to a runtime environment? It also includes whether Apple should expect developers to create a separate client-side app for their iPhone / iPod / iPad devices for each game or highly-interactive site that they work on.

LiveSide article about Hotmail service outage (March 12, 2009)

BBC Technology article about recent GMail blackout (February 24, 2009)

An increasing number of people are using free Web-based e-mail services like Windows Live Hotmail, Google GMail and Yahoo Mail because of their free, anywhere access model. What is happening now is that these popular services are groaning under the weight of their huge userbase and traffic demands.

This is manifested through slow response time during sessions and, lately, the services enduring significant amounts of downtime. I have even observed this with a friend’s GMail service which was off-air for a significant amount of time and this friend worrying about e-mail they or their correspondents were meant to receive. The situation ends up with users losing faith in the services or wondering what is happening with their incoming and outgoing e-mail, especially if the service is their primary e-mail address.

Most of these services typically run huge server farms on a high-availability arrangement, but they may need to identify ways of identifying potential bottlenecks and spreading the load. This could involve localisation of the user experience or simply extra machines or server farms providing a failover role.

Some of the recent Web-mail failures have been targeted not at the e-mail storage or handling but at the user-experience servers. A few people in the IT industry reckon that some of these servers are being subjected to DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks by computer hackers.

The situation that is happening with GMail and Hotmail needs to be observed by Web-based Internet services like the Bebo, Facebook and MySpace social networks; and the photo-sharing and video networks like Picasa and YouTube. This is in order to keep the Web 2.0 services alive and resilient.