Speaker 1: Get text with technology with text Stuff from host efforts
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey there, and welcome to text Stuff. I'm
Speaker 1: your host, Jonathan Strickland, and it's just me flying so
Speaker 1: low today. And I thought I would take a look
Speaker 1: at something that a lot of us deal with frequently,
Speaker 1: but we often take for granted. So I wanted to
Speaker 1: talk about web addresses specifically. I wanted to talk about
Speaker 1: U r l s and how they make using the
Speaker 1: web easier. But in order to do that, I need
Speaker 1: to set some background first. So this is all going
Speaker 1: to be very basic stuff, with the way the Internet
Speaker 1: infrastructure works and the way the web works. But I
Speaker 1: thought it was one of those things that once you
Speaker 1: you have the realization of what's going on in the background,
Speaker 1: you have a greater appreciation for things. So to get
Speaker 1: the obvious out of the way, the Internet is a
Speaker 1: network of computer networks. That's why it's called the Internet.
Speaker 1: It's what allows your computer to communicate with other computers.
Speaker 1: But in order for there to be any communication, you
Speaker 1: have to have a couple of things. You need rules
Speaker 1: that all the computers are going to abide by. You
Speaker 1: need some sort of common language that all the different
Speaker 1: types of computers can understand, because otherwise you would only
Speaker 1: be able to receive information from similar machines as your own,
Speaker 1: because they all operate with different operating systems, using different
Speaker 1: file types, that sort of thing. And you also need
Speaker 1: a method for computers to know where to send a message,
Speaker 1: because if you didn't have that, the Internet would just
Speaker 1: be a bunch of computers shouting into the void, hoping
Speaker 1: that the machine they are trying to reach, actually here's them,
Speaker 1: while simultaneously hoping that everyone else ignores them. And it
Speaker 1: might seem like that's how things work in your typical
Speaker 1: Internet forum, but that's not what's really going on. So
Speaker 1: every device connected to the Internet has an Internet Protocol
Speaker 1: address an i P address. Now, an IP address is
Speaker 1: sort of like a phone number or a physical address.
Speaker 1: It's the number that includes the information needed for data
Speaker 1: to arrive at that particular device. It tells the network
Speaker 1: where that device is in the grand connection of the
Speaker 1: network of networks. Using the old i P V four method,
Speaker 1: the version four of the Internet Protocol, IP addresses have
Speaker 1: a thirty two bit number. Now that creates a hard
Speaker 1: limit for addresses, which is specifically four billion, two million,
Speaker 1: nine D sixty seven thousand, two hundred ninety six of them.
Speaker 1: Now of those, more than two million of them are
Speaker 1: reserved for specific uses, and so you effectively have around
Speaker 1: four billion addresses that could be assigned. An ip v
Speaker 1: four address is represented by four groups of numbers. Those
Speaker 1: range between zero and two, meaning they're two fifty six
Speaker 1: total potential numbers for each one. And each of those
Speaker 1: four groups of numbers is separated from the others by dots.
Speaker 1: UH each of those numbers groups. They represent a group
Speaker 1: of eight bits. So here's an example of an i
Speaker 1: p v four i P address. It could be two
Speaker 1: six dot to seven dot six one dot one three seven.
Speaker 1: That's just a random example, and four billion addresses sounds
Speaker 1: like a bunch, But it didn't take that long for
Speaker 1: those addresses to start getting scarce. The address pool was
Speaker 1: exhausted in February of two thousand eleven. And you might
Speaker 1: have heard some stories about how certain companies, like big
Speaker 1: software companies UH that we're relying on I p v
Speaker 1: four have had some issues running out of IP addresses
Speaker 1: to assign to people on their networks. So they're folks
Speaker 1: couldn't actually connect, and not just people but executives. We're
Speaker 1: not having any luck connecting to the Internet because they
Speaker 1: had run out of IP addresses to assign to their employees.
Speaker 1: It's one of the reasons there's been a big push
Speaker 1: to move from I p V four to I p
Speaker 1: V six, which uses eight bit numbers, not thirty two
Speaker 1: bit numbers. So what does that actually mean? Well, if
Speaker 1: you go with I p V six, there are three
Speaker 1: point four oh three times ten to the thirty eight
Speaker 1: power or two to the hundred and twenty eight power
Speaker 1: addresses available in IPv six. Why am I putting the
Speaker 1: number in those terms, Because to actually spell out the
Speaker 1: number in full would probably take most of this podcast,
Speaker 1: and that would only be interesting for a few seconds.
