Internet Glossary
Unfamiliar or unclear about a term or concept related to Web hosting services or Domain registration? This glossary gives meaning to much of the commonly used vocabulary associated with Web Hosting and the Internet. Simply click on any alphabetical category to quickly find the word you're looking for.
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Packet
A unit of data used to send information across the Internet. Most types of network communications use the Transport Control Protocol (TCP) layer of the TCP/IP protocol to split messages into a number of discrete packets before transmitting them.
Packet-Switched
The method used to move data around on the Internet . In packet switching, all the data coming out of a machine is broken up into chunks, each chunk has the address of where it came from and where it is going. This enables chunks of data from many different sources to co-mingle on the same lines, and be sorted and directed to different routes by special machines along the way. This way many people can use the same lines at the same time
Page
Name for a basic web document, Websites usually consist of many (web) pages
PAP
(Password Authentication Protocol) PAP is the authentication protocol used over PPP connections
Parking (Domain Name)
Registries require the use of name servers or hosts for every domain registered. Parking is the process by which someone selects a domain name, and "parks" it by registering the domain name under someone's name servers. Parking can be done by anyone, to anyone else who has active name servers. However, parking a domain name alone will result in no service (web hosting, e-mail) for that particular domain name
Password
A sequence of characters required to log in or otherwise gain access to a computer system.
Password Protected Directory
A directory on your site that requires the viewer to enter a username and password before accessing
Payment Gateway
Applying to e-commerce, a payment gateway is software that is a hosted on a server that routes financial transactions between the merchant and the bankcard processing associations (Credit Card).
PCMCIA
Personal Computer Memory Card Industry Association is an international trade association that has developed standards for devices, such as modems and external hard disk drives that can be plugged into notebook computers.
PDA / Personal Digital Assistant
A small, totally portable electronic device that combines computing, telephone/fax, and networking features. A typical PDA can function as a cellular phone, Fax sender, and personal organizer.
PDF / Portable Document Format
A file created by Adobe's Acrobat software. PDF files are designed for distributing documents electronically, and thus contain original fonts, graphics and other design elements that faithfully record the layout of the original.
Peer-to-Peer network
A peer-to-peer network is a collection of computers that can communicate and share information, but that don't have any kind of hierarchical structure. This is the opposite of the client/server model
Pentium4
Pentium 4 (P4) is the latest Intel processor (codenamed Willamette ), released in November 2000. The new processor has a viable clock speed of 1.5 gigahertz (GHz) - as compared to the 1 GHz of the Pentium 3 - and is likely to be available with a rate of at least 3.60 GHz by the end of 2004.
Perl / Practical Extraction and Report Language
An interpreted scripting language for scanning text files, extracting information, and printing reports, Perl is widely used for creating CGI applications. Created by Larry Wall
Permission List Marketing
Companies seeking to target a large number of new prospects can pay to access the subscriber's permission list managers. These services play an intermediary role between customers and marketers. Customers, consumers and professional users are invited to register with the service and, ideally, choose from among a number of categories about which they would like to receive commercial announcements. The service then sells access to those consumers to marketers. List managers do not release the email addresses of their subscribers to the marketers. Rather, the marketer supplies the message to the list manager, who relays it to the service's subscribers on the marketer's behalf.
PGP / Pretty Good Privacy
A widely-used method of ensuring the security and integrity of data transferred across the Internet -- whether it is e-mail, Usenet postings, or submissions to Web sites. Through use of the digital equivalent of keys, users can authenticate messages from each other.
PHP
PHP (Personal Home Page Tools) / Hypertext Preprocessor is a server-side; HTML embedded scripting language that is used primarily on Linux Web servers to create dynamic Web pages. PHP script is enclosed within special PHP tags. An HTML page that includes a PHP script is typically given a file name suffix of ".php" ".php3," or ".phtml".
PHP Nuke
PHP Nuke is the most popular web portal software. Developed by Francisco Burzi, it is a complete solution for any webmaster who would like to develop and manage his own content without advanced knowledge of databases or site development. PHP Nuke possesses the world's biggest support community for a PHP project.
PICS / Platform for Internet Content Selection
The PICS is a controversial Web site ratings standard introduced by the W3C, which associates actual content with associating labels - metadata. Filtering software can be used to exclude sites if the PICS are deemed inappropriate.
Primary DNS
The Primary Domain Name Server for the customer's domain. These are the DNS IP numbers, usually preceded by "ns.name.com" and "ns2.name.com" and a domain must point at a DNS for it to "resolve" to a local virtual location
Ping
A small program used to check for the presence and response time of a remote computer.
Ping Storm
A flood of large packets sent to a computer a computer by a ping program, either to test the machine's ability to manage large volumes of traffic or, occasionally, deliberately to cause it to malfunction.
Pixel
Short for "picture element", the smallest unit in a digital image, appearing as a dot on the computer screen, Digital images are measured in pixel size dimensions (e.g., a "100 x 200" image, 100 pixels wide by 200 pixels high). In Web multimedia, each pixel in an image can be defined as a hypermedia anchor (a technique known as image mapping), providing a link to another image, file, or document on the Web.
PKE / Public Key Encryption
An encryption system that uses two keys, a public key for encrypting messages and a private key for decrypting messages, to enable users to verify each other's messages without exchanging secret keys.
