Internet 2 ―the next step

1. Read the headings and the text. Then match them to the paragraphs.

• Partners for change

• Trials and challenges

• A new project

• Future plans

• Speed, security, service

1.....................................................

Internet2 is a collaborative project between universities, government agencies and industry partners in the USA. It aims to create advanced Internet applications for academic research, distance learning and education. The I2 project was developed by the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID) in October 1996.

2.....................................................

There are three major challenges facing Internet2:

• to establish an advanced communications infrastructure for the US research and education community

• to develop new applications, such as digital libraries, telemedicine and virtual laboratories, allowing participants to send big packets of data and video at high speed. For Example, teachers and students can view and consult during real-time medical operations, scientists can collaborate in virtual meetings etc

• to transfer the new network capabilities to all levels of education and to the rest of the Internet.

3.....................................................

The I2 project is made up of three main categories of members: universities, non-profit organizations and corporate partners, i.e. sponsors and industries interested in investing in the project.

4.....................................................

Internet2 is working together with advanced networks such as the high-speed Backbone Network Service developed by MCI/WorldCom, and the Next Generation Internet, which is being built by US federal agencies. It runs on a new fibre-optic backbone called Abilene, which operates at speeds of up to 2.4 gigabits (1,024 megabits) per second. Internet2 uses Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) instead of the current IPv4. This new protocol uses the Quality of Service (Quos) technology, which allows users to send data with guaranteed delivery - on time and intact.

5.....................................................

Internet 2 and its fast backbones are not available to the general public yet, and its physical structure is not intended to replace the global Internet. But the plan for the future is to integrate the new technology with the public Internet and to make it available to everyone.

2. Fill in the gaps in these sentences using the passive forms of the following verbs.

provide  develop  use  call  send  deliver

1. The new national backbone ................................ Abilene.

2. The Internet2 project ................................ by UCAID in October 1996.

3. Funds and grants for research ................................ by non-profit organizations like the National Science Foundation.

4. One objective of Internet2 is to develop new technologies that can ................................ in the global Internet.

5. Huge packets of data and video ................................ at high speed.

6. In the future it’s likely that all media (TV, web content, email, etc.) ................................ over Internet2.

3. Refer to the text to find the term for these definitions.

In paragraph 1

• investigation undertaken to discover new facts

In paragraph 2

• technology that provides high-quality information to doctors over long distances

In paragraph 4:

• glass material that guides light impulses at high frequencies

• high-speed data highways that connect other networks

• 1,024 megabits

• specification that describes how computers will talk to each other on a network

Text 3

A NEW KIND OF WEB

While PCs were once the primary means of accessing the Internet, we're now seeing Internet-enabled devices such as pagers and cell phones that send and receive e-mail and access the Web. Soon, everything from your car to your refrigerator will be connected to the global network, communicating with each other wirelessly.

Electrolux, best known for its vacuum cleaners, has developed the ScreenFridge, an Internet icebox that manages your pantry, among other things. It e-mails a shopping list to your local supermarket and coordinates a convenient delivery time with your schedule. Say hello to a brave, new world.

Internet English Website

UNIT 2. SECURITY ISSUES

Text 1

COMPUTER CRIME

1. Read the article and make a plan of it.

Criminals in the past used to have guns, masks and escape cars. Now they have a computer, a telephone and a piece of computer equipment called a “modem”. They simply dial a telephone number to link their own computer with others, and then, using a password (a secret word or phrase), enter a company’s computer system (in a bank or a government office for example). Many companies stupidly used to have the word “password” as their password.

In 1990 two American teenagers broke into a computer system and added rude messages to some information and made other important data disappear. The damage cost over two million dollars to correct. A 12-year old boy in Detroit used his own computer to enter the computer system of a large company and caused financial chaos.

In Britain, computer crime costs companies about 400 million pounds a year. Often, the computer criminals do not want to make money; they just want to show the world how clever they are.

They also like to create computer viruses. They program a computer disk with a special fault in it. When a computer copies a disk, the fault enters the computer’s memory. That means it gets onto any other disk each time you put a new disk into your computer. Some viruses are just silly messages. For example, one puts the message “peace and love” on your computer screen while you are working. Other viruses use all the “memory” on the computer, and the computer is “sick” and unable to work. One hospital in Britain recently lost all of its records about sick patients because of a computer virus.

Clockwise

Text 2

COMPUTER VIRUSES

1. Match the words and definitions listed below.

   a detonator an infector to boot to trigger to erase pirated a shield to detect

   a protective device to remove all traces of something a device used to set off an explosion or other destructive process to discover or recognize that something is present to set a process in motion something which transmits a disease or virus stolen, obtained without the owner’s consent to load the operating system into memory

2. Read the article and answer the questions.

1. What is a computer virus?

2. How does a virus work?

3. How can a virus spread?

4. What are the sources of viruses?

5. How can you keep your computer virus-free?

A computer virus ― unwanted program that has entered your system without you knowing about it ― it has two parts, which I’ll call the infector and the detonator. They have two very different jobs. One of the features of a computer virus that separates it from other kinds of computer program is that it replicates itself, so that it can spread (via floppies transported from computer to computer, or networks) to other computers.

