technology creating problem on human daily life

Spamhaus has been under attack since adding a Dutch hosting organisation called Cyberbunker to its list of unwelcome internet sites. Photograph: Piotr Pawinski/Alamy

Hundreds of thousands of Britons are unsuspecting participants in one of the internet's biggest cyber-attacks ever – because their broadband router has been subverted.
Spamhaus, which operates a filtering service used to weed out spam emails, has been under attack since 18 March after adding a Dutch hosting organisation called Cyberbunker to its list of unwelcome internet sites. The service has "made plenty of enemies", said one expert, and the cyber-attack appeared to be retaliation.
A collateral effect of the attack is that internet users accustomed to high-speed connections may have seen those slow down, said James Blessing, a member of the UK Internet Service Providers' Association (ISPA) council.
"It varies depending on where you are and what site you're trying to get to," he said. "Those who are used to it being really quick will notice." Some people accessing the online streaming site Netflix reported a slowdown.
Spamhaus offers a checking service for companies and organisations, listing internet addresses it thinks generate spam, or which host content linked to spam, such as sites selling pills touted in junk email. Use of the service is optional, but thousands of organisations use it millions of times a day in deciding whether to accept incoming email from the internet.
Cyberbunker offers hosting for any sort of content as long, it says, as it is not child pornography or linked to terrorism. But in mid-March Spamhaus added its internet addresses to its blacklist.
In retaliation, the hosting company and a number of eastern European gangs apparently enlisted hackers who have in turn put together huge "botnets" of computers, and also exploited home and business broadband routers, to try to knock out the Spamhaus system.
"Spamhaus has made plenty of enemies over the years. Spammers aren't always the most lovable of individuals, and Spamhaus has been threatened, sued and [attacked] regularly," noted Matthew Prince of Cloudflare, a hosting company that helped the London business survive the attack by diverting the traffic.
Rather than aiming floods of traffic directly at Spamhaus's servers – a familiar tactic that is easily averted – the hackers exploited the internet's domain name system (DNS) servers, which accept a human-readable address for a website (such as guardian.co.uk) and spit back a machine-readable one (77.91.248.30). The hackers "spoofed" requests for lookups to the DNS servers so they seemed to come from Spamhaus; the servers responded with huge floods of responses, all aimed back at Spamhaus.
Some of those requests will have been coming from UK users without their knowledge, said Blessing. "If somebody has a badly configured broadband modem or router, anybody in the outside world can use it to redirect traffic and attack the target – in this case, Spamhaus."
Many routers in the UK provided by ISPs have settings enabled which let them be controlled remotely for servicing. That, together with so-called "open DNS" systems online which are known to be insecure helped the hackers to create a flood of traffic.
"British modems are certainly being used for this," said Blessing, who said that the London Internet Exchange — which routes traffic in and out of the UK — had been helping to block nuisance traffic aimed at Spamhaus.
The use of the DNS attacks has experts worried. "The No 1 rule of the internet is that it has to work," Dan Kaminsky, a security researcher who pointed out the inherent vulnerabilities of the DNS years ago, told AP.
"You can't stop a DNS flood by shutting down those [DNS] servers because those machines have to be open and public by default. The only way to deal with this problem is to find the people doing it and arrest them"

History of computing hardware

Computing hardware evolved from machines that needed separate manual action to perform each arithmetic operation, to punched card machines, and then to stored-program computers. The history of stored-program computers relates first to computer architecture, that is, the organization of the units to perform input and output, to store data and to operate as an integrated mechanism.
Before the development of the general-purpose computer, most calculations were done by humans. Mechanical tools to help humans with digital calculations were then called "calculating machines", by proprietary names, or even as they are now, calculators. It was those humans who used the machines who were then called computers. Aside from written numerals, the first aids to computation were purely mechanical devices which required the operator to set up the initial values of an elementary arithmetic operation, then manipulate the device to obtain the result. A sophisticated (and comparatively recent) example is the slide rule in which numbers are represented as lengths on a logarithmic scale and computation is performed by setting a cursor and aligning sliding scales, thus adding those lengths. Numbers could be represented in a continuous "analog" form, for instance a voltage or some other physical property was set to be proportional to the number. Analog computers, like those designed and built by Vannevar Bush before World War II were of this type. Numbers could be represented in the form of digits, automatically manipulated by a mechanical mechanism. Although this last approach required more complex mechanisms in many cases, it made for greater precision of results.
In the United States, the development of the computer was underpinned by massive government investment in the technology for military applications during WWII and then the Cold War. The latter superpower confrontation made it possible for local manufacturers to transform their machines into commercially viable products.^[1] It was the same story in Europe, where adoption of computers began largely through proactive steps taken by national governments to stimulate development and deployment of the technology.^[2]
The invention of electronic amplifiers made calculating machines much faster than their mechanical or electromechanical predecessors. Vacuum tube (thermionic valve) amplifiers gave way to solid state transistors, and then rapidly to integrated circuits which continue to improve, placing millions of electrical switches (typically transistors) on a single elaborately manufactured piece of semi-conductor the size of a fingernail. By defeating the tyranny of numbers, integrated circuits made high-speed and low-cost digital computers a widespread commodity. There is an ongoing effort to make computer hardware faster, cheaper, and capable of storing more data.
Computing hardware has become a platform for uses other than mere computation, such as process automation, electronic communications, equipment control, entertainment, education, etc. Each field in turn has imposed its own requirements on the hardware, which has evolved in response to those requirements, such as the role of the touch screen to create a more intuitive and natural user interface.
As all computers rely on digital storage, and tend to be limited by the size and speed of memory, the history of computer data storage is tied to the development of computers.

Microsoft Computer Training

Step by Step Training are experts in delivering customised computer training solutions to a wide range of organisations and corporate clients across New Zealand.
Our most common training requests are:

• Microsoft Word
• Microsoft Excel
• Microsoft Outlook
• Microsoft PowerPoint
• Microsoft Access

Specialising in Microsoft training our network of computer tutors provide targeted training to meet the individual skill gaps of staff.