Online data capturing Hardly a firm today can afford not to engage in electronic commerce if it does not want to be swept out of business by competitors. "Information is everything" has become something like the Lord's prayer of the New Economy. But how do you get information about your customer online? Who are the people who visit a website, where do they come from, what are they looking for? How much money do they have, what might they want to buy? These are key questions for a company doing electronic business. Obviously not all of this information can be obtained by monitoring the online behaviour of web users, but there are always little gimmicks that, when combined with common tracking technologies, can help to get more detailed information about a potential customer. These are usually online registration forms, either required for entry to a site, or competitions, sometimes a combination of the two. Obviously, if you want to win that weekend trip to New York, you want to provide your contact details. The most common way of obtaining information about a user online is a cookie. However, a cookie by itself is not sufficient to identify a user personally. It merely identifies the computer to the server by providing its IP number. Only combined with other data extraction techniques, such as online registration, can a user be identified personally ("Register now to get the full benefit of xy.com. It's free!") But cookies record enough information to fine-tune advertising strategies according to a user's preferences and interests, e.g. by displaying certain commercial banners rather than others. For example, if a user is found to respond to a banner of a particular kind, he / she may find two of them at the next visit. Customizing the offers on a website to the particular user is part of one-to-one marketing, a type of direct marketing. But one-to-one marketing can go further than this. It can also offer different prices to different users. This was done by Amazon.com in September 2000, when fist-time visitors were offered cheaper prices than regular customers. One-to-one marketing can create very different realities that undermine traditional concepts of demand and supply. The ideal is a "frictionless market", where the differential between demand and supply is progressively eliminated. If a market is considered a structure within which demand / supply differentials are negotiated, this amounts to the abolition of the established notion of the nature of a market. Demand and supply converge, desire and it fulfilment coincide. In the end, there is profit without labour. However, such a structure is a hermetic structure of unfreedom. It can only function when payment is substituted by credit, and the exploitation of work power by the exploitation of data. In fact, in modern economies there is great pressure to increase spending on credit. Using credit cards and taking up loans generates a lot of data around a person's economic behaviour, while at the same restricting the scope of social activity and increasing dependence. On the global level, the consequences of credit spirals can be observed in many of the developing countries that have had to abandon most of their political autonomy. As the data body economy advances, this is also the fate of people in western societies when they are structurally driven into credit spending. It shows that data bodies are not politically neutral. The interrelation between data, profit and unfreedom is frequently overlooked by citizens and customers. Any company in a modern economy will apply data collecting strategies for profit, with dependence and unfreedom as a "secondary effect". The hunger for data has made IT companies eager to profit from e-business rather resourceful. "Getting to know the customer" - this is a catchphrase that is heard frequently, and which suggests that there are no limits to what a company may want to about a customer. In large online shops, such as amazon.com, where customer's identity is accurately established by the practice of paying with credit cards, an all business happens online, making it easy for the company to accurately profile the customers. But there are more advanced and effective ways of identification. The German company Sevenval has developed a new way of customer tracking which works with "virtual domains". Every visitor of a website is assigned an 33-digit identification number which the browser understands as part of the www address, which will then read something like http://XCF49BEB7E97C00A328BF562BAAC75FB2.sevenval.com. Therefore, this tracking method, which is advertised by Sevenval as a revolutionary method capable of tracking the exact and complete path of a user on a website, can not be simple switched off. In addition, the method makes it possible for the identity of a user can travel with him when he / she visits one of the other companies linked to the site in question. As in the case of cookies, this tracking method by itself is not sufficient to identify a user personally. Such an identification only occurs once a customer pays with a credit card, or decides to participate in a draw, or voluntarily completes a registration form. Bu there are much less friendly ways of extracting data from a user and feeding the data body. Less friendly means: these methods monitor users in situations where the latter are likely not to want to be monitored. Monitoring therefore takes place in a concealed manner. One of these monitoring methods are so-called web bugs. These are tiny graphics, not more than 1 x 1 pixel in size, and therefore invisible on a screen, capable of monitoring an unsuspecting user's e-mails or movements on a website. Leading corporations such as Barnes and Noble, eToys, Cooking.com, and Microsoft have all used web bugs in advertising campaigns. Richard Smith has compiled a web bugs FAQ site that contains detailed information and examples of web bugs in use. Bugs monitoring users have also been packaged in seemingly harmless toys made available on the Internet. For example, Comet Systems offers cursor images which have been shown to collect user data and send them back to the company's server. These little images replace the customary white arrow of a mouse with a little image of a baseball, a cat, an UFO, etc. large enough to carry a bug collecting user information. The technology is offered as a marketing tool to companies looking for a "fun, new way to interact with their audience". The cursor image technology relies on what is called a GUID (global unique identifier). This is an identification number which is assigned to a customer at the time of registration, or when downloading a product. Many among the online community were alarmed when in 1999 it was discovered that Microsoft assigned GUIDS without their customer's knowledge. Following protests, the company was forced to change the registration procedure, assuring that under no circumstances would these identification numbers be used for tracking or marketing. However, in the meantime, another possible infringement on user anonymity by Microsoft was discovered, when it as found out that MS Office documents, such as Word, Excel or Powerpoint, contain a bug that is capable of tracking the documents as they are sent through the net. The bug sends information about the user who opens the document back to the originating server. A document that contains the bug can be tracked across the globe, through thousands of stopovers. In detailed description of the bug and how it works can be found at the Privacy Foundation's website. Also, there is an example of such a bug at the Privacy Center of the University of Denver. Of course there are many other ways of collecting users' data and creating appropriating data bodies which can then be used for economic purposes. Indeed, as Bill Gates commented, "information is the lifeblood of business". The electronic information networks are becoming the new frontier of capitalism.

