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CNET editor Dong Ngo gives all his answers to questions about the basics of home networking.

A typical wireless router with LAN ports for Ethernet-ready devices and antennas for Wi-Fi clients.

As the guy who reviews networking products I generally receive a couple of e-mails from readers a day, and most of them, in one way or another, are asking about the basics of networking (as in computer to computer, I am not talking about social networks here.)

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate e-mails because, at the very least, it gives me the impression that there are real people out there amid the sea of spam. But I'd rather not keep repeating myself. So instead of saying the same thing over and over again in individual e-mails, I'll talk all about home networking basics, in layman's terms, in this post.

Advanced and experienced users won't need this, but for the rest, I'd recommend reading the whole thing, and if you want to quickly find out what a networking term means, you can search for it here.

1. Wired Networking A wired local network is basically a group of devices connected to one another using network cables, more often than not, with the help of a router, which brings us to the very first networking term.

Router: This is the central device of a home network that you can plug one end of a network cable into. The other end of the cable goes into a networking device that has a network port. If you want to add more network devices to a router, you'll need more cables and more ports on the router. These ports, both on the router and on the end devices, are called Local Area Network (LAN) ports. They are also known as RJ45 ports. The moment you plug a device into a router, you have yourself a wired network. Networking devices that come with an RJ45 network port are called Ethernet-ready devices. More on this below.

The back of a typical router; the WAN port is clearly distinguished from the LANs.

LAN ports: A home router usually has four LAN ports, meaning out of the box it can host a network of up to four wired networking devices. If you want to have a larger network, you will need to resort to a switch (or a hub), which adds more LAN ports to the router. Generally a home router can handle up to about 250 networking devices, and the majority of homes and even small businesses don't need more than that. There are currently two main speed standards for LAN ports: Ethernet, which caps at 100Mbps (or about 13MBps), and Gigabit Ethernet, which caps at 1Gbps (or about 125MBps). In other words, it takes about a minute to transfer a CD's worth of data (some 700MB or about 250 digital songs) over an Ethernet connection. With Gigabit Ethernet, the same job takes just about 5 seconds. In real life, the average speed of an Ethernet connection is about 8MBps, and of a Gigabit Ethernet connection is somewhere between 45 and 80MBps. The actual speed of a network connection depends on many factors, such as the end devices, the quality of the cable, the amount of traffic, and so on.

In short, LAN ports on a router allow Ethernet-ready devices to connect to one another and share data. In order for them to also access the Internet, the router needs to also have a Wide Area Network (WAN) port.

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Home networking explained: Here's the URL for you

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire -08/06/12)- Jobscience Inc., the leader in Social Relationship Management for Hiring, today announced the acquisition of Atomkeep, a pioneer in social profile management. Atomkeep helps users sync their profile information on social networks, job boards and other internet sites. Users gain a streamlined way to validate and control their social identity across multiple sites. Accessing user-validated accounts helps recruiters and employers avoid cases of mistaken identity and potential liability issues.

"It has become common practice for employers and colleges to request access to social media sites and use the information to screen applicants," said Ted Elliott. "Job seekers need to control their social identity and validate what they are willing to share with employers."

On June 26, 2012 the California Assembly Judiciary Committee unanimously approved Senate Bill 1349, which seeks to prohibit California colleges, universities and businesses from requiring a student or prospective student to disclose the user name or account password to social networking sites. A U.S. congressional committee is considering the Social Networking Online Protection Act (SNOPA), which would forbid employers from requiring job seekers or workers to hand over their social networking passwords as a condition of employment.

"Employers want to rely on validated social information and job seekers need the tools to control their public identity. Atomkeep is a first step for Jobscience in bridging the candidate's needs with an employer's request to understand the social graph of future employees."

Atomkeep helps users easily ensure that all of their social network profiles from sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, Monster, Yelp and YouTube are accurate and up-to-date. Users simply build a profile on a single website and then publish it to all of his/her accounts. Users can then give potential employers or universities permission to access their validated and updated social profiles -- which improves the accuracy of the information and eliminates potential mistaken identity situations.

