June 30, 2021 • 47 mins
We've reached the end of our primer on tech acronyms and initialisms (for now). In this episode, learn about search engine optimization, what an SSID is, why you should pick WPA over WEP and what Y2K was all about.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and I love of all things tech. And Okay, I
think we are now down to the home stretch here,
(00:25):
So if you've just joined us. Over the past several
long episodes, we've been going through popular acronyms and initialisms
in tech to explain what they mean and kind of
give some background on each of them. This is the
sixth and final episode for all those terms. Keeping in
(00:46):
mind that we did skip a couple, but that'll just
have to wait for a follow up at some point.
We are currently in the SYS, so let's get right
to it and not waste any more time. First is
s EO. This stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it's
pretty much what it sounds like. SEO covers a suite
(01:10):
of strategies and best practices that give web page creators
a better chance of ranking well in various search engines.
And really, when we say search engines, we mostly mean Google.
According to Global Stats, Google accounts for staggering ninety two
point two percent of the search engine market share so really,
(01:34):
focusing on anything else doesn't make any sense. You're just
you're targeting such a small audience that should really focus
on Google. But let's talk a little bit about why
s EO is such a big deal in the first place. Well,
according to Statista, a different site that tracks these sorts
of things, nearly thirty percent of all web traffic is
(01:54):
funneled through search. That was back in twenty nineteen at least,
so nearly a third of all traffic on the Internet
is dependent upon search. Search represents a way for people
to discover web content, but only if you rank well
enough to be found in a search right. If your
web page isn't showing up pretty early on in search results,
(02:18):
you might as well not even be in the listing
at all. And here's another statistic. This one is according
to webfx, only twenty of users ever bother to go
beyond the first page of search results. So that means
seventy of people using the web will use a search
result that appears on the first page and they never
go beyond that first page, which means if your website
(02:41):
doesn't pop up in that first page for whatever relevant
search criteria match your sight, then you're not going to
get very much web traffic through search, and it gets worse. Actually,
when you look at search results, you really only see
the first few listed before you need to start scrolling
down the page. We would typically call the search results
(03:02):
that appear below the screen as being below the fold.
That's term the dates back to newspapers, and some folks
won't even go beyond the fold, right, They'll just look
at the first view and they won't even scroll down.
So you really need to have your page rank very
high in search results for whatever the relevant search queries
are for your web page. Google uses a ranking system
(03:26):
for search results that has changed several times since it
first appeared. Now, in the old days, the criteria that
really determined where a specific result would appear within search
would include stuff like how old the site was, was
it had it been around for a while? Uh, how
many other sites were linking to this page? The idea
(03:47):
being that if a lot of other sites are linking
into a specific one, that specific one should be pretty good, right.
It's kind of like wisdom of the crowd and other
stuff like that really played a big part. Today it's
even more complicated, and that's what gave birth to the
idea of search engine optimization. So the goal is to
give a web page every advantage so that it has
(04:10):
the best chance of ranking high in search results for
the irrelevant queries. And a lot of the strategies in
s c O are individually pretty small, they can seem insignificant,
but when they're used collectively, they can all make a
big difference. That is, until Google changes its algorithm again
and all your strategies no longer work, which is a thing.
(04:33):
The dependence on search engines can become a really limiting
factor on web based companies. For websites that generate revenue
through ads and those that depend on search traffic, it
can be devastating when Google makes a change. A site
could be doing really well in search one quarter, and
then its performance the following quarter might plummet because of
(04:54):
a change in Google's algorithm, and that means that revenue
will plummet as well. It's tough these days. Search isn't
the only area that companies need to focus on. Social
networks are another big source of web traffic, and so
there are similar strategies meant to encourage people to visit
sites through links on platforms like Twitter, and Facebook. Moving
(05:15):
on next, we have s m S or Short Message Service,
which is kind of another way to say text messaging.
SMS is on top of communication protocols that both determine
how messages can transmit over telecommunications lines and also places
some limits on those communications. For example, the SMS allows
(05:36):
for transmission of messages of up to one hundred sixty
characters per message. This is why Twitter had a one
hundred forty character limit for a really long time. Twitter
was built to work with SMS so that people could
tweet or receive tweets via text on their phones, and
you know, twenty characters were says aside for stuff like
user handles. A variant of SMS, MMS or Multimedia Messaging Service,
(06:03):
which can send audio, video, and images via cellular communication.
All right, moving on s little oh big C SO
s o C, and there are actually quite a few
tech related topics that have the acronym s O C.
If you're actually talking all caps, you might mean Security
Operations center, which is a centralized department in charge of
(06:26):
dealing with computer security, typically within a company or other organization. Uh,
you could mean BIGES, little oh big C and talk
about separation of concerns. That refers to an approach in
computer programming, but I actually wanted to look at a
different version of s OC, that being system on a chip.
(06:47):
This is a type of integrated circuit that includes all
the basic components of a computer all on a single chip.
So that would include a processor, computer memory, some form
of storage, and in put in output ports. So as
the name suggests, it's a full computer system all located
on a single chip. This is all about manaturization and
(07:09):
building out mobile devices that have lots of features in them,
so they tend to be pretty power efficient as well.
And you can find s OC and stuff like smartphones
or car systems or Internet of Things devices. And that's
just a start. There are also lots of research facilities
that use system on a chip design for various scientific projects.
(07:29):
And they can even be used in laptops and small
PCs because they can be powerful and really efficient when
it comes to how much power they consume, how much
electricity they need to operate. Okay, burning through it, let's
get to the next one. S q L. This stands
for structured query language. This language relates to databases and
(07:51):
think of all the stuff you might do with a database,
such as you might want to update records in the database,
you might want to search a database, you might want
to pull U S Pacific record. All of those basic things. Well,
s q L is useful when you're dealing with structured data.
Some engineers at IBM originally developed s q L in
the nineteen seventies. Back then it was actually called Sequel.
(08:14):
Some people will still refer to s q L as Sequel,
but the company that really took the ball and ran
with it was Oracle, which built an entire industry around
database construction and management. So if you ever see s
q L, that's what it's in reference to. It's this
language that tends to be used regarding databases. Next, we
(08:37):
have S s D solid state drive. Now, in a
previous episode in this series, we talked about h d
d s, or hard disk drives, and how those storage
devices use physical platters to store data magnetically. A solid
state drive is a different type of data storage system.
Rather than using spinning platters and magnetic storage, s s
(08:59):
D s use an integrated circuit to store data. The
most common method is to use what is called flash memory.
