Answer to Question 1
An extranet was originally defined as an intranet that had been extended to include specific entities outside the boundaries of the organization, such as business partners, customers, or suppliers. Extranets were used to save money and increase efficiency by replacing traditional communication tools such as fax, telephone, and overnight express document carriers. To maintain security within extranets, almost all organizations that created them did so by interconnecting private networks.
A virtual private network (VPN) is a connection that uses public networks and their protocols to send data in a way that protects the data as well as a private network would, but at a lower cost. IP tunneling creates a private passageway through the public Internet that provides secure transmission from one computer to another. The passageway is created by VPN software that encrypts the packet content and then places the encrypted packets inside another packet in a process called encapsulation.
VPNs therefore provide secure transmission of information across the Internet.
Answer to Question 2
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is responsible for managing and doling out Internet domain names. It is not an easy job. And making it harder was a scheme used by some registrars known as domain tasting. Someone would buy up lots of domain names, try them out, and then get rid of the unprofitable ones, all without losing any money. As long as the registrar dumped the domains within the five-day grace period, known as the Add Grace Period (AGP), a full refund was given.
Designed by ICANN to help registrars who made errors in their domain names, the grace period refund was quickly abused by Web sites that populated their domains with lots of ad links that redirected visitors to other sites. It also led to the unavailability of popular names that were scooped up by domain tasters.
In June 2008, ICANN decided to act. The organization stopped refunding the 20-cent annual fee for each registered deleted domain name beyond a certain limit.
But since 20 cents per domain wasn't much of a penalty, ICANN got tougher. The organization began charging registrars 6.75 (the cost of a current .org domain) or higher for each deleted domain beyond a certain limit during the grace period. ICANN has reported that the new policy resulted in a 99.7 percent decrease in domain deletions from June 2008 to April 2009.