Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I am your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and how the tech are you? It's time for a
Speaker 1: tech Stuff classic episode. This episode originally published on June
Speaker 1: twenty nine, two thousand fifteen. It is titled What's My Address?
Speaker 1: It's all about Internet addresses and network addresses and why
Speaker 1: those are important. Let's sit back and listen. So to
Speaker 1: get the obvious out of the way, the Internet is
Speaker 1: a 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 hears 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 address,
Speaker 1: an I p address. Now, an IP address is sort
Speaker 1: of like a phone number or a physical address. It's
Speaker 1: the number that includes the information needed for data to
Speaker 1: arrive at that particular device. It tells the network where
Speaker 1: that device is in the grand connection of the network
Speaker 1: 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. Now.
Speaker 1: Of those, more than two million of them are reserved
Speaker 1: for specific uses, and so you effectively have around four
Speaker 1: billion addresses that could be assigned. An i p v
Speaker 1: four address is represented by four groups of numbers. Those
Speaker 1: range between zero and two fifty five, meaning they are
Speaker 1: two hundred fifty six total potential numbers for each one
Speaker 1: and each of those four groups of numbers separated from
Speaker 1: the others by dots. Each of those numbers groups they
Speaker 1: represent a group of eight bits. So here's an example
Speaker 1: of an ip v four IP address. It could be
Speaker 1: two one six dot to seven dot six one dot
Speaker 1: one three seven. That's just a random example, and four
Speaker 1: billion addresses. Sounds like a bunch, but it didn't take
Speaker 1: that long for those addresses to start getting scarce. The
Speaker 1: address pool was exhausted in February of two thousand eleven.
Speaker 1: And you might have heard some stories about how certain companies,
Speaker 1: like big software companies UH that we're relying on I
Speaker 1: p v four have had some issues running out of
Speaker 1: IP addresses to assign to people on their networks, so
Speaker 1: they're folks couldn't actually connect, and not just people but executives.
Speaker 1: We're not having any luck connecting to the Internet because
Speaker 1: they had run out of IP addresses to assign to
Speaker 1: their employees. It's one of the reasons there's been a
Speaker 1: big push to move from i p v four to
Speaker 1: i p v six, which uses eight bit numbers, not
Speaker 1: thirty two bit numbers. So what does that actually mean? Well,
Speaker 1: if you go with I p V six, there are
Speaker 1: three point four oh three times ten to the thirty
Speaker 1: eight power or two to the hundred and twenty eight
Speaker 1: power address is available in I p V six. Why
Speaker 1: am I putting the number in those terms because to
Speaker 1: actually spell out the number in full would probably take
Speaker 1: most of this podcast, and that would only be interesting
Speaker 1: for a few seconds. So how can we put into
Speaker 1: terms what that actually means? Well, there'd be so many
Speaker 1: addresses that even if you were adding a huge number
Speaker 1: every pico second, it would probably last until our son
Speaker 1: actually burns out. So I think will be good in
Speaker 1: the long term when everyone switches over, will be in
Speaker 1: great shape until the sun burns out, at which point
Speaker 1: will have other problems to worry about. Now, an I
Speaker 1: p v six address is a little more complicated than
Speaker 1: the I p V four one. So uh, if you
Speaker 1: were to look at one of these addresses, an example
Speaker 1: would sound something like this. To zero zero one, colon
Speaker 1: c d b A, colon zero zero zero zero, colon
Speaker 1: zero zero zero zero, colon zero zero zero zero, colon
Speaker 1: zero zero zero zero, colon three to five seven, colon
Speaker 1: nine six five to It is significantly longer. 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 E d B A colon
Speaker 1: colon three to seven colon two. That double colon would
Speaker 1: represent that everything in between those were just empty groups
Speaker 1: of zeros. So that's one way of shortening it. Now.
Speaker 1: Your own computer's IP address is not likely to stay
Speaker 1: the same across multiple uses. Instead receives an IP address
Speaker 1: from a dynamic host configuration Protocol server that's on your network.
