All computers connected to the internet have a special or unique number. This is known as an I.P. address. Such addresses are issued by I.C.A.N.N.. This stands for the International Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers and is responsible for, and presumably capable of, ensuring the uniqueness of your, and everyone else’s I.P. or Internet Protocol address.
I’m sure that most people have seen their I.P. address before. On-line payment forms often record your address to help prevent fraud. Recently, due to false and destructive spamming or unsolicited commercial mail allegations, many marketers are recording the addresses of subscribers, to go some way, in proving their innocence.
Incidentally, electronic mail can be sent to your “machine”, and lists of addresses are bought, and obviously sold, so that less virtuous individuals than yourself can fill your inbox without knowing your conventional e-mail address. This applies mainly to people who don’t display, exhibit or insert their contact e-mail address on their respective sites, or indeed, the sites of others. The people that do are at the mercy of “e-mail harvesters”( software for automatically collecting addresses for one almost apparent purpose, which is “busting their buns” with various and sundry psuedo-marketing material ). If you are new to this, well then there are scripts available to over come this inconvenience.
I.P. addresses are comprised of four sets of numbers with each set ranging from zero(0) to two hundred and fifty five(255). This addressing system is known as thirty two(32) bit. That’s four sets of numbers with eight bits each (a byte) and one multiplied by the other gives an output of thirty-two, as the name would suggest. The way it is written is called decimal dotted notation.
The version that is currently in use is known as I.P. version 4. Hey! there’s nothing wrong with it but we are now “running out” of such addresses.
I.P. version 6 is the upcoming, agreed version with tighter security implications and has an address limitation in the order of seventy octillion addresses. An octillion is ten to the power of twenty-seven and is a relatively large number and somewhat, mind boggling. Whoever brainstormed the current version would, perhaps, agree. Under conditions where hosting occurs, separate or different addresses are allocated to each site so each computer is not limited to one. Future trends are also envisaged and allowed for, by such a multi-octillion number.
In conclusion; it works and wherever would we be without it?
Seamus is a webmaster and author. His studies include A+, Server+, and Net+.
