A device that allows wireless clients to connect to one another. An access point can also act as a bridge between wireless clients and a wired network, such as an Ethernet network. Wireless clients can be moved anywhere within the coverage area of the access point and remain connected to the network. If connected to an Ethernet network, the access point monitors Ethernet traffic and forwards appropriate Ethernet messages to the wireless network, while also monitoring wireless traffic and forwarding wireless client messages to the Ethernet network.

Active Directory is an implementation of LDAP, directory service by Microsoft for use in Windows environments. Active Directory allows administrators to assign enterprise-wide policies, deploy programs to many computers, and apply critical updates to an entire organization. An Active Directory stores information and settings relating to an organization in a central, organized, accessible database. Active Directory networks can vary from a small installation with a few hundred objects, to a large installation with millions of objects.

Microsoft created this technology and bundled it with its IIS webserver software. It is designed to allow easy combination of HTML, scripts (such as JavaScript and Microsoft’s VBScript), and ActiveX. Active Server Pages promise to be more robust than CGI when handling large amounts of client requests, but that competition is close and ongoing.

A Microsoft technology that uses COM technology, and is designed to enable easier embedding of interactive objects, and often multimedia, on Web pages. To interact with ActiveX on sites that support it, your browser must support it as well.

A technology that is the phone company’s answer to cable modems. It supports data speeds over 7Mbps downstream (to the user) and slower speeds upstream (to the Internet). Asymmetric describes how the upstream speed is different than the downstream speed.

In cryptography, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is an encryption standard adopted by the U.S. government. AES is based on a design principle known as a Substitution permutation network. It is fast in both software and hardware, is relatively easy to implement, and requires little memory. The standard comprises three block ciphers, AES-128, AES-192 and AES-256, adopted from a larger collection originally published as Rijndael. Each AES cipher has a 128-bit block size, with key sizes of 128, 192 and 256 bits, respectively. The AES ciphers have been analyzed extensively and are now used worldwide, as was the case with its predecessor, the Data Encryption Standard (DES). AES is the first publicly accessible and open cipher approved by the NSA for top secret information.

Analog refers to a representation of a quantity that varies over any continuous range of values. Analog signals can be thought of as pure in nature and not processed. Thus, the debate over whether record albums (analog representation of sound, where the sound is generated by physical ridges on the record) sound better than CDs (digital representation of sound, where variation is limited by the encoding level). Think of nature as analog. Analog values are exact, but it is impossible to correct errors in reproduction (e.g., a scratch on a record).

FTP services requiring no specific authentication, using a login name of “anonymous” and your e-mail address as a password.

A networking protocol initially designed to move multimedia data around with high reliability and speed. It uses small, fixed-size cells of data that can be more easily controlled and kept at specific service levels than TCP/IP. Some ISPs use ATM as the protocol for their backbones.

A process of proving the identity of a computer or computer user. For users, it generally involves a user name and password.  Computers usually pass a code that identifies that they are a legitimate part of a network.

A measure, in some amount of bits per second, of the maximum amount of data that can be sent over a particular cable, interface, or bus.

A term given to a product that isn’t ready for public consumption, but is good enough for a wider testing scope. Many companies publicly release their beta software to a fraction of their users to let them get experience with the new software while the company gets feedback on bugs and features.

Also see Alpha

The smallest unit of measure in a computer. It is represented by a 0 (off) or 1 (on). You can think of a bit as a switch. If it’s in the on position it’s a 1, and if the switch is off it’s a 0. All parts of your computer communicate in bits at the lowest level.

When sending an e-mail, if you BCC someone you are sending him or her a copy of your e-mail, but not allowing the recipients in the “To” or “CC” fields of your e-mail client to know that the BCC recipient was sent the message as well. BCC is often used for covert company communications, such as if you are getting irritated at someone and want to let someone else in on it without alerting the party you are irritated about, or if you are sending the CEO of your company a mail telling him or her he or she is wrong about something and want to BCC copies to your friends to gloat over it. Use BCC with caution. One of the most common uses of BCC is when sending mass e-mails; just send the e-mail to yourself and BCC it to the whole group you are sending to. That way, your mailing list is not known to any of the members.

