Internet – Technical Development and Applications

The Internet helps us and makes our lives easier. It’s very useful in many aspects of our daily lives and offers as many possibilities as the number of ideas every Internet users may have. What else can be done to this helpful tool better? There are many ways to improve Internet, like: technical improvement, limited access to web content, fight against piracy, better search algorithms, catching cyber criminals, control of information overload (spam), and increase users awareness. In recent history the television was a window to the world, now it is computer with Internet connection. It’s worth to take care of Internet to be more and more useful tool to better satisfy humans needs.

Algorithms of queue management in IP routers determine which packet should be deleted when necessary. The active queue management, recommended by IETF, enhances the efficiency of transfers and cooperate with TCP congestion window mechanism in adapting the flows intensity to the congestion in a network. Nowadays, a lot of Internet applications use UDP protocol to transport the data. In the article we analyze the impact of increased UDP traffic on Active Queue Management. The article also investigates the influence of the way packets are chosen to be dropped (end of the queue, head of the queue) on the performance, i.e. response time in case of RED.

Optical Packet Switching (OPS) is a technology which thanks to its speed of operation may become popular in next-generation networks. Because optical packets are not buffered it is necessary to develop new mechanisms which would allow quality of service management in OPS networks. The paper discusses the architecture of OPS networks of the ring type with nodes enabling optical packet switching, equipped with the mechanism of Quality of Service (QoS) management. The differentiation of the quality of service was achieved by means of the proposed mechanism of priority registers with the timeout mechanism. This enables the network to be used for transporting various classes of data with varying requirements as to the quality of service. Simulation trials have been conducted and an analytical model for this type of network has been proposed.

This paper provides a technique that enables embedding of path and twig query evaluation in an application server built on top of a small footprint data manager. The technique proposed offers increased flexibility, enabling seamless integration of business rules with low level evaluation facilities. This flexibility compares with that supported by stored procedures in SQL, not available for XML. Our method leverages deferred processing of a Structural Join (SJ) that we modify so as to achieve the minimum number of IO operations. The deferred structural join provides a primitive construct that can be used by our recursive composition technique, allowing local optimization of individual location steps. This recursive composition technique takes advantage of either input set low cardinality or high selectiveness of parent-child join, resulting in a performance boost.

The article presents the very first step of the 3D traffic modeling, which is the developing network traffic generator (equivalent to transmitting of 3D object) and methodology, based on measurements in real 3D environment (with the use of laser rangerfinder).

Effectiveness of information technology use is one of the key issues influencing overall organization performance. Interface design of applications needs to support users in every day work activities. We propose a general methodology for testing the quality of software applications interfaces. Methods were verified in the research aimed at the usability testing of the information search agent for advanced retrieval of internet information (Copernic Agent Professional). The main methods used in our research were think-aloud protocols, but also interviews and observations. Paper characterizes the key findings together with recommendations for application performance improvements.

This paper describes the need for intuitive interfaces to complex systems that take their origin from the concepts of Semantic Web. Then it shows how Semantic Integration System HILLS can benefit from being merged with Pseudo Natural Language layer of Metalog system. The cooperation of these two systems is not perfect though - second part of the paper shows guidelines to its improvement in context of Polish language.

In the paper, design concept, architecture and functionality of the “Students’ Electronic Card” computer system are presented. The system was developed in 1998-2007 and deployed at the Faculty of Electrical, Electronic, Computer and Control Engineering, Technical University of Lodz, Poland. It aids to efficiently organize activities of the community, including 4500 students along with 450 faculty and staff members. The core elements of the system are internet database (Oracle, Postgress) and a network of different functionality terminals (class assignment, cost analysis, marking, student portal, etc.). These terminals are used to enter, edit or retrieve data related to the management of teaching, research and other activities at the faculty, including funds allocation and cost analysis. A number of users of different roles and privileges are defined in the system. Smart cards are issued to users to store their personal secret keys for data encryption and electronic signature generation while communicating with the database. The system has been continuously updated and expanded for more than 10 years. One of the recent projects in this area is ”Electronic Education Connectivity Solution”, aimed at providing support to Bologna processed-governed student mobility between European universities, funded from 7FP UE program.

Visual retrieval systems need to store a large amount of digital video data. The new possibilities offered by the Internet as well as local networks have made video data publicly and relatively easy available, for example Internet video collections, TV shows archives, video-on-demand systems, personal video archives offered by many public Internet services, etc. Video data should be indexed, mainly using content-based indexing methods. Digital video is hierarchically structured. Video is composed of acts, sequences, scenes, shots, and finally of single frames. In the tests described in the paper a special software called the AVI – Automatic Video Indexer has been used to detect shots in tested videos. Then, the single, still frames from different time positions in the shots detected in ten TV sports news have been thoroughly examined for their usefulness in an automatic classification of TV sports news.

