Now THAT'S Funny...

 So about twenty years ago - yeah, I went there - the primary content of this space, in it's earlier versions, was primarily technical content. I enjoyed working in technology for many years.  I left it because, frankly, it was just too difficult to keep searching for a new job every 2-3 years.  I'm the person who wants to find an employer they can retire from.  But I digress - which is what I also do here.

So I have multiple email accounts.  Some are more public than others.  The one I use here is my Hotmail account.  This means that it's the primary target for spammers, scammers, and just generally dumb people.  Today's sheer stupidity award goes to the numbnuts who will undoubtedly be doing very low-level jobs for their entire life - presuming, of course, they manage to stay out of incarceration.  Yes, kids, that's a big word which describes why numbskull might go from his basement to a nice room with bars on the front of it.  Nice in that said scheisskopf (that's a German word - Scheiss meaning that which regularly comes out of most people's rear ends, while others use it to fill their heads, kopf being the German word descriptive of that lump on your shoulders) will not have to pay cash for the residence.  They will most likely spend time there because of their own sheer stupidity.

Why, you ask, am I going after someone because of an email?  Well, pull up a log and have a seat, we have Dipshit Technology University How To Spot Stupid Spammer Scammers, it's a 100-level intro course, in session today.  We need to start with a little basic introduction into the Internet.

That's right, folks, we're staring at the Google-Drive level instructions that tell you how to get out of your neighborhood.  Something you presumably did prior to the pandemic lockdowns on a fairly regular basis.  But let's get going.

You see, the internet was never an infinite solution.  Back when they were first noodling about, trying to figure out how to connect a number of computers, they came up with something called an "IP Address".  IP stood for Internet Protocol, which is how all this came into being.  Some folks decided that there would be a limit of roughly four billion computers connected to this thing.  Let's be honest - back in the 1960s when the initial pieces of this were first being kicked around, four million computers was a hell of a lot, let alone four billion.  Not everyone had one at work, let alone a computer at work, a computer at home, a computer in their pocket, a computer in their kitchen, a computer in their car...  And who knows how many other places.  

So what they did was build an address out of numbers.  Those IP numbers are built out of four groups of numbers that can be no more than 255.  So your IP address might be 192.168.1.1 - for example.  If you're really interested and on a PC running some version of windows, you can get yourself out to a command prompt and type in the command IPCONFIG.  It will sit and rumble for a few seconds, then tell you a bunch of information.  My computer tells me that my IPv4 Address is 192.168.68.59.  

Now, you're undoubtedly a smart person.  After all, you're still reading this, and I'm not trying to flatter you.  But you're looking at the screen you're reading this on, and you know that there are more than four million computers that connect to the internet on a regular basis.  Which is where we need to spend a little time on the future.

Up above, I noted that my IPv4 address was what it was.  What some folks did, after the internet kind of caught on and began including more than just American Military computers, and they decided we needed more room.  So here's where we get to scary math.  The IPv4 above indicates we're using Version 4 of the Internet protocol on most of our networks.  It uses something called a 32-bit address.  Because that wasn't enough, they developed IPv6.  And here is where we get into big numbers.

Under IPv4, we had a limit of roughly 4,294,967,296 computers.  That's 256 times 256 times 256 times 256.  Which we know isn't actually true.  I do not believe there is a computer at 0.0.0.0.  However, I have it on a fairly reasonable authority that there is a computer at 1.0.0.0 - so there's probably 4,278,190,080 addresses under IPv4, because it uses a 32-bit address.  That is, there's a string of 32 bits to identify each computer.  And a bit is either on or off.  A 1 or a 0.  But because that was a little restrictive, they came up with the IPv6 address.  How many computers under that?  Well, sit down.  

IPv6 uses a 128-bit address.  That's right, 128 zeros or 1s strung together.  How many computers can we have?  If I've done the math right, we have a total of 339,308,319,336,257,241,262,718,860,079,831,955,456 computers, give or take a couple.  

