Question

Subject is Foundation of Information Technology

Discussion Questions

To log on to a website such as G-mail or Yahoo!, you need to specify your login name and password. The site does not allow you to access your e-mail messages if the information provided is incorrect. At times you do not remember the password for a particular site and have to repeatedly guess the right password and type it, wasting valuable time.

1. What are some of the ideas that you use for generating passwords for your own use?

What do you believe are good aspects about this method and what do you think are issues with this method?

Be careful not to share any of your own personal passwords.

2. The Internet is based on the client/server architecture, which is the most widely used system architecture.

Another system architecture called the peer-to-peer architecture can be used on a LAN.

Research peer-to-peer architecture and compare it with client/server architecture.

Share examples along with positives and negatives for the uses of either architecture and how it can affect outcomes or results from the infrastructure.

Please answer all questions if possible.

Answer 1

Answer 1

For generating the passwords one can take into account following things:

1. Use of one or more words that use in day to day life, except your name.
2. Mixing those words with upper and lower case letters.
3. Adding up some digits, like your lucky number or part of yours any vehicle’s number.
4. Adding some alphanumeric characters, excluding alphabets, like @, #, etc.
5. Length of the password is also necessary, according to me minimum 10 characters should be there in the password.

Positive points about this technique are:

1. Since most of the people tend to forget the password, so by using a word which is very familiar to us helps us in remembering it.
2. To make the password secure, make it case sensitive is very efficient.
3. Addition of digits and other characters helps us in breaking the long password into parts and it makes it easy to remember it as well as security is being enhanced.

Shortcoming of this technique is:

1. The word being used is familiar to us and so it may be familiar to people who are close to us, most of the time, like family members.
2. If size of password is very long, then it becomes hard to remember it, and we ultimately waste our time by thinking what was the right password.

Answer 2

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application. There are three models of unstructured P2P computer network architecture:

• Pure P2P
• Hybrid P2P
• Centralized P2P

The most common application is for content distribution. This includes software publication and distribution, content delivery networks, streaming media and peer casting for multicasting streams, which facilitates on-demand content delivery.

Peer-to-Peer	Client-Server
Resources are not removed from the network until they are no longer being requested.	Resources may be removed at any time.
Resources inserted under content hash key URIs will always have the same content.	Resources referenced by URIs may change content.
Signed subspace keys create unique, verifiable namespaces in the network.	Namespaces are assigned by a centralized body and rely on DNS resolution.
Storage and bandwidth are distributed and provided by the entire network.	Storage and bandwidth must be provided by the host.
Very difficult to determine who is inserting or requesting content. Thus good privacy.	Relatively easy to determine who is inserting or requesting content. Lesser privacy

Peer to Peer

Examples — Skype, GNUnet, Lime Wire, Kazaa etc. are some leading software using peer to peer architecture.

Advantages of peer to peer architecture are:

1. Easy and simple to set up only requiring a hub or a switch to connect all computers together.
2. You can access any file on the computer as-long as it is set to a shared folder.
3. If one computer fails to work all the other computers connected to it still continue to work.

Disadvantages of peer to peer architecture are:

1. Security is not good.
2. If the connections are not connected to the computers properly then there can be problems accessing certain files. Data loss may also happen due to improper connectivity.
3. It does not run efficient if you have many computers. Best performance is given with two to eight computers.

Client/Server

Examples — WhatsApp, Hike, Cloud services, google mailing services, etc.

Advantages of Client/Server

1. A client server can be scaled upto many services that can also be used by multiple users.
2. Security is more advanced than a peer-to-peer network.
3. All the data is stored onto the servers which generally have far greater security controls than most clients.
4. Server can control the access and resources better to guarantee that only those clients with the appropriate permissions may access and change data.

Disadvantages

1. More expensive than a peer-to-peer network.
2. When the server goes down or crashes all the computers connected to it become unavailable to use.
3. When you expend the server it starts to slow down due to the Bit rate per second.
4. When everyone tries to do the same thing it takes a little while for the server to do certain tasks.

Peer to Peer

1. It has low cost, thus rapidly increasing use, so highly supportive to business infrastructure.
2. Many of the leading brands are using this, like Skype — most of the telephonic interviews, companies’ call conferencing, meetings are commonly done using Skype. Thus peer to peer networking has a positive impact on the current infrastructure.

Client/Server

1. Cloud services like Google Drive, DropBox etc. are being enabled by such network only, thus depending on the requirement it too has positive impact on the infrastructure.