Communicating through information technology platforms for greater results

[Adam John]

The World Wide Web (www) has now emerged as the most popular media for an investor to communicate with a broker's website. All online stock option trading platforms now leverage upon the tools and services available in the net to assist their customers in their daily transactions. However, once the information is released over the web, it becomes vulnerable. Therefore, it is in the Netizens' interest to ensure complete secrecy to avoid becoming a prey to the cyber criminals through interception of the information sent and received through the internet. An understanding of the security systems may minimize such incidents.

Consider the events that led to the development of the World Wide Web (www). Tim Berners-Lee of Massachusetts's Institute of Technology developed the World Wide Web and it was then mainly used by the Center for European Nuclear Research (CERN), Switzerland. It was actually a software to allow communication of information through simple networks. The servers are interconnected forming a web and since the network is spread all over the globe, it is aptly called as the World Wide Web.

These servers that hosted a huge amount of information were called as web servers. Each distinct file on a web server that could be downloaded is called a web page. A set of related web pages constituted a website. The first page of a website is called its home page. Generally, the domain name of the www servers begins with 'www' for example, www.yahoo.com.

The Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) was invented by Browser Kale and was commercially released by the Thinking Machine Corporation. This distributed information system allows simple natural language input, indexed searching and provides relevant feedback.

Paul Lindner and Marc Mc Cahill of the University of Minnesota invented gopher. This distributed information system presented information to the user in the form of hierarchical menus. Cooperation between the many gophers on the Internet allowed users to search for information in different host computers using the same interface.