This is a non volatile form of computer storage and
just as a reminder. That means that the information stored
in this kind of format will remain intact even if
the computer were to lose power. You can erase and
(09:21):
right over stuff that's stored in flash memory, so it's
not like it's set in stone, but otherwise information will
remain persistent within flash memory. S s d s have
several advantages over h d ds. For one thing, they
have no moving parts and so they are silent, and
HDD requires a motor to spin the platters, and depending
(09:43):
on the make of the hard disk drive, it can
sometimes be kind allowed when it starts to spin up
to speed. Uh They s s d s are are
more resistant to physical damage as well. If you were
to drop a hard disk drive, you would run the
risk of knocking the platters out of alignment or breaking
some mechanical component. But ss d s are a bit
(10:04):
more shock resistant than that. They are not damage proof.
I don't mean to suggest that they're like Superman and invulnerable.
S s d s are also typically much smaller, I
mean physically smaller than hard disk drives. That's also a
big advantage. It means you can make smaller form factors
for computers, as well as making lighter computers as well.
(10:27):
This gets to be pretty important when you're working with
stuff like laptops and portable computers and smartphones and that
kind of thing. Computers can pull information from ss d
s much more quickly than they can from HDDs. For
that reason, solid state drives are the preferred long term
storage solution for people who need to run very low
(10:47):
latency applications. That includes gamers. A good solid state drive
means that you have little to know load times when
you're initiating a program. So let's say you're playing a
really you know, resource intensive game. Let's say it's something
like a big open world game like an Assassin's Creed game. Well,
(11:08):
with a solid state drive, you might be able to
run all over the world map in that game and
never encounter a loading screen. That's a pretty big deal
for gamers. Generally speaking, solid state drives are much more
expensive than hard disk drives if you're looking at it
on a per gigabyte basis. Also, it's easier and far
(11:28):
less expensive to find really high capacity hard disk drives
compared to solid state drives. When you start looking at
the multi terrabyte range of storage, hard disk drives are
significantly less expensive than solid state drives, so it's not
as easy as saying that solid state drives are outright
(11:48):
better than hard disk drives. It actually depends on what
you want to use storage for and how much you
have to spend on it, like how much money you've got.
For gamers, solid state drive might be important for holding
whatever games are in current rotation of play, and then
you might want to supplemental hard disk drive that's standing
by that holds onto other titles that aren't in your
(12:11):
current player rotation. That's just an example. Moving on S
s i D. This stands for Service set identify Er.
This is more or less a fancy way of saying
network name. They can be up to thirty two characters long.
There's no minimum length, though, and routers typically come with
a default S s I D, usually something that relates
(12:34):
to whatever company manufactured that router, followed by some letters
or numbers or both. Generally speaking, it's usually a good
idea to go into the settings of your router. You
can usually find some pretty easy instructions on how to
log into your local router. It's not typically very hard,
and then you change the default name of your network
(12:56):
to something else. You can also pretty much name it
anything you like within those thirty two characters. So, for example,
I can use my phone to serve as a WiFi hotspot,
which I do occasionally whenever I can't access reliable WiFi,
but you know I do happen to have a strong
cell signal. I can use it as as sort of
like a WiFi modem. My phone's hot spot name is
(13:20):
totally trustworthy WiFi because I think that's funny, and because
it's the sort of name that would give other folks
just a bit of a pause before they would try
to connect to it, because like, but if it's totally
not trustworthy, I also protect it with a pretty strong password,
so actually connecting to that network is kind of tough.
But the reason you want to go in and change
(13:41):
the default name and password is because some companies use
a blanket default password, like using admin as a log
in and the word password as password, and that could
mean that someone else might get access to your network
and cause all sorts of mischief, from attempting to snoop
on what you're doing, to using your network as part
of like a bottan net attack on a target Typically,
(14:03):
routers have a sticker somewhere on them that lists the
default S s I D, though obviously if you go
through in settings and you change this, then that default
is no longer going to apply. You can use settings
on your computer or smartphone to look at S s
i D s within range. So if you were to
come into possession of a router and you discovered it
(14:23):
along the way that someone had changed the S s
i D, you could scan the available networks and look
to see if you could find the strongest signals and
try to identify which one is your actual router. Of course,
if someone also changed the default password, you might be
kind of stuck. Though. Many of these machines also have
a reset button so that you can reset it to
(14:44):
the UH the manufacturer default settings and get into it.
That way. You can also change settings on your router
so that it won't broadcast the S s i D
to nearby devices. That means that in this case, when
people search for networks, they won't see yours as they're
scanning the S s i D s. You can only
(15:05):
connect to such a network if you already know the
S s I D and you specifically direct your device
to connect with it. That requires manually changing wireless settings
on your device. Now, this sounds like it's a pretty
powerful way to protect yourself, but really it's more of
a surface level protection. Hiding your S S I D
might save you from the nubiast of nubes when it
(15:28):
comes to you know, bad actors, but folks who know
what they're doing can still track network traffic with the
right know how and the right tools. Maybe I'll reach
out to friend of the show, Shannon Morris to guests
on an episode to talk about the steps you can
take to best secure your home network. I think that
would be a valuable conversation to have. Okay, we've got
(15:49):
some acronyms and initialisms, but we're starting to head into
the home stretch. We're first going to take a quick break.
We're back and we're starting with S s L and
I reference this a little bit with HTTPS. SSL stands
(16:10):
for Secure Socket Layer. Uh, this is actually an outdated term.
The more current version is the t l S or
transport layer security. But in either case, the purpose is
to authenticate and encrypt communication links between networked computers. So
these are protocols that allow for secure and secret communications. Now,
(16:31):
when I say secret communications, I don't mean that the
fact that communication is happening is a secret. S s
L and t l s do not hide the fact
that communication is happening between computers. Instead, they encrypt and
obvious skate the nature of that communication. So it's kind
of like seeing two of your friends whispering to each other.
(16:54):
You know, you know they're up to no good, but
you don't know what they're specifically plotting. You might even
suspect that they're whispering about you, but you can't be
certain because you're not able to hear what they're saying.
So what I'm saying is, I know you're up to something,
Lena and Shay, and I don't approve, not one bit.
Knock it off. All right, all right, that got a
(17:17):
little personal. Let's let's get back on track. S s
L and t l s work by binding websites with
a digital document called an x dot five oh nine certificate,
which assigns pairs of keys to those websites. One key
is a public key. This is the key that the
website can share with the world. Anyone communicating with this
(17:39):
website through a browser does so using the public key,
which encrypts the messages that are sent to that website.
The only way to decrypt those messages to change it
back into meaningful information is to use the private key.
The website retains the private key for itself, it does
not share the private key. This way, all communications sent
(18:02):
to the website can only be decoded by the website alone,
unless some other entity were just about gain possession of
the private key or use a method like brute force
to try and replicate the private key. That brute force
thing is possible, depending upon the nature of the key. However,
it might be so difficult as to be practically impossible.
So in other words, yeah, you could, in theory be
(18:26):
able to do it, but it might take such a
long time to accomplish that you would be long dead
by the time of your computer finally managed it. In
addition to encrypting information, the website can digitally signed documents
that anyone with the public key can verify as being authentic.