Speaker 1: So how can we put into terms what that actually means. Well,
Speaker 1: there'd be so many addresses that even if you were
Speaker 1: adding a huge number every pico second, it would probably
Speaker 1: last until our son actually burns out. So I think
Speaker 1: will be good in the long term when everyone switches over,
Speaker 1: will be in great shape until the sun burns out,
Speaker 1: at which point will have other problems to worry about. Now,
Speaker 1: an I p V six address is a little more
Speaker 1: complicated than the I p v for one, so uh,
Speaker 1: if you were to look at one of these addresses.
Speaker 1: An example would sound something like this to zero zero
Speaker 1: one colon c d b A colon zero zero zero zero,
Speaker 1: colon zero zero zero zero, colon zero zero zero zero,
Speaker 1: colon zero zero zero zero, colon three to seven, colon
Speaker 1: n five to It is significantly longer, and now you
Speaker 1: can actually simplify things by omitting the groups of zeros.
Speaker 1: You don't have to include all of those. There is
Speaker 1: a way of having shorthand to express that number, and
Speaker 1: the way you do that is you drop the groups
Speaker 1: of zeros, but you include an extra colon to signify
Speaker 1: that there is no mission. So the long address I
Speaker 1: mentioned just a bit ago could be shortened to two
Speaker 1: zero zero one colon c d b A colon colon
Speaker 1: three to seven colon to That double colon would represent
Speaker 1: that everything in between those were just empty groups of zeros.
Speaker 1: So that's one way of shortening it. Now, your own
Speaker 1: computer's IP address is not likely to stay the same
Speaker 1: across multiple uses. Instead, receives an IP address from a
Speaker 1: dynamic host configuration Protocol server that's on your network. The
Speaker 1: server gives the network a bit more freedom because it
Speaker 1: can shift IP addresses around whenever necessary. But other computers
Speaker 1: on the network, like web servers, they have to have
Speaker 1: the same IP address all the time because otherwise they
Speaker 1: would just get lost in the cluttery. They would have
Speaker 1: to consistently update all the registries to alert them of
Speaker 1: their new IP address whenever they changed, or else any
Speaker 1: incoming traffic would never find the server. So while your
Speaker 1: personal computer might have an IP address one day and
Speaker 1: a different one the next day, the web server that
Speaker 1: you want to visit that has the website you are
Speaker 1: interested in, is going to have the same IP address
Speaker 1: day to day. They have what is called a static
Speaker 1: IP address, so it's going to be assigned to that
Speaker 1: machine and only that machine. You'll never find another machine
Speaker 1: with that same IP address, at least as long as
Speaker 1: the original one is active. Now, the IP address is
Speaker 1: associated with the media access control address for that specific
Speaker 1: network interface on the server. Now, that's a MAC address.
Speaker 1: You probably have heard that term. You typically find the
Speaker 1: MAC address written on a little sticker that tends to
Speaker 1: be on these servers. Sometimes it has sometimes it's written
Speaker 1: down in someone's notebooks somewhere. But that is what is
Speaker 1: permanently associated with the static IP address. And this is
Speaker 1: how the Internet keeps track of where everything is. It's
Speaker 1: all machine readable language, but it's not really useful to humans.
Speaker 1: It's not human readable. Most of us can't remember I
Speaker 1: P addresses that easily, particularly once you start adding lots
Speaker 1: and lots of websites. So if you had to remember
Speaker 1: the IP address of every single web server that you
Speaker 1: wanted to visit in order to, you know, access a
Speaker 1: specific web page, after a while, you would find it
Speaker 1: very difficult to keep them all straight. So we needed
Speaker 1: to have a different means of accessing these things to
Speaker 1: make it easier for people. And that method ends up
Speaker 1: being one that can correspond to those IP addresses but
Speaker 1: doesn't require us to remember the strings of numbers. And
Speaker 1: that's where the u r L comes in. U r
Speaker 1: L stands for Uniform Resource Locator, and that's what allows
Speaker 1: us to use human language to reach the information we
Speaker 1: want when using the web. And it consists of a
Speaker 1: few different pieces, and all of these correspond to machine language,
Speaker 1: which the computers understand, uh, and it's important to be
Speaker 1: able to match the two up. So the pieces that
Speaker 1: make up a u r L. First, if you look
Speaker 1: at a web browser and you're looking at the address
Speaker 1: bar and you're looking at a specific web page. The
Speaker 1: first thing you're probably going to see, depending upon the
Speaker 1: browser and which version you're using, is the h T
Speaker 1: t P colon slash slash prefix. Now that stands for
Speaker 1: Hypertext Transfer Protocol. That little string of letters defines the
Speaker 1: message format that tells the computer which sets of rules
Speaker 1: to follow when exchanging information across the Internet. Because there
Speaker 1: are lots of different sets of rules, different protocols, it
Speaker 1: all depends upon what you are actually trying to do.
