Week 5 Midterm: What is the origin of the word “Spam”?

Spam is a word referred to on the internet as a mass message sent out to multiple recipients from a source that is trying to get you to buy their goods, scam you, or collect email addresses. There are many speculations as to who came up with the word "spam" and what it means exactly. after researching on the internet I have found a few interesting claims about the origin of the word "spam". Some say it is an acronym meaning "Shit Posing As Mail or Stupid Boring Annoying Messages" (ezinearticles.com). Others say it has to do with downloading images. Often times people would try to download a picture of a naked woman and when they viewed the image it turned out to be only a picture of a can of spam. In our book, it explains a different story about the word's origin."The term spam comes from a Monty Python skit in which every item on a menu contained Spam Luncheon meat. It was originally used to refer to unsolicited postings for commercial products or services on Usenet, especially when they were cross-posted to several newsgroups." (How The Internet Works, pg. 103). "Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, lovely spam! Wonderful spam!" (Monty Python's Flying Circus). In class we discussed the true origin of the word, which doesn't actually have anything to do with Monty Python. The actual origin derived from a group of web geeks. When one would receive a mass email from someone trying to sell them something or obtain their email address, they would call it spam. If you picture someone throwing a handful of spam into a fan, it would send chunks of it flying everywhere. This is what these early web geeks used to describe a mass email being sent out to numerous people at once.

Week 5 Midterm: What is IPv6?

The internet works by sending information from its source to its destination. When you send information from one computer to another computer, the data gets broken up into small pieces or packets. These packets are sent individually through a series of routers. Once each packet finally reaches the receiving computer, it is pieced back together to its original form. "That's the job of the two most important communications protocols on the Internet-The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the internet Protocol (IP). They are frequently referred to as TCP/IP. TCP breaksdown and reassembles the packets, whereas IP is responsible for ensuring the packets are sent to the right destination." (How The Internet Works, Pg. 19). IPv4 is the internet protocol used today. It was designed by the Internet Engineering Task Force in 1981 and has been in use ever since. The main problem with IPv4 is it's lack of memory. It uses a 32-bit address to send packets over the web. with this limited amount of data memory, the internet moves slowly and often times undergoes an effect call address exhaustion. IPv6 plans to fix this problem by upgrading the 32-bit address memory to 128-bit. This will allow a lot more packets to be sent and received all at once. IPv6 has also been changed to make routing more efficient. "IPv6 routers do not perform fragmentation. IPv6 hosts are required to either perform PMTU discovery, perform end-to-end fragmentation, or to send packets no larger than the IPv6 default minimum MTU size of 1280 octets." (wikipedia).The packet header in IPv6 is also much more simplified than that of IPv4. It uses less options in which to send packet data. Therefore, even though IPv6 addresses are four times as large as IPv4 addresses, they are only twice the size as IPv4 headers.