We're starting a new series on the Internet! This episode covers URLs (the addresses of websites) and some basic safety tips for using the world wide web.
Keep up with the show! https://linktr.ee/trialbywireshow
Questions? Comments? Email trialbywireshow@gmail.com
Music:
We're starting a new series on the Internet! This episode covers URLs (the addresses of websites) and some basic safety tips for using the world wide web.
Keep up with the show! https://linktr.ee/trialbywireshow
Questions? Comments? Email trialbywireshow@gmail.com
Music:
Welcome back to Trial by Wire! My name is Denton, and I think we're ready to start getting into some specific topics of technology. If there's something you want to hear about, please let me know! We're going to start today with how to navigate everyone's favorite information superhighway, the Internet. By the end of the episode, you should understand a little better what's actually happening when you log in to your favorite website.
We already talked a little about the Internet a few episodes ago, but as a refresher: the Internet is a network of computers. Using our restaurant analogy, your device that you use to connect to it (whether that's your phone, your laptop, your tablet, etc.) is a client on that network. Other kinds of computers, known as servers, provide the content that your client accesses on that network. This content is provided in a few different ways, but the most common is known as a "website".
A website is a location on the Internet where you can go to see or do something. Websites are addressed by Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs. When you type in https://www.facebook.com, that's the URL for Facebook. URLs are kind of like addresses that you can use for navigation. Let's break the URL of Facebook down into a few pieces:
First, the HTTPS portion tells me that I'm using the secure version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP. HTTP is the "language" that a server uses to serve up a website. The main thing to note here is that, per its name, HTTPS is more secure than HTTP, which is really important if you're entering any kind of personal information, especially financial information. Most web browsers nowadays will throw some kind of security warning up if you try to go to an HTTP site; that's just the browser trying to keep you safe. You should be aware of that if you see it.
Next is the web address portion. Like I said, we can think about this like a physical address on a map. Let's take the following address: 123 Main Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217, United States of America. If you put the address in reverse order, every line gets more specific. First, you know you need to go to the United States, then to the 11217 post office in Brooklyn, New York, then to Main Street, and finally to house number 123. Websites work the same way. If you flip the Facebook web address around, you can see that we first need to go to ".com". .com is what's called a "top-level domain". These are the signposts of the Internet - your browser goes here before you go anywhere else. There's also .org, .net, .gov, .mil, and hundreds of others. Usually, your top-level domain indicates something about the purpose or ownership of the website; for example, .gov sites are sites operated by the United States government. After the top-level domain, the rest of the web address helps you navigate to the site itself. Facebook has its own web domain, so any site at facebook.com will take you to a Facebook-owned site. The WWW just tells you that this is a web site of Facebook. If there was an "m" there instead, that would be their mobile site.
URLs may seem confusing, but it's really important that you understand how they work. Fake sites will try to use similar URLs to real sites in order to get you to click on them. For example, if you see www.facebook.evilsite.com, you might think that you were going to Facebook. But, remember how URL navigation works. First you go to .com, then to the domain "evilsite", THEN to the "facebook" web site deployed at the domain evilsite.com. That's not Facebook! Similarly, if you see face~book.com or faceb00k.com with the os replaced by 0s, neither of those will get you to the Facebook-owned domain. Make sure any time you click or type a URL, it's pointing to a place that you expect.
So, the next question is: how do you access the Internet? That's where web browsers come in. A web browser is a piece of software which allows you to navigate to different web sites and resources on the Internet. Web browsers can take a URL and locate the server which returns content for that URL, then process the data from the server to show you a pretty web site. Some of the more popular browsers are Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge.
Web browsers can do a lot more than just accessing web sites, though. You can make a list of your favorite sites and have your browser remember them to get to them via a single click later. Your browser keeps your web history so that you can find a site if you forget to write it down. The bar at the top which lets you enter a web site will also let you plug in search terms to send to a search engine, which is a website which is specifically designed to search for other websites based on keywords. Google and Bing are two of the biggest examples of search engines. You can download files from a web site, and your browser will save them to a folder on your computer (which you probably know as the Downloads folder). And big browsers have rich libraries of extensions created by other people which you can use to add even more features to your browser.
