Computer Protocols- TCP/IP, POP, SMTP, HTTP, FTP and More. In order for computers to communicate with one another, standard methods of information transfer and processing have been devised. These are referred to as protocols and some of the more common ones such as TCP, IP, UDP, POP, SMTP, HTTP, and FTP are discussed here.
One of the possible uses for this function is as a hash key. See the notes at the beginning of this section about storing hash values efficiently. You can also use SHA1() as a cryptographic function for storing passwords. SHA() is synonymous with SHA1() .
Encoding globally available pointers helps protect them from being exploited. The EncodePointer function obfuscates the pointer value with a secret so that it cannot be predicted by an external agent. The secret used by EncodePointer is different for each process. A pointer must be decoded before it can be used.