Speaker 1: The server gives the network a bit more freedom because
Speaker 1: it can shift IP addresses around whenever necessary, But other
Speaker 1: computers on the network, like web servers, they have to
Speaker 1: have the same IP address all the time because otherwise
Speaker 1: they would just get lost in the cluttery. They would
Speaker 1: have to consistently update all the registries to alert them
Speaker 1: of their new IP address whenever they changed or else.
Speaker 1: Any incoming traffic would never find the server. So while
Speaker 1: your personal computer might have an IP address one day
Speaker 1: and a different one the next day, the web server
Speaker 1: that you want to visit, that has the website you
Speaker 1: are interested in, is going to have the same IP
Speaker 1: address day to day. They have what is called a
Speaker 1: static IP address, So it's going to be assigned to
Speaker 1: that machine and only that machine. You'll never find another
Speaker 1: machine with that same IP address, at least as long
Speaker 1: as the original one is active. Now, the IP address
Speaker 1: is associated with the media access control address for that
Speaker 1: specific 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 sometimes it's written down
Speaker 1: in someone's notebooks somewhere. But that is what is permanently
Speaker 1: associated with the static IP address, and this is how
Speaker 1: the Internet keeps track of where everything is. It's all
Speaker 1: machine readable language, but it's not really useful to human
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 i L is military.
Speaker 1: Different countries have their own top level domains like dot
Speaker 1: RU 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
Speaker 1: as then there's a slash after that top level domain,
Speaker 1: so maybe it was how stuff works dot Com 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 may be. So for that to work, you
Speaker 1: can't have duplicate web addresses. Otherwise servers wouldn't know which
Speaker 1: machine you actually wanted to contact. So you can't have
Speaker 1: two different sites that both use www. Dot house stuff
Speaker 1: works 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 I see
Speaker 1: this is a server a service. Rather under i CAN,
Speaker 1: I CAN as an organization. The acronym stands for the
Speaker 1: Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and numbers, and i can's
Speaker 1: job is to maintain order in all this chaos by
Speaker 1: overseeing the root name servers, among other things. I CAN
Speaker 1: actually has a lot of different responsibilities, but one of
Speaker 1: them is to make sure that this system remains orderly.
Speaker 1: So registration secures the web address for the server containing
Speaker 1: that relevant information. No one else will be allowed to
Speaker 1: use that web address, at least no one will be
Speaker 1: allowed to use it legitimately. Uh So, anyone who uses
Speaker 1: www dot house stuff works dot com should, in theory,
Speaker 1: go straight to the house stuff Works homepage and nowhere else.
Speaker 1: I'll 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 map 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 d n s. The Network Information Center
Speaker 1: maintained a text file that had web addresses mapped to
Speaker 1: I P addresses. So, in other words, if you had
Speaker 1: a web address back in those early early days of
Speaker 1: the Internet we're talking pre then your web address appeared
Speaker 1: in this text file and was corresponding. You know, it
Speaker 1: corresponded to the actual I P address of the web
Speaker 1: server that contained that web page. So if you had
Speaker 1: a website at that time, then it would be inside
Speaker 1: this text file. But as you probably can imagine, this
Speaker 1: text file got really big, really quickly as more and
Speaker 1: more entity started jumping on the Internet and and putting
Speaker 1: web pages on the Internet. This text file grew to
Speaker 1: an unmanageable size, so it was inefficient to keep a
Speaker 1: single text document as the reference. It was taking too
Speaker 1: long to cross reference web addresses to IP addresses. It
Speaker 1: was actually increasing the amount of time it would take
Speaker 1: for you to go to a website through your browser
Speaker 1: because it was just taking too long to resolve the
Speaker 1: web address name. So that's when the University of Wisconsin
Speaker 1: formed the Domain Name System and it automatically maps web
Speaker 1: addresses to IP addresses. So when you type in an address,
Speaker 1: your request goes out over your network the Internet service
Speaker 1: provider that you use, UM, it goes over their network
Speaker 1: to their domain name server. Now, not every computer on
Speaker 1: the Domain Name system has every web address and IP
Speaker 1: address stored in it. It would be crazy if they did.