Speaker 1: So there's the file Transfer Protocol which is FTP uh
Speaker 1: and that's not the only other one. There's also ones
Speaker 1: like the Internet Message Access Protocol or IMAP. But ht
Speaker 1: P h T t P is the protocol we use
Speaker 1: primarily in web browsers, that hypertext transfer protocol. Now the
Speaker 1: middle bit of the web address, after the H T
Speaker 1: t P colon slash slash it corresponds to the server
Speaker 1: or group of servers you want to access within a
Speaker 1: top level domain. Well, that means we need to learn
Speaker 1: what a top level domain is. Uh So, if you're
Speaker 1: wondering what domain name is, if you look at something
Speaker 1: the the dot com part of your typical web address,
Speaker 1: that is the domain name. Domain names generally tell you
Speaker 1: something about the site you are visiting, so for example,
Speaker 1: dot com suggests a commercial business, dot org is an organization,
Speaker 1: dot gov is government, dot m L is military. Different
Speaker 1: countries have their own top level domains, like dot r
Speaker 1: you as Russia, or dot UK is the United Kingdom,
Speaker 1: but these have become a lot more fluid over the
Speaker 1: last few years, particularly with the release of new top
Speaker 1: level domains that really open the floodgates and make this
Speaker 1: UH not quite as cut and dry as it was
Speaker 1: when it first when the web was was brand new.
Speaker 1: But that is your domain name or the domain name
Speaker 1: of the site that you're trying to visit. So for www,
Speaker 1: dot how stuff works dot com UH, dot com would
Speaker 1: be the domain name, and how stuff works would be
Speaker 1: the second level domain off of the dot com top
Speaker 1: level domain, and Www indicates the host name the specific
Speaker 1: machine inside that second level domain that contains the information
Speaker 1: you want UH, And it's not always going to be Www.
Speaker 1: That's the most common, but it's not always going to
Speaker 1: be that. If you're looking at a long web address as,
Speaker 1: then there's a slash after that top level domain. So
Speaker 1: maybe it was how stuff Works dot com h slash
Speaker 1: and then another name there. Uh. Well, everything that follows
Speaker 1: that slash after the top level domain, uh is a
Speaker 1: reference to the directory in the file system that contains
Speaker 1: the specific file you are interested in. So this is
Speaker 1: just a means of organization. It's a way for the
Speaker 1: computer to know where to look to pull the specific
Speaker 1: file you want to look at. So remember that when
Speaker 1: you're using a web browser and you're looking at a
Speaker 1: web page, you're really looking at a file. And everything
Speaker 1: that follows that that top level domain is just a
Speaker 1: way of pointing the computer, the server to the specific
Speaker 1: file you are interested in. So it sends it to
Speaker 1: your browser and you can see it or experience it. However,
Speaker 1: uh that maybe, So for that to work, you can't
Speaker 1: have duplicate web addresses. Otherwise servers wouldn't know which machine
Speaker 1: you actually wanted to contact. So you can't have two
Speaker 1: different sites that both used www. Dot house, stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com. But how do you prevent duplicates from happening?
Speaker 1: How can you make sure that someone doesn't go out
Speaker 1: and create a website that already uh you know, that
Speaker 1: uses an address that's already in use. Well, that's why
Speaker 1: there is a specific process you have to follow when
Speaker 1: you establish a web address, and that process begins with
Speaker 1: a registrar. Registrars are entities that are authorized to assign
Speaker 1: host names under one or more top level domains like
Speaker 1: dot com and dot org and that sort of stuff.
Speaker 1: Registrars then register those names with inter in IIC, this
Speaker 1: is a service a service rather under i CAN, I
Speaker 1: CAN as an organization. The acronym stands for the Internet
Speaker 1: Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and i can's job
Speaker 1: is to maintain order in all this chaos by overseeing
Speaker 1: the root name servers, among other things. I CAN actually
Speaker 1: has a lot of different responsibilities, but one of them
Speaker 1: is to make sure that this system remains orderly. So
Speaker 1: registration secures the web address for the server containing that
Speaker 1: relevant information. No one else will be allowed to use
Speaker 1: that web address, at least no one will be allowed
Speaker 1: to use it legitimately. Uh So, anyone who uses www
Speaker 1: dot house stuff works dot com should, in theory, go
Speaker 1: straight to the house Stuffworks homepage and nowhere else. I'll
Speaker 1: talk about an exception to this a little bit later,
Speaker 1: but it involves something hinky. So how does the Internet
Speaker 1: know which computer you need to contact when you type
Speaker 1: in the web address in human language, because like I said,
Speaker 1: it's human language, not machine language. Machines don't read human
Speaker 1: language the way we do, at least not natively. You
Speaker 1: can build in natural language algorithms that can parse language
Speaker 1: and understand in a way or at least mapp in
Speaker 1: a way what that language means, and then respond to it.
