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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCING WINDOWS VISTA
The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard
(see http://www.w3.org/RDF/ ) for describing information on the Internet using Extensible Markup
Language (XML). Developers use it for a wide range of tasks, everything from news syndication to
photo collections. RSS (see http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/rss.html ) is an extension of RDF
technology presented by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Stan-
dards (OASIS) that helps you keep abreast of the latest news without much effort. The publisher
pushes (sends) the summary to you and you decide whether you want to read the whole story.
Phishing attacks are on the rise, so having protection from them is a great addition to IE7. A
phishing attack is one where someone sends an e-mail claiming to be a reputable organization such
as a bank. The e-mail can look quite legitimate, so many people are fooled into clicking the link.
When they get to the website, they see a display that looks very much like the reputable organiza-
tion’s website. In fact, sometimes they look exactly alike. The whole purpose of this ruse is to obtain
personal information from the user including social security number, date of birth, and mother’s
maiden name. The person who was phishing can now open a credit card in the user’s name. As you can
see, having good protection from this kind of attack is a must because a phishing attack can take any
form. For example, someone might do the very same thing to gain access to your corporate network.
Protected mode is a Vista-only feature that further improves the security that IE7 provides. The
main focus of this feature is to keep code from running silently in the background and prevents out-
siders from damaging essential system data. This protection helps against many forms of attack,
but the most important is the elevation of privilege attack that gives the hacker access to your entire
system (not that User Access Control, or UAC, makes that very easy anyway). This particular fea-
ture relies on a broker to process incoming and outgoing calls. The broker prevents reading or writ-
ing data outside the temporary Internet file folder without the user’s explicit permission.
A tabbed interface is the final major productivity aid for IE7. Using Tabs lets you keep multiple
windows open at the same time. Earlier versions of Internet Explorer required that you open one
browser for every website you wanted to visit. Not only did this make it hard to move between
websites, but it also tended to waste system resources. The tabbed interface is user friendlier and
makes your Web surfing experience better.
IPv6
Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is a necessary and useful upgrade to the Internet as a whole. The
most prominent new feature that this protocol provides is more address space, which means more
websites and other uses for IP addresses. Even though IPv4 appeared to provide unlimited address
space when first developed, it’s all too evident that the Internet is beginning to run out of addresses
today. IPv6 provides a number of other features such as automatic network configuration. You can
see more information, including the IPv6 specification, at http://www.ipv6.org/ .
Windows Collaboration/People Near Me
Windows Collaboration is the Vista feature that makes it significantly easier to work with other
people. Anyone can make use of Windows Collaboration because it isn’t limited to company web-
sites or other forms of organization that people normally associate with collaboration. You can col-
laborate with the guy across the street on a security plan for your neighborhood should you wish
to do so (this is admittedly an extreme example). You can use Windows Collaboration to invite both
local and remote participants, view the participants who actually attend, distribute agendas and
other documents required for the collaboration, perform activities such as giving presentations,
and perform person-to-person activities such as passing notes. You can even use Windows Collab-
oration in unsecured environments should the need arise.
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