So ss L and t l s help ensure that
(18:47):
private information like say a credit card number, remains secure
and that the entity you're sharing that information with is authenticated,
so you know for sure with whom you're sharing that information.
It's why it's important to look for that HTTPS or
that closed padlock symbol in your browser whenever you're interacting
(19:07):
with a site and sharing sensitive information. Next up, we
have TCP i P. Now collectively, these make up the
Internet Protocol Suite. Individually, these refer to the Transmission Control
Protocol or TCP and the Internet Protocol or i P,
and we nearly always referred to both of them together,
(19:28):
as they represent the set of communication protocols that allow
computers to connect together in a network and you know,
actually do stuff. These days, it seems natural that various
computational devices should be able to link up with each
other and communicate. It's been that way for decades now.
But once upon a time this wasn't true. Computers were
(19:51):
self contained silos. They served important purposes, but they did
so in isolation. Different computers made from different men factors
had proprietary means of operation, meaning there was no common language,
if you will, So even if you could connect two
different computers together, they wouldn't necessarily be able to interoperate.
(20:12):
It would be kind of like putting me on the
phone with someone who could only speak and understand Mandarin.
That person and I would be unable to make any
sort of meaningful conversation. In the nineteen sixties, the Department
of Defenses Advanced Research Project Agency, then called ARPA these
days we know it as DARPA set out to create
(20:33):
the means for computers to connect with one another in networks.
This would be the underlying foundation for modern computer networks
in general and the Internet a k a. The Network
of networks in particular. Vitten Surf and Robert Klein, who
both joined the project in the early nineteen seventies, would
pioneer the work on the basic set of protocols that
(20:55):
would allow for the network to communications between computers. Now,
to get them to the nuts and bolts of t
C P I P would require a full episode, or
probably more than one, so we're gonna save that for later.
It's good to know that they represent the basic set
of rules for computer networking. It's the set of instructions
that determine how communication between machines happens. Next up, we've
(21:19):
got UPS, and we are not talking about the delivery
service here. Instead, we're talking about uninterruptable power supplies. That's
what UPS stands for in this context, and as the
name implies, these are technologies that supply power to other
things even should a normal power source fail. So allow
me to paint a scenario, as the quister would say,
(21:42):
this is one that I have maybe personally experienced, possibly
on numerous occasions. So let us say that you have
an intrepid writer for a website, and this writer is
plugging away at an article plug plug plug. And let
us say that this optimist, naive young writer last saved
(22:03):
the document that they happened to be working on quite
some time ago. Maybe they've written a couple of pages
worth of work since the last time they saved the document.
And let us say that an inopportune moment, the power
goes out inside the office building where this brash, handsome
young writer is working, and because the writer is working
(22:26):
on a desktop computer without a battery backup, that machine
crashes and all the work that was created since that
last save disappears into the ether. And then our unnamed
but presumably dashingly handsome writer as all get out laments
the fact that they will now have to start over
(22:47):
back at their last save point and recreate all the
work that they had done in order to write about
how goose neck trailer hitches work. Mm hmm, Yeah, that
happened to me, and I could have been spared a
great deal of frustration if I had had my desktop
computer plugged into an uninterruptable power supply. So these devices
(23:11):
typically plug into a power source like a wall outlet,
and then you plug other devices into the UPS itself,
so the UPS plugs into the wall. You plug your
stuff into the UPS kind of like a power strip right.
In fact, some UPS devices look a lot like power strips,
so it's not just a power strip. The UPS also
(23:33):
contains a battery backup or some other means of storing electricity.
You know, maybe it's a supercapacitor or something, but battery
backup is pretty common. And if the normal power supply
that is power coming from the wall outlet suffers an outage,
the backup power supply, the battery or whatever comes on
practically instantaneously, at least fast enough so that it prevents
(23:58):
an interruption of power to you or devices. So any
devices you have plugged into the UPS continue to receive power. Now,
typically a UPS doesn't have a huge capacity for storing electricity,
so this isn't meant for you to just keep on
working away while the power is out. The battery life
might only allow for a few minutes of continued operation,
(24:20):
but that can be enough for you to be able
to save your progress and then shut down your equipment
through proper methods. This can help prevent damage to your
work and your equipment, and it can give you time
to get stuff in a safe mode while you wait
for the power to come back on. Frequently, a UPS
can also act as a surge protector, so I can
(24:41):
prevent voltage spikes from damaging equipment. Some UPS gadgets need
to be reset after a power outage. Some of them
will beep at you a lot. Typically they beat when
they are running low on battery power, and this is
a message that you really do need to start shutting
down all of your plugged in devices if you don't
want them to suddenly lose power. But they can also
(25:03):
beep as an indication of capacity overload. In that case,
you have plugged in devices that have too great a
demand for power for the UPS to accommodate, and you
need to distribute that load across other devices. Next, we
have you r L. That stands for Uniform Resource Locator,
but you could just call it a web address. Essentially,
(25:26):
this is what tells computers where on a network a
particular resource resides. It's kind of like your physical address,
so u r L relates to a specific location on
a specific server within a specific network. When you type
out a web address and a browser, you're essentially telling
the browser I want to see the stuff that is
(25:46):
stored at this location, and the browser sends out a
request up through your network to the Internet. Then routers
direct that request to the proper destination, and thanks to
that handy dandy u r L that cross references to
that location, your request arrives there at its proper destination.
Or if you miss type the web address, you get
(26:07):
something else, probably an error, but possibly someone's page, especially
if someone is squatting on commonly made typos. That's still
a thing. Tim berners Lee, the guy who invented the
Worldwide Web, defined u r L s in an RFC.
Do you remember RFCs? That stands for Request for Comments.
(26:27):
I covered it in the last episode. Next, we have USB.
This stands for Universal Serial Bus and it is a
standardized connection for all sorts of stuff. And boy, howdy,
am I thankful for it because it really made things easy.
I'm not even being facetious here. USB s are fantastic.
(26:49):
So in the old old days we would use all
sorts of different types of connection ports to connect stuff
to other stuff. And really I'm focusing primarily on computers
here because I feel that that's what most of us
associate with this kind of thing, although I will allow
that people who are really into home entertainment centers or
or audio setups are also really familiar with the the uh,
(27:12):
the burdens of having to make lots of different connections
using different types of cables and ports. Anyway, back in
the old days, computers had all sorts of different connection
ports on them, and I'm talking about stuff like parallel ports,
serial ports, more specific stuff like PS two connectors or
D I N connectors. Some game controllers required a special
(27:34):
game port. Typically you would find those on some of
the more popular sound cards. Back in the day. Sound
cards were a thing too, because you didn't have uh
integrated sound chips in computers, so you would have to
install a sound card in your computer, and on the
back plate of your PC you would have a new
port there where you could plug in a controller. It
(27:56):
was a real mess. Some of these ports required expand
in cards, and you would have to slot those into
your motherboard. Just like the sound cards I mentioned, Your
keyboard might need to go into one specific port, your
mouse in another. And then in the ninety nineties that
began to change. That's when we saw the introduction of
the USB standard. USB allows for the transmission of data
(28:18):
and power over the same cable, and it did not
take long for computer accessory manufacturers to start making stuff
like USB keyboards or USB computer mice. Uh. And later
on we saw more stuff like computer printers and docking
stations and stuff like you know, you know, a docking
station for an MP three player, that kind of thing.