Speaker 1: But that's not the way machines typically communicate. So the
Speaker 1: way machines do this is through the Domain Name system
Speaker 1: or DNS. Now, in the early days of the Internet,
Speaker 1: there was no DNS. The Network Information Center maintained a
Speaker 1: text file that had web addresses mapped to i P addresses. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, if you had a web address back
Speaker 1: in those early early days of the Internet we're talking
Speaker 1: pre then your web address appeared in this text file
Speaker 1: and was corresponding. You know, it corresponded to the actual
Speaker 1: i P address of the web server that contained that
Speaker 1: web page. So if you had a website at that time,
Speaker 1: then it would be inside this text file. But as
Speaker 1: you probably can imagine, this text file got really big,
Speaker 1: really quickly as more and more entities started jumping on
Speaker 1: the Internet and and putting web pages on the Internet.
Speaker 1: This text file grew to an unmanageable size, so it
Speaker 1: was inefficient to keep a single text document as the reference.
Speaker 1: It was taking too long to cross reference web addresses
Speaker 1: to IP addresses. It was actually increasing the amount of
Speaker 1: time it would take for you to go to a
Speaker 1: website through your browser because it was just taking too
Speaker 1: long to resolve the web address name. So that's when
Speaker 1: the University of Wisconsin formed the Domain Name System and
Speaker 1: it automatically maps web addresses to IP addresses. So when
Speaker 1: you type in an address, your request goes out over
Speaker 1: your network the Internet service provider that you use UM
Speaker 1: it goes over their network to their domain name server. Now,
Speaker 1: not every computer on the domain name system has every
Speaker 1: web address and IP address stored in it. It would
Speaker 1: be crazy if they did. So you type in a
Speaker 1: web address, it goes out over your Internet service provider's
Speaker 1: network to the DNS server. UH. It consults its registry
Speaker 1: to see if it in fact has the information needed,
Speaker 1: and if it doesn't, it works with the other servers
Speaker 1: on the d n S to find that information send
Speaker 1: it to your computer so that it can contact the
Speaker 1: appropriate web server and get the file that it wants. So,
Speaker 1: if you're using a browser to look up a web page,
Speaker 1: your request goes to the d n S and that
Speaker 1: sends the IP address of the appropriate server once it's
Speaker 1: identified it to your browser. Your browser then essentially sends
Speaker 1: a request to the web server that has that particular
Speaker 1: page that file and says, hey, can I see that?
Speaker 1: And the web server, assuming everything is on the up
Speaker 1: and up, says, of course you can, and sends the
Speaker 1: file like the web page to your browser and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, travels through the network in this way. It's
Speaker 1: not it's not a direct pathway from the server to
Speaker 1: your computer necessarily, and then it shows up in your browser. Now,
Speaker 1: all this stuff happens in fractions of a second. Um.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it can take a little longer depending upon the
Speaker 1: stats of the network and the amount of traffic involved.
Speaker 1: But it's still an incredibly fast process to especially when
Speaker 1: you consider how much is actually going on here with
Speaker 1: all the cross referencing. To go from web address address
Speaker 1: to IP address to sending the signal to responding to it,
Speaker 1: it's amazing. Now, I've got a couple of other things
Speaker 1: I wanted to mention. One of those is why are
Speaker 1: so many web addresses written in English. Now not all
Speaker 1: of them are, and in fact, this has changed quite
Speaker 1: a bit over the last few years. But for a
Speaker 1: long time, English was the dominant language in web addresses,
Speaker 1: even web addresses that were in other countries, uh that
Speaker 1: don't use English as their primary language. And the reason
Speaker 1: is pretty you know, well, pretty cut and dry. Really,
Speaker 1: it's because the people who developed the standards we use
Speaker 1: for creating web addresses, we're mostly English speaking Americans, so
Speaker 1: um or English speaking natives, whether it was of America
Speaker 1: or other countries. Now. Uh. The people who established those
Speaker 1: rules included Tim Burners Lee, who worked for CERN and
Speaker 1: was what we consider the the inventor of the Worldwide Web.
