Improvement: what can be done?

I think that our class of e-culture can be improved in different ways. First, as a lot of students have already said, we can create a wiki and post our contributions on it. But this has already be done. We can also open a netvibes page and subscribe to rss from other students blogs. But this has already been done too.

But I am convinced that the most important problem in this cyber class is that we hardly speak English together. Honnestly in 3 hours of class each student speaks English 5 minutes which is ridiculuous. This point can be explain in many ways. We mostly work on computers and we have to make researchs on the Internet. The major activity is to read. And because the subjects can be hard, it's often technical, we also use French websites to understand. We don't speak English between us because we don't have to and it's not really natural. When we speak together in class it's only to explain technical terms or resolve problems so it's useless to speak English in that case. And in my opinion, it's really disappointing to have the opportunity to have an American teacher and only speak 5 minutes of English per class.

I think it would be great if we can speak with other people in English. We could speak about a subjects wich is understandabke by everyone together. But the best would be to speak with English students via skype or msn. we could practice oral English and it would also give us the opportuity to compare our different points of view about e-culture.

Really simple RSS!!!

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS is a simple XML-based system that allows users to subscribe to their favorite websites. Using RSS, webmasters can put their content into a standardized format, which can be viewed and organized through RSS-aware software or automatically conveyed as new content on another website. A program known as a feed reader or aggregator can check a list of feeds on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. It is common to find web feeds on major websites and many smaller ones. Some websites let people choose between RSS or Atom formatted web feeds; others offer only RSS or only Atom.

RSS feeds are indicated by those symbols:

Cybercriminality

Cybercrime is defined by the Council of Europe (Novembre 2001) as

Criminal offences committed against or with the help of computer networks.

It is a general notion. That means that cybercrime describes crimes which occur on the networks like Internet, or crimes which occur thanks to the networks or computers. To make short, cybercrime is a term used broadly to describe criminal activity in which computers or networks are a tool, a target, or a place of criminal activity.

According to wikipedia, we can find a lot of examples of cybercrimes. The most current are spamming and certain intellectual property and criminal copyright crimes, particularly those facilitated through peer-to-peer networks. It also exists financial crimes on the Internet. In this case, someone, a hacker, can steal your access codes and make transactions with your bank account. But activities like paedophilia which often occur on the Internet is a cybercrime too. So we see that there is a huge range of cybercrimes.

I found an example of cybercrime which has taken place in California in January 2006. Mr. Heim was sentenced to two years of probation and required to pay a $500 fine in addition to having to make restitution to his victim, Facility Automation Systems, in the amount of $6,050. Indeed, Mr. Heim admitted he used the username and password assigned to its former employer FAS for its Internet domain, redirected all the Internet traffic, including electronic mail, to a server at Mr. Heim’s new employer, the Moreno Valley Unified School District. Mr. Heim knew that redirecting the traffic to that server would make FAS’ web site and electronic mail services inaccessible.

S-HTTP, SSL: Security is in progress

Secure HTTP (S-HTTP) is a secure message-oriented communications protocol designed for use in conjunction with HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol). S-HTTP is designed to coexist with HTTP's messaging model and to be easily integrated with HTTP applications.

S-HTTP is an extension to the HTTP to support sending data securely over the World Wide Web. It was developed by Enterprise Integration Technologies (EIT), which was acquired by Verifone in 1995. Secure HTTP provides a variety of security mechanisms to HTTP clients and servers, providing the security service options appropriate to the wide range of potential end uses possible for the World-Wide Web (WWW). S-HTTP provides symmetric capabilities to both client and server (in that equal treatment is given to both requests and replies, as well as for the preferences of both parties) while preserving the transaction model and implementation characteristics of HTTP.

But not all Web browsers and servers support S-HTTP. Another technology for transmitting secure communications over the World Wide Web, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), is more prevalent. However, SSL and S-HTTP have very different designs and goals so it is possible to use the two protocols together. Whereas SSL is designed to establish a secure connection between two computers, S-HTTP is designed to send individual messages securely. Both protocols have been submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for approval as a standard.