Efficient use of information technology (IT) is considered a major determinant of an end-user's business performance and an enterprise's competitiveness. A 16-item tool that can efficiently measure end-user information competency is presented with the measures. The validity and reliability of the tool is confirmed, and the tool's theoretical and practical applications are discussed.

There is an emerging requirement for real-time flow-based traffic monitoring, which is vital to detecting and/or tracing DoS attacks as well as troubleshooting and traffic engineering in the ISP networks. We propose the architecture for a scalable real-time flow measurement tool in order to allow operators to flexibly define "the targeted flows" on-demand, to obtain various statistics on those flows, and to visualize them in a real-time manner. A traffic distribution device and multiple traffic capture devices processing packets in parallel are included in the architecture, in which the former device copies traffic and distributes it to the latter devices. We evaluate the performance of a proto-type implementation on PC-UNIX in testbed experiments to demonstrate the scalability of our architecture. The evaluation shows that the performance increases in proportion to the number of the capture devices and the maximum performance reaches 80 K pps with six capture devices. Finally we also show applications of our tool, which indicate the advantage of flexible fine-grained flow measurements.

The recent evolution on the network tomography have successfully provided principles and methodologies of inferring network-internal (local) characteristics solely from end-to-end measurements, which should be followed by deployment in practical use. In this paper, two kinds of user-oriented tools for inferring one-way packet losses based on the network tomography are proposed. They can infer one-way packet loss rates on paths or path segments from/to a user-host (a client) to/from a specified target host (an application server or a router) without any measurement on the target, and thus can find the congested area along the path between the client and an application server. One is a stand-alone tool running on the client, and the other is a client-server style tool running on both the client and a proxy measurement server distributed in the Internet. Prototypes of the tools have been developed and evaluated by experiments in the actual Internet environment, which shows that the tools can infer the loss rates within 1% errors in various network conditions.