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Content as Transport Medium for Values and Ideologies With the dissemination of their content commercial media are among other things also able to transport values and ideologies. Usually their programming reflects society's dominant social, political, ethical, cultural and economical values. A critical view of the prevalent ideologies often is sacrificed so as not to offend the existing political elites and corporate powers, but rather satisfy shareholders and advertisers. With most of the worlds content produced by a few commercial media conglomerates, with the overwhelming majority of companies (in terms of revenue generation) concentrated in Europe, the U.S., Japan and Australia there is also a strong flow of content from the 'North-West' to the 'South-East'. Popular culture developed in the world's dominant commercial centers and Western values and ideologies are so disseminated into the most distant corners of the earth with far less coming back.

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Copyright Management and Control Systems: Post-Infringement Post-infringement technologies allow the owners of copyrighted works to identify infringements and thus enhance enforcement of intellectual property rights and encompass systems such as: Steganography Applied to electronic files, steganography refers to the process of hiding information in files that can not be easily detected by users. Steganography can be used by intellectual property owners in a variety of ways. One is to insert into the file a "digital watermark" which can be used to prove that an infringing file was the creation of the copyright holder and not the pirate. Other possibilities are to encode a unique serial number into each authorized copy or file, enabling the owner to trace infringing copies to a particular source, or to store copyright management information. Agents Agents are programs that can implement specified commands automatically. Copyright owners can use agents to search the public spaces of the Internet to find infringing copies. Although the technology is not yet very well developed full-text search engines allow similar uses. Copyright Litigation While not every infringement will be the subject of litigation, the threat of litigation helps keep large pirate operations in check. It helps copyright owners obtain relief for specific acts of infringement and publicly warns others of the dangers of infringement.

