Chapter 1: I.

Introduction

1.1 Rationale
The Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) became a big influence in our world today giving the people the power do their professional activities and use it in their everyday lives. One of its best contributions would be the informations that became available and easily accessed by the people. These challenges provided many changes in the security and protection of the computer systems.

The World Wide Web (abbreviated as WWW or W3, commonly known as the web) is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them via hyperlinks. British engineer Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist and at that time employee of CERN, a European research organisation near Geneva, wrote a proposal in March 1989 for what would eventually become the World Wide Web. The 1989 proposal was meant for a more effective CERN communication system but Berners-Lee eventually realised the concept could be implemented throughout the world. Berners-Lee and Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau proposed in 1990 to use hypertext "to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will", and Berners-Lee finished the first website in December that year. Berners-Lee posted the project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup on 7 August 1991.

The following stated above are my reasons for conducting this research. As an Information Technology student, it is very interesting and challenging for us to know the different factors and functions that are important for the security of the internet. These informations enable us to understand the difference in security and cryptography and how they function similarly in the internet or WWW (World Wide Web).

WWW prefix Many domain names used for the World Wide Web begin with www because of the long-standing practice of naming Internet hosts (servers) according to the services they provide. The hostname for a web server is often www, in the same way that it may be ftp for an FTP server, and news or nntp for a USENET news server. These host names appear as Domain Name System or (DNS) subdomain names, as in www.example.com. The use of 'www' as a subdomain name is not required by any technical or policy standard and many web sites do not use it; indeed, the first ever web server was called nxoc01.cern.ch. According to Paolo Palazzi, who worked at CERN along with Tim Berners-Lee, the popular use of 'www' subdomain was accidental; the World Wide Web project page was intended to be published at www.cern.ch while info.cern.ch was intended to be the CERN home page, however the dns records were never switched, and the practice of prepending 'www' to an institution's website domain name was subsequently copied. Many established websites still use 'www', or they invent other subdomain names such as 'www2', 'secure', etc. Many such web servers are set up so that both the domain root (e.g., example.com) and the www subdomain (e.g., www.example.com) refer to the same site; others require one form or the other, or they may map to different web sites. The use of a subdomain name is useful for load balancing incoming web traffic by creating a CNAME record that points to a cluster of web servers. Since, currently, only a subdomain can be used in a CNAME, the same result cannot be achieved by using the bare domain root. When a user submits an incomplete domain name to a web browser in its address bar input field, some web browsers automatically try adding the prefix "www" to the beginning of it and possibly ".com", ".org" and ".net" at the end, depending on what might be missing. For example, entering 'microsoft' may be transformed to http://www.microsoft.com/ and 'openoffice' to http://www.openoffice.org. This feature started appearing in early versions of Mozilla Firefox, when it still had the working title 'Firebird' in early 2003, from an earlier practice in browsers such as Lynx. It is reported that Microsoft was granted a US patent for the same idea in 2008, but only for mobile devices. In English, www is usually read as double-u double-u double-u. Some users pronounce it dub-dub-dub, particularly in New Zealand. Stephen Fry, in his "Podgrammes" series of podcasts, pronounces it wuh wuh wuh. The English writer Douglas Adams once quipped in The Independent on Sunday (1999): "The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for". In Mandarin Chinese, World Wide Web is commonly translated via a phono-semantic matching to wn wi wng (), which satisfies www and literally means "myriad dimensional net", a translation that very appropriately reflects the design concept and proliferation of the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee's web-space states that World Wide Web is officially spelled as three separate words, each capitalised, with no intervening hyphens.

Use of the www prefix is declining as Web 2.0 web applications seek to brand their domain names and make them easily pronounceable. As the mobile web grows in popularity, services like Gmail.com, MySpace.com, Facebook.com and Twitter.com are most often discussed without adding www to the domain (or, indeed, the .com).

1.2

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

The general problem of this research, in my opinion, would be the inaccessibility of the internet in the users due to the individual problems that are related to the security and cryptography of WWW (World Wide Web).The following problems in this research is somehow threatening and disturbing because it tackles two different fields; the security and cryptography in WWW (World Wide Web). The sub-problems in this research are mentioned below: 1. The authentication of the user. 2. The people who made the software should make sure that their software are safe to use and to inform others about the different functions by the said software. 3. Unsafe transmission of documents.

1.3

OBJECTIVES

The following are my objectives in doing/conducting my research: To fully understand the history and other information about the World Wide Web. To learn about the different problems affecting the internet. To differentiate the functions and meaning of security and cryptography. To know the advantages and disadvantages of using the internet and its security.

These are my following goals to achieve in doing this research. This will benefit not only the Information Technology students, but also the people or the users from all walks of life.

1.4

METHODS
Survey Method To gather informations about the users. Observational Method The researcher will be observing and recording the informations that will be given. Library Research The researcher will go to different libraries to gather informations.