The Internet can best be described as network of data networks with millions of users, spanning the entire globe. Your browser accesses the Internet using the World Wide Web (WWW) to retrieve information.

Having its origin in the military, the Net is now undergoing fundamental changes. Business has discovered it as a medium to transfer information quickly and cost-effectively. But as an inherently one-to-one communication medium, it also holds enormous potential for marketing in companies big or small.

The Internet is linked via satellite and undersea cables. The "host" or "server", the core of individual networks, usually carries all the information of the "clients", and make them available to anyone in the world who is "online". This allows the "clients" to be "offline", means their information is still accessible from the "server".

Picture it as your right hand as the server, and your fingers as individual clients; the body is the world, and your other hand or foot is just another server. But now you don't only have two hands and two feet, but thousands of them, each one with hundreds or thousands of fingers and toes. And if one foot is bathing, means temporarily "offline", others will ensure that information crossing the body is still delivered via another route until the server is up again. This is the Internet - big, fast, flexible.

The World Wide Web is an information system that makes it possible to navigate through the Internet in a simple fashion by clicking on what are known as 'links'. You can access documents, files, programs and applications via the WWW - or short: "web'.

Lately, technology has made it possible to also 'stream' information to your PC. This means you no longer have to download the complete file and play/run it on your side, but you get piece by piece sent to your PC, and you can use it as it is sent. In practice, this means you can listen to the first 20 seconds of a -- say -- RealAudio file, and then abort the transfer whenever you like. The information is used as it is received, therefore a 'stream' of data.

Email is probably the most versatile and effective element of modern communications technology. It allows you to communicate with friends, relatives or like-minded souls quickly and cost-effectively.

Email is split into SMTP and POP3. SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is for sending mail; POP (Post Office Protocol) is used for receiving messages.

The e-mail address is in format:

name@address.country

ie. SMTP format.

Sign up for a FREE email account!

Hardware

---

Hardware is the bit you can kick :-)

USENET or newsgroups is a 'place' in cyberspace where people with common interests share discussion forums. Anything from the absurd to the bizarre, from politics to computers, from hobbies to interests, from the present to the future is being discussed. There are currently more than 20.000 individual newsgroups listed. Have your pick, and take part in inter-continental communication. Subscription is free in most cases. Please refer to the group:

news.announce.newusers

for details on how to conduct in the news- or discussion forums.

On the public USENET, technical questions relating to browsers are discussed under

comp.infosystems.www.browsers.ms-windows

Your bowser is a program which provides access to the World Wide Web World_Wide_Web(WWW). WWW uses a type of address known as Universal Resource Locator (URL). This is an example of URL:

http://www.members.tripod.com/~nmsbl/index.htm

Usually a URL consists of the following sections:

protocol://machine-name/directory/filename

but in some cases particular sections can be omitted.

A protocol states how a document shall be retrieved, and what type of document it is. Browsers support some of the protocols below:

HTTP - HyperText Transfer Protocol. This is the most common protocol and is used for retrieving normal documents on the Web.
FTP - File Transfer Protocol. This is used for retrieving simple documents, files and programmes from so-called FTP (FTP-file-stores).
Gopher - This is used for searching for files in large archives of documents.
WAIS - Wide Area Information Server.
News - This is used for reading newsgroups (discussion groups).
Mailto - This is used for sending electronic mail.

	FTP Search	Downloads

Links can usually be seen as differently coloured text, eg.red. But links can also be graphics, and these have an extra border round them, which is usually red. When you click on a link, you retrieve the document the link points to.

You can now also save files that are links, like .MIDI files. This is being done via the right-click menu.

Winsock is a programme library, which is used for communications. Most browsers are dependent on this library for retrieving information from the Internet.

Problems with different communications modules (winsock)
There are very many different communications modules (winsock) available. Sometimes these can be very different in the problems produced. In the worst case the machine can hang.

A Name server is like a telephone directory. Give it a name/address and it finds the corresponding number.

In practice, if you enter a URL (uniform resource locator), the name server will look up the IP (Internet Protocol) address relating to that URL. This will tell the server to look up server and retrieve its documents.

The MIME protocol is a method for declaring document types. It is used when sending mail over the Internet or World Wide Web.

HTML - Hyper Text Markup Language is a readable document format which is used on the World Wide Web.

An example of HTML is shown below:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
<HTML>

<HEAD>
<TITLE>Welcome to our home page</TITLE>
<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="">
<META NAME="FORMATTER" CONTENT="">
</HEAD>
<BODY BACKGROUND="" BGCOLOR="#000000" TEXT="#ffffff" LINK="#ff80ff" VLINK="#80ff80" ALINK="#b30000">
<P>
<H1>This is a header</H1>
This is body text. And this is <B>bold</B>.

</BODY>
</HTML>

On the web, this would look like this:

This is a header

This is body text. And this is bold.

As you can see, HTML is a markup language, governed by tags in brackets <>. This makes it easy to write HTML documents, but the newer word processors and HTML editors take the pain out of writing HTML code manually.

TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is the protocol that defines how to transmit data and reliably deliver them, or detect and recover from a failure.

IP is the Internet Protocol, defining how to transmit a chunk of data from one computer to another via a number of connected networks.