(28:39):
The USB standard itself also evolved, with more recent versions
capable of carrying far more data per second than older versions.
And this meant that now suddenly you had a universal
kind of connection port and universal cable system where you
could connect all your different stuff to any of those
available ports on your computer. You didn't have to remember, oh,
(29:00):
this one is for the printer, this one is for
an extra display, Like if it was a USB then
you can plug it into any port that was USB
on your machine. With the USB three point oh standard,
we're looking at transmission speeds of five gigabits per second
and beyond. USB three point two generation two by two
(29:21):
has a top speed of ten gigabits per second across
two lanes of transmission, which gives you a total of
twenty gigabits per second bandwidth. So now we can use
USBs for stuff far more demanding than just powering a
computer mouse. Now, there's still the issue of various connectors
even with USB. I mean, there's nothing like mixing up
USB B many with the USB B micro, with USB
(29:46):
C connectors and all that kind of stuff. But still
it's leagues better than the old days of the mishmash
of connectors, and it makes managing that stuff way easier. Next,
we have v g A, the stands for video graphics Array.
Speaking of connectors, this was one of them, and some
computer manufacturers continue to support v g A connections, though
(30:08):
not nearly as many as they used to. These connectors
support computer video output, and so this is a port
that you would use to connect a computer to a
compatible display or monitor. The connectors have three rows of
five holes in them, and those line up with the
fifteen pens that are in the cables. You would use
to connect your computer to a display. These days, you
(30:30):
typically see this replaced with more recent technologies like hd M. I. Okay,
we have one last batch of acronyms and initialisms to
get through. Let's see if I can do this without
running super long. But first, let's take a quick break.
(30:52):
All right, here we go. VM. This stands for virtual machine,
which I touched on a little bit in this aries.
A virtual machine is the emulation of a computer system.
You might use specialized software, some specialized hardware, or a
combination of the two in order to make this happen.
And there are a lot of reasons why you would
want to run a virtual machine on top of actual
(31:15):
physical hardware. For example, you might have a really powerful
computer and you want to run separate processes that should
not intermingle on a single machine. So rather than buy
a second machine and then divide up the tasks, you
create virtual machines on your one physical computer, and each
(31:35):
virtual machine acts like its own standalone computer. They handle
a specific task, and the two tasks won't come into
contact with each other. Virtual machines can each have their
own dedicated computer resources. Or maybe you've got a computer
like a Mac, but you want to run PC software
on it, so you create a virtual PC machine running
(31:58):
on top of the MAC system. The virtual machine emulates
the physical hardware and architecture of a PC and allows
you to run PC software on this virtual platform. Virtualization
is also really important for stuff like data centers, but
I'll say further discussion for a future episode. Next, we
have VPN. This stands for virtual private networks. These are
(32:22):
means of creating a private network connection, particularly when you're
on a public like WiFi network. The purpose of a
VPN is to encrypt your Internet activities and disguise your
online identity, something that can be really important if you
happen to be working from say a public WiFi hotspot
like in a coffee shop or something. The way this
(32:44):
works is that you connect to a VPN directly. Your
machine essentially makes a connection with the VPN. Then the
VPN access kind of like your liaison. When you want
to visit a website, for example, your request for goes
to the VPN and the vp N kind of acts
like a proxy to retrieve the website data, then sends
(33:06):
that data to you and it's all encrypted. To the
website on the other end, it looks like all the
requests are coming from the VPN, not from you, So
you know, if you were to go to how stuff
works dot com, how stuff works dot Com would see
the traffic coming from the VPN, but would not see
that go further back to you. This is handy if
(33:28):
you want to have some secure connections and not worry
about someone, whether it's a hacker or an I s
P or the admin of the hot spot that you're using,
to know what you're doing. Some companies require employees to
use a VPN before accessing internal systems to help mitigate
the risk of hacker intrusions. Another way people use VPNs
is to bypass region locking. So let's say you want
(33:51):
to access a service in another country, but you get
a message saying that you're not within the regional service
area for that and this happens a lot with media
based services like streaming video, So you could use a
VPN to make it appear as though you are in
that country and while you can access stuff. That is
(34:13):
assuming that the media company hasn't blacklisted the VPN servers
IP address and said this is a VPN, we don't
want to allow traffic to it. I don't advocate for
this approach. I would rather see region locking just kind
of go away, rather than suggest you find ways around it.
But anyway, VPNs are an important component to secure web browsing.
(34:37):
It's also good to research VPNs before joining one. Some
vBNS keep a record of users that could potentially become
a problem if some other entity ever got hold of it.
Other VPNs make it a practice to never maintain any
kind of record at all, so your use of the
service would never become public knowledge, even if, say, law
(34:58):
enforcement were to go out after it. Next up is VR.
This one's easy. It's virtual reality basically refers to any
system in which some, most, or all of your sensory
input is coming courtesy of a computer system. Typically we
associated with systems that include head mounted displays. That means
that everything you see comes from a computer source, and
(35:19):
it's usually paired with technology that allows for head tracking,
so that when you turn your head, the computer reflects
this with a change in your perspective. It's a subtype
of mixed reality, along with a R or augmented reality,
which we covered way back at the beginning of this series.
Next is W three C. The number three so W
(35:40):
three C. This stands for the Worldwide Web Consortium, which
is a group that develops standards for use on the
Worldwide Web. Tim berners Lee pops up again here, as
he founded and currently leads the organization. The Consortium mainly
focuses on getting all the various players in the Web
to work on an agreed upon on set of standards
(36:01):
so that the experience of accessing the Web remains consistent
no matter what browser or platforms someone happens to be using.
Next up, W A N. This is a wide area network.
So in a previous episode we talked about l a
N s lands or local area networks. Well, a w
a N is just a really big network. It's one
(36:22):
that spans a large geographic region. So we're talking about
a network that measures at least half a mile across,
but can be much larger. These networks, like lands, can
be purely self contained. That means you can have a
w a N that does not connect out to the Internet,
or they might have interconnections with other types of networks.
(36:45):
Next up, we've got w e P. This stands for
Wired Equivalent Privacy. It's a type of security algorithm for
use with wireless networks. So the idea is that this
security algorithm would provide the same sort of privacy that
you would experience if you had physically connected all the
computers in your network together with cables. So you're trying
(37:07):
to prevent the chance for some outside force to snoop
in on what's going on with the network. And obviously
this is something to be concerned about when you're dealing
with wireless networks, right. I mean, all communications are relying
on radio waves, which can be intercepted by anyone with
a compatible tuner and antenna. W EP became a security
(37:28):
standard back in n It uses encryption to protect network communications,
but w e P has fallen out of favor since
the mid two thousand's. It's not seen as being particularly secure.