How did I arrive at that number?  Well, you see, as each of the 128 bits can be either a 1 or a 0, that means that each bit you add doubles the number of addresses.  Huh?  If you have a one bit address, you're either a 1 or a 0.  Now, if you add a second bit, you have either 00, 01, 10, or 11 - that is, you have four addresses.  A third bit brings us to 000, 001, 010, 100, 011, 101, 110, and 111 - eight addresses.  So you see one bit is two, two bits is four, three bits is eight, four bits is sixteen, five bits is thirty-two...  And so on.  So we're up to 128 bits, giving you that gargantuan number.  It's nowhere near a google - that is, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.  This is a number 3 followed by another 38 numbers.  

To put this in a bit of perspective, there's the number 371,650,498,560,000,000.  That rather puny number expresses the number of inches light will travel in one year.  That's 18 digits.  Or there's 1,263,611,695,104,000,000 - the number of inches, roughly, from here to the nearest star that isn't our sun.  

Where did this go from technology content to math class?  Bringing the wagon train back round to our original destination, the reason I went down the road for IP addresses is because, early on, some folks decided that that four billion computer thing was a bit of a limitation.  I mean, there were companies like IBM who needed a whole lot of addresses, and back when these were handed out to specific computers, it was a bit of a problem.

Wait a minute, I hear you say, "specific computers?"  Another frontage road on our route today is the difference between static and dynamic IP addresses.  

Oh great, I hear you thinking, another layer between the point.  Let's keep this one short.  As you saw above, computers are math machines. While we think in words, pictures, music, and all other sorts of pieces of information, a computer is, down there at the lowest level, pretty simple.  On or off.  Or a 1 or a 0.  That little bit is used literally to represent everything we store on a computer.  To take us back a step or six, the letters you see on your screen in front of you aren't stored as letters in the computer.  They're stored as a byte.  That's a collection of bits.

If you have any sort of experience, long-term, with video games, you will probably have heard the term "8-bit" - that is, anything represented on the video game screen was identified by eight zeros and ones strung together.  If we straggle back to the example above, six bits get you 64 different values.  Seven bits gets you 128 values.  Eight bits get you 256 values.  That's right.  So early video games could use up to 256 colors.  And if you look at your keyboard in front of you, you know the English Alphabet, the one used to first define this stuff, uses 26 distinct letters.  But each letter has two forms.  What?  That's right.  You have a capital A and a lower-case a - these are two different things for the computer.  If you look across your keyboard, you'll see a raft of other characters - numbers, punctuation, and the like.  So after the early computers were developed using keyboards from typewriters, each key pressed on the typewriter sent a specific numeric value to the computer,  which then knew what to display on the screen.  

What's this got to do with static versus dynamic IP addresses?  Well, back in the day, when a computer was sending a string of ones and zeroes to another computer, the sending computer needed to know how to reach the receiving computer.  Because these folks were working in the military and in school buildings, where budgets are fairly important, someone looked and said "now, wait a minute - if you want to send a message from upper New York State to the Pentagon, that's a long-distance call.  But there's a computer down the road a few miles that isn't a long distance call.  What if we set it up so this message goes to that computer, then it makes a local call to the next computer, and so on..."  That's right.  Fear of long-distance bills.  

In part.  The other idea was that if each computer on the network knew how to reach another computer on the network, if one location was not available, there should be another way to get the message there.  Which is why some computers had very specific addresses.  Most computers, these days, have dynamic addresses because there's more than four billion of them out there.

What's this got to do with spam?  Ah, here's where we're getting close to the point.  When they built the internet back in the day, and those big computer folks like IBM and others needed more addresses than some folks were willing to assign, they came up with a couple of good ideas.  That is, certain addresses aren't just addresses.  

You might note that above, I said my computer's address was 192.168.68.59.  There are some addresses you can't go to on the internet.  They don't exist "on the internet".  

Here's the last wonky technical bit I'll throw at you.  If you're looking at this from your computer at home, the only thing the internet can see is ... well, nothing, really.  You have what we still call an ISP - an Internet Service Provider.  Your internet service provider might be a company that you call into to get connected to the internet, or you might be lucky like me and have one of those full-time always-on-line connections.  My cable modem connects all of the devices that need the internet in my home to that computer network.  

Because I'm not a big shot, I'm not doing any web sites from home or anything like that, there's some content that stays in my home network.  There's some stuff that goes through my firewall and through my cable modem - much like, when I publish this post, it will go from the computer next to me here to another computer that's connected to the internet as a server.  

