Australian National University

Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology

COMP6341

Information Technology in Electronic Commerce

Assignment 2

This assignment will be updated on a regular basis. Clarifications and modifications will be added as and when required. Note that answers should be submitted both electronically and in printed form. You will be required to submit one or more files for each question, with specific file names. You can submit additional files, if required, and these can be image files, in the form in the form of jpg or gif images; or pdf files; or html or css files. Make sure that all of these files (including the specified ones) are located in the same directory and that you submit all of them. Use relative links to refer to such files, eg, <a href="myadditionalfile.html">. Remember to provide detailed references, if any have been made use of. Supply absolute URL's to any online references.

This is a group assignment and should be completed in groups of 2. Both people in the group must contribute equally to the assignment. It is strongly recommended that both people in the group work collaboratively on all the questions, rather than split the workload across the questions. You are only required to hand in one copy of the assignment with both names and student numbers clearly shown.

Note that all work submitted must be entirely your own work. Make certain you use quality information and that you carefully reference all the material that you use. It is unacceptable to cut and paste another author's work and pass it off as your own. Anyone found doing this, from whatever source, will get a zero for the assignment. Any material that you wish to quote should be put in quotation marks and the source should be clearly referenced. Read the department's policy on plagiarism, to be found in the Department of Computer Science Student Handbook.

It is strongly suggested that you start working on the questions right away and submit questions as and when you finish them. You can submit as many times as you want. Only the most recent submission will be retained.

Note that the COMP3410 assignment is for the undergraduate students and the COMP6341 assignment for the postgrad students. The two are not interchangeable. If you find problems with this assignment (e.g., something is not clear, or there are broken links), please get in contact with the concerned lecturer immediately. The name of the lecturer and email contact details can be found at the top of each question.

Question 1
First posted: Thu Sep 17 10:28:59 EST 2009
Last modified: Wed Sep 30 13:59:20 EST 2009
Questions to: Ramesh Sankaranarayana
Marks: 35

Natural Health Products decides to provide online shopping facilities to their customers. Lacking the expertise, they decide to outsource the work. So they first ask for quotations from interested parties. The quotations are to be submitted electronically. In order to appear unbiased, they decide to employ a trusted third party, Alice, to collect the quotations. The quotations are to be kept in a a database until the deadline for submitting quotations has passed, at which time they will be opened and examined. The quotations have to be unaltered, confidential and non-repudiable. They should remain confidential until the deadline has passed, at which time authorised officials from Natural Health Products should be able to decrypt and examine the quotations. Describe a method that Alice can use for this purpose, that uses cyptographic techniques and meets the above requirements. Also, briefly discuss any infrastructure requirements to maintain trust, certification support, etc, in this approach.

Submit your report in a file called crypto.html.

Question 2
First posted: Thu Sep 17 10:28:59 EST 2009
Last modified: Thu Sep 17 10:28:59 EST 2009
Questions to: Ramesh Sankaranarayana
Marks: 30

You are the webmaster for the Austrian Notional University's website. The University has charged you with making the University's home page rank top in popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo!. Discuss how you would go about doing this using Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques. Explain the kinds of queries you would target and why the particular techniques chosen by you will be effective.

Submit your answer in a file called seo.html.

Question 3
First posted: Thu Sep 17 10:28:59 EST 2009
Last modified: Thu Sep 17 10:28:59 EST 2009
Questions to: Roger Clarke
Marks: 30

This question is about P2P products. P2P is an important and valuable technology. For example, P2P could be a more effective way to distribute urgent software patches, and to communicate information during emergencies.

But P2P poses challenges for everyone - consumers, business, regulatory agencies and law enforcement agencies. In particular, the downloading of a significant proportion of the files that are available over P2P networks may well be in breach of copyright law. And the popularity of P2P can result in network congestion. For these reasons, P2P operations might be blocked on some universities' networks, and perhaps by some other ISPs.

Select a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) product. It would be advantageous to select one that you have used, that you want to use, or that you are prepared to experiment with. But if you want to, you may do the assignment based on theory alone, without personal experience of using the product. You should make clear in your report which approach you have adopted.

1. Briefly name and describe the P2P product and its purpose. Make sure that your answer reflects the differences between networks, protocols, software products, and the types of files shared using them. [7 marks]

   [In this case only, if you find a high-quality and clear description written by someone else, you're welcome to use that in your answer. But of course you must show quotation marks and cite the source fully and accurately, including the URL. Usually that approach is not acceptable; but this preliminary question might be already answered somewhere, and we don't need to keep reinventing the wheel.]

2. Analyse the service, applying the notions of market, market participants, categories of tradable item, price-setting mechanisms and categories of commercial arrangement, as they were presented in the first lecture. [14 marks]
3. How does the service apply the notions of (id)entification, (id)entity authentication and nymity, as they were presented in the fourth lecture. When you use the product to download files, do you know who you're dealing with? And does that matter? [14 marks]

Submit your answer in a file called p2p-technology.html.

Submission Guidelines

Make only one submission per group. You will need to submit your assignments both electronically and in printed form. The filenames to be used for electronic submission are given above, as part of each question. In addition, you need to attach a completed cover sheet and submit it as ass2-cover.html. Read the information on the assignments page for electronic submission.

Make sure that you attach an assignment cover sheet to your submission, with all the fields filled in. Failure to do so can cost you up to 5 marks.

For submitting the printed version, print off your complete assignment (all parts included), attach a completed cover sheet to the top and staple the lot. Place your assignment in the assignment box labeled COMP3410, which is located on the ground floor of the CS&IT building.

Note that you can only submit your assignment electronically if you belong to a tutorial group.

Late Assignments

If your submission is late, then a late penalty of 10% per day applies. Assignments will not be accepted one week after the deadline.

Extensions

Extensions will only be given under special circumstances. Students should write a letter to Dr. Ramesh Sankaranarayana stating the reason for the request and attach supporting documentation (e.g., medical certificate). This should be done before the deadline. Requests for extensions after the deadline will not be accepted.