M.Sc. (Information Technology) / The internet grew exponentially over the last decade. With more information available on the web, search engines, with the help of web crawlers also known as web bots, gather information on the web and indexes billions of web pages. This indexed information helps users to find relevant information on the internet. An extranet is a sub-set of the internet. This part of the web controls access for a selected audience to a specific resource and are also referred to as restricted web sites. Various industries use extranets for different purposes and store different types of information on it. Some of this information could be of a confidential nature and therefore it is important that this information is adequately secured and should not be accessible by web bots. In some cases web bots can accidently stumble onto poorly secured pages in an extranet and add the restricted web pages to their indexed search results. Search engines like Google, that are designed to filter through a large amount of data, can accidently crawl onto access restricted web pages if such pages are not secured properly. Researchers found that it is possible for web crawlers of well known search engines to access poorly secured web pages in access restricted web sites. The risk is that not all web bots have good intentions and that some have a more malicious intent. These malicious web bots search for vulnerabilities in extranets and use the vulnerabilities to access confidential information. The main objective of this dissertation is to develop a prototype web bot called Ferret that would crawl through a web site developed by a web developer(s). Ferret will try to discover and access restricted web pages that are poorly secured in the extranet and report the weaknesses. From the information and findings of this research a best practice guideline will be drafted that will help developers to ensure access restricted web pages are secured and invisible to web bots.

The Internet is becoming increasingly interwoven in the daily life of many individuals, organisations and nations. It has, to a large extent, had a positive effect on the way people communicate. It has also introduced new avenues for business and has offered nations an opportunity to govern online. Nevertheless, although cyberspace offers an endless list of services and opportunities, it is also accompanied by many risks. One of these risks is cybercrime. The Internet has given criminals a platform on which to grow and proliferate. As a result of the abstract nature of the Internet, it is easy for these criminals to go unpunished. Moreover, many who use the Internet are not aware of such threats; therefore they may themselves be at risk, together with businesses and governmental assets and infrastructure. In view of this, there is a need for cyber security awareness and education initiatives that will promote users who are well versed in the risks associated with the Internet. In this context, it is the role of the government to empower all levels of society by providing the necessary knowledge and expertise to act securely online. However, there is currently a definite lack in South Africa (SA) in this regard, as there are currently no government-led cyber security awareness and education initiatives. The primary research objective of this study, therefore, is to propose a cyber security awareness and education framework for SA that will assist in creating a cyber secure culture in SA among all of its users of the Internet.

The twenty-first century has found education at the crossroads of change. There are burgeoning challenges facing the modern educator. To rise to the importuning, educators find themselves turning to Information Technology for the answers. The technologies utilised in attempts to overcome the challenges often include the Internet and electronic educational resources. Although the Internet is not unduly called the Information Highway, it is also fraught with misleading and incorrect information. Educators’ arduous searches result in few good and useable resources. Thus, to store, organise and efficiently retrieve the discovered resources is a matter of time-saving. The aim of the study was to develop a method to organise and retrieve educational resources in an efficient and personalised manner. In order to do this, an exploration into pedagogy and educational paradigms was undertaken. The current educational paradigm, constructivism, proposes that each learner is an individual with unique learning and personal needs. To develop a new model, the current models need to be understood. The current solutions for the organising of educational resources are realised as several software packages, also called e-learning packages. A list of criteria that describes the essential requirements for organising educational resources was established. These criteria were based upon the pedagogical principles prescribed by educators and the practical technological frameworks necessary to fulfil the needs of the teaching/learning situation. These criteria were utilised to critique and explore the available solutions. It was found that although the available e-learning packages fulfil a need within their genre, it does not meet with the core requirements of constructivism. The resource base model seeks to address these needs by focussing on the educational aspects of resource delivery over an Intranet. For the purposes of storing, organising and delivering the resources, a database had to be established. This database had to have numerous qualities, including the ability to search and retrieve resources with great efficiency. Retrieving data in an efficient manner is the forte of the star schema, while the storing and organising of data is the strength of a normalised schema. It is not standard practice to utilise both types of schemas within the same database. A star schema is usually reserved for data warehouses because of its data retrieval abilities. It is customary to utilise a normalised schema for operational databases. The resource base model, however, needs both the storage facilities of an operational database and the efficient query facilities of a data warehouse. The resource base model, therefore, melds both schemas into one database with interlinking tables. This database forms the foundation (or the back-end) of the resource base. The resource base model utilises web browsers as its user interface (or front-end). The results of the study on the pedagogy, the current e-learning solutions and the resource base were written up within this dissertation. The contribution that this dissertation makes is the development of a technique to efficiently store, organise and retrieve educational resources in such a manner that both the requirements of constructivism and outcomes-based education are fulfilled. To this end, a list of technological and pedagogical criteria on which to critique a resource delivery technique has been developed. This dissertation also elaborates on the schema designs chosen for the resource base, namely the normalised schema and the star schema. From this schema, a prototype has been developed. The prototype’s function was two-fold. The first function is to determine the feasibility of the technique. Secondly, to determine the success of the technique in fulfilling the needs expressed in the list of criteria

