Quality and Performance Evaluation of the Sri Lankan e-Government web Portal

This study was conducted to evaluate the quality and performance of the official e-Government web portal of Sri Lanka. For this purpose some well recognized and generally accepted evaluation tools and frameworks were used. Web site evaluation framework of Panopoulou et al., (2008) was utilised to evaluate quality and performance of official government web portal of Sri Lanka. The evaluation shows evidently that government used web portal mainly for promotional and information dissemination purpose

Distributed online doctor surgery

This paper reports on redesign of the existing manual system of a Doctor Surgery, to a computerised system, which takes the advantage of the latest technologies and allows the patients to have better interaction with the system. The Doctor surgery plays a major role in human life, over the years we have seen the drastic changes in the treatment of patient in surgery, however we haven't really seen much changes on structure of the system as a whole. Many surgeries still use a manual paper based system for their transaction. The recent rapid development in web technology and growth of distributed processing seems to be only applicable for commercial business and field such as medical treatment seems to have fallen behind in the technology and as consequence, inefficient and ineffective services provided to the patients. The new prototype system has been designed using Object Oriented Methodology and implemented by using mainly JAVA (RMI, SQL, SERVLET and other Java packages) for creating the communication server and the web site. Also, for the end user interface of the database in the surgery ORACLE 7 and Developer 2000 application was used. The implementation of the system allows the patient to carry out appointment transaction (create, query, delete) and communicate with the doctor via the web site, which is connected to the oracle server in the surgery. The web site provides all the necessary details and information about the surgery and practice. The final prototype utilises distributed technology and built upon the research carried out

The Behaviour and Perceptions of On-Line Consumers: Risk, Risk Perception and Trust

The growth and the expansion of the Internet and the World Wide Web continue to impact society in new and amazing ways. The role of economic commerce has not been as dynamic as some predicted, but has still demonstrated remarkable success and tremendous potential. Any failure to meet some of the expectations may be explained in large part by questions and concerns surrounding existing methods of electronic commerce and of the Internet. A key negative perception centres on the security involved in Internet practice and electronic payment systems. Negative perceptions are then compounded and reinforced by massive media exposure of Internet security incidents. Many consumers still lack the necessary trust in on-line merchants and Internet security procedures and continue to use the Web to simply browse. The types of attack individuals face include confidence-trick or actual encounters calculated to extract bank or personal details, computer spyware that opens on accessing the Internet, enticing users with offers of non-existent free gifts while copying confidential files, and programmes that can infiltrate networks, operating within them undetected, ultimately causing them to crash. Social Engineering is one such method used by an attacker to get information. There are two main categories under which all social engineering attempts could be classified, computer or technology-based deception and human based deception. The technology-based approach is to deceive the user into believing that is interacting with the ‘real’ computer system (such as popup window, informing the user that the computer application has had a problem) and get the user to provide confidential information. The human approach is done through deception, by taking advantage of the victim’s ignorance, and the natural human inclination to be helpful and liked. One of the most effective technology-based approach is a scam, called “phishing” as a form of identity theft. This is a technique used to gain personal information for the purposes of identity theft, using fraudulent e-mail messages that appear to come from legitimate businesses. These authentic-looking messages are designed to fool recipients into divulging personal data such as account numbers and passwords, credit card numbers and Social Security numbers. This paper provides an overview of electronic commerce and the impact of risk and trust on on-line shopping consumer behaviour. Due to the growth and potential of on-line shopping and the lack of academic-based research on Internet-related consumer behaviour, there is a tremendous need for impartial, academic investigation into the behaviour and perceptions of on-line consumers

Evaluation of cyber legislations: trading in the global cyber village

The menace of organised crime and terrorist activity grows ever more sophisticated as the ability to enter, control and destroy our electronic and security systems grows at an equivalent rate. Cyber-crime (organised criminal acts using microchip and software manipulation) is the world's biggest growth industry and is now costing an estimated $220 billion loss to organisations and individuals, every year. There are serious threats to nations, governments, corporations and the most vulnerable group of all, individuals. Cyber-crime combines the same methods of traditional crime identifying targets, using surveillance and psychological profiling but has added-in levels of duplicity in that the perpetrator need never actually be at the scene of the crime. Indeed the traditional idea of a criminal gang is meaningless in that the unit may exist but each member resides on a different continent and never needs to physically meet. The types of attack individuals face include confidence-trick telephone calls or actual encounters calculated to extract bank or personal details, computer spyware that opens on accessing the internet, enticing users with offers of non-existent free gifts while copying confidential files and programmes that can infiltrate networks, operating within them undetected, ultimately causing them to crash. Information and services provided on the internet which can be utilised by any person(s) with access bring to fore the concept of legislations. Thus cyber laws and legislations refers to those guidelines and regulations put in place to ensure that information and services so displayed and acquired on the internet meet a standard within the e-society. This paper aims to review these legislations and showcasing their impact and relevance to the society for which they are formulated. Finally, the question whether the current internet legislation is adequate to protect society is also raised