"But Denton", you may be saying, "I don't really use a web browser that much since I have all of these apps installed on my phone". That's a good point! A web browser is not the only way to connect to the Internet. Applications which you install on your devices can also make connections to the Internet and download and upload content. Your Instagram application, for example, connects to Instagram and downloads your feed, which is why it doesn't work if you're unable to access the Internet from your phone. This is important to know because many times, applications are able to access the Internet regardless of whether you explicitly allow them to. You should always be careful when installing applications on your devices and ensure that you are getting the application from a trusted source.
Now that you can get around the Internet, we should probably talk about how to be safe while you're doing that. There is so much to talk about here, and I might make a separate episode to go deeper into some of these. But we'll start with a few basics to keep you out of some common pitfalls.
Point number 1: never ever click a link you receive unless it comes from a trusted source. A popular type of scam is a "phishing" scam, a scam which deceives you to get some kind of personal information from you to use for some purpose. For example, in middle school, I fell for a site pretending to be the Twitter log-in page and accidentally gave my username and password to a scammer. This scammer then used my account to post links to other web sites on my account, I assume to get the credentials of some other people as well. If you get a notification from "Amazon" that your account has been locked, go to the Amazon website (not by clicking on the link, by going separately and entering the URL) and log in to see if your account has actually been locked. If not, you can safely delete the email, or maybe even report it to Amazon or some other entity.
Phishing scams can be pretty sophisticated. If you receive a friend request from someone who you thought you were already friends with, reach out to them in another way to confirm, maybe by texting or calling. The new account might be fake. If you get a phone call from somebody saying that a relative needs money, you should confirm independently with that relative before saying yes. The easiest way to beat a phishing scam is to do your own research on the "emergency" instead of just blindly trusting the notification and doing what the scammer wants you to do.
Next, don't readily hand out personal information online. Unless a site is requiring your phone number for something, you don't just have to freely hand it out to them. Even the most innocuous statements can help a scammer build a profile of you. For example, let's say that you frequently post about your dog Fido on your public Instagram account. Then, maybe your bank allows you to set security questions, and you decide to use a question about your dog's name (which, obviously, is Fido). That's not hard information to figure out from your online presence, and a scammer can use that to provide the correct answer to your security question and get into your bank account without even knowing who you are. Now, I'm not saying that you have to be paranoid about everything you post - you are allowed to use social media if you like and talk to others. Just understand that the more information you give out about yourself, the easier it is for someone to impersonate you to get your information. Always err on the side of caution when filling out online forms or thinking about what to post.
Finally, if you've been on the Internet for a while, you likely have accounts on several websites. My last personal count was over 300. It can be very tempting to use weak passwords or re-use the same password over and over again. The problem is that those passwords are easy for hackers to guess, and if you've reused one, Tik Tok getting hacked may mean that somebody can also break into your insurance account. But I'm not asking you to remember a unique, difficult password for every single site you log into - that's unreasonable, that's ridiculous. You can use something called a "password manager" to store all of your passwords. Password managers can also generate new, random, strong passwords for any new site. And they often come as browser extensions and phone apps, meaning that you can just tap a button when you log in to get your password securely. Then, all you have to do is set one really good, really strong password for your password manager that you remember, and then you don't have to remember any other web site password. I personally recommend Bitwarden due to its generous free tier, but you can also check out other options.
There is so much more to think about when being safe online, but these tips will help get you started. If you're interested in learning more, let me know and we can go deeper into any of these.
For today's homework, I'd like to challenge you to do a digital inventory of your online presence. Do you know how many accounts you have? When's the last time you changed your password on any of them? Consider doing a digital "spring cleaning" and additionally deleting any accounts you are no longer using. Using a password manager can help you easily track all of your accounts and change your passwords on them. Think about that, and I'll see you next time.
Hey, thanks for listening! If you're watching on YouTube, make sure to like the episode if you enjoyed it. You can subscribe to our biweekly uploads on your favorite podcast feed or on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@TrialByWireShow. You can also find us on X (formerly known as Twitter) or on Instagram at @trialbywireshow or on Facebook at https://facebook.com/trialbywirepodcast. If you have comments or questions, I'd love to hear them. Send me an email at trialbywireshow@gmail.com. See you soon!