Speaker 1: He designed the first web page, and then the Internet
Speaker 1: Engineering Task Force or i e t F. They established
Speaker 1: the set of standards for web addresses in and in
Speaker 1: setting up the standards, the i e t F limited
Speaker 1: web addresses to upper and lowercase Latin letters, in other words,
Speaker 1: the letters that appear in the English alphabet. And you
Speaker 1: could also use digits from zero to nine, and also
Speaker 1: a few symbols, not all of them, but a few
Speaker 1: of them. And if you spoke English, you you happen
Speaker 1: to have an English keyboard, a keyboard that had Latin
Speaker 1: alphabetical letters on it, that was okay, But if you
Speaker 1: have to live in one of those countries that doesn't
Speaker 1: use the Latin alphabet, it made using the web more difficult.
Speaker 1: So for you folks out there using English keyboards such
Speaker 1: as myself, imagine if instead the Internet relied upon a
Speaker 1: different alphabet, like an Arabic alphabet or a Cyrillic alphabet,
Speaker 1: and you only had the English alphabet or Latin alphabet
Speaker 1: to work with, it would be much harder for you
Speaker 1: to navigate the web. You would have to possibly use
Speaker 1: either you know, a mapping system, so that's mapping English
Speaker 1: or Latin letters rather to these other alphabets, or you
Speaker 1: might have to insert the letters one by one using
Speaker 1: the insert um uh option. It's not the easiest thing
Speaker 1: in the world to do um So that was one
Speaker 1: of the drawbacks to the Web for many years, and
Speaker 1: it wasn't until two thousand nine that i CAN approved
Speaker 1: the use of internationalized domain names. That meant that Web
Speaker 1: addresses could finally include non English characters in them. And coincidentally,
Speaker 1: perhaps two thousand nine was also the year that the
Speaker 1: United States government gave up control of i CAN and
Speaker 1: they transitioned it to a multi stakeholder governance model. And
Speaker 1: you might wonder what that means. It's it's essentially i
Speaker 1: CAN is a nonprofit organization and it only answers to
Speaker 1: stakeholders rather than having to answer to the United States government.
Speaker 1: And you might wonder why it was i CAN ever
Speaker 1: answering to the U. S Government in the first place.
Speaker 1: But keep in mind, the Internet itself is essentially the
Speaker 1: product of a US government project. It all started back
Speaker 1: with ARPA back in those days, it wasn't even DARPA yet,
Speaker 1: with our PA net, which established the general structure and
Speaker 1: protocols that would be used later and evolve into the
Speaker 1: ones that we use for the Internet. So the United
Speaker 1: States was very heavily involved in the construction and the
Speaker 1: standardization of the Internet, which is why things are the
Speaker 1: way they are now. Besides non Latin characters, you are
Speaker 1: els can now also contain emojis, those little symbols that
Speaker 1: mean all sorts of stuff. These days. Used to be
Speaker 1: just being smiley and frowny faces and winky faces, but
Speaker 1: now it's all sorts of stuff. And we've seen a
Speaker 1: couple of different examples of this, Coke launched an ad
Speaker 1: campaign that used a single emoji Internet address, and recently
Speaker 1: Norwegian Airlines did this for a special announcement they were
Speaker 1: launching direct flights from Copenhagen to Las Vegas. So there
Speaker 1: you are. L was www dot Airplane, Emoji slot Machine,
Speaker 1: Emoji money, emoji dot w S, which is adorable and maddening.
Speaker 1: Um so this could lead to a new era of
Speaker 1: emoji u r l's aimed at people younger than I am,
Speaker 1: so get off my lawn. Okay, But seriously, this actually
Speaker 1: does sound like a pretty nifty idea to mean. The
Speaker 1: limitation really is that unless you have a device that
Speaker 1: has the emojis available, it makes it harder to access
Speaker 1: these sites, at least harder to access them directly. You
Speaker 1: could still get there through other means, like a direct
Speaker 1: link from another site or search results from a search
Speaker 1: engine like Google. But maybe it's not a big deal anyway,
Speaker 1: because I mean, how many people actually bother to type
Speaker 1: in the web address for the websites they are going to?