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In Search of Reliable Internet Measurement Data Newspapers and magazines frequently report growth rates of Internet usage, number of users, hosts, and domains that seem to be beyond all expectations. Growth rates are expected to accelerate exponentially. However, Internet measurement data are anything thant reliable and often quite fantastic constructs, that are nevertheless jumped upon by many media and decision makers because the technical difficulties in measuring Internet growth or usage are make reliable measurement techniques impossible. Equally, predictions that the Internet is about to collapse lack any foundation whatsoever. The researchers at the Internet Performance Measurement and Analysis Project (IPMA) compiled a list of news items about Internet performance and statistics and a few responses to them by engineers. Size and Growth In fact, "today's Internet industry lacks any ability to evaluate trends, identity performance problems beyond the boundary of a single ISP (Internet service provider, M. S.), or prepare systematically for the growing expectations of its users. Historic or current data about traffic on the Internet infrastructure, maps depicting ... there is plenty of measurement occurring, albeit of questionable quality", says K. C. Claffy in his paper Internet measurement and data analysis: topology, workload, performance and routing statistics (http://www.caida.org/Papers/Nae/, Dec 6, 1999). Claffy is not an average researcher; he founded the well-known Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA). So his statement is a slap in the face of all market researchers stating otherwise. In a certain sense this is ridiculous, because since the inception of the ARPANet, the offspring of the Internet, network measurement was an important task. The very first ARPANet site was established at the University of California, Los Angeles, and intended to be the measurement site. There, Leonard Kleinrock further on worked on the development of measurement techniques used to monitor the performance of the ARPANet (cf. Michael and Ronda Hauben, Netizens: On the History and Impact of the Net). And in October 1991, in the name of the Internet Activities Board Vinton Cerf proposed guidelines for researchers considering measurement experiments on the Internet stated that the measurement of the Internet. This was due to two reasons. First, measurement would be critical for future development, evolution and deployment planning. Second, Internet-wide activities have the potential to interfere with normal operation and must be planned with care and made widely known beforehand. So what are the reasons for this inability to evaluate trends, identity performance problems beyond the boundary of a single ISP? First, in early 1995, almost simultaneously with the worldwide introduction of the World Wide Web, the transition of the stewardship role of the National Science Foundation over the Internet into a competitive industry (bluntly spoken: its privatization) left no framework for adequate tracking and monitoring of the Internet. The early ISPs were not very interested in gathering and analyzing network performance data, they were struggling to meet demands of their rapidly increasing customers. Secondly, we are just beginning to develop reliable tools for quality measurement and analysis of bandwidth or performance. CAIDA aims at developing such tools. "There are many estimates of the size and growth rate of the Internet that are either implausible, or inconsistent, or even clearly wrong", K. G. Coffman and Andrew, both members of different departments of AT & T Labs-Research, state something similar in their paper The Size and Growth Rate of the Internet, published in First Monday. There are some sources containing seemingly contradictory information on the size and growth rate of the Internet, but "there is no comprehensive source for information". They take a well-informed and refreshing look at efforts undertaken for measuring the Internet and dismantle several misunderstandings leading to incorrect measurements and estimations. Some measurements have such large error margins that you might better call them estimations, to say the least. This is partly due to the fact that data are not disclosed by every carrier and only fragmentarily available. What is measured and what methods are used? Many studies are devoted to the number of users; others look at the number of computers connected to the Internet or count IP addresses. Coffman and Odlyzko focus on the sizes of networks and the traffic they carry to answer questions about the size and the growth of the Internet. You get the clue of their focus when you bear in mind that the Internet is just one of many networks of networks; it is only a part of the universe of computer networks. Additionally, the Internet has public (unrestricted) and private (restricted) areas. Most studies consider only the public Internet, Coffman and Odlyzko consider the long-distance private line networks too: the corporate networks, the Intranets, because they are convinced (that means their assertion is put forward, but not accompanied by empirical data) that "the evolution of the Internet in the next few years is likely to be determined by those private networks, especially by the rate at which they are replaced by VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) running over the public Internet. Thus it is important to understand how large they are and how they behave." Coffman and Odlyzko check other estimates by considering the traffic generated by residential users accessing the Internet with a modem, traffic through public peering points (statistics for them are available through CAIDA and the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research), and calculating the bandwidth capacity for each of the major US providers of backbone services. They compare the public Internet to private line networks and offer interesting findings. The public Internet is currently far smaller, in both capacity and traffic, than the switched voice network (with an effective bandwidth of 75 Gbps at December 1997), but the private line networks are considerably larger in aggregate capacity than the Internet: about as large as the voice network in the U. S. (with an effective bandwidth of about 330 Gbps at December 1997), they carry less traffic. On the other hand, the growth rate of traffic on the public Internet, while lower than is often cited, is still about 100% per year, much higher than for traffic on other networks. Hence, if present growth trends continue, data traffic in the U. S. will overtake voice traffic around the year 2002 and will be dominated by the Internet. In the future, growth in Internet traffic will predominantly derive from people staying longer and from multimedia applications, because they consume more bandwidth, both are the reason for unanticipated amounts of data traffic. Hosts The Internet Software Consortium's Internet Domain Survey is one of the most known efforts to count the number of hosts on the Internet. Happily the ISC informs us extensively about the methods used for measurements, a policy quite rare on the Web. For the most recent survey the number of IP addresses that have been assigned a name were counted. At first sight it looks simple to get the accurate number of hosts, but practically an assigned IP address does not automatically correspond an existing host. In order to find out, you have to send a kind of message to the host in question and wait for a reply. You do this with the PING utility. (For further explanations look here: Art. PING, in: Connected: An Internet Encyclopaedia) But to do this for every registered IP address is an arduous task, so ISC just pings a 1% sample of all hosts found and make a projection to all pingable hosts. That is ISC's new method; its old method, still used by RIPE, has been to count the number of domain names that had IP addresses assigned to them, a method that proved to be not very useful because a significant number of hosts restricts download access to their domain data. Despite the small sample, this method has at least one flaw: ISC's researchers just take network numbers into account that have been entered into the tables of the IN-ADDR.ARPA domain, and it is possible that not all providers know of these tables. A similar method is used for Telcordia's Netsizer. Internet Weather Like daily weather, traffic on the Internet, the conditions for data flows, are monitored too, hence called Internet weather. One of the most famous Internet weather report is from The Matrix, Inc. Another one is the Internet Traffic Report displaying traffic in values between 0 and 100 (high values indicate fast and reliable connections). For weather monitoring response ratings from servers all over the world are used. The method used is to "ping" servers (as for host counts, e. g.) and to compare response times to past ones and to response times of servers in the same reach. Hits, Page Views, Visits, and Users Let us take a look at how these hot lists of most visited Web sites may be compiled. I say, may be, because the methods used for data retrieval are mostly not fully disclosed. For some years it was seemingly common sense to report requested files from a Web site, so called "hits". A method not very useful, because a document can consist of several files: graphics, text, etc. Just compile a document from some text and some twenty flashy graphical files, put it on the Web and you get twenty-one hits per visit; the more graphics you add, the more hits and traffic (not automatically to your Web site) you generate. In the meantime page views, also called page impressions are preferred, which are said to avoid these flaws. But even page views are not reliable. Users might share computers and corresponding IP addresses and host names with others, she/he might access not the site, but a cached copy from the Web browser or from the ISP's proxy server. So the server might receive just one page request although several users viewed a document. Especially the editors of some electronic journals (e-journals) rely on page views as a kind of ratings or circulation measure, Rick Marin reports in the New York Times. Click-through rates - a quantitative measure - are used as a substitute for something of intrinsically qualitative nature: the importance of a column to its readers, e. g. They may read a journal just for a special column and not mind about the journal's other contents. Deleting this column because of not receiving enough visits may cause these readers to turn their backs on their journal. More advanced, but just slightly better at best, is counting visits, the access of several pages of a Web site during one session. The problems already mentioned apply here too. To avoid them, newspapers, e.g., establish registration services, which require password authentication and therefore prove to be a kind of access obstacle. But there is a different reason for these services. For content providers users are virtual users, not unique persons, because, as already mentioned, computers and IP addresses can be shared and the Internet is a client-server system; in a certain sense, in fact computers communicate with each other. Therefore many content providers are eager to get to know more about users accessing their sites. On-line registration forms or WWW user surveys are obvious methods of collecting additional data, sure. But you cannot be sure that information given by users is reliable, you can just rely on the fact that somebody visited your Web site. Despite these obstacles, companies increasingly use data capturing. As with registration services cookies come here into play. For If you like to play around with Internet statistics instead, you can use Robert Orenstein's Web Statistics Generator to make irresponsible predictions or visit the Internet Index, an occasional collection of seemingly statistical facts about the Internet. Measuring the Density of IP Addresses Measuring the Density of IP Addresses or domain names makes the geography of the Internet visible. So where on earth is the most density of IP addresses or domain names? There is no global study about the Internet's geographical patterns available yet, but some regional studies can be found. The Urban Research Initiative and Martin Dodge and Narushige Shiode from the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at the University College London have mapped the Internet address space of New York, Los Angeles and the United Kingdom (http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/casa/martin/internetspace/paper/telecom.html and http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/casa/martin/internetspace/paper/gisruk98.html). Dodge and Shiode used data on the ownership of IP addresses from RIPE, Europe's most important registry for Internet numbers.

