What Does DNS Actually Do?

Many people get confused when we talk about DNS the problem is that although it’s often discussed there are few explanations outside technical IT books. Anyway we found this great little video which helps explains the concept in easy to understand language which hopefully some people will find useful. If you’re interested in doing anything online from playing games to working with that VPN service then knowing the basics of DNS will certainly be helpful.

Transcript below:

Hi, there! In this video, you’ll learn about a crucial part of the Internet, the domain name system, or DNS. So, what is DNS? Well, it’s a translation system that allows us humans to search the Internet using language we’re comfortable with. Without DNS, the Internet as we know it would not exist. For example, you couldn’t do your shopping online; you’d have to drive to an actual store to buy your things. There’d be no way to stream music or videos to your smartphone, and no way to video chat with a friend across the ocean, or even across the street.

But what does DNS have to do with this? The Internet is made up of computers that are set up in large networks around the world. These networks are connected by a web of underground, and in some cases, undersea wires. Computers on the Internet communicate with each other using strings of numbers called Internet Protocol, or IP addresses. IP addresses function like street addresses; they identify where a computer is located on the Internet and help guide the information traveling between computers.

Now it’s one thing for computers to communicate using strings of numbers, but imagine if we humans had to memorize these seemingly random numbers strings, for every single website we wanted to find… not very realistic, huh? Well because of DNS, we don’t have to. DNS translates the human-friendly domain names that we’re comfortable using into the IP addresses that computers need to communicate with one another. When you type a domain name into your web browser, your browser and computer to determine if one of them already has the domain’s related IP address in their memory.

If it’s a domain that you’ve recently visited, like say a newspaper you look at every day, your browser may have stored the domain name and IP address in its memory and can display the website in a split second. If the domain isn’t found in local memory, your computer takes the search out to the Internet where it asks, or queries, a series of DNS servers if they have the domain name in their memory or a database.

The first DNS server that receives the query checks its memory for the domain name. If it doesn’t find the domain name in its memory, it sends the query on to the next DNS server to see if it can help. As soon as the domain name is found on a DNS server that the server returns the domain name and its IP address to the requesting DNS server and on down the line until it arrives back at your computer. Each time a requesting DNS server receives a domain name and IP address, the server stores the information in its memory, so any future requests for the domain name can be answered more quickly.

Once your computer has the IP address for the domain name, your browser knows where to find it on the Internet. Your browser uses your computer to communicate with the server where the domain name is hosted and requests any associated files. The host server returns the files, which then display in your web browser. Our ability to use domain names to quickly and easily retrieve websites and files from the Internet is entirely dependent on this tightly integrated and tiered line of communication. So the next time you buy a pair of shoes online, listen to some music on your smartphone, or video chat with a friend on another continent; remember, it’s not magic that lets you do these things on the web, it’s DNS! .

Why You May Need a Residential IP Provider

There are many people and businesses online who are finding themselves increasingly constrained by having only a single network address.  It’s not the technical limit that’s the issue, it’s the fact that increasingly IP addresses are used to filter, block or reroute online users.  For example if you’re a business who advertises online in different countries, it’s only natural that you’d want to check your campaigns occasionally.  Yet the problem is that what you see on your screen is not always going to be the same as your target audience.

Let’s for example look at one of the most popular sites on the internet – the BBC.  This is what you see if you visit from outside the UK.

Residential IP Provider

It looks similar to the main BBC site, but in fact it’s very different in many ways. This is BBC.com the site you will be redirected to if your IP is detected as being outside the UK. It’s designed for an international audience so has more a focus on global rather than UK news. It’s also missing most of the best bits of the BBC site, live streaming the TV channels and access to the BBC iPlayer archive.

Unfortunately this is a common occurrence and what you can see or access varies greatly depending on your physical location. Obviously this is a real nuisance if you’re in the UK and you want to check how your US Google adverts are looking. However it get’s worse than that and there’s many more restrictions, some sites you can’t even access if you’re not in the right location.