After the infector has copied the virus elsewhere, the detonator performs the virus’s main work. Generally, that work is either damaging data on your disks, altering what you see on you computer display, or doing something else that interferes with the normal use of computer.

Here’s an Example of a simple virus, the Lehigh virus. The infector portion of Lehigh replicates by attaching a copy of itself to COMMAND.COM (an important part of DOS), enlarging it by about 1000 bytes.

So let’s say you put a floppy containing COMMAND.COM into an infected PC at your office ― that is, a PC that is running the Lehigh program. The infector portion of Lehigh looks over DOS’s shoulder, monitoring all floppy accesses. The first time you tell the infected PC to access your floppy drive, the Lehigh infector notices the copy of COMMAND.COM on the floppy and adds a copy of itself to that file.

Then you take the floppy home to your PC and boot from the floppy. (In this case, you’ve got to boot from the floppy in order for the virus to take effect, since you may have many copies of COMMAND.COM on your hard and floppy disks, but DOS only uses the COMMAND.COM on the boot drive.)

Now the virus has silently been installed in your PC’s memory. Every time you access a hard disk subdirectory or a floppy disk containing COMMAND.COM will be used on a boot disk on some computer someday.

Meanwhile, Lehigh keeps a count of infections. Once it has infected four copies of COMMAND.COM, the detonator is trigged. The detonator in Lehigh is a simple one. It erases a vital part of your hard disk, making the files on that part of the disk no longer accessible. You grumble and set about rebuilding your work, unaware that Lehigh is waiting to infect other unsuspecting computers if you boot from one of those four infected floppies.

Don’t worry too much about viruses. You may never see one. There are just a few ways to become infected that you should be aware of. The sources seem to be service people, pirated games, putting floppies in publicly available PCs without write-protect tabs, commercial software (rarely), and software distributed over computer bulletin board systems (also quite rarely, despite media misinformation).

Many viruses have spread through pirated ― illegally copied or broken ― games. This is easy to avoid. Pay for your games, fair and square.

If you use a shared PC or a PC that has public access, such as one in a college PC lab or a library, be very careful about putting floppies into that PC’s drives without a write-protect tab. Carry a virus-checking program and scan the PC before letting it write data onto floppies.

Despite the low incidence of actual viruses, it can’t hurt to run a virus checking program now and then. There are actually two kinds of antivirus programs: virus shields, which detect viruses as they are infecting your PC, and virus scanners, which detect viruses once they’ve infected you. Viruses are something to worry about, but not a lot. A little common sense and the occasional virus scan will keep your virus-free. Remember these four points:

• Viruses can’t infect a data or text file.

• Before running an antivirus program, be sure to cold-boot from a write-protected floppy.

• Don’t boot from floppies except reliable DOS disks or your original production disks.

• Stay away from pirated software.

3. Decide whether the following statements are true (T) or false (F) in relation to the information in the text. If you feel a statement is false, change it to make it true.

1. Viruses cannot be spread through a computer network, only via floppies transported

from computer to computer.

2. The virus will spread as soon as you put the infected floppy in your PC.

3. The infector works by interfering in some way with the normal use of your computer.

4. The detonator in Lehigh works by altering what you see on your screen.

5. Most viruses spread through pirated games.

6. You should run an antivirus program every time you use your computer

7. There are not very many viruses in circulation

8. Virus shields are more effective than virus scanners.

4. Indicate the line reference where the following ideas are found in the text.

1. L. __ The Lehigh virus must infect four copies of COMMAND.COM before damage is done to data.

2. L. __ Always boot your computer from dependable DOS disks or your original disk.

3. L. __ The infector part of a virus must first copy itself somewhere before the detonator part damages the data on your disks.

4. L. __ Virus scanners discover viruses after the infection and virus shields discover viruses during the infection process.

5. These are answers to questions about the text. Write the questions.

1. Two. one that infects and one that does the damage.

2. By interfering in some way with the normal use of the computer.

3. After it has infected four copies of COMMAND.COM.

4. Every time you access a hard disk subdirectory or a floppy disk containing

COMMAND.COM.