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The Piracy "Industry" Until recent years, the problem of piracy (the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of copyrighted works (for commercial purposes)) was largely confined to the copying and physical distribution of tapes, disks and CDs. Yet the emergence and increased use of global data networks and the WWW has added a new dimension to the piracy of intellectual property by permitting still easier copying, electronic sales and transmissions of illegally reproduced copyrighted works on a grand scale. This new development, often referred to as Internet piracy, broadly relates to the use of global data networks to 1) transmit and download digitized copies of pirated works, 2) advertise and market pirated intellectual property that is delivered on physical media through the mails or other traditional means, and 3) offer and transmit codes or other technologies which can be used to circumvent copy-protection security measures. Lately the International Intellectual Property Alliance has published a new report on the estimated trade losses due to piracy. (The IIPA assumes that their report actually underestimates the loss of income due to the unlawful copying and distribution of copyrighted works. Yet it should be taken into consideration that the IIPA is the representative of the U.S. core copyright industries (business software, films, videos, music, sound recordings, books and journals, and interactive entertainment software).) Table: IIPA 1998 - 1999 Estimated Trade Loss due to Copyright Piracy (in millions of US$) Motion Pictures Records & Music Business Applications Entertainment Software Books 1999 1998 1999 1998 1999 1998 1999 1998 1999 1998 Total Losses 1323 1421 1684 1613 3211 3437 3020 2952 673 619 Total Losses (core copyright industries) 1999 1998 9910.0 10041.5

