Cutting the Wires Other Ways 554 IR is radiation of a frequency lower than visible light (below red) but higher than microwaves. The technology has one big disadvantage in comparison to WiFi and Bluetooth: Devices have to be able to “see” each other across the room. Signals might be able to bounce around a desk or off the ceiling but not through a door or wall. For computers, infrared communication is an adaptation of the 802.11 stan- dard, with a top speed of about 1.6 Mbps, but only if there is nothing in the way and if the angle of communication is head-on or no more than about 15 degrees off center. Many laptops two or three generations old (perhaps three to six years old) came with infrared circuitry and a small red-filtered window for use in com- munication. The IR port is a specialized version of a standard serial port. Windows, from Windows 98 and later, include built-in support for IR ports, often using an industry standard name of IrDA. An Infrared Wizard config- ures the IR serial port and troubleshoots communication between devices. There are a handful of cordless mice and keyboards available for use with IR systems; if you’re buying a new system there is little reason not to use WiFi instead. On the horizon: Wireless USB Within the next few years, many laptops will come equipped with an exten- sion of the already ubiquitous USB port. Wireless USB (WUSB) devices are expected to include hard disk drives, CD/DVD drives, modems, printers, digi- tal cameras, LCD projectors, and things we haven’t even thought of yet. In its initial version, USB can communicate between devices at speeds of about 480 Mbps, which is comparable to real-world throughput on a wired USB 2.0 circuit. Designs are already in the works to double WUSB to at least 1 Gbps by about 2010. Although it technically isn’t a network — it’s a means of communication between disparate devices — it shares many of the same attributes as WiFi and Bluetooth. WUSB uses a technology called Ultra Wideband radio, allow- ing devices to communicate at distances of about 10 meters (39 feet) within a home or office. A WUSB system will be logically organized as a hub-and-spoke topology with devices communicating through a central host. Just as with wired USB, the host will have the capability of working with as many as 127 devices. Unlike a wired USB system, though, since the devices will not be physically con- nected to a computer or a USB hub, each piece of equipment must have its own source of power either from batteries or an AC adapter. 41 140925-bk08ch03.qxp 4/8/08 12:51 PM Page 554 Chapter 4: Spinning the Web In This Chapter ߜ Seeing what’s to do on the Internet ߜ Getting online ߜ Choosing and using a Web browser ߜ Using Favorites, tabs, and other zippy Web tools W hat a tangled Web we receive, when first we practice to retrieve. (First of all, apologies to Sir Walter Scott, who is the author of the original quote: “What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.” Second of all . . . I fact-checked the quote on the Internet where I confirmed that it was Scott, not William Shakespeare, who gave first warning about modern online research.) In any case, by this time nearly everyone has used the Internet in one form or another. But what exactly is it? The Internet is, at its core, a huge network of networks. Any person or coun- try (at least those in places where repressive governments haven’t intruded) can open up the contents of computer-based data (words, images, numbers, and music included) and send to anyone else who has access to the system. Components of the Internet include the World Wide Web, usually called the Web, which is a more or less organized (but essentially unsupervised) system of web sites. Also on the Internet are services including e-mail, news groups, and point-to-point file sharing. Included in the mix are streaming media including music and video, as well as digitized telephone service called Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) which I discuss in Book VIII, Chapter 6. Cruising the Web I could just as reasonably asked the question in the negative: Is there any- thing left to do or see that isn’t on the Internet? On a typical day, my wife and I perform the following essential tasks with a few clicks of the mouse: 42 140925-bk08ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:52 PM Page 555 Cruising the Web 556 ✦ Download, read, and respond to dozens of pieces of mail sent to us by business associates, friends, and family. (We also throw away dozens of pieces of electronic junk offering to sell us watches, pharmaceuticals, and access to millions of dollars in secret Nigerian bank accounts or Italian lottery winnings.) ✦ Communicate by instant message (IM) between laptops and desktops (and cell phones and PDAs) anywhere in the world within reach of the Internet or a cell phone signal. ✦ Make all our phone calls without any connection to the plain old tele- phone system. In and around our office and home, all calls travel wire- lessly to a base station and from there by wire to a telephone