About JobscienceAs the leader in Social Relationship Management for hiring, Jobscience understands that social connectivity is more than a feature -- it's the future. Deployed on salesforce.com's Force.com platform, Jobscience's agile solutions bring social, mobile and CRM processes to talent management, keeping corporations and staffing agencies connected with and attracting top talent. For the last four years, Jobscience has been voted the AppExchange Customer Choice Award in HR and Recruiting by salesforce.com customers, and recently won the 2011 Brandon Hall Gold Award for Best Advance in Talent Acquisition Technology. Discover what Jobscience clients already know: great people, great technology and great companies are all connected. To learn more, visit http://www.jobscience.com.

All trademarks and registered trademarks in this document are the properties of their respective owners.

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Jobscience Acquires Atomkeep to Help Job Seekers Control Their Social Identity

06.08.2012 - (idw) Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)

First set of projects for networking and social science research cooperation between researchers in India and four European countries approved No 42 6 August 2012

The Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) in association with the Deutsche For-schungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), the UKEconomic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Netherlands Organi-sation for Scientific Research (NWO) have launched the first set of projects for networking and social science research cooperation between researchers in India and the four European countries.

The ORA scheme provides a straightforward mechanism for leading social scientists to obtain na-tional funding to collaborate with partners elsewhere in Europe, avoiding many of the bureaucratic obstacles and restrictions associated with other types of European funding.

The scheme is open to proposals in any area of the social sciences, resulting in an exciting portfolio of projects that will influence policy and push the boundaries of our understanding of individual and social behaviour.

This is the first multilateral social science research collaboration that India has entered into. The networking projects will rationalise and economise Europes efforts of engaging with India to pro-duce high-quality, high-impact social science research addressing major global challenges including economic growth and development, energy and climate change, and health and well-being.

The first joint call announced under this India-Europe initiative in May 2011 resulted in six projects agreed for funding over a period of three years. All projects have an Indian partner and five have a UK partner and other European partners. The six projects awarded funding will cover areas of growing social concern ranging from ageing and wellbeing, bullying and pupil-safety, globally ac-cessible medicine to mapping the cultural authority of science, and climate governance.

The awards include:

Mapping the Cultural Authority of Science across Europe and India European Principal Investigators: Professor Martin W. Bauer, London School of Economics (LSE), STeP (Science, Technology & the Public Sphere), Institute of Social Psychology (IPS), London, United Kingdom; Dr. Petra Pansegrau, Institute of Science and Technology Studies (IWK), Biele-feld University, Germany Indian Principal Investigators: Dr. Rajesh Shukla, NCAER Centre for Macro Consumer Research (NCAER-CMCR), New Delhi; Dr. Anil Rai, Andian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute (IARSI), New Delhi Ageing and Well-being in a Globalising World European Principal Investigators: Dr. Ajay Bailey, Professor Inge Hutter, Population Research Cen-tre, University of Groningen, The Netherlands; Professor Maria Evandrou, Centre for Research on Ageing and ESRC Centre for Population Change, University of Southampton, United Kingdom Indian Principal Investigators: Professor K.S. James, Population Research Centre, Institute of Social and Economic Change, Bangalore; Professor S. Irudaya Rajan, Centre for Development Studies, Thirvananthapuram

Indian-European Multi-level Climate Governance Research Network (MCGRN) European Principal Investigators: Professor Miranda Schreurs, Environmental Policy Research Cen-tre (FFU), Freie Universitt Berlin, Germany; Professor Frank Biermann, Institute for Environmen-tal Studies (IVM), Department of Environmental Policy Analysis, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands Indian Principal Investigators: Dr. Arabinda Mishra, TERI University, New Delhi; Professor Joyashree Roy, Global Change Programme, Jadavpur University, Kolkata; Professor K.V. Devi Prasad, Department of Ecology and Environmental Science, Pondicherry University, Pondicherry

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First Indian-European Research Networking Projects in the Social Sciences Launched

The worth of a Facebook picture hinges on what it says. For a Phillipsburg man, one picture spoke volumes.

It was worth six months in the Warren County jail.

A picture of Brian Slack, 31, holding a beer on the other side of the Delaware River revealed that he broke three rules of his parole: no Facebook, no leaving the state without permission and no alcohol. Slack was sentenced in June for violating the conditions of a community supervision for a life sentence imposed for a 2001 sexual assault conviction, according to court documents.