The problem of database issues teaching with usage of Internet tools was discussed in the paper. For this purpose the database knowledge and groups of course trainees were categorized. It has influenced the construction of a database e-learning course for which the module structure has been proposed. The designed course was implemented to the MOODLE platform. Various mechanisms for database knowledge presentation and practicing were used. This mechanisms were extended of a new activity making a database interactive querying possible. The process of the MOODLE platform extending and benefits of its usage were also presented.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are ad-hoc networks in which small independent sensor nodes have limited energy, computational resources and wireless communication capabilities. Recently, both academia and industry have shown great interest in the area of Wireless Sensor Networks. This paper focuses on the practical applications in commerce and feasible future employment of WSNs. Continued advances of wireless communication technologies have led to the following fields of applications: habitat and environmental monitoring, security of buildings and property, oil and gas installations, mines and tunnels, emergency medical care, military applications. In the near future WSNs will certainly enter our homes and offices changing the way we monitor our nearest surrounding.

In today’s rapidly changing economy it is vital to maintain appropriate relationships with clients. Any kind of loyalty schemes and gift cards systems, present in small and medium-sized trading networks, require the use of appropriate information technology. However, the cost and organizational factors and common lack of access to the Internet, causes the need to develop dedicated organizational and technical solutions. In the article a low-cost oriented system of gift cards authorization was described, with a special attention to social and organizational aspects.

This paper presents a universal approach to the problem of a remote access to the building management system. The idea bases on the configuration of the BMS stored in the XML format. The configuration consists of defined properties of buildings, devices and states. The building management protocol for remote access to the BMS is also described. Proper commands for controlling devices, monitoring are enumerated. Shortly the solution of the problem of transaction is presented.

In this paper we present the results of analysis of the genetic data of children with diabetes mellitus type 1 (DMT1) and their up to now healthy siblings. Base on the data the decision support system has been developed to classify and later on to predict the illness among the children with genetic susceptibility to DMT1. The system can recommend to include a person to pre-diabetes therapy. The data mining and classification algorithms are based on the rough set theory.

The tentative thesis of the Enterprise Resource Control (ERC) theory is the statement, that every planning and control system, taken from any enterprise, may be transformed with all its functions and data to an ERC system or to its part. In spite of such declared generality of the ERC theory the structure of the framework ERC system is relatively simple. All information describing organizational and functional structure of an ERC system, the structure of its data, as well as data values may be recorded in the relational database of this system. The key attributes of all tables belonging to any ERC system may be taken from the settled set of 20 structural attributes. The framework ERC system may have any number of organizational levels (typically four: primary organizational system, a plant, an organizational cell and a workstation). In each level, except of the lowest one, there are four functional layers of coordination, reengineering, allocation and execution planning. For formal description of ERC systems the Organizational Information-Transition Nets (OITN) are applied. The OITN structure is similar to the structure of Coloured Petri Nets (CPN). Pages from a hierarchical CPN correspond to organizational systems belonging to a multilevel OITN. OITN transitions are sites of data processing procedures. OITN places, incident to a given transition, are the sets of those tuples from the database tables, which are data inputs or data outputs of this transition.

In today’s information society, based on easy access to the means of communication, in order to maintain competitiveness on the market, it is necessary that the market participants implement new technological solutions. In case of Corporation, there is a need to diversify the suppliers of IT solutions. Competition between suppliers is now seen as a desirable way of stimulating the development of technology and improving the quality of services, while providing opportunities to optimize the investment costs. This article presents the situation in a particular area in which on one hand we are dealing with one supplier, and on the other hand allow to confront the suppliers in the market fight for contract for the implementation of changes to the system functioning as an integrated system environment. Against this background, there are technical differences shown in the change implementation process, as well as aspects related to the choice of the implementation model.

The measurement of software products is an area of software engineering, which cannot be considered as sufficiently mature not only in terms of practice, but also in terms of knowledge maturity. That is why over the last couple of years significant intensification of works could have been observed, which aimed to standardize the best practices of software products measurement. Various ISO/IEC norms have been developed as a result of these works, filling an important gap in the software engineering. One of the most important groups of ISO/IEC standards concerns the software product size measurement. Normalization of such measurement is mainly aimed at reducing unnecessary diversity in the area of software size measures, ensuring compatibility between the standardized approaches as well as their usefulness, especially for Business Software Systems. Thus the aim of the paper is to provide a synthetic presentation of these very aspects of the software products size measurement standardization.

Tools to automate the maintenance of the system play an important role in managing a complex environment with high dynamics of change. Among such tools are: open tools - functioning under a public license, and closed solutions - which the source code is not published, and the usage is associated with the need to pay the fee for the rights of copyright holders. In this article there is the comparison of the two types of tools, together with identification of their use.

