Monday, May 6, 2002		Bits & Bytes

Snake oil: Refers to a cryptography or security product that makes exaggerated claims of what the product is capable of, giving the user a false sense of security. The term snake oil, which is credited to Matt Curtin for using in reference to computer security products, comes from the 19th-century American practice of selling cure-all elixirs in travelling medicine shows. Snake oil salesmen would falsely claim that the potions would cure any ailments. The term has been appropriated to mean security and encryption products that make impossible claims, such as unbreakable codes.

Internesia: Formed from the combination of Internet and amnesia, Internesia is the inability to remember which Website or other Internet-related location (such as e-mail or newsgroups) specific information came from. The more one uses the Internet, the more information one is exposed to.

HCI: Short for human-computer interaction, a discipline concerned with the study, design, construction and implementation of human-centric interactive computer systems. A user interface, such as a GUI, is how a human interacts with a computer, and HCI goes beyond designing screens and menus that are easier to use and studies the reasoning behind building specific functionality into computers and the long-term effects that systems will have on humans.

WebDAV: Short for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning, an IETF standard set of platform-independent extensions to HTTP that allows users to collaboratively edit and manage files on remote Web servers. WebDAV features XML properties on metadata, locking - which prevents authors from overwriting each other's changes - namespace manipulation and remote file management.