Computer Awareness GK Questions with Answers – Page 7

Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi was a ninth-century Persian mathematician and astronomer whose treatise on calculation with Hindu-Arabic numerals reached Europe in Latin translation; his Latinised name produced the word algorithm, and another of his works gave the word algebra.

The oval is the terminal symbol, and a well-formed flowchart has exactly one Start terminal and at least one Stop terminal; a chart that can never reach a Stop describes an infinite loop and so breaks the finiteness property of an algorithm.

The diamond or rhombus is the decision symbol: it holds a condition and has one entry with two exits, marked Yes and No, so the flow branches according to the test.

ONDC is not an application or a marketplace but a set of open protocols, in the same spirit as UPI in payments, designed so that a buyer using one application can discover and order from a seller registered on a different application.

EDI is the computer-to-computer exchange of standard business documents such as purchase orders, invoices, despatch advices and payment instructions, in an agreed format, without paper and without a person re-typing the data at the other end.

This Act is the legal foundation of electronic commerce in India: it recognised electronic records as equivalent to paper records, gave digital and later electronic signatures the status of a signature, provided for certifying authorities, and created the offences under which online fraud such as identity theft and cheating by…

On such a platform both the buyer and the seller are enterprises: a factory sources raw material, components, machinery or packaging from suppliers, and the orders are usually bulk orders with negotiated prices, credit terms and long-term supply contracts.

GeM is an online marketplace on which central and state government departments, public sector undertakings and other public bodies buy common-use goods and services from registered sellers, with the aim of making purchase faster, cheaper and transparent.

HTTPS is HTTP carried inside a protected channel: the browser and the server first exchange a digital certificate and agree on keys, after which card numbers, passwords and addresses travel as cipher text that an eavesdropper on the network cannot read.

M-commerce, or mobile commerce, is the part of electronic commerce conducted on smartphones, tablets and even feature phones over a wireless network, and the term is credited to Kevin Duffey in 1997.

NPCI, set up in 2008 as the umbrella organisation for retail payments in the country, built and runs UPI, which lets a user link several bank accounts to one mobile application and transfer money instantly using a virtual payment address, without sharing account numbers.

Here both sides of the deal are individuals and the website only provides the listing, the search and sometimes the payment and dispute machinery, earning a fee or advertising revenue rather than a trading margin.

In an auction the price is not fixed by the seller but is discovered from what buyers are willing to bid, and this way of trading appears at two levels.

This Act gave electronic records and digital signatures the same legal standing as paper records and handwritten signatures, and its amendment of 2008 broadened the provision to electronic signatures generally.

The Advanced Encryption Standard is the Rijndael cipher, designed by the Belgian cryptographers Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen, which won an open competition and was adopted in 2001 in place of the ageing Data Encryption Standard.

In a key pair, whatever one key locks only the other can unlock. So a message encrypted with the receiver's public key can be opened only by the receiver's private key, which nobody else holds; that is exactly what confidentiality requires.

A digital signature is made by hashing the document and encrypting that digest with the signer's private key.

The Message Digest 5 algorithm takes an input of any length and returns a 128-bit digest.

RSA, named after Rivest, Shamir and Adleman, works with a linked pair of keys and takes its security from the difficulty of factorising the product of two large prime numbers; it is used both to exchange keys and to create digital signatures.

HTTPS is HTTP carried inside an SSL or TLS tunnel, and the port reserved for it is 443, which is why a padlock appears in the address bar when a site is reached on that port with a valid certificate.