Huh?  Well, if you look at the top of the window, the odds are, below the menu and a bunch of other stuff, you see a string of text.  It probably starts with or has hidden a bunch of text that starts with http - that stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol - which is what the world-wide-web uses.  Oh, that's right.  The World Wide Web - the WWW in any web address you use - isn't the internet.  

What I hear you shriek - I'm on the internet, dude.  Right.  But you're only using a small piece of what was originally designed out there.  The original basis for the internet was the ability to share messages quickly.  And then more information became important.  So we attached a few other things to the internet.  And the WWW part is by far the most spectacularly successful chunk of the internet, the bottom line here is that without the whole IP address thing we've been nattering on about, none of this would exist.  So be nice to grandpa.  

Now, getting back to the core idea here, sending information from one computer to another is the primary function of the internet, which includes the information that makes up this post.  So where I was going is networks.  You might have a simple network at home where you connect one computer to another box, which then connects to your modem, which gets you on the internet.  Or you might have a very complex network.  It's important to remember that in about 40 years, we've gone from "network theory" to networks in people's homes.  

This stuff grew up pretty damned fast.  Welcome to the computer age.  But once again, returning to our core point where I started you off on the other end of our log, here - that being the very definition of a university - one individual who has information they are willing to share with another.  That'd be me and you.  

And I got an email from a spammer.  It had all sorts of graphics inserted in it that, if I clicked on one of them, was intended to deliver an undoubtedly crappy attempt some dipshit stole from someone else to infect my computer with something.  Now, were I a darned fool, I might have clicked on one of these images to get the free reward I was promised from a drug store.  Except for one thing.  

Now, one tool you can use to determine what the hell someone is trying to do is the good old hover over the link.  That is, you put your mouse pointer over the thing - text or graphics - and most modern browsers on computers will, at the bottom of your current window, display the location it wants to take you to - if it works.

And that whole thing above about networks?  Well, when IBM complained they weren't getting enough addresses for their computers, the folks who managed the internet way back when said "well, this might become a problem for other groups as well.  What can we do?"  Someone had the pretty good idea of creating what we used to call "non-routable addresses blocks".  That is, there are a couple of blocks of addresses that you will find that don't go everywhere.  Like that 192.168 number above.  The odds are extremely high that your computer has a similar address that starts with 192.168.  That doesn't mean we're on the same network - I mean, we are if we're connected to the internet, but that 192.68 block of addresses is set aside for smaller organizations.  If you have a home network, your network undoubtedly has a device that assigns you a dynamic IP address - that is, it might change.  It normally won't, but if you add another computer next week, it'll need a new address - so your router or modem will say "oh, hey, new kid, here's your IP Address" and assign another number within the 192.168 block.  It will let your computer see the internet, but it won't let someone not connected to your network see it. That is, I can't see into your network, even though we might have very similar addresses, because the greater internet past your modem will see a request that says "let me see what's at 192.168.10.20" as garbage.  Why?  Because the 192.168 block is non-routeable on the internet.  Any message like that that makes it on to the internet is treated as noise.  Garbage.  It shouldn't be out there because there are too many identical addresses.  It's not an individual computer, it's twenty million of the exact same address.

It works inside your house because your router or modem is only responsible for what's inside your network.  And that's why it works - because I can run down to the local Target, or most any other retailer, these days, and pick up a router.  Back when I was in college, that little device that sits on or under your desk and connects you to your modem, which gets you to the internet, was four distinct pieces of equipment - and one piece that hadn't been invented yet.  

There are things called bridges - they allowed one network to connect to another.  There were things we called routers - which told one network how to send messages to get to the other network.  There were devices called concentrators, and there were other devices that filtered traffic.  What we called a concentrator back then is now more popularly known as a hub.  Most hubs these days have a traffic filter built into it.

We had called those devices switches for some time, but here we go down another network sideline.  

The IP protocol was designed from the beginning to allow computers to talk to one another.  Back in the old days, we might have said something like "allowed one computer to broadcast to another."  A lot of folks will look at computer networks like the telephone network - that is, each device on the network has only one way to connect to it.  If I pick up my phone, the dial tone tells me that my phone is ready to accept another device address.  That is, it's ready for me to dial a phone number.  That phone number is an address that the telephone network uses to find another device.  For a very long time, that device sat in a location at the end of another wire, and messages were transmitted from your location to that other destination - which then rang.  