This is generally a measure of how fast some device communicates, usually in thousands of bits per second (Kbps) or millions of bits per second (Mbps).

See also Bytes per second

This is generally a measure of how fast some device communicates, usually in thousands of bytes per second (KBps) or millions of bytes per second (MBps). See also bits per second. If you’ve got a capital B, you are talking Bytes, if you have a lowercase b, then it's bits.

A piece of network hardware that links two or more network segments. The network topologies do not have to be the same (e.g., you can bridge Ethernet and Token Ring), but the protocols must be (e.g., TCP/IP or IPX/SPX). If the protocols are different on the linked segments, you’ve got a router, not a bridge. Bridges are used to reduce network traffic, increase cable distance (by acting as a repeater), and also to link dissimilar network topologies that run the same network protocol.

A technology that refers to the transfer of multiple signals over a single medium. In slang terms, it is any Internet connection that allows for higher transfer speeds than an analog modem, most often applied to cable modem or DSL access. It can be used to describe satellite and wireless Internet services as well.

Most commonly used to refer to a software program used to look at World Wide Web pages. More technically, a browser reads HTML pages over TCP/IP port 80 using HTTP. Thus, you will notice the term “HTTP” before the URL in your browser address bar, such as: “http://www.google.com/”

A temporary location to store or group information in hardware or software. Buffers are used whenever data is received in sizes that may be different than the ideal size for the hardware or software that uses the buffer. For example, a 64-bit processor on a 16-bit bus may have a buffer to hold 16-bit requests until they equal 64-bits. Another use of buffers is to keep hardware from getting overwhelmed with information. In that scenario, you use a large buffer to hold data until a device or program is ready to receive it, instead of just pushing it onto a device that might not be ready. Buffers must be optimized in size to work efficiently for the purpose they are designed.

Simply put, it’s 8 bits. Think of it as a string of 1s and 0s that represents a number from 0 to 255. For example “01100101″ is one byte of information, whereas “0″ or “1″ are bits of information.

A high-speed, buffer-type memory filled at medium speed from the main memory. (Programs and instructions found in the cache memory can be operated at higher speeds without the necessity of loading another segment.)

CD-R drives record up to 650 MB of data onto specialized CD-R media. The media is more expensive compared to the mass-produced CDs that software is generally distributed on, but cheap for the amount of data you can store on it. CD-R media is a WORM technology. You can Write to it Once and Read Many times, but you can’t erase anything you’ve written.

CD-ROM media is read-only media that holds about 650 MB of data. It’s generally accepted as the easiest way to distribute software. CD-ROM drives can also read audio CDs even though they are in a different format than standard CD-ROM media.

(1) Location of telephone switching equipment where customers' lines are terminated and interconnected.

(2) Switching center that provides local access to the public network. Sometimes referred to as: End Office, Local Dial Office, Wire Center or Switching Center.

Cable consisting of an outer conductor surrounding an inner conductor, separated from each other by insulating material. It can carry a much higher bandwidth than a wire pair. 

A game designed to be played on a game console

Any piece of equipment in your house, apartment building, or office connected to the carrier's or ISP's internet or telephone connection. Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) can include telephones, DSL modems, or set-top boxes.

A test to see whether data has been transferred properly over a modem or to and from disk media. The sender of the data adds a check number to the end of the data being sent, and the receiver applies the same check to the data and compares the number it gets with the check number. If they don’t match, the data can be requested again.

Connection of multiple devices in a serial fashion. (An advantage of daisy chaining is a savings in transmission facilities. The disadvantage is that if a device malfunctions, all other devices daisy-chained behind it are disabled.)