Furthermore research is difficult as your results are all skewed to your exact physical location. If you do anything international online you have to be very aware of these geographical considerations. Even relatively small companies will operate internationally over the internet so this isn’t an issue that just affects the big companies either.

Not Just Geographical Filtering

If this wasn’t bad enough, the internet is beginning to be segmented in other ways too.   Although you can in some senses see a logical justification for filtering based on location, after all the search engines have always done it to ensure you get results which are localised.  However the other growth area is in filtering based on the classification of your IP address.

IP addresses can also be split into two other groups (actually it’s more than this but these are the important ones) – commercial and residential addresses.  Broadly speaking the residential ones are supplied to individuals and smaller businesses through their Internet Service Provider (ISP).  Whereas the commercial addresses are assigned to corporate networks and datacentres.  However from a web sites perspective the distinction is even more important – basically ordinary web users and commercial connections.  Plus to extend the comparison, one group is full of ‘ordinary users’ and the other is full of commercial connections, bots, automated software, people using proxies and similar.

Not surprisingly most web sites have much more time for the first category and many have started filtering on this basis.  For example a couple of years ago, Netflix got totally fed up with people using VPNs to switch which version they got access to.  What was happening was people were logging in through a US VPN in order to get the much bigger and better US version.  However this broke the film and movie industries rather archaic licensing rules and so they instigated a blanket ban on access to all commercial addresses.

Basically you couldn’t access Netflix from anything other than a residential IP address.  If you accessed via a VPN or from a corporate network or anything remotely originating from a datacentre you’d get blocked.   It was a huge change that of course you probably only noticed if you tried to watch Netflix from work or used a VPN to get more movies!

Growth of the Residential IP Provider Services

It’s not stopped there though, many websites are doing the same.  Even if they’re not actively blocking yet they’re monitoring access from these commercial addresses.   You’ll have problems on many sites using commercial addresses, including social networks and many e-commerce sites especially if used aggressively.

Many businesses have been forced to use residential IP proxies in order to conduct their research or access blocked resources.   Many entrepreneurs who buy and sell online have found they need to use residential addresses to buy items especially if they’re scarce.   Also internet marketers who run multiple Instagram or Facebook accounts have found that you’re much likely to get blacklisted from commercial IP addresses.

The demand is growing for these residential IP addresses as more and more websites start to favor them.  Many marketers have been forced to invest in proxies which are pre-loaded with these IP addresses in contrast with the normal commercial addresses which were used previously.

They can be expensive but are invaluable in many situations particularly when accessing popular sites.  The prices have come down slightly as providers have come up with technical solutions like rotating addresses automatically, but they’re still much more than commercial addresses.  The problem is that unless you’re an ISP it’s actually difficult to get hold of them.   So if you’ve started looking you may be surprised at some of the prices if you want to buy residential ips.  they also have a tendency to be given different names too like ATC proxies which can also add to the confusion.

There are actually a few tactics to gain access to these addresses, although none of them are that easy.  Probably the most straight forward and extensive is the one operated by a company called Luminati.  They have literally millions of IP addresses available because they have a very unique way to gathering them.  If you need real volume it’s probably the nearest you’re get to a network of unlimited residential proxies.  The company offer a VPN service which users can access for free in exchange for allowing some of their bandwidth to be used as ‘a residential desktop proxy’.   This means that connections are actually routed through an ordinary residential home users connection so are virtually indistinguishable from any other home based user.   What’s more because the endpoint of the connection is not limited to some datacentre, there’s much more geographical variation involved.   This is important if you want an IP address registered to a very specific location for example for posting in Craigslist.

It’s probably the most anonymous and hardest to detect residential IP address, although it’s not one of the cheapest options.