And our next entry will pick up where w EP
left off, so let's move on to it. That would
be w p A. This stands for WiFi Protected Access
(37:51):
and this family of security systems are the current recommended
ones to have in use for Wi Fi networks. There
are three generations of this current LEE. You've got w
P A, w P A two, and w p A three.
To get into the full details of this will require
a separate episode because it gets really technical, but it's
(38:11):
a good thing to remember that if you have options
to set your network security to either w e P
or w P A, you should go with w p A.
More and more devices infect Almost pretty much every device
made now is going to be w p A compatible.
If you're working with really old tech, you might have
some that aren't, but generally speaking, networks should be w
(38:34):
p A, preferably w P A three. Next up, we've
got whizzy wig or w y s I w y
G whizzy wig. It stands for what you see is
what you get, and it refers to any type of
editing software in which what you're seeing as you edit
(38:55):
is pretty much what you're going to get with the
final finished product. This is easier for me to explain
with an old example. So if you've been listening to
this series, you heard me talk about when I was
making my first web pages decades ago, using a text
editor to write out all the HTML code. The text
document was a collection of markup language tags and then
(39:17):
the content, and on casual glance it looked like a
real mess. I mean, you could scan through the document
and kind of get an idea of what the web
page was all about. But if you just looked at
it casually, it looked like a bunch of symbols and
letters and numbers and didn't have a whole lot of
meaning to it. Flash forward a few years and companies
began to develop software that would let people develop a
(39:40):
web page without having to manage the actual HTML code.
It was more like a word processor. You could view
the document as if it were a web page in progress,
long before you ever uploaded it to a server. So
what you see is what you get. The view you
have of your web page in progress is what it
would look like if some one were to visit it
(40:01):
through a browser. Now, there tends to be trade offs
with whizzywig interfaces. You can see right away if something
is working or not, but you might have to dig
a bit deeper in the user interface to get to
some of the more fine tuning controls. If you're coding
stuff the hard way, you typically have way more precise
(40:21):
control over things if you know what you're doing, but
it does require a lot more back and forth to
make sure that everything's coming out all right. Man, this
is making me think of the old days when I
would use word perfect to make documents, and I would
have reveal codes on all the time, just so I
could see where stuff was, like an underlying section, or
where hard returns were, stuff like that. And those were
(40:44):
the days, man I miss those. Next XML. I touched
on this in a previous entry, but it stands for
extensible markup language. This language allows users to create and
define their own tags, and so this is a meta
textual markup language. Another way to think of it is
that x m L is information that is wrapped in tags,
(41:06):
and xm L doesn't actually do anything on its own.
You have to write some form of software to interpret
and act upon those tags. So, for example, if you
were to create a document and you wanted to use
some XML tags, you might create a tag that reads,
you know, open bracket, subheading clothes bracket. Then you might
(41:26):
type you know a message that you want to have
as a subheading on your document, and then at the
end of it you would type open bracket slash subheading,
close bracket. But that alone doesn't do anything right, that's
meaningless by itself. But then let's say you create some
software to handle how this document gets viewed, and in
(41:47):
the creation of that software, you lay out the rules
as to how that subheading tag should be displayed within
a view of the document. That's what x m L does.
It creates the opportunity to carry data in a specif
ific way as determined by the tags and the definition
of those tags. Now this is in contrast with HTML,
(42:07):
a different markup language which has predefined tags. And finally
we have HY two K. This was an abbreviation meant
to indicate a potentially disastrous problem when the calendar switched
from to two thousand. Some of you listening to this
(42:28):
might have been born after two thousand or he might
have been too young to know what this was all about.
And um I remember, and it was crazy. It mostly
boils down to people being a little lazy and relying
on work that was never meant to stand the test
of time. So let's get to it. Way back in
the day, computer programmers were facing some pretty big challenges,
(42:51):
and one of those was finding ways to limit the
size of programs, both for the sake of simplicity and
to conserve computer storage space, which was in short supply
early on in the days of programming. To that end,
when making programs that need to reference what year it
was a lot of programmers used a shorthand. They only
used the last two digits of the year, so for example,
(43:13):
this year would be twenty one for one. Now, this
started around the nineteen sixties, so let's be fair to
those programmers. They probably did not anticipate that the code
they were building was going to be dependent upon nearly
half a century later. I'm sure they assumed understandably so
that someone somewhere, at some point would make a better
(43:37):
version of the program. And you know, when stuff like
conserving computer storage space wouldn't be as quite a big concern.
You could have code with four digits and not have
to take the shorthand approach. But instead people kept on
perpetuating that particular form of programming shorthand. At least a
(43:58):
lot of people did, and a lot of systems, particularly
systems that would become legacy systems, ones that companies would
rely upon because it was just too expensive or too
difficult to upgrade everything, so they would just continue to
rely on this old infrastructure. A lot of that still
relied on that two digit format for the year. And
(44:18):
that works okay until you cross over the end of
a millennium. Then you potentially have issues. So when was
to become zero zero, people weren't sure what could happen.
I mean for systems that use the year to calculate
stuff like, you know, location data for things like airlines
(44:40):
or particular financial data. The worry was that the computer
systems would roll over from zero zero, and that the
computers would essentially assume the current year would not be
two thousand, it would instead be nineteen hundred, and that
could be disastrous. Now, this worry lead to a global
concer learned bordering on panic. In some instances, there were
(45:03):
fears that technology ranging from computer systems to airplanes to
microwaves might fail because of this oversight. Some companies spent
millions hundreds of millions of dollars to hire programmers to
go in and update code to reflect a four digit year,
and in some cases programmers needed to create complicated software
(45:26):
to adjust for hardware that was hard coded with this
two digit year approach. In the end, when the clock
ticked over, there were very few major problems with Y
two K, particularly here in the United States. Part of
that reason they have been just that a lot of
the most necessary work had already happened. A lot of
companies had spent much of n addressing the issue. There
(45:52):
were a few exceptions, one of which was a particularly
scary one. A nuclear energy facility in Japan had some
creation containment equipment fail, but fortunately backup systems came online immediately,
so disaster was averted. Some countries did see more problems
than others. These were typically countries that had not invested
(46:13):
nearly as much money into preventing the Y two K issue,
So like South Korea had some issues. I'll probably have
to do a full episode about Y two K and
talk about all those related issues with code, including some
that are similar and had uh you know, relating issues.