Speaker 1: Besides me? I know I do it. Maybe some of
Speaker 1: you out there do it a lot too. But in
Speaker 1: my mind this is very similar to the limitations we
Speaker 1: saw when we could only use Latin alphabetical figures or
Speaker 1: character is rather when typing in web addresses. It's it's
Speaker 1: very similar to that because if you don't have a
Speaker 1: smartphone or other device that has these emojis that are
Speaker 1: built into it, you then have to construct them some
Speaker 1: other way. So I imagine most of these web addresses
Speaker 1: will have a language variant of them, not just the
Speaker 1: emoji ones. All right, So we've got a couple of
Speaker 1: other things we need to cover before I can wrap
Speaker 1: up here. One of those is what about you are
Speaker 1: l shorteners? So these are techniques that redirect traffic to
Speaker 1: a domain name by using a short string to conserve characters. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, instead of having a long web address,
Speaker 1: you might have a much shorter one. Sometimes the shorter
Speaker 1: one is a vanity you are l so that it's
Speaker 1: very easy for you to tell somebody, Hey, use this
Speaker 1: very short uh web address, You'll go straight to my site.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's more of like a random seeming string of
Speaker 1: letters and numbers, which makes a little harder to communicate,
Speaker 1: at least verbally, But at any rate, these techniques are
Speaker 1: meant to make it easier to navigate to a specific
Speaker 1: page that otherwise has a long or cumbersome web address.
Speaker 1: It can be used for lots of different reasons. It
Speaker 1: can also be used to track traffic, so in other words,
Speaker 1: it's a strategy so that you can tag traffic for
Speaker 1: one reason or another in order to keep an eye
Speaker 1: on what's going on with a site. So in other words,
Speaker 1: it's not just a redirect. It's also kind of tagging
Speaker 1: to get an idea of traffic patterns. Sometimes it's used
Speaker 1: in a sneaky way to disguise the actual destination of
Speaker 1: the redirect. So in other words, I could say, hey,
Speaker 1: look at this really cool website, and I use a
Speaker 1: u r L shortener, And unless you have a means
Speaker 1: of previewing where that shortener is pointing to, you might
Speaker 1: click on it not knowing what the destination is and
Speaker 1: it might end up being a place where there's a
Speaker 1: lot of malware. Or maybe it's a website that has
Speaker 1: tons of pop up ads and I'm really just trying
Speaker 1: to drive traffic to it because that way I can
Speaker 1: drive up revenue. Um. There are a lot of kind
Speaker 1: of ways to abuse the shortened u r L s.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's just to shorten the address for the purpose
Speaker 1: of messages that have a real strict character limit like Twitter,
Speaker 1: And of course Twitter has its own well purchased a
Speaker 1: u r L shortener so that if you are posting
Speaker 1: a web address into Twitter, it will automatically shorten it
Speaker 1: for you so that it can conserve some of those characters,
Speaker 1: because the hundred forty precious characters is you know, you've
Speaker 1: gotta you gotta maximize that as much as you can
Speaker 1: in order to get your point across. Now, the redirect
Speaker 1: gets cross reference to the u r L and thus
Speaker 1: the IP address of the shortened web address, So that
Speaker 1: means there's a registry database for the shortened links. Uh,
Speaker 1: So you have the short version that's cross reference to
Speaker 1: the long version of the web address, which in turn
Speaker 1: is reference to the IP address of the actual web
Speaker 1: server that the page lives on. It's a lot of
Speaker 1: different degrees of separation, but it's still the basic same principle. Now,
Speaker 1: this idea was first patented in two thousand five. The
Speaker 1: pattern was filed back in two thousands, so this was
Speaker 1: something people were thinking about pretty early on. Keeping in
Speaker 1: mind that the web really only got started in the
Speaker 1: early nineties. One issue with these services is that if
Speaker 1: the entity that maintains the registry database goes out of business,
Speaker 1: the links go dead, and that happens whether or not
Speaker 1: the destination website is working or has gone away as well. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, let's say that I post a blog
Speaker 1: a blog post where I use a shortened u r
Speaker 1: L in it, but the company that actually made the
Speaker 1: short u r L shortener and maintained the registry goes
Speaker 1: out of business, then that lincolns up being dead, even
Speaker 1: if the website I linked to is still perfectly fine,
Speaker 1: whereas if I had used the full web address, then
Speaker 1: the link would presumably still work just fine, assuming that
Speaker 1: no one had changed anything on the or end. So
Speaker 1: that is a downside. In fact, that some people have
Speaker 1: really criticized u r L shorteners for that very reason,
Speaker 1: saying that you are destabilizing the Internet by using them.
Speaker 1: Here's a little bit of trivia about u r L s.
