Category Archives: Glossary

What is SSL?

Stands for “Secure Sockets Layer.” SSL is a secure protocol developed for sending information securely over the Internet. Many websites use SSL for secure areas of their sites, such as user account pages and online checkout. Usually, when you are asked to “log in” on a website, the resulting page is secured by SSL.

Tebibyte

A tebibyte is a unit of data storage that equals 2 to the 40th power, or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes. While a terabyte can be estimated as 10^12 or 1,000,000,000,000 bytes, a tebibyte is exactly 1,099,511,627,776 bytes. This is to avoid the ambiguity associated with the size of terabytes. A tebibyte is 1,024 gibibytes and precedes the pebibyte unit of… Read More »

What is TraceRoute?

When computers communicate over the Internet, there are often many connections made along the way. This is because the Internet is made up of a network of networks, and two different computers may be on two separate networks in different parts of the world. Therefore, if a computer is to communicate with another system on the Internet, it… Read More »

What is a Terabyte?

A terabyte is 2 to the 40th power, or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes. It can be estimated as 10 to the 12th power, or 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. A terabyte is 1,024 gigabytes and precedes the petabyte unit of measurement. While today’s consumer hard drives are typically measured in gigabytes, Web servers and file servers may have several terabytes of space. A… Read More »

What is a Virus?

Like a biological virus, a computer virus is something you don’t want to get. Computer viruses are small programs or scripts that can negatively affect the health of your computer. These malicious little programs can create files, move files, erase files, consume your computer’s memory, and cause your computer not to function correctly. Some viruses can duplicate themselves,… Read More »

What is a Trojan Horse?

In Greek mythology, there is a story about the Trojan War. This war lasted many years, as the Greeks could not penetrate the heavily barricaded city of Troy. So one day, a few of the Greek soldiers brought the people of Troy a large wooden horse, which they accepted as a peace offering. The horse was moved inside… Read More »

What is Visual Basic?

Visual Basic is a programming language and development environment created by Microsoft. It is an extension of the BASIC programming language that combines BASIC functions and commands with visual controls. Visual Basic provides a graphical user interface GUI that allows the developer to drag and drop objects into the program as well as manually write program code.

What is a WAN?

A WAN (Wide Area Network) is a type of computer network that spans a large geographical area, typically covering cities, countries, or even continents. It connects multiple smaller networks, such as local area networks (LANs) or metropolitan area networks (MANs), allowing them to communicate with each other over long distances.

What is Wi-Fi?

Short for “Wireless Fidelity.” (Yes, it is pretty much a rip-off of the term “Hi-Fi,” or High Fidelity, which refers to high-quality audio or surround sound.) Wi-Fi refers to wireless network components that are based on one of the Wi-Fi Alliance’s 802.11 standards.