But that is it. We have finally made our way
(46:34):
through the alphabet. It only took six episodes, and honestly,
I also skipped over some stuff, like I didn't talk
about good news very much, but we will save that
for a catch up episode. If you have suggestions for
topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff
alphabetically or otherwise, let me know the best way to
do that is through Twitter. The handle for the show
(46:55):
is text Stuff hs W, and I'll talk to you
again really soon. Tex Stuff is an I Heart Radio production.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and I love of all things tech. And Okay, I
think we are now down to the home stretch here,
(00:25):
So if you've just joined us. Over the past several
long episodes, we've been going through popular acronyms and initialisms
in tech to explain what they mean and kind of
give some background on each of them. This is the
sixth and final episode for all those terms. Keeping in
(00:46):
mind that we did skip a couple, but that'll just
have to wait for a follow up at some point.
We are currently in the SYS, so let's get right
to it and not waste any more time. First is
s EO. This stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it's
pretty much what it sounds like. SEO covers a suite
(01:10):
of strategies and best practices that give web page creators
a better chance of ranking well in various search engines.
And really, when we say search engines, we mostly mean Google.
According to Global Stats, Google accounts for staggering ninety two
point two percent of the search engine market share so really,
(01:34):
focusing on anything else doesn't make any sense. You're just
you're targeting such a small audience that should really focus
on Google. But let's talk a little bit about why
s EO is such a big deal in the first place. Well,
according to Statista, a different site that tracks these sorts
of things, nearly thirty percent of all web traffic is
(01:54):
funneled through search. That was back in twenty nineteen at least,
so nearly a third of all traffic on the Internet
is dependent upon search. Search represents a way for people
to discover web content, but only if you rank well
enough to be found in a search right. If your
web page isn't showing up pretty early on in search results,
(02:18):
you might as well not even be in the listing
at all. And here's another statistic. This one is according
to webfx, only twenty of users ever bother to go
beyond the first page of search results. So that means
seventy of people using the web will use a search
result that appears on the first page and they never
go beyond that first page, which means if your website
(02:41):
doesn't pop up in that first page for whatever relevant
search criteria match your sight, then you're not going to
get very much web traffic through search, and it gets worse. Actually,
when you look at search results, you really only see
the first few listed before you need to start scrolling
down the page. We would typically call the search results
(03:02):
that appear below the screen as being below the fold.
That's term the dates back to newspapers, and some folks
won't even go beyond the fold, right, They'll just look
at the first view and they won't even scroll down.
So you really need to have your page rank very
high in search results for whatever the relevant search queries
are for your web page. Google uses a ranking system
(03:26):
for search results that has changed several times since it
first appeared. Now, in the old days, the criteria that
really determined where a specific result would appear within search
would include stuff like how old the site was, was
it had it been around for a while? Uh, how
many other sites were linking to this page? The idea
(03:47):
being that if a lot of other sites are linking
into a specific one, that specific one should be pretty good, right.
It's kind of like wisdom of the crowd and other
stuff like that really played a big part. Today it's
even more complicated, and that's what gave birth to the
idea of search engine optimization. So the goal is to
give a web page every advantage so that it has
(04:10):
the best chance of ranking high in search results for
the irrelevant queries. And a lot of the strategies in
s c O are individually pretty small, they can seem insignificant,
but when they're used collectively, they can all make a
big difference. That is, until Google changes its algorithm again
and all your strategies no longer work, which is a thing.
(04:33):
The dependence on search engines can become a really limiting
factor on web based companies. For websites that generate revenue
through ads and those that depend on search traffic, it
can be devastating when Google makes a change. A site
could be doing really well in search one quarter, and
then its performance the following quarter might plummet because of
(04:54):
a change in Google's algorithm, and that means that revenue
will plummet as well. It's tough these days. Search isn't
the only area that companies need to focus on. Social
networks are another big source of web traffic, and so
there are similar strategies meant to encourage people to visit
sites through links on platforms like Twitter, and Facebook. Moving
(05:15):
on next, we have s m S or Short Message Service,
which is kind of another way to say text messaging.
SMS is on top of communication protocols that both determine
how messages can transmit over telecommunications lines and also places
some limits on those communications. For example, the SMS allows
(05:36):
for transmission of messages of up to one hundred sixty
characters per message. This is why Twitter had a one
hundred forty character limit for a really long time. Twitter
was built to work with SMS so that people could
tweet or receive tweets via text on their phones, and
you know, twenty characters were says aside for stuff like
user handles. A variant of SMS, MMS or Multimedia Messaging Service,
(06:03):
which can send audio, video, and images via cellular communication.
All right, moving on s little oh big C SO
s o C, and there are actually quite a few
tech related topics that have the acronym s O C.
If you're actually talking all caps, you might mean Security
Operations center, which is a centralized department in charge of
(06:26):
dealing with computer security, typically within a company or other organization. Uh,
you could mean BIGES, little oh big C and talk
about separation of concerns. That refers to an approach in
computer programming, but I actually wanted to look at a
different version of s OC, that being system on a chip.
(06:47):
This is a type of integrated circuit that includes all
the basic components of a computer all on a single chip.
So that would include a processor, computer memory, some form
of storage, and in put in output ports. So as
the name suggests, it's a full computer system all located
on a single chip. This is all about manaturization and
(07:09):
building out mobile devices that have lots of features in them,
so they tend to be pretty power efficient as well.
And you can find s OC and stuff like smartphones
or car systems or Internet of Things devices. And that's
just a start. There are also lots of research facilities
that use system on a chip design for various scientific projects.
(07:29):
And they can even be used in laptops and small
PCs because they can be powerful and really efficient when
it comes to how much power they consume, how much
electricity they need to operate. Okay, burning through it, let's
get to the next one. S q L. This stands
for structured query language. This language relates to databases and
(07:51):
think of all the stuff you might do with a database,
such as you might want to update records in the database,
you might want to search a database, you might want
to pull U S Pacific record. All of those basic things. Well,
s q L is useful when you're dealing with structured data.
Some engineers at IBM originally developed s q L in
the nineteen seventies. Back then it was actually called Sequel.
(08:14):
Some people will still refer to s q L as Sequel,
but the company that really took the ball and ran
with it was Oracle, which built an entire industry around
database construction and management. So if you ever see s
q L, that's what it's in reference to. It's this
language that tends to be used regarding databases. Next, we
(08:37):
have S s D solid state drive. Now, in a
previous episode in this series, we talked about h d
d s, or hard disk drives, and how those storage
devices use physical platters to store data magnetically. A solid
state drive is a different type of data storage system.
Rather than using spinning platters and magnetic storage, s s
(08:59):
D s use an integrated circuit to store data. The
most common method is to use what is called flash memory.
This is a non volatile form of computer storage and
just as a reminder. That means that the information stored
in this kind of format will remain intact even if
the computer were to lose power. You can erase and
(09:21):
right over stuff that's stored in flash memory, so it's
not like it's set in stone, but otherwise information will
remain persistent within flash memory. S s d s have
several advantages over h d ds. For one thing, they
have no moving parts and so they are silent, and
HDD requires a motor to spin the platters, and depending
(09:43):
on the make of the hard disk drive, it can
sometimes be kind allowed when it starts to spin up
to speed. Uh They s s d s are are
more resistant to physical damage as well. If you were
to drop a hard disk drive, you would run the
risk of knocking the platters out of alignment or breaking
some mechanical component. But ss d s are a bit
(10:04):
more shock resistant than that. They are not damage proof.