Try out their Trial in the Link Below

Luminati Network 

 

 

 

 

 

The Economics of Digital Profits

It’s over nearly three decades since I completed my economics degree, but I often wonder how much more interesting the subject would be now. Sure we’ve had global crashes, recessions and all sorts of financial scandals, but to some extent we’ve always had events like these throughout the last century.

There’s little doubt that if you follow economics you’ll see how uncertain a science it really is. Pick up a copy of the economist from any given time and you’ll see articles about how well an economy is doing. I can remember reading about the powerhouses of Brazil and Turkey from only a few years ago. Incredible stories of economic success and huge growth rates have almost inevitably been replaced with currency crashes, inflation and corruption scandals.

These tales of economic boom and bust are almost inevitable most underdeveloped countries almost inevitably experience this sort of growth. It’s not really these situations that I find most interesting in the world of economics – it’s somethign much newer and unique.

It’s called the digital economy and in many aspects has the potential to change the economics of the world. There is little doubt that those countries in the forefront of the global digital economy have a distinct advantage and there’s huge potential to add significantly to their GDP. However one of the advantages that the developed world has is the ability to incorporate these ‘new economic sectors’ into the taxation system.

Take for example the millions of people who now make some or all of their living online. Through websites, blogs or even video channels many people are making very decent incomes. Unfortunately for governments this income can be difficult to monitor and track and hence more difficult to tax than traditional employment. many countries already struggle with gathering taxes from their citizens, even a relatively successful economy like Turkey has huge issues in collecting tax revenue. It is largely cited that collecting taxes (or not) played a large part in the demise of the Greek economy too.

Can these countries successfully collect revenues based on income from YouTube or Amazon or from online casino sites? It’s much more difficult to collect and the more citizens that move to these income models the more important that this will become. One of the problems is that the methods of making money in the digital economy are extensive and varied which obviously means that the source of the income changes too.

For example, in the US there’s a huge market for people buying and selling online via a myriad of different sites. These are often little more than buying and selling without the needs of stocks, manufacturing and business premises. yet the numbers involved may be actually much larger. In the ‘streetwear’ market there’s lots of individuals making huge amounts of money buying goods online. One such market is for branded sneakers, which are released in limited numbers by companies like Supreme, Nike and Adidas. Individuals attempt to buy these and then resell at huge multiples.

This is possible because of the scarcity of these releases yet people develop systems to purchase these in bulk. They use software programs called ‘bots’ and location hiding devices servers called proxies to make multiple purchases. You can read all about these sort of systems in this article which explains the whole system and what are proxies for bots, and how you make money from them. Remember there are literally millions of people doing similar things all across the globe and making huge incomes.

In the US, UK and other developed countries there has been some effort to incorporate these people into the taxation system but it’s not easy. It relies heavily on self assessment methods in most places and can be very difficult to trace income if it’s not declared. Much of this income doesn’t even have to end up in a traditional bank account either. I know many internet entrepreneurs who deal primarily in digital currencies like Bitcoin and transfer through various electronic payment processors on the periphery of the traditional banking systems.

It’s easy to find negatives in the ‘digital economy’ however it’s important to realize that for many people it’s become increasingly important. What’s more in the ‘less developed’ countries it offers a potential for individuals to escape poverty and set up online businesses which are much easier to set up than traditional bricks and mortar ones.

The world is changing in many ways due to the internet, it’s important that economics keeps pace. Both to maximize the opportunities and to adapt to them.

John Heather
Blogger and technology journalist who writes on a variety of subjects all over the web. He also covers the world where technology and entertainment overlap, read this article about the Netflix and copyright blocks.

How Can I Keep My Wifi Network Secure?

In many instances hacking into a wireless network is pretty easy, so you need to make sure that your home/business wireless network is secure
Let me explain how easy it is and how you can protect yourself from your local neighborhood war driver.

The first thing you need to understand is a sport called wardriving which basically involves driving around in your car with a laptop or PDA scanning for WIFI hotspots This practice is not in itself illegal as you have not actually gained access to a WIFI network merely scanned for an AP ( access point ) which is broadcasting an SSID which is the name of your network that gets broadcasted by the AP.

