B211 Assignment 1

Assignment 1

Tasks

Short Answers (marks: 15%)

Answer the following questions:

(2 marks)
During a heavy thunderstorm, the microwave dish above Perth city's Bankwest Tower handling data traffic between Murdoch University and the rest of PARNet (and therefore the rest of the world) is damaged. The technicians estimates that it would take approximately 2 days to repair.

You and your fellow students on the University campus have 24 hours to complete your B211 assignment 1. You need an Internet connection to do so. One of you suggested that you all ask the School of IT to pay for a traffic re-route through the University of Western Australia's Nedlands campus. Is that a feasible option?

(2 marks)
An institution has been allocated the IP (version 4) class B address of 128.128.xxx.xxx. It has registered to use the domain name dwarves.com.au. It now wants to create different local domain names for different web-sites, like:

sleepy.dwarves.com.au grumpy.dwarves.com.au tattoo.fantasyisland.dwarves.com.au
How many such local domains names can the institution create?

(2 marks)
You are implementing an HTML page which contains a form to allow users to send queries to you in an email. You would like to protect this facility by only allowing people with the correct usernames and passwords to use it. Is JavaScript a good option to implement this? If yes, show the code to do so. If no, why not?

(2 marks)
You are given a URL http://dijkstra.it.murdoch.edu.au/~hiew/evil.txt. You assume (quite legitimately) that it is a text file since it has a .txt extension. But when you access the URL, your web browser displays non-text gibberish. Someone informs you that the file is really an MS-WORD document. How do you verify that?

(7 marks)
One of your fellow students is very sensitive about her privacy, but loves to surf the web. She only has access to the web through her student account, so she uses one of the campus labs regularly to do her web surfing. She believes that if she does her web surfing after-hours, when the lab is empty, no one will ever know what she has been up to. Based on what you know about the web servers and web browsers, explain why her belief is wrong.

How the Internet Works (marks: 25%)

Using materials learnt in Topics 1 & 2 of this unit, give an overall picture of how technically the Internet and the World Wide Web works. Your description should include the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web.

You are only required to describe the concepts given materials in topics 1 & 2 of this unit. You may use outside resources to enhance or supplement the concepts, but you do not need to find completely new facts or concepts.

Page limit: 3 pages.

Web Research Proficiency (marks: 50%)

Consider yourself as a research consultant, and you have been have hired to supply as list of important web-sites about the following topics:

AARNet

Statistics on the number of people online.

One of:

What is the U.S. hip-hop rapper Marshall Mathers currently up to?

What are Natasha Stott Despoja and the Australian Democrats latest activities and policies on Internet gambling and Internet censorship?

What are the latest developments in the human cloning debate?

Write a report which includes only the following:

A summary description of what kind of information is available about the topic, and who is supplying them.

State the official/authoritative site(s) which most sites on the topic refer and link to, if any.

List some of the attention-worthy sites, and a few statements on why they are worth noting.

Page limit: 3 pages for each topic.

Learning to Learn (marks: 10%)

Read the Learning to Learn document, and complete the information in the two forms:

Plans. (2%)

Evaluation of plans and methods. (8%)

Deadlines

A copy of your plans (part IV a) must be submitted directly to your tutor before or during week 4. Internal students must do so during your lab sessions.

The whole assignment (including part IV a) is due at 12noon Monday 3rd September 2001 (week 6).

Submission Requirements

The following must be submitted to your tutor before or during week 4:

A copy of your plans (part IV a) - keep the original for the final submission.

The following must be submitted by 12noon Monday 3rd Sept 2001 (week 6). Internal students should submit to the assignment boxes. External students submit to External Studies Office as normal.

Printed reports and answers to parts I, II and III.

Completed Learning to Learn forms (part IV a and b).

Printed and completed cover sheet. Internal students must use the internal cover sheet. External students must use the copies sent to you by the External Studies Office.

Some guides on working on this assignment:

You may choose to fill the forms for part IV using pen and paper. Presentation is not important in part IV, only the content, so do not waste time formatting the content in a word processor. The purpose of the having you fill the forms is to assess how well you understand the processes you use to complete this assignment, so that you can learn from them and apply them for future tasks.

Part IV (a) is only a plan. You only need to think about how you will approach doing the tasks, without starting any work. Just look at what resources is available to you, think about what you should do, and complete the form. It may turn out you make major adjustments in your methods as you are doing your work - that's OK. The adjustments can all be described in part IV (b).

H.L. Hiew
Unit Coordinator