I don't mean to suggest that they're like Superman and invulnerable.
S s d s are also typically much smaller, I
mean physically smaller than hard disk drives. That's also a
big advantage. It means you can make smaller form factors
for computers, as well as making lighter computers as well.
(10:27):
This gets to be pretty important when you're working with
stuff like laptops and portable computers and smartphones and that
kind of thing. Computers can pull information from ss d
s much more quickly than they can from HDDs. For
that reason, solid state drives are the preferred long term
storage solution for people who need to run very low
(10:47):
latency applications. That includes gamers. A good solid state drive
means that you have little to know load times when
you're initiating a program. So let's say you're playing a
really you know, resource intensive game. Let's say it's something
like a big open world game like an Assassin's Creed game. Well,
(11:08):
with a solid state drive, you might be able to
run all over the world map in that game and
never encounter a loading screen. That's a pretty big deal
for gamers. Generally speaking, solid state drives are much more
expensive than hard disk drives if you're looking at it
on a per gigabyte basis. Also, it's easier and far
(11:28):
less expensive to find really high capacity hard disk drives
compared to solid state drives. When you start looking at
the multi terrabyte range of storage, hard disk drives are
significantly less expensive than solid state drives, so it's not
as easy as saying that solid state drives are outright
(11:48):
better than hard disk drives. It actually depends on what
you want to use storage for and how much you
have to spend on it, like how much money you've got.
For gamers, solid state drive might be important for holding
whatever games are in current rotation of play, and then
you might want to supplemental hard disk drive that's standing
by that holds onto other titles that aren't in your
(12:11):
current player rotation. That's just an example. Moving on S
s i D. This stands for Service set identify Er.
This is more or less a fancy way of saying
network name. They can be up to thirty two characters long.
There's no minimum length, though, and routers typically come with
a default S s I D, usually something that relates
(12:34):
to whatever company manufactured that router, followed by some letters
or numbers or both. Generally speaking, it's usually a good
idea to go into the settings of your router. You
can usually find some pretty easy instructions on how to
log into your local router. It's not typically very hard,
and then you change the default name of your network
(12:56):
to something else. You can also pretty much name it
anything you like within those thirty two characters. So, for example,
I can use my phone to serve as a WiFi hotspot,
which I do occasionally whenever I can't access reliable WiFi,
but you know I do happen to have a strong
cell signal. I can use it as as sort of
like a WiFi modem. My phone's hot spot name is
(13:20):
totally trustworthy WiFi because I think that's funny, and because
it's the sort of name that would give other folks
just a bit of a pause before they would try
to connect to it, because like, but if it's totally
not trustworthy, I also protect it with a pretty strong password,
so actually connecting to that network is kind of tough.
But the reason you want to go in and change
(13:41):
the default name and password is because some companies use
a blanket default password, like using admin as a log
in and the word password as password, and that could
mean that someone else might get access to your network
and cause all sorts of mischief, from attempting to snoop
on what you're doing, to using your network as part
of like a bottan net attack on a target Typically,
(14:03):
routers have a sticker somewhere on them that lists the
default S s I D, though obviously if you go
through in settings and you change this, then that default
is no longer going to apply. You can use settings
on your computer or smartphone to look at S s
i D s within range. So if you were to
come into possession of a router and you discovered it
(14:23):
along the way that someone had changed the S s
i D, you could scan the available networks and look
to see if you could find the strongest signals and
try to identify which one is your actual router. Of course,
if someone also changed the default password, you might be
kind of stuck. Though. Many of these machines also have
a reset button so that you can reset it to
(14:44):
the UH the manufacturer default settings and get into it.
That way. You can also change settings on your router
so that it won't broadcast the S s i D
to nearby devices. That means that in this case, when
people search for networks, they won't see yours as they're
scanning the S s i D s. You can only
(15:05):
connect to such a network if you already know the
S s I D and you specifically direct your device
to connect with it. That requires manually changing wireless settings
on your device. Now, this sounds like it's a pretty
powerful way to protect yourself, but really it's more of
a surface level protection. Hiding your S S I D
might save you from the nubiast of nubes when it
(15:28):
comes to you know, bad actors, but folks who know
what they're doing can still track network traffic with the
right know how and the right tools. Maybe I'll reach
out to friend of the show, Shannon Morris to guests
on an episode to talk about the steps you can
take to best secure your home network. I think that
would be a valuable conversation to have. Okay, we've got
(15:49):
some acronyms and initialisms, but we're starting to head into
the home stretch. We're first going to take a quick break.
We're back and we're starting with S s L and
I reference this a little bit with HTTPS. SSL stands
(16:10):
for Secure Socket Layer. Uh, this is actually an outdated term.
The more current version is the t l S or
transport layer security. But in either case, the purpose is
to authenticate and encrypt communication links between networked computers. So
these are protocols that allow for secure and secret communications. Now,
(16:31):
when I say secret communications, I don't mean that the
fact that communication is happening is a secret. S s
L and t l s do not hide the fact
that communication is happening between computers. Instead, they encrypt and
obvious skate the nature of that communication. So it's kind
of like seeing two of your friends whispering to each other.
(16:54):
You know, you know they're up to no good, but
you don't know what they're specifically plotting. You might even
suspect that they're whispering about you, but you can't be
certain because you're not able to hear what they're saying.
So what I'm saying is, I know you're up to something,
Lena and Shay, and I don't approve, not one bit.
Knock it off. All right, all right, that got a
(17:17):
little personal. Let's let's get back on track. S s
L and t l s work by binding websites with
a digital document called an x dot five oh nine certificate,
which assigns pairs of keys to those websites. One key
is a public key. This is the key that the
website can share with the world. Anyone communicating with this
(17:39):
website through a browser does so using the public key,
which encrypts the messages that are sent to that website.
The only way to decrypt those messages to change it
back into meaningful information is to use the private key.
The website retains the private key for itself, it does
not share the private key. This way, all communications sent
(18:02):
to the website can only be decoded by the website alone,
unless some other entity were just about gain possession of
the private key or use a method like brute force
to try and replicate the private key. That brute force
thing is possible, depending upon the nature of the key. However,
it might be so difficult as to be practically impossible.
So in other words, yeah, you could, in theory be
(18:26):
able to do it, but it might take such a
long time to accomplish that you would be long dead
by the time of your computer finally managed it. In
addition to encrypting information, the website can digitally signed documents
that anyone with the public key can verify as being authentic.
