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Glossary of “Buzzwords”
& Concepts Helpful for Survival
Digital or electronic cash: Also called “e-cash,” these
terms refer to any of several schemes enabling payment for goods or services
by transmitting a number from one computer to another. The numbers, just like
those on a dollar bill, are issued by a bank and represent specified sums of
real money. One of the key features of digital cash is that it's anonymous
and reusable, just like real cash. This is a key difference between e-cash
and credit card transactions over the Internet.
Electronic wallet: This is a payment scheme that stores your
credit card numbers on your hard drive in an encrypted form. You can then make
purchases at Web sites that support that particular electronic wallet. When
you go to a participating online store, you click a Pay button to initiate
a credit card payment via a secure transaction enabled by the electronic wallet
company’s server.
Public-key encryption: one of the strongest
encryption methods available, it’s a system that uses two keys—a
public key known to everyone and a private or secret key known only to the
recipient of the message. An important element to the public key system is
that only the public key can encrypt messages and only the corresponding private
key can decrypt them. Public-key systems, such as PGP, are becoming popular
for transmitting information via the Internet because they are extremely secure
and relatively simple to use.
Secure server: A Web server that supports any of the major security
protocols, like SSL, that encrypt and decrypt messages to protect them against
third party tampering.
Secure Electronic Transactions (SET): SET encodes the credit
card numbers stored on merchants’ servers. This standard, created by Visa and
MasterCard, enjoys wide support in the banking community.
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL): A protocol designed
to create a secure connection to a server using “public key encryption,” to
protect data as it travels over the Internet. SSL was created by Netscape but
has now been published in the public domain.
Shopping cart: A metaphor for a piece of
software that acts as an online store’s catalog and ordering process.
Typically, a shopping cart is the graphical interface linking a company’s
ecommerce site with its deeper infrastructure. Consumers can select merchandise;
review what they have selected; modify their selections; and ultimately purchase
the merchandise. Shopping carts can be sold as independent pieces of software
so companies can integrate them into their own unique online solution, or they
can may be integrated into a complete merchant application.
Trust-e: A partnership of companies seeking to build public
trust in ecommerce by putting a Good Housekeeping-style seal of approval on
sites that don’t violate consumer privacy.
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