Speaker 1: So you type in a web address, it goes out
Speaker 1: over your Internet service providers network to the DNS server. UH.
Speaker 1: It consults its registry to see if it in fact
Speaker 1: has the information needed, and if it doesn't, it works
Speaker 1: with the other servers on the d n S to
Speaker 1: find that information send it to your computer so that
Speaker 1: it can contact the appropriate web server and get the
Speaker 1: file that it once. So, if you're using a browser
Speaker 1: to look up a web page, your request goes to
Speaker 1: the d n S and that sends the IP address
Speaker 1: of the appropriate server once it's identified, it to your browser.
Speaker 1: Your browser then essentially sends a request to the web
Speaker 1: server that has that particular page that file and says hey,
Speaker 1: can I see that? And the web server, assuming everything
Speaker 1: is on the up and up, says, of course you can,
Speaker 1: and sends the file like the web page to your
Speaker 1: browser and uh, you know, travels through the network in
Speaker 1: this way. It's not it's not a direct pathway from
Speaker 1: the server to your computer necessarily, and then it shows
Speaker 1: up in your browser. Now, all this stuff happens in
Speaker 1: fractions of a second um. Sometimes it can take a
Speaker 1: little longer, depending upon the stats of the network and
Speaker 1: the amount of traffic involved, but it's still an incredibly
Speaker 1: fast process to especially when you consider how much is
Speaker 1: actually going on here with all the cross referencing to
Speaker 1: go from web address address to IP address to sending
Speaker 1: the signal to responding to it, it's amazing. We'll be
Speaker 1: back with more of this classic episode of tech stuff
Speaker 1: after this quick break. Now, I've got a couple of
Speaker 1: other things I wanted to mention. One of those is
Speaker 1: why are so many web addresses written in English? Now
Speaker 1: not all of them are, and in fact this has
Speaker 1: changed quite a bit over the last few years. But
Speaker 1: for a long time, English was the dominant language in
Speaker 1: web addresses, even web addresses that were in other countries
Speaker 1: that don't use English as their primary language. And the
Speaker 1: reason 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: is for creating web addresses were mostly English speaking Americans,
Speaker 1: so um or English speaking natives, whether it was of
Speaker 1: America or other countries. Now. Uh. The people who established
Speaker 1: those rules included Tim Berners Lee, who worked for CERN
Speaker 1: and was what we considered 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, you know,
Speaker 1: possibly use either you know, a mapping system, so that's
Speaker 1: mapping English or Latin letters rather to these other alphabets,
Speaker 1: or you might have to insert the letters one by
Speaker 1: one using a the insert um uh option. It's not
Speaker 1: the easiest thing in the world to do. Um So
Speaker 1: that was one of the drawbacks to the Web for
Speaker 1: many years. And it wasn't until two thousand nine that
Speaker 1: i CAN approved the use of international allied domain names.
Speaker 1: That meant that Web addresses could finally include non English
Speaker 1: characters in them. And coincidentally, perhaps two thousand nine was
Speaker 1: also the year that the United States government gave up
Speaker 1: control of i CAN and they transitioned it to a
Speaker 1: multi stakeholder governance model. And you might wonder what that means.
Speaker 1: It's it's essentially i CAN as a nonprofit organization and
Speaker 1: it only answers to stakeholders rather than having to answer
Speaker 1: to the United States government. And you might wonder why
Speaker 1: it was, I can ever answering to the U. S
Speaker 1: Government in the first place, But keep in mind the
Speaker 1: Internet itself is essentially the product of a US government project.
Speaker 1: It all started back with ARPA back in those days.
Speaker 1: It wasn't even DARPA yet, with ARPA Net, which established
Speaker 1: the general structure and protocols that would be used later
Speaker 1: and evolve into the ones that we use for the Internet.