adapter that communicates over the Internet. When we travel, we use a cell phone (with a link to the Internet) and a softphone that allows a WiFi- enabled laptop to place and receive phone calls anywhere we can latch onto an Internet connection. ✦ Shop for home improvements, clothing, books, music, and just about anything else. In recent years, we’ve purchased four new cars for our- selves and our children in negotiations that began and ended without having to set foot in an automobile dealership until the moment came to pick up the keys. ✦ Conduct nearly all our banking through secure online web sites. We can see the balances in our accounts and pay bills without need for exchanges or papers . . . or stamps. Speaking for myself, there remain just two occasional reasons to actually visit a bank (or more commonly, an ATM): to obtain cash for the increas- ingly rare instances where we have to pay for something without flashing a credit or debit card or arranging for electronic transfer of funds, and to make a deposit of checks that arrive in the mail. And I don’t expect to need to visit the bank for deposits much longer; there already exists a system that allows you to scan a check and send its image to the bank for deposit. ✦ Research the contents of any one of those billions of Web pages through the use of increasingly sophisticated search engines, including Google. Efforts like Project Gutenberg are in the process of scanning or manually entering the text of tens of thousands of books no longer under copy- right and making them searchable and readable online. ✦ Upload and download files with my clients, including publishers and business partners. ✦ Listen to music provided for free by sites like www.pandora.com or pur- chase music through Apple’s iTunes or similar commercial enterprises like Amazon. ✦ Catch up on episodes of commercial television or watch video news reports. 42 140925-bk08ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:52 PM Page 556 Book VIII Chapter 4 Spinning the Web Discerning the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Internet 557 ✦ Map the quickest and most efficient route between any two places on the map, and zoom in from space to look at satellite images of almost any place on the planet. ✦ Go on location to check the weather and traffic conditions through any of thousands of web cameras. (Attention grandparents and parents: You, too, can add to your daily worries by seeing if there is snow or rain or other problems for your family.) Discerning the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Internet One of the beauties of the Internet is that it is essentially unmonitored or controlled. There is no systematic before-publication censorship, no after- the-fact policing of political opinion (in most of the world, although some countries including China and certain nations in the Middle East attempt to control the spread of independent or outside ideas, with limited success), and no borders. These are, alas, also the weaknesses of the Internet. There are no editors and although the government of one nation may object to the content of a web site (or even attempt to block access to it), there is basically nothing that a government can do unilaterally about activities that are rooted some- where out there in cyberspace. What is cyberspace? The best definition I know of actually reaches back to old technology: the telephone. If you and I were to speak on the phone, where is that conversation taking place? It isn’t in my office, and it isn’t at your loca- tion. It is somewhere in between, an unmapped meeting of the electrons: cyberspace. Just because you find some information posted on the Internet doesn’t make it necessarily true or accurate or up-to-date. For centuries, readers and scholars have relied upon professional editors and journalists to separate the wheat from the chaff; sometimes it seems as if since 1990, the Internet has existed as a place to publish the chaff. Although there will always be someone who feels that an established old-line publication like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal may have a political or economic or cultural bias, there is at least some reason to believe in the benefit of a professional check-and-balance and accountability. That is not so when it comes to the proliferation of web logs (blogs) on the Internet, however interesting some of them are; they represent unverified (and some- times unverifiable) opinion and sometimes fiction masquerading as fact. And then there are the pirates of the Caribbean and all of the other oceans and land masses of the world: It is very easy to hide behind a Web domain or 42 140925-bk08ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:52 PM Page 557 Getting on the Internet 558 an e-mail address for reasons ranging from a desire for privacy to outright criminality. Like it or not, the Internet is also the home of more than a few people out to steal our money . . . and much worse. In Book IX, I tell you about steps you can take to erect security