Social network requirements in New Jersey, for the most part, stop there, but some lawmakers are seeking to expand restrictions to other offenders. Assemblywoman Donna Simon, D-Hunterdon, announced earlier this month plans to propose an identical version of Louisiana's recently passed law that requires Megan's Law offenders to identify themselves as such in their social networking profiles. Simon said the law would serve as an additional protection against offenders veiling their identity to prey on children.

"Anybody who's ever watched, 'To Catch a Predator' knows they don't come to the door anymore," she said.

The question of a sex offender's right to social networking sites has saturated national discussion in the past few months. The Supreme Court recently upheld an Indiana law banning registered offenders from the sites entirely, and Louisiana's law went live Aug.1. State laws tread in varying degrees of prohibition, which is changing as lawmakers address social networks as tools of supervision.

In New Jersey, lifelong parole is imposed on offenders convicted of aggravated sexual assault, endangering the welfare of a child and kidnapping. A ban on social networks or the Internet as a whole is sometimes a condition of probation but is rarely applied in Warren County, said Assistant Chief Probation Officer Brenda Beacham. It's a special condition considered in cases where a computer was used to commit the crime, she said.

The sites can also be useful tools for probation officers to monitor those in their care.

"There are times when it is helpful because you can see something that you can talk to them about," she said.

However, checking sites like Facebook and Twitter isn't, at this point, a major component of an officer's job, she said.

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Social networking and sex offenders: Pennsylvania and New Jersey approach bans differently

As the social networking companies try to make more money, they may become less friendly to outside developers.

Hundreds of thousands of developers know that building apps that rely on the Facebook or Twitter platforms comes at a riskat any time, the companies can change their access rules or launch a competing feature.

The risk is often worth the built-in audience and data from millions of users. Just look at how Zynga grew. Lately, though, as both Twitter and Facebook strain to bring in more revenue and threaten to tighten their platform rules or alter their features to this end, the perennial uncertainty is worsening. For some startups, the situation is even stalling investments or delaying product plans while they wait to see how the future will shake out.

Twitter, which attracted millions of users in part by throwing open its data to outside developers and spawning more than a million third-party apps, has given developers reason to think it may be changing course.

As a business plan for Twitter emerged, the third-party software that many people still use to access the service or interact with it offsite may threaten its ambitions. This is because it cannot guarantee that those using outside apps will see sponsored tweets or the new expanded news and multimedia posts on its site. In a June blog post, Twitter said it would seek a more "consistent" user experience going forward, leading to speculation that it would soon issue more constraining developer guidelines for many kinds of apps. "Consistent" is the same word Twitter used when it began to make it more difficult for developers to maintain applications that closely replicated the mainstream Twitter experience last year.

This time, Twitter has not yet given additional details, leaving startups and investors wondering about how it might restrict access to its platform. Speculation worsened when Twitter stopped allowing tweets to be posted on LinkedIn and also shut off "friend finding" access to Instagram's photo-sharing app in recent weeks. The CEO of Flipboard, a company that makes an app that curates social news by integrating with Twitter and other sites, stepped down from Twitter's board this week, fueling further speculation about a brewing conflict between Twitter and the companies that depend on it.

The uncertainty is already translating into economic damages, says longtime Internet entrepreneur Nova Spivack. His current startup, Bottlenose, is building a way to find popular news by measuring activity on different social networks, including Twitter. "There are a lot of companies that have ground to a halt as people wonder. It's irresponsible," he says.

After getting no clarification from Twitter about its plans for developers and hearing the other startups cite this as a reason they are struggling to raise money from investors, Spivack launched a petition yesterday calling on Twitter to "uphold [its] promise of being an open platform," or, at minimum, make its intentions clear.

A less open Twitter may not bode well for innovation in social networking. "If you can't pull the data out that you want, it makes the kind of stuff you can do less and less interesting," says Ed Finkler, a developer who built an open-source Twitter client in 2007 but has stopped work on it, partly because Twitter's rule change last year made developing the app more difficult for him.

Facebook also seems on course for increased friction with third-party developers and startups, especially as its stock price tumbles and pressure to make money mounts.

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Startups Worry that Twitter and Facebook Are Blocking Their Way