A look at online banking accessibility in the EU and the USA

Information Systems become the necessary tool for financial organisations. Online banking is now more than an ideal environment for standard banking transactions because it provides customers an easy access to a wider range of services and allows them to deliver more timely and cost-effective services around the clock. To meet the higher demands of the customers of today’s global networked economy the websites of the financial institutions needed to be more accessible for people with disabilities. The significant number of disable people tends to be excluded from the use of World Wide Web as a mechanism by which services and facilities are provided. This paper reports on the e-Accessibility standards of online banking services and identified that despite standards and guidelines set by the international agencies like W3C many websites still fall short of e-Accessibility

The UK government’s Critical National Infrastructure policy for emergency services communications platforms: vulnerabilities in the TETRA architecture

In this era of global communications individual communities and entire cities rely heavily on the public telecommunication platforms to support the emergency services workers to provide a professional service in extreme situations, such as natural disasters - floods, earthquakes and hurricanes etc; or terrorist / political attacks, such as London, New York and Madrid. Previous experiences have demonstrated that in such situations entire cities find their general communication platforms such as the Public Switched Telephone Networks and Cellular systems are overwhelmed with emergency communication traffic, as huge number of calls are made locally and internationally to the disaster area to determine if love ones are injured or safe. Until recently under these extreme conditions the emergency services would have to rely solely on the available telecommunications bandwidth and any contingency bandwidth that has been allocated for such situations. However the UK government has a part of its Critical National Infrastructure as deployed a TETRA based private mobile radio (PMR) system to separate critical emergency communication from the general communication platforms. This paper analyzes whether this new system is resilient or could the use of MANET’s be utilised to operate in extreme situations to provide a crucial short/mid-term communication platform

Accessibility evolution tools comparison

The Web is widely used as a delivery channel and the importance of eAccessibility to digital resources is now widely acknowledged. By developing a series of guidelines and designing standards the W3C WAI has played an important role to achieve the goal of eAccessibility and to ensure that Web resources can be accessed by people with special need. Accessibility tools play a critical and important role in ensuring the accessibility of the Web and perform a static analysis of home pages or sites regarding their accessibility. This paper claims that because of no standardization these tools often provide different results of the same tested Website according to their own interpretation and due to the lack of standard testing methods eAccessibility is a difficult goal to achieve

Automatic Teller Machine for disable users and its security issues

Automatic Teller Machine is highly beneficial in banking industry. The banking industry forcefully promotes the use of ATM cards. In spite of the success and extensive use of Automatic Teller Machine, a large percentage of bank clients can not use them and it has been noted that no importance has been given to the feature of the accessibility at all. The significant number of disable users in bank industry had experience many difficulties in their interaction with these ATM’s. Speech technology has been recommended by which a blind person might be encouraged to use ATMs in banking industry. This paper investigated users approach to the use of ATMs and its security issues in banking industry and illustrates how ATMs can be improved with a focus on universal desig

Review of identity and access management systems

Identity and access management is rapidly becoming the top business issue as organizations look to increase security, reduce risk and decrease operational costs. In order to evaluate adequately the emerging maze of technologies brought forward by various vendors it is necessary to critically analyze many aspects of the identity related security terms and techniques. The emerging development of techniques assisting in the consolidation of dispersed yet somewhat related Identity components across the enterprise-wide systems could very well reduce the cost of management, while increasing the control over enforcement of governing Compliance and internal security policies. But as always there may be tradeoffs that could damage the organization if not planned properly. The fascinating fact is that Identity Management is 80% politics and business and 20% technology. Identity Management is a set of processes and supporting infrastructure for the creation, maintenance and use of digital identities (unique ids, attributes, credentials, entitlements. This paper aims to discuss what Identity Management means in the context of Information Technology and to provide an over view of the important components that makeup Identity Management Systems