firewalls, antivirus and antispam utilities, and ways to protect your identity and per- sonal information from the would-be electronic evildoers. Getting on the Internet The process of using the Internet is not quite as mysterious as it might appear to a complete neophyte. Think of it in terms more familiar: How do you go about watching television in your home? To watch television you need the following: a television, an account with an electricity utility for power (delivered from the power plant to your home), and finally, a way to tune into one or hundreds of data signals floating out there in the ether. Okay, back to the computer. Let me translate the television example into Internet terms and services. Here’s what you need to use the Internet: ✦ A computer with sufficient horsepower and graphics capability to handle the stream of data that comes its way and convert the informa- tion into words, images, and sound. (That’s the television part of the metaphor, right?) ✦ Electricity from an AC outlet or a built-in rechargeable battery to ener- gize your laptop. ✦ A way to connect to the Internet. That connection could be delivered by an account you have with an Internet service provider that feeds data over a cable television circuit, a DSL telephone wire line, a fiber-optic cable, Internet from a satellite, or even a poky dial-up link over the plain old telephone system. And the connection could come via a wireless link between your laptop and a local or regional transmitter or receiver. ✦ A way to tune in the data. On a television set that is handled by a piece of electronics called, appropriately enough, a tuner; for many of us, the tuning is handled by a converter box provided to us by a cable television company. On a computer, though, the tuning is performed by a piece of software called a browser; the most common one for Windows users is supplied by Microsoft and called Internet Explorer. The browser commu- nicates with other computers somewhere out there in cyberspace and delivers to your laptop the page or stream or nugget of information you’re looking for. 42 140925-bk08ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:52 PM Page 558 Book VIII Chapter 4 Spinning the Web Getting on the Internet 559 Broadband is a fat pipe that gushes more data per millisecond than is possi- ble for a human (and most machines) to absorb, while not-broadband is a narrow straw of a connection that is slow and limited. Forget about what anyone else tells you about life in other contexts: When it comes to Internet connections, fat is good. In Book VIII, Chapter 1, I discuss the difference between broadband and standard connections to the Internet. Choosing a browser Back in the early days of office automation (back when the very idea of a “personal” computer would have gotten you laughed out of the board room) there was a maxim that held a great deal of sway in business: “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” What they meant by that was: Why take chances with Brand X — even if we think it is better or cheaper or faster — when we know that there’s no risk in going along with the choice that almost every- one else is making? Internet Explorer In many ways, that’s the message of Microsoft in selling the Windows operat- ing system and its Office suite of programs. And from the start, Microsoft’s Windows Internet Explorer has been included as a “free” component of Windows. (For a short period of time, Microsoft offered a version of IE that could run on a Macintosh operating system but current editions of the browser are exclusively for Windows. Today, Apple Safari browser can run on both Mac and Windows-based machines.) Internet Explorer is a very impressive product and has over time held on to a market share near 90 percent; today it runs on more than 80 percent of all personal computers of all brands and types. It may not be the flashiest or the easiest to use, and many technical types strongly contend that it continues to have many serious flaws when it comes to protecting the security of data on machines on which it runs. (It’s a bit of an open question, though: Do the majority of virus and spam authors target machines running Internet Explorer because it is easy to do so, or because it is by far the most commonly used browser?) In any case, no one is likely to be fired because they use Windows Internet Explorer on their Windows-based machine. It’s the official browser of Microsoft, after all. Mozilla Firefox and Opera On Windows machines, in distant second place, is a browser with the geeky name of Mozilla Firefox which may be used by as many as 15 percent of machines. 