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Acessing the Internet The Net connections can be based on wire-line and wireless access technolgies. Wire-line access Wire-less access copper wires Satellites coaxial cables mobile terrestrial antennas electric power lines fixed terrestrial antennas fiber-optic cables Usually several kinds of network connections are employed at once. Generally speaking, when an E-mail message is sent it travels from the user's computer via copper wires or coaxial cables ISDN lines, etc., to an Internet Service Provider, from there, via fibre-optic cables, to the nearest Internet exchange, and on into a backbone network, tunneling across the continent und diving through submarine fibre-optic cables across the Atlantic to another Internet exchange, from there, via another backbone network and across another regional network to the Internet Service Provider of the supposed message recipient, from there via cables and wires of different bandwidth arriving at its destination, a workstation permanently connected to the Internet. Finally a sound or flashing icon informs your virtual neighbor that a new message has arrived. Satellite communication Although facing competition from fiber-optic cables as cost-effective solutions for broadband data transmission services, the space industry is gaining increasing importance in global communications. As computing, telephony, and audiovisual technologies converge, new wireless technologies are rapidly deployed occupying an increasing market share and accelerating the construction of high-speed networks. Privatization of satellite communication Until recently transnational satellite communication was provided exclusively by intergovernmental organizations as Intelsat, Intersputnik and Inmarsat. Scheduled privatization of intergovernmental satellite consortia: Satellite consortia Year of foundation Members Scheduled date for privatization Intelsat 1964 200 nations under the leadership of the USA 2001 Intersputnik 1971 23 nations under the leadership of Russia ? Inmarsat 1979 158 nations (all members of the International Maritime Organization) privatized since 1999 Eutelsat 1985 Nearly 50 European nations 2001 When Intelsat began to accumulate losses because of management failures and the increasing market share of fiber-optic cables, this organizational scheme came under attack. Lead by the USA, the Western industrialized countries successfully pressed for the privatization of all satellite consortia they are members of and for competition by private carriers. As of February 2000, there are 2680 satellites in service. Within the next four years a few hundred will be added by the new private satellite systems. Most of these systems will be so-called Low Earth Orbit satellite systems, which are capable of providing global mobile data services on a high-speed level at low cost. Because of such technological improvements and increasing competition, experts expect satellite-based broadband communication to be as common, cheap, and ubiquitous as satellite TV today within the next five or ten years. Major satellite communication projects Project name Main investors Expected cost Number of satellites Date of service start-up Astrolink Lockheed Martin, TRW, Telespazio, Liberty Media Group US$ 3.6 billion 9 2003 Globalstar 13 investors including Loral Space & Communications, Qualcomm, Hyundai, Alcatel, France Telecom, China Telecom, Daimler Benz and Vodafone/Airtouch US$ 3.26 billion 48 1998 ICO 57 investors including British Telecom, Deutsche Telecom, Inmarsat, TRW and Telefonica US$ 4.5 billion 10 2001 Skybridge 9 investors including Alcatel Space, Loral Space & Communications, Toshiba, Mitsubishi and Sharp US$ 6.7 billion 80 2002 Teledesic Bill Gates, Craig McCaw, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdul Aziz Alsaud, Abu Dhabi Investment Company US$ 9 billion 288 2004 Source: Analysys Satellite Communications Database