Speaker 1: So the United States was very heavily involved in the
Speaker 1: construction and the standardization of the Internet, which is why
Speaker 1: things are the way they are now. Besides non Latin characters,
Speaker 1: you are els can now also contain emojis, those little
Speaker 1: symbols that mean all sorts of stuff. These days. Used
Speaker 1: to be just be smiley and frowny faces and winky faces,
Speaker 1: but now it's all sorts of stuff. And we've seen
Speaker 1: a couple of different examples of this. Coke launched an
Speaker 1: ad campaign that used a single emoji Internet address, and
Speaker 1: recently Norwegian Airlines did this for a special announcement they
Speaker 1: were launching direct flights from Copenhagen to Las Vegas. So
Speaker 1: there you are. L was www dot airplane, Emoji, slot machine, Emoji,
Speaker 1: money emoji dot w S, which is adorable and maddening.
Speaker 1: Um so this could lead to a new era of emoji.
Speaker 1: You are 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: characters rather when typing in web addresses. It's it's very
Speaker 1: similar to that because if you don't have a smartphone
Speaker 1: or other device that has these emojis that are built
Speaker 1: into it, you then have to construct them some other way.
Speaker 1: So I imagine most of these web addresses will have
Speaker 1: a language variant of them, not just the emoji ones.
Speaker 1: All right, so we've got a couple of other things
Speaker 1: we need to cover before I can wrap up here.
Speaker 1: One of those is what about you are l shorteners?
Speaker 1: So these are techniques that redirect traffic to a domain
Speaker 1: 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 will go straight to
Speaker 1: my site. Sometimes it's more of like a random seeming
Speaker 1: string of letters and numbers, which makes it a little
Speaker 1: harder to communicate, at least verbally. But at any rate,
Speaker 1: these techniques are meant to make it easier to navigate
Speaker 1: to a specific page that otherwise has a long or
Speaker 1: cumbersome web address. It can be use for lots of
Speaker 1: different reasons. It can also be used to track traffic, So,
Speaker 1: in other words, it's a strategy so that you can
Speaker 1: tag traffic for one reason or another in order to
Speaker 1: keep an eye on what's going on with a site,
Speaker 1: So in other words, it's not just a redirect. It's
Speaker 1: also kind of tagging to get an idea of traffic patterns.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's used in a sneaky way to disguise the
Speaker 1: actual destination of the redirect. So in other words, I
Speaker 1: could say, Hey, look at this really cool website, and
Speaker 1: I use a u r L shortener, and unless you
Speaker 1: have a means of previewing where that shortener is pointing to,
Speaker 1: you might click on it not knowing what the destination
Speaker 1: is and it might end up being a place where
Speaker 1: there's a lot of malware, or maybe it's a website
Speaker 1: that has tons of pop up ads and I'm really
Speaker 1: just trying to drive traffic to it because that way
Speaker 1: I can drive up revenue. Um. There are a lot
Speaker 1: of kind of ways to abuse the shortened u r
Speaker 1: L s. Sometimes it's just to shorten the address the
Speaker 1: purpose of messages that have a real strict character limit
Speaker 1: like Twitter, and of course Twitter has its own well.
Speaker 1: It purchased a u r L shortener so that if
Speaker 1: you are posting a web address into Twitter, it will
Speaker 1: automatically shorten it for you so that it can conserve
Speaker 1: some of those characters, because a d forty precious characters
Speaker 1: is you know, you've gotta you gotta maximize that as
Speaker 1: much as you can in order to get your point across.