42 140925-bk08ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:52 PM Page 559 Getting on the Internet 560 Whatever the name, Firefox is a fully capable browser with a fair number of fans who prefer its style. And though it isn’t immune to security assaults, the number of viruses aimed at Firefox is much less than those directed at Internet Explorer. In even-more-distant third place for Windows users is the Opera browser, which has its roots in a Norwegian telecommunications company. The browser also runs on Apple’s Mac OS X, Linux, and some other operating systems. Choosing the browser for you I’ve used all major browsers for Windows and found things to like in each of them. But like the old-timers in 1981, my job — as an explainer of technology — demands a concentration on Windows Internet Explorer. No one is going to lose their job by staying with the product that has an 80 percent market share; if that number ever drops to a minority, I’ll lead the charge to a new browser. The fact is that all the browsers operate in a similar manner. Some have a few extra features that may be obvious to the user or may be hidden in the code and delivered in the form of enhanced security or efficiency. And, by the way, why not have two or more different browsers loaded on your system? You can even run several browsers at the same time, although this does open the door to resource conflicts. In this chapter, I concentrate on Windows Internet Explorer. I also present some keyboard shortcuts for both IE and Firefox. For details about how to inform Windows about the particulars of the hard- ware and the networking protocols of your system, see Book VIII, Chapter 2. It’s a jungle out there The product began as Phoenix, which was later translated to a more contemporary Firebird and then changed to Firefox after a dispute with the backers of another product called Firebird. A creature in China is called a firefox — a species of Panda, apparently — but that may be just coincidental. And Mozilla? That name came from its long-ago origin as a group trying to compete with one of the first (pre-Microsoft) browsers, a product called Mosaic. Mozilla was a contraction of Mosaic-killer. Do you see why corporate types were more readily attracted to a company called Microsoft offering a product with the straightforward name Internet Explorer? 42 140925-bk08ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:52 PM Page 560 Book VIII Chapter 4 Spinning the Web Finding Your Way on the Web 561 Most browsers, including Windows Internet Explorer, install a shortcut on your machine’s desktop and may also insinuate themselves onto the taskbar. And just for good measure most also pin themselves to the Start menu of Windows. Clicking the icons or shortcuts automatically starts the browser. Clicking a link in a document also generally launches the page within your default browser. Finding Your Way on the Web When you first start a browser it will display the home page. Many browser makers, including Microsoft, deliver their product with a particular home page preset as the default page; some laptop makers install Windows and a browser with the home page set to their product support page. And if you configure your system with the assistance of your ISP (a cable television company or a DSL provider, for example), they may put their own page in place. Be on the lookout for web sites that helpfully offer to “make this page your home page.” Sometimes it’s easy to miss this sort of electronic land grab. Many current security software programs will detect and block any attempt to change your home page without your permission. None of this means that you have to use someone else’s suggestion (or demand) for your home page. You can set a news site like the online edition of The New York Times or your favorite sports team or the main page for your preferred search engine. Netscape Navigator loses its way Netscape Navigator, the first commercial Web browser, officially reached the end of its life in February of 2008 when its current owner, AOL, announced it would end further development and technical support. Netscape’s market share had all but disappeared, replaced by its open-source cousin, Firefox. Users will still be able to download and use Netscape, but AOL will not longer offer security and compatibility updates. I recommend that any remaining Netscape users — you probably both know each other personally — change over to Firefox or Windows Internet Explorer. Netscape was introduced in late 1994 as a commercial product, but Internet Explorer fol- lowed and (leaving out some serious legal wrangling with Microsoft over the years) the company was purchased by AOL in 1999. 42 140925-bk08ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:52 PM Page 561 Finding Your Way on the Web 562 To get back to your home page at any time, click the Home button on the toolbar. If you’re so unlucky as to be still using a dial-up modem, you can get to the Internet faster by setting a blank screen as your home page. That way you won’t have to wait for graphics and text to download before you trudge to the page you really want to visit. Can I have your address? Although the World Wide Web exists only in cyberspace, there has to be a way for visitors to find their way to the front doors of each of its sites. Behind the scenes, a collection of huge databases keeps track of where every Web page is located through the use of a Web address. In technical terms, the address is