Netstumbler is usually the war drivers program of choice as it gives a range of information about the AP, including SSID, GPS location of the node ( if you have a GPS device )and the MAC address of the AP.

Once the wardriver has this information its up to him what he does next. He could LEECH your internet connection and surf for FREE maybe download pornography, send spam through your connection or try to hack into your private files. Or drive off and find some more. Netstumbler will also log each AP so they can come back at will without getting lost! Remember it’s also difficult to tracks these attacks too, they could be quite a distance away and often will be bouncing their connection through an intermediate server such as a VPN or proxy. These are now relatively inexpensive and you can subscribe to one like this being used to watch the BBC iPlayer in Ireland.

So what can you do to prevent this from happening to you?

First of all TURN ON MAC FILTERING on your AP. This means that only MAC addresses YOU enter into the LIST can gain access to your AP. This by NO means secures your network, it just means that it becomes a little bit more difficult and the attacker needs to spend 5 more minutes and needs another two program’s to access your network!

First he would open up a WIFI Sniffer program such as Airopeek which sniffs the airwaves for packets of data and decodes them to give you MAC addresses on the network you are sniffing. So he now has a MAC address that is on the filter list.

He would then open up S.M.A.C a program that allows you to ‘ SPOOF ‘ ( change ) your MAC address to any other MAC address. Enter the MAC address of the one that he ‘ sniffed out ‘, and wait for that MAC address to log off the network. Then he can log on and do any of the above! What’s more it can seriously impact your network performance especially if they end up relaying Spam. Often you’ll find them using your connection to download or stream vide, perhaps to watch British TV abroad using your IP address as cover.

So what else do I need to do?

Next you need to turn on WEP which means any WIFI device that connects to your network needs a SECURE ENCRYPTED KEY to be secure choose the highest WEP you can and make yourself a KEY. This is does NOT secure your WIFI NETWORK as I’m sure you are waiting for me to say by now!

This does however make it a much more time consuming job trying to gain access to your WIFI network. The attacker would now need to open up a WEP cracking program such as KisMac. This will now depend on the amount of data flowing through your network as to how fast your WEP key can be cracked. This can take days, weeks or even months to crack but can be cracked!

Hopefully you are now aware that securing your WIFI NETWORK is very important and if you just grabbed your AP straight out of the box and plugged it in, now go and secure your network!

Wireless Security Primer – Key Terms

All devices on your wireless home network must use the same settings as your Wireless Router. WEP encryption is recommended to increase the security of your wireless network.

SSID
The SSID is the unique name shared among all devices in a wireless network. The SSID must be identical for all devices in the wireless network. It is case-sensitive and must not exceed 32 alphanumeric characters, which may be any keyboard character. I recommend that you change the default SSID to a unique name of your choice.

SSID Broadcast
Disabling SSID broadcasting can be a useful security feature. However, when SSID broadcasting is disabled, Wireless site survey tools such as Windows XP’s Zero Configuration utility will not function. It is best to disable the SSID broadcast AFTER you have configured all of your wireless network clients.

Channel
This setting specifies the default 802.11b channel used by the Wireless LAN communication. Wireless clients will scan through all available channels searching
for an Access Point.

With the new increased speeds, it’s now possible to stream all sorts of content directly to wireless connected devices not just those hard wired. For example you can stream high definition media across a properly configured wireless network to a myriad of devices. Try signing up for the free trial of BBC iPlayer abroad and you can gain access to thousands of shows and programmes on the BBC network. The following video demonstrates how simple it is:

WEP
An acronym for Wired Equivalent Privacy, WEP is an
encryption scheme used to protect your wireless data communications. WEP uses a combination of 40-bit keys to provide access control to your network and encryption security for every data transmission. To decode a data transmission,
each wireless client on the network must use an identical
64 or 128-bit key.
Note: Disable WEP while you build your wireless home network

Quick Tip: Buy an access point with a firewall installed – and don’t turn it off.