These days, telephones are in our pockets - but once again, each phone has only one address - that is, that phone number gets your phone and only your phone, unless someone has "spoofed" it and copied the information.  Back when the phone network was first built, this was impossible.  These days, crooks have all sorts of options.  

But getting back to the point, when the IP protocol was developed, it was designed for a computer to holler "hey, anyone, can you get this message to Fred?"  In numerical form, obviously, but the core idea is that a computer on the internet would either have a path it knew to follow to get the message from one computer to the next.  And the next computer would look at it, decide if it was destined for someone it knew, or someone it didn't know.  If it didn't see them on it's network, it would forward the message.

In the mean time, the other eight computers near the originating computer would all look at the message and say "nope, not it".  Which is what made the early internet very noisy.  Every computer had to pay attention to every message and determine if it was for them.

Which is where switches came in.  Early switches required you to configure them.  Computer A would be connected to port A, computer B to B, and etc. The beauty of a switch was that, when computer A needed to speak to computer J, the switch would take the message from A, and send it on ONLY to J.  Because it knew J was connected to port J.  

Then came along these pesky folks who, damnit, moved the computer.  Back when a "computer" was a room-sized device that required a staff to worship, clean, manage, and do all other sorts of private things to it, computers did not physically move.  That cell phone in your pocket is a number of leaps beyond the room-sized computers which sent man to the moon, but it's still got a couple of addresses - the phone number, and if it's a smart phone, an IP Address that allows it to get internet traffic.  

Once computers started moving, managed switches were moved back into the wiring closet, and unmanaged switches were invented.  They just looked for connected computers, got each one's address, and then when a message came in from another computer, it said "oh, hey, computer J is now connected to port Q" - and it still filtered the noise out there, but it did it much faster, without a whole lot of oversight.

These days, that little device sitting next to your modem is a router, because it routes traffic from your internal network to the bridge - or modem, as we now call them - that connects to the internet.  It prevents a lot of dangerous, naughty traffic from breaching into your home network.  It confines the traffic on your internal network so that, if you're sending a document from your computer to your printer, it directs the message to ONLY the printer - and when the printer says "all done, come get it" that message is returned to your computer - not to the dishwasher, the fridge, or the TV in the living room, all of which might be connected.  

And it's that switch, and protective functions which we called "Firewalls" for a long time, that we're concerned with for today's dipshit spammer.  Because the graphics in dipshit's message were trying to direct me to an address in the 10 block.  That is, an IP address that starts 10.x.x.x - the Ten block being rather notoriously first issued to IBM for their computers.  When they needed more, our Internet Forefathers said "what the hell, Big Blue, here you go - you can use all of the addresses behind 10 for your own purposes.  As can any other large organization."  When IBM screamed "it's not enough" the fine internet folks explained "look, buddy, each of your buildings can have an address within the ten block.  That gives you 255 addresses from 10.1 to 10.255 - and each one of those 255 addresses can have another 65,000 addresses."  IBM complained again, and that was when the folks said "yeah, but look - you have over 16 million addresses.  Now within each of those 16 million, we're going to give you the ability to have another 65,000 locations because we're going to make the 192.168 block non-routeable too."  That means that my ISP undoubtedly has a number of locations around the country that pass out a 10 block address to various concentrators - that is, more IP address servers - which assigns your modem a specific address when connected - and behind your modem, you have another 65,000 potential addresses.

Which stay on your internal network.  Much like any 10-block address I might try to go to from a spammer's address, because he linked it to a computer on his home network - where I can't get to it because there's only about a million of them out there, give or take a bit. 

And so, my friends, to end today's bloviation on network security and dipshit spammers, it's easy to spot the rookies.  They'll link to the malware on their home computer.  Unfortunately, I can't report them to the police because that 10 block address could be anywhere from down the street to Bangladesh.  Odds right now are it's not in Russia, because many internet backbone providers - you know, the folks with set static IP addresses - aren't dealing with Russian traffic thanks to their brutal assault on Ukraine.  

So there you have it, dipshit spammers, IP tutorials, and a roundhouse jab to the nuts of Tsar Putin.  I wish.