Speaker 1: We've got more to say in this classic episode of
Speaker 1: tech stuff after these quick messages. Now, the redirect gets
Speaker 1: cross reference to the u r L and thus the
Speaker 1: IP address of the shortened web address. So that means
Speaker 1: there's a registry database for the shortened links. Uh. So
Speaker 1: you have the short version that's cross reference to the
Speaker 1: long version of the web address, which in turn is
Speaker 1: reference to the IP address of the actual web server
Speaker 1: that the page lives on. It's a lot of different
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 1: So in other words, let's say that I post a
Speaker 1: blog a blog post where I use a shortened U
Speaker 1: r L in it, but the company that actually made
Speaker 1: the short U r L shortener and maintained the registry
Speaker 1: goes out of business, then that lincolns up being dead,
Speaker 1: even 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 the other end. So that
Speaker 1: is a downside. In fact, some people have really criticized
Speaker 1: you r L shorteners for that very reason, saying that
Speaker 1: you are destabilizing the Internet by using them. Here's a
Speaker 1: little bit of trivia about U r L s. Tim
Speaker 1: berners Lee has some regrets about how you are L
Speaker 1: s are actually structured. He feels some sense of responsibility
Speaker 1: 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: standards are, so it's too late and we just have
Speaker 1: to struggle through with our dots and extra slashes, and
Speaker 1: 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 ultrasonic sound 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 on to somebody to say, hey, check
Speaker 1: out this link, assuming that that person is in the
Speaker 1: same area that you are in, you could press a
Speaker 1: little button and a your computer speaker would omit this
Speaker 1: ultrasonic chirp, which again you would be unable to hear.
Speaker 1: But someone else with a computer or mobile device that
Speaker 1: has a microphone attached to it could have that get
Speaker 1: picked up by the device and it would translate the
Speaker 1: chirp into a u r L, which then you could visit.
Speaker 1: So if I found a really awesome website and I
Speaker 1: wanted 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
Speaker 1: are misspellings or typos of their chief competition, so that
Speaker 1: they themselves can grab that traffic. In other words, imagine
Speaker 1: that you are Coca Cola and you end up UH
Speaker 1: registering p w p s I dot com, so you're
Speaker 1: one letter off from Pepsi. You've just you've gone instead
Speaker 1: of doing EVE, done W, which is one key over
Speaker 1: from the E key, And the reason you've done it
Speaker 1: is so that anyone who makes the typo trying to
Speaker 1: visit Pepsi's website instead goes to your website, and your
Speaker 1: website might just be filled with propaganda about how coke
Speaker 1: is awesome and Pepsi is stupid and you should just
Speaker 1: buy coke products and not Pepsi products. This kind of
Speaker 1: U 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 redirects traffic to
Speaker 1: a rogue DNS server instead of the legitimate one that's
Speaker 1: on your Internet service provider. So remember earlier I said
Speaker 1: that if you typed in a web address and in
Speaker 1: your browser and you hit enter, normally, your computer would
Speaker 1: send this message along to the DNS server that's on
Speaker 1: your Internet service provider, which would then follow the set
Speaker 1: of rules to make sure it found the correct IP
Speaker 1: address to send to your browser, and then you would
Speaker 1: end up retrieving the proper web page, the one that
Speaker 1: you wanted. But there's some types of malware that you
Speaker 1: can encounter that will make fundamental changes to your computer
Speaker 1: or the web browser. Uh. There are a lot of
Speaker 1: different types of malware that can do this, and the
Speaker 1: ones I'm specifically talking about here would change the DNS
Speaker 1: settings on your computer so it's pointed to a different
Speaker 1: DNS server, one that's owned by somebody else and not
Speaker 1: the I s P. So when you open up your
Speaker 1: web browser and you type in a web address and
Speaker 1: this malware has affected your computer, instead of sending it
Speaker 1: 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 happen, and the
Speaker 1: hacker is getting paid on a per impression basis. Um
Speaker 1: or you know, you might end up having a mirror site,
Speaker 1: one that looks like an official site, but 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
Speaker 1: they have. Obviously their entire business depends upon the viability
Speaker 1: of those machines, so it's one that we don't have
Speaker 1: to worry about quite as much. I hope that you
Speaker 1: enjoyed that classic episode of tech Stuff about addresses one
Speaker 1: of those topics that I think people take for granted
Speaker 1: unless they're, you know, in the I T field, in
Speaker 1: which case they think about it a lot. If you
Speaker 1: have any suggestions for topics I should cover in future
Speaker 1: episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out and let me know.
Speaker 1: The best way to do that is on Twitter. The
Speaker 1: handle for the show is tex Stuff hs W and
Speaker 1: I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is
Speaker 1: an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my
Speaker 1: Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.