Speaker 1: Tim Burners Lee has some regrets about how you are
Speaker 1: L s are actually structured. He feels some sense of
Speaker 1: responsibility for this, having played a part in creating the standards,
Speaker 1: and for one, he says that he really wishes that
Speaker 1: he had not used a double slash after h T
Speaker 1: T P colon. He says the colon it means they
Speaker 1: could have used a single slash. Think of all the
Speaker 1: time you would have saved in your life not having
Speaker 1: to have put two slashes in. I mean two slashes
Speaker 1: would be awesome in some cases, like it would be
Speaker 1: an amazing version of guns and roses, But for web
Speaker 1: addresses that could get pretty irritating. He also which says
Speaker 1: he wishes that he had used slashes instead of dots
Speaker 1: to separate each element in a web address. So for
Speaker 1: the example of h T T P colon slash slash
Speaker 1: www dot how stuff works dot com, that would instead
Speaker 1: become h T T P colon slash www slash how
Speaker 1: stuff works slash calm. So things would look a lot
Speaker 1: different if Tim burns Ley could go back and do
Speaker 1: it all over again. But now we've already established what
Speaker 1: the standards are, so it's too late, and we just
Speaker 1: have to struggle through with our dots and extra slashes,
Speaker 1: and that's all all we can all we can do. Really,
Speaker 1: here's another fun bit of trivia. So in May of
Speaker 1: news broke that Google's Chrome browser now has an experimental
Speaker 1: new feature in it that is an option that uses
Speaker 1: ultrasonic sound waves to transmit u r L data to
Speaker 1: nearby devices that have microphones. So ultrasonics on waves are
Speaker 1: well outside the range of human hearing, so you wouldn't
Speaker 1: hear anything when you use this. This actual feature, and
Speaker 1: instead of having to copy and paste a u r
Speaker 1: L from a web address into a message and then
Speaker 1: sending that message onto somebody to say, hey, check out
Speaker 1: this link, assuming that that person is in the same
Speaker 1: area that you are in, you could press a little
Speaker 1: button and a your computer speaker would omit this ultrasonic chirp,
Speaker 1: which again you would be unable to hear, but someone
Speaker 1: else with a computer or mobile device that has a
Speaker 1: microphone attached to it could have that get picked up
Speaker 1: by the device and it would translate the chirp into
Speaker 1: a u r L, which then you could visit. So
Speaker 1: if I found a really awesome website and I wanted
Speaker 1: to share it with folks, here at how stuff works.
Speaker 1: I could tell people, hey, you know, get ready to
Speaker 1: to listen with your computers, and then press a little
Speaker 1: button and transmit it. Just kind of neat. Now here's
Speaker 1: some not so fun trivia. One common practice that has
Speaker 1: been an issue since web addresses have become a thing
Speaker 1: is for competitors to register u r l's that are
Speaker 1: misspellings or typos of their chief competition so that they
Speaker 1: themselves can grab that traffic. In other words, imagine that
Speaker 1: you are Coca Cola and you end up UH registering
Speaker 1: p w p s I dot com, so you're one
Speaker 1: letter off from Pepsi. You've just you've gone instead of
Speaker 1: doing EVE, done W, which is one key over from
Speaker 1: the E key, And the reason you've done it is
Speaker 1: so that anyone who makes the typo trying to visit
Speaker 1: Pepsi's website instead goes to your website, and your website
Speaker 1: might just be filled with propaganda about how coke is
Speaker 1: awesome and Pepsi is stupid, and you should just buy
Speaker 1: coke products and not Pepsi products. This kind of U
Speaker 1: r L hijacking was really common still is fairly common,
Speaker 1: not as common today as it used to be, in
Speaker 1: large part because companies have gotten savvy to it. So
Speaker 1: a lot of companies will buy various variations of their
Speaker 1: brand names, including common misspellings of them, so that way,
Speaker 1: if someone types in the u r L, they get
Speaker 1: redirected to the actual website they wanted to go to,
Speaker 1: as opposed to going to some other site that is
Speaker 1: unrelated to the brand. So we're seeing it less and
Speaker 1: less simply because companies are taking the effort to prevent
Speaker 1: it from happening, but it still can happen. There's nothing
Speaker 1: that protects the system from that sort of stuff. In fact,
Speaker 1: it would be kind of antithetical to the spirit of
Speaker 1: the Internet to build in restrictions based on that. But
Speaker 1: worse than that, worse than U r L hijacking by far,
Speaker 1: is d n S hijacking. It's also known as d
Speaker 1: n S redirection. This is when someone read REX traffic
Speaker 1: to a rogue DNS server instead of the legitimate one
Speaker 1: that's on your Internet service provider. So remember earlier I