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This thesis describes the design and development of both the hardware and software of an embedded, distributed control system using a LAN infrastructure for communication between nodes. The primary application of this system is for power monitoring and control at Rhodes University. Both the hardware and software have been developed to provide a modular and scalable system capable of growing and adapting to meet the changing demands placed on it. The software includes a custom written Internet Protocol stack for use in the embedded environment, with a small code footprint and low processing overheads. There is also Linux-based control software, which includes a web-based device management interface and graphical output. Problems specific to the application are discussed as well as their solutions, with particular attention to the constraints of an embedded system.

Many important applications in the social, ecological, epidemiological, and biological sciences can be modeled as complex systems in which a node or variable interacts with another via the edges in the network. Community detection has been known to be important in obtaining insights into the network structure characteristics of these complex systems. The existing community detection methods often assume that the pairwise interaction data between nodes are already available, and they simply apply the detection algorithms to the network. However, the predefined network might contain inaccurate structures as a result of indirect effects that stem from the nodes' high-order interactions, which poses challenges for the algorithms upon which they are built. Meanwhile, existing methods to infer the direct interaction relationships suffer from the difficulty in identifying the cut point value that differentiates the direct interactions from the indirect interactions. In this thesis, we consider the overlapping community detection problem with determination and integration of the structural information of direct dependency interactions. We propose a new overlapping community detection model, named direct-dependency-based nonnegative matrix factorization (DNMF), that exploits the Bayesian framework for pairwise ordering to incorporate the structural information of the underlying network. To evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method, we compare it with state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets collected from different domains. Our empirical results show that after the incorporation of a direct dependency network, significant improvement is seen in the community detection performance in networks with homophilic effects.

Många organisationer som anvander IT-system i sin verksamhet bedriver ocksa någon form av systemförvaltningsverksamhet. Någon eller några aktörer har till uppgift att kontinuerligt vidmakthålla och vidareutveckla organisationers verksamhet med hjälp av IT-system. Avhandlingen belyser hur detta arbete går till idag och hur det bör organiseras för att öka styrbarheten i systemförvaltningsverksamheter. Forskningsprocessen har haft en kvalitativ ansats med såväl induktiva som deduktiva inslag. Källstudier och intervjuer har genomförts for att kartlagga vilka aktiviteter som ingar i en systemförvaltningsverksamhet och hur den är organiserad. Dessutom har tre fallstudier genomförts med aktionsforskningsinslag i syfte att skapa effektiva förvaltningsobjekt som grund för organisering av systemförvaltningsverksamhet. Resultatet av arbetet är ett konceptuellt ramverk för att organisera systemförvaltningsverksamhet med hjalp av effektiva förvaltningsobjekt. Ramverket är uppbyggt kring fyra centrala begrepp; förvaltningsuppdrag, förvaltningsobjekt, förvaltningsorganisation och förvaltningsaktiviteter som alla ör relaterade till organiseringsbegreppet genom att de tre förstnämna utgör medel för att organisera systemförvaltningsverksamhet (aktiviteter). En delmängd av resultatet utgörs av en model för avgränsning och definition av förvaltningsobjekt. I avhandlingen ges ocksa förslag till referensdefinitioner på systemförvaltning och dess ingående aktiviteter; kunskapsstöd, ändringshantering, förvaltningsstyrning och daglig IT-drift och underhåll.

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M.B.A. / As e-commerce becomes a more accepted and important way of doing business, the strategist's stock-and-status will rise accordingly. With more of a company's communications and revenue moving through the Internet, Web work will be seen less as a separate project and more as a core business process. Web business strategy will become of such fundamental importance that it will fall under the CEO's purview (Cutler, 1996:3). The Internet is an area of high seismographic activity, increasing the danger that strategies will be built along a fault line. The technology advances so rapidly, and the numbers change so often, that time scales have to be compressed, and planners must learn to make decisions in an environment filled with ambiguity (Cutler, 1996:3). Learning, comparing and evaluating how companies devise their e-commerce strategies could explore common factors, which could be summarised into key steps aimed at assisting management in the future, who plan to embark on a project of implementing Internet technologies...

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