Additional Network Security Rules to Remember

  • Look for the SSL-enabled (Secure Sockets Layer) The leading security protocol on the Internet. When an SSL session is started, the server sends its public key to the browser, which the browser uses to send a randomly generated secret key back to the server in order to have a secret key exchange for that session.
  • Whenever you exchange sensitive information. this is usually indicated by a pad lock or some other visual indicator at the bottom of your browser also look for the URL in the browse window that starts with https:// – If a web page offers a secure version of the service use it. Always use secure, since it uses SSL encryption
  • Don’t use insecure email protocols like POP (Post Office Protocol) A standard mail server commonly used on the Internet.
  • Or IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) A standard mail server expected to be widely used on the Internet unless you also use SSL encryption. Check you email software and consult you administrator for more information. Usually web based email has a secure connection, but just check to make sure it start https://
  • Use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) if your company provides one.

Quick Tip: One of the easiest things you can do to protect your wireless home network is to change the default configuration settings on your router

Useful Links on Private Proxies for Instagram: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwPeaN6EfRs

Configuring DHCP on Your Windows Computer

Here’s a Quick Guide on how to configure DHCP in a Microsoft Windows network

One of the more confusing parts of setting up a network is DHCP or more technically referred to as Dynamic Host Control Protocol.
It’s also one of the most fundamental and luckily for the beginner one of the easier tasks to complete, for almost all home user environments your Router is going to be doing all the work here.
Every computer and/or “resource” on a network has to have a unique TCP/IP address so the router can tell which data needs to be sent to which machine.
Just as every website has an address, such as: 205.205.47.18 ( the address of this site )

Although with a website that address is going to called a “public” address meaning that it’s able to be found on the internet, but the computers on your home network will have what’s called a “private” address and will be made up of one of a few ranges of addresses set aside for smaller networks.  It’s the public facing address that everyone online sees and in fact determines what you can access.  For example if you’ve got a UK IP address then you can access British resources, otherwise you’ll need to use a proxy like in this post – How to Watch Channel 4 Abroad.

 

As far as Private addresses go there are 3 sets of numbers you can use, they are:
10.0.0.0 – 10.255.255.255
172.16.0.0 – 172.31.255.255
192.168.0.0 – 192.168.255.255
It is your choice which to use just remember all the pc’s must use the same range of numbers in order to “see” each other.
Most vendors of routers are going to have a set of addresses they like to use and it’s easiest to simply follow their lead and continue to use numbers from the same range.

Also, IP addresses in the range of 169.254.0.0 -169.254.255.255 are reserved for Automatic Private IP Addressing. -which are address used by MS Windows if it can’t find an address from another source, so you don’t want to see this as your computers address.

To check your IP address of your computer click here IP address

All that may sound technical and complicated, however, here’s where the easy part comes in-
You could manually assign these addresses to each of your computers one by one. This technique is called “Static” addressing, and is used in more advanced set-ups.

But that’s too much work and not as efficient as using DHCP where your router will simply hand out new addresses to each new PC as it boots up and gets discovered on the network. DHCP is especially useful when you are trying to determine if your computer and router are connected and functioning.
If your computer has a private IP address then it must have gotten that information from the router and therefore they must be communicating.

So, let’s check some settings in Windows-
First, you need to verify that DHCP is turned on in the configuration of your router. For this you will need to check with the documention that was supplied with your router.
IF you can’t get to the configuration screens for your router click here

Second, you need to verify each computer is set to use DHCP. The steps for this are slightly different in each version of Windows, so follow the directions on each of the specific version of Windows because they are slightly different.The Final step is to check and verify that you have gotten a address from your router and that your computer and router are “talking.”
To do so click on the link below to check your IP address and verify connectivity.

Further Reading: http://residentialip.net/ip-address-questions-why-use-residential-ip-addresses/