Speaker 1: said that if you typed in a web address and
Speaker 1: in your browser and you hit enter, normally your computer
Speaker 1: would send this message along to the DNS server that's
Speaker 1: on your Internet service provider, which would then follow the
Speaker 1: set of rules to make sure it found the correct
Speaker 1: IP address to send to your browser, and then you
Speaker 1: would end up retrieving the proper web page, the one
Speaker 1: that you wanted. But there's some types of malware that
Speaker 1: you can encounter that will make fundamental changes to your
Speaker 1: computer or the web browser. Uh. There are a lot
Speaker 1: of different types of malware that can do this, and
Speaker 1: the ones I'm specifically talking about here would change the
Speaker 1: DNS settings on your computer so it's pointed to a
Speaker 1: different DNS server, one that's owned by somebody else and
Speaker 1: not the I s P. So when you open up
Speaker 1: your web browser and you type in a web address
Speaker 1: and this malware has affected your computer, instead of sending
Speaker 1: it to the DNS server on the s I s P,
Speaker 1: it sends it to this rogue DNS server, which could
Speaker 1: point you anywhere. It does not have to correlate your
Speaker 1: web address to the proper i P address and send
Speaker 1: you to the right place. It might send you someplace,
Speaker 1: you know, random, which would kind of be a case
Speaker 1: of someone being mischievous and and and just sort of
Speaker 1: destructive for no particular reason. Or it might send you
Speaker 1: to a website that has other malware on it so
Speaker 1: that your computer gets infected by even more malware. Or
Speaker 1: you might end up on one of those websites that
Speaker 1: just has tons of ads on it, because that's how
Speaker 1: the hacker is getting revenue. Every time you go on
Speaker 1: the ads. All these different ad impressions happened, and the
Speaker 1: hacker is getting paid on a per impression basis. Um or,
Speaker 1: you know, you might end up having a mirror site,
Speaker 1: one that looks like an official site. It is there
Speaker 1: in order to phish data from you, to convince you
Speaker 1: that you are on a legitimate website, but in fact
Speaker 1: you're on a fake one, and the data you are
Speaker 1: sharing is going straight to the hacker, giving them even
Speaker 1: more power over you. That's a particularly nasty attack. Um Now. Fortunately,
Speaker 1: it's the sort of thing you can largely prevent because
Speaker 1: if you're careful, if you have UH virus protection on
Speaker 1: your computer, if you have a good firewall set up,
Speaker 1: you are limiting your exposure to that sort of stuff.
Speaker 1: If you're careful about the links you visit. You know,
Speaker 1: all of these things the basic security rules of using
Speaker 1: the internet. If you follow those, you should be in
Speaker 1: pretty good shape. You probably won't encounter the d n
Speaker 1: S redirect attack. You could have cases of hackers actually
Speaker 1: targeting DNS servers, but that's something that we as users
Speaker 1: have no control over, and in fact, I s p
Speaker 1: s put a lot of money into protecting the servers have. Obviously,
Speaker 1: their entire business depends upon the viability of those machines,
Speaker 1: so it's one that we don't have to worry about
Speaker 1: quite as much. Anyway. That is how you are L's work.
Speaker 1: It's why web addresses are the way they are, It's
Speaker 1: why so many are in English. I thought it'd be
Speaker 1: kind of fun to just sort of run down those
Speaker 1: basic rules so that we could have a better understanding
Speaker 1: of it. I look forward to doing more of these
Speaker 1: in the future, where I take different types of basic
Speaker 1: technology and kind of explain them. This is just one
Speaker 1: type of episode that I like to do here at
Speaker 1: Tech Stuff. Obviously, I also enjoy having guests, either as
Speaker 1: guest hosts so they talk to me about certain types
Speaker 1: of technology, or an interview subject. I of course love
Speaker 1: to concentrate on all things technology. It doesn't have to
Speaker 1: be a specific technology. It could be a company or
Speaker 1: persona in tech. It could be how technology affects society.
Speaker 1: I like to look at all these different things. You
Speaker 1: guys have been sending me some incredible suggestions for future topics,
Speaker 1: many of which I'm going to be tackling very very soon.
Speaker 1: I want you to keep doing that, keep sending me
Speaker 1: those suggestions. The address that you can write to is
Speaker 1: tech Stuff at how stuffwards dot com, or you can
Speaker 1: drop me a line on Twitter or Facebook or on
Speaker 1: Tumbler at all three. I am tex Stuff, your H
Speaker 1: s W. And I look forward to hearing from you,
Speaker 1: and you'll hear from me again really soon. For more
Speaker 1: on this, embattens another topic because it has to works
Speaker 1: dot Com