TCP breaks up the message it will send into smaller packets, which IP then gets to its destination, and the remote TCP then reconstructs the message and delivers it, or handles any problems before it can deliver the message to the receiver.

The TLS (Transport Layer Security) Protocol is the result of further development based on the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) version 3.0 (developed by Netscape).

The development has been made by a Work Group in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) over the last couple of years. TLS has now been accepted as a Proposed Standard by the standards group overseeing internet standards.

The message structure is mostly the same as in SSL v3, but many of the fundamental (cryptographical) formulas used to calculate encryption keys and so on has been changed to improve security.

The protocol is designed to let a client (browser, in our case) and a server, to agree on a method of encrypted communication, optionally verify each others identities, exchange secret information needed to create encryption keys. The messages sent between the client and the server are then encrypted using the agreed upon keys. Each part of the message contains a signature verifiying the authenticity of the message part (the signature is *very* difficult to counterfeit without knowing the secret exchanged when the connection was set up.

If you are interested in more information, take a look at the IETF TLS WG home page http://www.consensus.com/ietf-tls/ or the SSL talk FAQ at http://www.consensus.com/security/ssl-talk-faq.html

Why do I have to press "Accept" when I do my online banking?
The certificates you have to press accept on, are either registered with a warning in the database, or as I think is the problem in your case, not traceable to a certificate in the database. The certificates from RSA Data security, secure server and commercial.

Some technical info
There are two types of certificate chains a server can send you, an incomplete one, without the root certificates, or complete ones, with root certificates.

All certificate chain shall be traceable to a root certificate, which can then be verified with its own public key (other certificates are verified using the public key of the issuers certificate, next in the chain).

If the certificate chain sent by the server is complete and the root certificate is in the database, or if the issuer of the last certificate in the chain is registered in the database, all is well (provided warning/deny is not set).

If the root certificate, or the issuer of the last certificate, are not registered, a warning is issued, asking the user if he wants to accept the connection. If the chain is complete the user is given the option of installing the root certificate, otherwise the new beta will remember the server's certificate and accept it for that run of Opera, as opposed to this negotiated session as in your version.

If you encountered the accept on every image, or page from a server, those who run that site did not set it up properly, or they are not closing the connection properly, or, as is their right, they set it up to not use what is called session resumption. Session resumption reuses the shared secrets used to create the encryption keys negotiated in a previous connection, saving the time needed to exchange the necessary data, and reducing the computational load on the server.

Cautions
Because of the interactivity between Javascript and your computer, and the fact that Javascript is executed on your computer and not the host computer, it may come to undesired effects, and in the worst case to crashes.

Also, due to the nature of Javascript, it is not a safe 'language', it may have some side-effects.

More and more site use Javascript for enhanced navigation, as well as 'interactivity' of their pages. This is true for commercial as for private sites.

If you are uncomfortable with Javascript, disable it. You can do so via the menu of your browser.

Please find a very brief introduction on Javascript below.
Introduction
JavaScript is a new scripting language which is being developed by Netscape. With JavaScript you can easily create interactive web-pages. JavaScript is not Java! Many people believe that JavaScript is Java because of the similar names. This is not true though.

Examples
JavaScript code is embedded directly into the HTML-page. In order to see how this works we are going to look at an easy example:

<html>
<body>


This is a normal HTML document.


  <script language="JavaScript">
    document.write("This is JavaScript!")
  </script>


Back in HTML again.
</body>
</html>

At the first glance this looks like a normal HTML-file. The only new thing is the part:

  <script language="JavaScript">
    document.write("This is JavaScript!")
  </script>

This is JavaScript. In order to see this script working save this code as a normal HTML-file and load it into your JavaScript-enabled browser.
Here is the output generated by the file (if you are using a JavaScript browser you will see 3 lines of output):

This is a normal HTML document.

Back in HTML again.

Must be admitted that this script isn't very useful - this could have been written in pure HTML more easily. I only wanted to demonstrate the <script:gt; tag to you. Everything between the <script> and the </script;> tag is interpreted as JavaScript code. There you see the use of document.write() - one of the most important commands in JavaScript programming. document.write() is used in order to write something to the actual document (in this case this is the HTML-document). So our little JavaScript program writes the text This is JavaScript! to the HTML-document.

Non-JavaScript browsers

What does our page look like if the browser does not understand JavaScript? A non-JavaScript browser does not know the <script> tag. It ignores the tag and outputs all following code as if it was normal text. This means the user will see the JavaScript-code of our program inside the HTML-document. This was certainly not our intention. There is a way for hiding the source code from older browsers. HTML-comments <!-- --> are used. New source code looks like this:

<html>
<body>
<br>
This is a normal HTML document.
<br>
  <script language="JavaScript">
  <!-- hide from old browsers

    document.write("This is JavaScript!")

  // -->
  </script>
<br>
Back in HTML again.
</body>
</html>

The output in a non-JavaScript browser will then look like this:

This is a normal HTML document.
Back in HTML again.

Without the HTML-comment the output of the script in a non-JavaScript browser would be:

This is a normal HTML document.
document.write("This is JavaScript!")
Back in HTML again.