Mirror Magazine

Mirror Magazine Techno page by Harendra Alwis

Internet telephony
Internet telephony is the transmission of telephone calls over the Internet, and it doesn’t matter whether traditional telephony devices, multimedia PCs or dedicated terminals take part in the calls or whether the calls are entirely or partially transmitted over the Internet.

The most significant benefit of Internet telephony and the driving force behind its evolution is money-saving and easy implementation of innovative services. This is also the reason behind the drastic reduction of IDD call rates we experienced in this country a few months back.

In the future, Internet Telephony Service Providers (ITSP) may use a single infrastructure for providing both, Internet access and Internet telephony. Only data-oriented switches could be deployed for switching data as well as voice “packets”. Multiplexing data and voice could also result in better bandwidth utilization than in today’s over-engineered voice-or-nothing links. Eventually, not only the providers, but also their clients will profit from the lower costs.

Now, customers may take advantage of flat Internet rating vs. hierarchical PSTN rating and save money while letting their long-distance calls be routed over the Internet. This is especially true in Europe, where the prices of long-distance calls are still higher than in the US. But according to some estimates, the prices of traditional and Internet telephony will equalize together with the convergence of value added services provided by them.

The IPT users may also profit from its software-oriented nature. Software solutions may be easily extended and integrated with other services and applications. Deployment of new IP telephony services requires significantly lower investment in terms of time and money than in the traditional PSTN environment.

The wide business deployment of Internet Telephony is still hindered by lower quality of voice over IP, particularly by higher delay and jitter. Many technical aspects such as accounting, billing, charging, and roaming leaves much to be desired.

Maintaining your computer
We often neglect our computers and their maintenance, mostly because we don’t consider the computer to be a machine that requires care and attention. We all know how important it is to change the oil in a car periodically and even worn out parts, because we know that negligence could cost you much. But we don’t look at our computers in the same way, even though unexpected data loss or hardware failure could mess up your life because we are dependant on our computers; its hardware and software far more than we think.

This is why I thought I should do what I can to keep you up-to-date with a few tips on how you should take care of your computer and maintain it to keep it running in optimal condition for many years to come. I must emphasize the importance of ‘preventive maintenance’. This simply means that you should seek to avoid problems, rather than wait for them to come to you, and then try to solve them.

Here are some reasons why you should develop a preventive maintenance plan for your PC:

* Preventive Maintenance Saves Money: I’m sure we’ve all heard the old adage “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. It’s trite, but it is also true. Avoiding problems with your PC will save you money in the long run, compared with laying out cash for new components or repair jobs.

* Preventive Maintenance Saves Time: Saves time? How can taking two hours a month or whatever to perform maintenance save time? Simple: because it saves you the much bigger hassles of dealing with system failures and data loss. Most preventive maintenance procedures are quite simple compared to troubleshooting and repair procedures—now those can really eat up your time at a fantastic rate.

* Preventive Maintenance Helps Safeguard Your Data: For most people, the data on the hard disk is more important than the hardware that houses it. Taking steps to protect this data therefore makes sense, and that is what PM is all about.

* Preventive Maintenance Improves Performance: Some parts of your system will actually degrade in performance over time, and preventive maintenance will help to improve the speed of your system in these respects.

Improve your computer literacy Phishing
Pronounced “fishing”, phishing refers to the act of sending an e-mail to a user falsely claiming to be an established legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft. The e-mail directs the user to visit a website where they are asked to update personal information, such as passwords and credit card, social security, and bank account numbers, that the legitimate organization already has.

The website, however, is bogus and set up only to steal the user’s information. For example, 2003 saw the proliferation of a phishing scam in which users received e-mails supposedly from eBay claiming that the user’s account was about to be suspended unless he clicked on the provided link and updated the credit card information that the genuine eBay already had.

Because it is relatively simple to make a website look like a legitimate organization site by mimicking the HTML code, the scam counted on people being tricked into thinking they were actually being contacted by eBay and were subsequently going to eBay’s site to update their account information. By spamming large groups of people, the “phisher” counted on the e-mail being read by a percentage of people who actually had listed credit card numbers with eBay legitimately.

Phishing, also referred to as brand spoofing or carding, is a variation on “fishing,” the idea being that bait is thrown out with the hopes that while most will ignore the bait, some will be tempted into biting.

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