5. Yes, by using your common sense and by occasionally scanning for them.

6. Look back in the text and find words or phrases with a similar meaning to:

1. reproduces

2. infect

3. changing

4. immediately

5. complain

7. Look back in the text and find words or phrases that have an opposite meaning to:

1. reducing

2. removed from

3. records

4. ignorant

5. frequently

Oxford English for Computing

Text 3

COMPUTER VIRUS CLASSIFICATION

Viruses can be divided into classes according to the following characteristics:

• environment

• Operating system (OS)

• different algorithms of work

• destructive capabilities

Not to forget: there exist also other "harmful" programs or so called "malware", such as Trojan horses. According to the ENVIRONMENT viruses can be divided into:

• file

• boot

• macro

• network

File viruses either infect executables in various ways (parasitic - the most common type of viruses), or create file doubles (companion viruses), or use filesystem specific features (link viruses).

Boot viruses either save themselves in disk boot sector, or to the Master Boot Record, or change the pointer to an active boot sector.

Macro viruses infect document files, electronic spreadsheets and databases of several popular software packages.

Network viruses use protocols and commands of computer network or e-mail to spread themselves.

There's is a large number of combinations ― for example file-boot viruses infecting both files and boot sectors on disks. As a rule these viruses have rather complicated algorithms of work, often use unusual methods of intrusion into the system, use Stealth and polymorphic technologies. Another Example of the combo ― network macro-virus, not only infecting the documents which are being edited, but also sending copies of itself by email.

The target OPERATING SYSTEM (namely the OS specific objects prone to attack) is the second level of division of viruses into classes. Each file or network virus infects files of one particular or several OS - DOS, Windows 3.xx, Windows95/NT, OS/2 etc. Macro viruses infect the Word, Excel, Office97 format files. Boot viruses are also format oriented, each attacking one particular format of system data in boot sectors of disks.

Among OPERATING ALGORITHMS the following features stand out:

• TSR capability

• the use of Stealth algorithms

• self encryption and polymorphic capability

• the use of non-standard techniques

A TSR virus while infecting a computer leaves its resident part in RAM, which then intercepts system calls to target objects and incorporates into them. Resident viruses reside in memory and are active until power down or until operating system reboot. Nonresident viruses do not infect computer memory and are active for an limited time only. Some viruses leave small resident parts in RAM which do not spread the virus. such viruses are considered nonresident.

Macro viruses can also be considered residents, because they reside in computer memory during all the run time of the infected editor program. Here the editor plays the role of operating system, and "system reboot" means the editor program termination.

In multitasking operating systems the lifetime of a resident DOS virus can also be limited by the moment of closing of the infected DOS window, the activity of boot viruses in some operating systems is limited to the moment of installation of OS disk drivers.

The use of Stealth algorithms allows viruses to completely or partially cover their traces inside the OS. The most common stealth algorithm is interception of OS read/write calls to infected objects. In such cases stealth viruses either temporarily cure them, or "substitute" themselves with uninfected pieces of information. In case of macro viruses the most popular technique is to disable the ViewMacro menu(s). "Frodo" is one of the first file Stealth viruses; "Brain" is the first boot Stealth virus.

SELF-ENCRYPTING and POLYMORPHIC capabilities are used by virtually all kinds of viruses to make virus detection procedure as complicated as possible. Polymorphic viruses are really hard to detect; they have no signatures, that is none of their code fragments remain unchanged. In most cases two samples of the polymorphic virus will not have a single match when doing a byte compare. This may be achieved by encrypting of the main body of the virus and making modifications to the decryption routine.

A variety of NONSTANDARD TECHNIQUES are being used in viruses to hide themselves as deep as possible in the OS kernel (as in "3APA3A"), to protect its residents copy from being detected ("TPVO", "Trout2"), make curing more difficult (for Example placing its copy into Flash BIOS) etc..

On their DESTRUCTIVE CAPABILITIES viruses can be divided as follows:

• harmless, that is having no effect on computing (except for some lowering of free disk space as a result of propagation);

• not dangerous, limiting their effect to lowering of free disk space and a few graphical, sound or other FX);

• dangerous viruses, which may seriously disrupt the computer's work;

• very dangerous, the operating algorithms of which intentionally contain routines which may lead to losing data, data destruction, erasure of vital information in system areas, and even according to one of the unconfirmed computer legends inflict damage to the moving mechanical parts by causing resonance in some kinds of HDDs.

But even if no destructive branches can be found in the algorithm of a virus, one cannot be perfectly sure that this virus is harmless, because its infiltration into a computer may prove to be unpredictable and sometimes have catastrophic consequences. This is due to the fact that any virus like any program may contain errors, which may damage both files and disk sectors (for Example, seemingly harmless "DenZuk" virus works rather correctly with 360K diskettes but can destroy information on high- capacity diskettes. There still are viruses which determine whether the file is COM or EXE not according to the internal structure of the file but according to its extension. And of course if the format of the file does not match the file extension, this file becomes unusable after it has been infected. System lock-ups are also possible when a resident virus infects a newer version of DOS, or while running under Windows, or also with other powerful software systems. And so on.