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Binary number system In mathematics, the term binary number system refers to a positional numeral system employing 2 as the base and requiring only two different symbols, 0 and 1. The importance of the binary system to information theory and computer technology derives mainly from the compact and reliable manner in which data can be represented in electromechanical devices with two states--such as "on-off," "open-closed," or "go-no go."

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Mass production The term mass production refers to the application of the principles of specialization, division of labor, and standardization of parts to the manufacture of goods. The use of modern methods of mass production has brought such improvements in the cost, quality, quantity, and variety of goods available that the largest global population in history is now sustained at the highest general standard of living. A moving conveyor belt installed in a Dearborn, Michigan, automobile plant in 1913 cut the time required to produce flywheel magnetos from 18 minutes to 5 and was the first instance of the use of modern integrated mass production techniques.

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Punch card, 1801 Invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard, an engineer and architect in Lyon, France, the punch cards laid the ground for automatic information processing. For the first time information was stored in binary format on perforated cardboard cards. In 1890 Hermann Hollerith used Joseph-Marie Jacquard's punch card technology for processing statistical data retrieved from the US census in 1890, thus speeding up data analysis from eight to three years. His application of Jacquard's invention was also used for programming computers and data processing until electronic data processing was introduced in the 1960's. - As with writing and calculating, administrative purposes account for the beginning of modern automatic data processing. Paper tapes are a medium similar to Jacquard's punch cards. In 1857 Sir Charles Wheatstone applied them as a medium for the preparation, storage, and transmission of data for the first time. By their means, telegraph messages could be prepared off-line, sent ten times quicker (up to 400 words per minute), and stored. Later similar paper tapes were used for programming computers.

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Assembly line An assembly line is an industrial arrangement of machines, equipment, and workers for continuous flow of workpieces in mass production operations. An assembly line is designed by determining the sequences of operations for manufacture of each product component as well as the final product. Each movement of material is made as simple and short as possible with no cross flow or backtracking. Work assignments, numbers of machines, and production rates are programmed so that all operations performed along the line are compatible.

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Neural network A bottom-up artificial intelligence approach, a neural network is a network of many very simple processors ("units" or "neurons"), each possibly having a (small amount of) local memory. The units are connected by unidirectional communication channels ("connections"), which carry numeric data. The units operate only on their local data and on the inputs they receive via the connections. A neural network is a processing device, either an algorithm, or actual hardware, whose design was inspired by the design and functioning of animal brains and components thereof. Most neural networks have some sort of "training" rule whereby the weights of connections are adjusted on the basis of presented patterns. In other words, neural networks "learn" from examples and exhibit some structural capability for generalization.

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