PKI / Public Key Infrastructure
A complex way of administering large public key encryption schemes
PKZIP or PKUNZIP
Popular compression and decompression programs
Platform
Broadly, the combination of an operating system and a processor to form a system on which application programs can run.
Plexus
A set of modular WWW server software written in Perl
Plug-In
A (usually small) piece of software that adds features to a larger piece of software, Common examples are plug-ins for the Netscape® browser and web server . Adobe Photoshop® also uses plug-ins. The idea behind plug-in's is that a small piece of software is loaded into memory by the larger program, adding a new feature, and that users need only install the few plug-ins that they need, out of a much larger pool of possibilities. Plug-ins are usually developed by a third party.
PNG / Portable Network Graphics
PNG is a file format designed primarily to replace the older GIF format. PNG files, which are lossless (meaning they don't lose any detail when they are compressed) support up to 48-bit true color or 16-bit grayscale and typically compress about 5% to 25% better than GIF files. Not support animations like GIFs do.
POP / Point of Presence
A Point of Presence usually means a city or location where a network can be connected to, often with dial up phone lines. So if an Internet company says they will soon have a POP in Belgrade , it means that they will soon have a local phone number in Belgrade and/or a place where leased lines can connect to their network
POP / Post Office Protocol
A protocol used to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. Most e-mail applications (sometimes called an e-mail client) use the POP protocol, although some can use the newer IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol). There are two versions of POP. The first, called POP2, became a standard in the mid-80's and requires SMTP to send messages. The newer version, POP3, can be used with or without SMTP.
POP Accounts
Users can retrieve e-mail directly from POP3 mailboxes on the mail server to the computer using an email program such as Eudora or Outlook.
POP3
The latest version of the Post Office Protocol, a standard for retrieving E-mail. (see POP)
Pornography
One of the Internet's biggest businesses, As the world's media never tire of pointing out, pornography is widely available on the Net, in both commercialized subscription form and for free.
Port
3 meanings. First and most generally, a place where information goes into or out of a computer, or both, E.g. the serial port on a personal computer is where a modem would be connected. Second: On the Internet port often refers to a number that is part of a URL , appearing after a colon (:) right after the domain name . Every service on an Internet server listens on a particular port number on that server. Most services have standard port numbers, e.g. Web servers normally listen on port 80. Services can also listen on non-standard ports, in which case the port number must be specified in a URL when accessing the server, so you might see a URL of the form: gopher://peg.cwis.uci.edu:7000/ shows a gopher server running on a non-standard port (the standard gopher port is 70). Finally, port also refers to translating a piece of software to bring it from one type of computer system to another, e.g. to translate a Windows program so that is will run on a Macintosh.
Portability
A characteristic of a program which can run on any platform without modification.
Portal
An electronic gateway to the World Wide Web, The portal is really an extension of the Search Engine idea, but instead of providing lists of sites matching someone's search criteria, it relies on a selection process to choose starter sites that new users might be interested in visiting.
POSIX
Portable Operating System Interface for computer environments. A set of IEEE standards designed to provide application portability. IEEE1003.1 defines a UNIX-like operating system interface, 1003.2 the shell and utilities, and 1003.4 real-time extensions.
Posting Up
To send a message to a discussion group or mailing list
Postscript
A page description language from Adobe Systems Inc. Its primary application is to describe the appearance of text, graphical shapes and sampled images on printed or displayed pages. A program in PostScript can communicate a document description from a composition system to a printing system in a device-independent way. Many printers now interpret PostScript directly.
PPP / Point-to-Point Protocol
A data communications standard for transmitting information between two computers using a serial interface.
PPTP / Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol
A technology developed by Microsoft , U.S. Robotics, and others to enable VPN to work securely over the internet without exposing their communications to intercept.
Private Key
A type of key used to decode encrypted messages, known only to the sender and recipient of a message.
PRI
(Primary Rate Interface). One of the two ISDN access methods, 23 of 64 Kbps B channels and 1 64 Kbps D channel constitute a PRI
ProFTPD
ProFTPD is FTP server software that grew out of the desire to have a secure and configurable FTP server, and out of a significant admiration of the Apache web server. A number of well known and high traffic sites use ProFTPD. Visit the ProFTPD website for more information
Protocol
A set of rules that determines how two computers should communicate with each other
Proxy Server
A computer that controls traffic between a Local Area Network and the wider Internet
Propagation
The process whereby the nameserver throughout the world have updated their records for a specific domain, For example, if you move your domain from one host to another, it will take around 24 hours or so for the new address to broadcast everywhere. During that 24 hour period, the traffic is decreasing at the old location and increasing at the new location
PSTN
(Public Switched Telephone Network) The set of all the traditional telephone lines and the entire infrastructure that comes with it
Public Key Cryptography
cryptographic systems in which messages are encrypted with a key split into two parts
Pull
Pull means searching the information and then pulling that information into the browser.
PURL / Persistent URL
Persistent URL, Instead of pointing directly to the location of an Internet resource, a PURL points to a resolution service that associates the PURL with the actual URL and returns that URL to the client.
Push
Push is the term used for technologies that are used to regularly deliver information directly to a client's computer.
Push Media
Content that is delivered automatically, rather that waiting for someone to come and get it
Python
Interpreted programming language, sometimes offered by hosts for server-side scripting, Here is the Python home page
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