As it results from studies carried out by the author, more and more government units in Poland has developed IT strategies. However, it appears that commonly these materials have purely declarative character and are not reflected by real actions — especially by information projects being realized (in compliance with a rule that the urgent things prevail over the important things). Considerations on how to perform the operationalization of IT strategy with use of a concept of Enterprise Architecture were undertaken in the article.

This article presents issues related to application of process approach to the information system projects.

The ease of interaction among the Internet users is a very important feature as far as business is concerned. A group of Internauts can comment a given event, upload their own materials, share their knowledge, make opinions on products. The aim of this article is to present organizational and managing consequences of Internauts’ opinions expressed within the framework of virtual communities. Basing on the case study of Jedroch partnership company, a range and character of enterprise reactions upon opinions expressed by current and potential users of company products in the Internet forums was analysed.

Quantum information processing is a new and dynamic research field at the crossroads of quantum physics and computer science. Once a quantum computer becomes reality, it will possess massive parallel processing capabilities. Although this goal is still quite distant, certain limited applications have been developed. One of them is quantum cryptography, exploiting Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to allow two remote parties to exchange a cryptographic key without a possibility for a third party to intercept the key during its exchange between the sender and the recipient. Current popular exchange of keys using public key cryptography suffers from two major flaws. First, it is vulnerable to technological progress. The development of the first quantum computer will consequently make the exchange of a key with public key algorithms insecure. The second flaw is the fact that public key cryptography is vulnerable to progress in mathematics. These threats simply mean that public key cryptography cannot guarantee future-proof key distribution. Quantum cryptography solves the key distribution problem by allowing the exchange of a cryptographic key between two remote parties with absolute security, guaranteed by the laws of physics. Mechanics of this exchange has been described in the paper. The quantum cryptography system is very promising and advancements are being made to improve upon the technology, most notably a wireless implementation, but it is still susceptible to hacker attacks and has transmission distance and encryption rate limitations. This paper will discuss the flaws of quantum cryptographic systems along with the plans for enhancing current quantum cryptographic systems.

Cerberis is a scalable solution that combines high speed layer 2 encryption appliance with the power of quantum key distribution (QKD) technology. Additional encryption appliances can be added to a QKD server at any time, without network interruption. It allows company for a scalable deployment when more bandwidth or additional protocols is requested. Cerberis is a solution that offers a radically new approach to network security based on a fundamental principle of quantum physic - i.e. observation causes perturbation to provide unprecedented security.

The quantum factorization is probably the most famous algorithm in quantum computation. The algorithm succeeds only when some random number with an even order relative to factorized composite integer is fed as the input to the quantum order finding algorithm. Moreover, post processing of the quantum measurement recovers the correct order only for some subset of possible values. It is well known that numbers with even orders are found with probability not less than 1/2. However, numerical simulation proves that probability of such event exhibits grouping on some discrete levels above that limit. Thus, one may conclude that usage of the lowest estimate leads to underestimation of the successful factorization probability. The understanding of the observed grouping requires further research in that field.

The software flaws give the possibility of attacking the IT systems, which may result in gaining remote control of them. The known vulnerabilities may be detected with the use of scanners and the threat is then removed through installing some patch or a new software version; however, when the tool does not have the updated threat database, the effect of its functioning may give illusory security. Furthermore, in practice, new vulnerabilities in the security systems are identified all the time, which indicates that obtaining high level of security is a significant problem.

State-of-the-art IT facilities are ever more frequently applied in all areas of life. Nowadays, Internet connection, online resources and services are taken for granted. It is much quicker (almost immediate) and more convenient to access electronic information and use online services than to employ traditional methods. Therefore, more and more people take advantage of these options. Aware of the benefits, they often forget about network threats (that arise from inappropriate software protection and failure to follow necessary security rules) or simply underestimate them. This chapter deals with threats to Internet transactions with particular emphasis on new ways of obtaining information and data under false pretences and threats to services rendered in wireless networks.

Security of Internet transaction is very important. It is not only the installed software, type of hardware used and the protection used by service providers (shops, banks, etc.) that influences the level of security; the behaviour of users (the parties of transactions, account holders, etc.) plays an importance role too. The overall level of security is influenced by many complementing actions. This chapter presents results of a survey conducted among students on the security of Internet transactions. Its aim was to assess students’actions in this field.

The chapter presents researches on the ontology applications in the Common Criteria methodology. The first issue concerns the ontological representation of the standard security specifications, and the second one presents how this approach can be applied to elaborate the evidences for the IT security evaluation. Both issues are exemplified by the developed ontology and related knowledge base. Current research results are concluded and the planned works are shortly discussed.

This article presents issues related to electronic voting, which can be used in elections to the parliament, presidential elections or national referendums. The advantages and disadvantages of such voting and protocols implementing the voting via internet are discussed. On the basis of Kutylowski model of e-voting an enhancement related to assigning rights phase is introduced.