called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). A few examples of URLs: ✦ www.microsoft.com is the front door to the company that makes and sells Windows, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office, and many of the other tools you likely use on your laptop. In current browsers, you don’t have to type the three ws; they’re assumed. ✦ www.dummies.com is the place to learn about the latest, greatest, and smartest additions to the best-selling For Dummies books. ✦ www.econoguide.com is one of the web sites I maintain to promote my books and to receive messages from (mostly) satisfied readers. The basic elements of a URL are these: http:// Addresses are preceded by either http:// or https:// to indicate the use of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol in its basic or “secured” form. HTTP is used in most intranets and the World Wide Web. In fact, it is so ubiquitous that for an address on Web you don’t even need to fill it in; the browser will do the work for you if you begin the URL with www. www An indication that the web site is part of the World Wide Web. There are other corners of the Internet and the intranet available to some or all visi- tors but stored and indexed in facilities that aren’t considered part of the Web. domain This is the heart of the address, a word or phrase that is relatively easy for humans to remember. The domain name is used by the browser to locate a page, but once computers are speaking to computers the domain name is replaced by a more complex series of numbers that help find the page and direct the components of the Internet to deliver it to your laptop. .com A domain type, also called a top-level domain. In its original design, .com was envisioned as a subdivision devoted exclusively to commercial enterprises; today it is more of a “common” name. Other top-level domains include the following: 42 140925-bk08ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:52 PM Page 562 Book VIII Chapter 4 Spinning the Web Finding Your Way on the Web 563 • .edu for educational institutions • .gov for government agencies • .mil for military functions • .org for organizations Some nations have second-level domains, such as .com.ar for commercial enterprises in Argentina or .co.uk for companies in the United Kingdom. Later in this chapter I give you a list of useful keyboard shortcuts for use with Internet Explorer. Here’s a sample: If you want to go to a location that is named in the most common fashion (like www.dummies.com) you can just enter the domain (dummies) and then press Ctrl + Enter from the keyboard to convert it to the proper URL. Links and recent pages Today we mostly think in terms of links. You’ll find them almost anywhere on the Internet. You’ll see a word in a color (often, but not always, blue) and usu- ally underlined; click that link and it will take you somewhere else — to a dif- ferent page on the same web site or to a completely different web site. Links can also be tied into a picture or image; click the HDTV set to go to a page that tells you all of the specs and the ordering information for that product. To test whether an item on a Web page is a link, bring your onscreen pointer to hover over it. If it is a link, you should see both of the following things on your screen: ✦ The mouse pointer changed to a hand with a pointing finger. ✦ A URL in the status bar at the bottom of Internet Explorer. This shows the web site that the browser goes to if you click the link. (Try to get in the habit of looking at the proposed address before clicking on a link; that is one way to involve your own judgment in the process of securing your machine against visits to unwanted or dangerous web sites.) Links are an essential element of the Internet. They are what makes the Web tick. When you use a search site like Google, the results you get are in the form of links you can click to jump to a new page. When you’re shopping for books or a pair of fleece-lined bunny slippers on Amazon, you get to check out the available products by clicking a link. Another important element of the Web is the ability to go backward or for- ward in your history of jumps from page to page. To go back to the previous page from the one you’ve linked to, click the Back button. You can go back several pages, and then you can use the Forward button to move ahead to where you started. 42 140925-bk08ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:52 PM Page 563 . Web 563 • .edu for educational institutions • .gov for government agencies • .mil for military functions • .org for organizations Some nations have second-level domains, such as .com.ar for commercial enterprises. on Windows Internet Explorer. I also present some keyboard shortcuts for both IE and Firefox. For details about how to inform Windows about the particulars of the hard- ware and the networking. “secured” form. HTTP is used in most intranets and the World Wide Web. In fact, it is so ubiquitous that for an address on Web you don’t even need to fill it in; the browser will do the work for you