So ss L and t l s help ensure that
(18:47):
private information like say a credit card number, remains secure
and that the entity you're sharing that information with is authenticated,
so you know for sure with whom you're sharing that information.
It's why it's important to look for that HTTPS or
that closed padlock symbol in your browser whenever you're interacting
(19:07):
with a site and sharing sensitive information. Next up, we
have TCP i P. Now collectively, these make up the
Internet Protocol Suite. Individually, these refer to the Transmission Control
Protocol or TCP and the Internet Protocol or i P,
and we nearly always referred to both of them together,
(19:28):
as they represent the set of communication protocols that allow
computers to connect together in a network and you know,
actually do stuff. These days, it seems natural that various
computational devices should be able to link up with each
other and communicate. It's been that way for decades now.
But once upon a time this wasn't true. Computers were
(19:51):
self contained silos. They served important purposes, but they did
so in isolation. Different computers made from different men factors
had proprietary means of operation, meaning there was no common language,
if you will, So even if you could connect two
different computers together, they wouldn't necessarily be able to interoperate.
(20:12):
It would be kind of like putting me on the
phone with someone who could only speak and understand Mandarin.
That person and I would be unable to make any
sort of meaningful conversation. In the nineteen sixties, the Department
of Defenses Advanced Research Project Agency, then called ARPA these
days we know it as DARPA set out to create
(20:33):
the means for computers to connect with one another in networks.
This would be the underlying foundation for modern computer networks
in general and the Internet a k a. The Network
of networks in particular. Vitten Surf and Robert Klein, who
both joined the project in the early nineteen seventies, would
pioneer the work on the basic set of protocols that
(20:55):
would allow for the network to communications between computers. Now,
to get them to the nuts and bolts of t
C P I P would require a full episode, or
probably more than one, so we're gonna save that for later.
It's good to know that they represent the basic set
of rules for computer networking. It's the set of instructions
that determine how communication between machines happens. Next up, we've
(21:19):
got UPS, and we are not talking about the delivery
service here. Instead, we're talking about uninterruptable power supplies. That's
what UPS stands for in this context, and as the
name implies, these are technologies that supply power to other
things even should a normal power source fail. So allow
me to paint a scenario, as the quister would say,
(21:42):
this is one that I have maybe personally experienced, possibly
on numerous occasions. So let us say that you have
an intrepid writer for a website, and this writer is
plugging away at an article plug plug plug. And let
us say that this optimist, naive young writer last saved
(22:03):
the document that they happened to be working on quite
some time ago. Maybe they've written a couple of pages
worth of work since the last time they saved the document.
And let us say that an inopportune moment, the power
goes out inside the office building where this brash, handsome
young writer is working, and because the writer is working
(22:26):
on a desktop computer without a battery backup, that machine
crashes and all the work that was created since that
last save disappears into the ether. And then our unnamed
but presumably dashingly handsome writer as all get out laments
the fact that they will now have to start over
(22:47):
back at their last save point and recreate all the
work that they had done in order to write about
how goose neck trailer hitches work. Mm hmm, Yeah, that
happened to me, and I could have been spared a
great deal of frustration if I had had my desktop
computer plugged into an uninterruptable power supply. So these devices
(23:11):
typically plug into a power source like a wall outlet,
and then you plug other devices into the UPS itself,
so the UPS plugs into the wall. You plug your
stuff into the UPS kind of like a power strip right.
In fact, some UPS devices look a lot like power strips,
so it's not just a power strip. The UPS also
(23:33):
contains a battery backup or some other means of storing electricity.
You know, maybe it's a supercapacitor or something, but battery
backup is pretty common. And if the normal power supply
that is power coming from the wall outlet suffers an outage,
the backup power supply, the battery or whatever comes on
practically instantaneously, at least fast enough so that it prevents
(23:58):
an interruption of power to you or devices. So any
devices you have plugged into the UPS continue to receive power. Now,
typically a UPS doesn't have a huge capacity for storing electricity,
so this isn't meant for you to just keep on
working away while the power is out. The battery life
might only allow for a few minutes of continued operation,
(24:20):
but that can be enough for you to be able
to save your progress and then shut down your equipment
through proper methods. This can help prevent damage to your
work and your equipment, and it can give you time
to get stuff in a safe mode while you wait
for the power to come back on. Frequently, a UPS
can also act as a surge protector, so I can
(24:41):
prevent voltage spikes from damaging equipment. Some UPS gadgets need
to be reset after a power outage. Some of them
will beep at you a lot. Typically they beat when
they are running low on battery power, and this is
a message that you really do need to start shutting
down all of your plugged in devices if you don't
want them to suddenly lose power. But they can also
(25:03):
beep as an indication of capacity overload. In that case,
you have plugged in devices that have too great a
demand for power for the UPS to accommodate, and you
need to distribute that load across other devices. Next, we
have you r L. That stands for Uniform Resource Locator,
but you could just call it a web address. Essentially,
(25:26):
this is what tells computers where on a network a
particular resource resides. It's kind of like your physical address,
so u r L relates to a specific location on
a specific server within a specific network. When you type
out a web address and a browser, you're essentially telling
the browser I want to see the stuff that is
(25:46):
stored at this location, and the browser sends out a
request up through your network to the Internet. Then routers
direct that request to the proper destination, and thanks to
that handy dandy u r L that cross references to
that location, your request arrives there at its proper destination.
Or if you miss type the web address, you get
(26:07):
something else, probably an error, but possibly someone's page, especially
if someone is squatting on commonly made typos. That's still
a thing. Tim berners Lee, the guy who invented the
Worldwide Web, defined u r L s in an RFC.
Do you remember RFCs? That stands for Request for Comments.
(26:27):
I covered it in the last episode. Next, we have USB.
This stands for Universal Serial Bus and it is a
standardized connection for all sorts of stuff. And boy, howdy,
am I thankful for it because it really made things easy.
I'm not even being facetious here. USB s are fantastic.
(26:49):
So in the old old days we would use all
sorts of different types of connection ports to connect stuff
to other stuff. And really I'm focusing primarily on computers
here because I feel that that's what most of us
associate with this kind of thing, although I will allow
that people who are really into home entertainment centers or
or audio setups are also really familiar with the the uh,
(27:12):
the burdens of having to make lots of different connections
using different types of cables and ports. Anyway, back in
the old days, computers had all sorts of different connection
ports on them, and I'm talking about stuff like parallel ports,
serial ports, more specific stuff like PS two connectors or
D I N connectors. Some game controllers required a special
(27:34):
game port. Typically you would find those on some of
the more popular sound cards. Back in the day. Sound
cards were a thing too, because you didn't have uh
integrated sound chips in computers, so you would have to
install a sound card in your computer, and on the
back plate of your PC you would have a new
port there where you could plug in a controller. It
(27:56):
was a real mess. Some of these ports required expand
in cards, and you would have to slot those into
your motherboard. Just like the sound cards I mentioned, Your
keyboard might need to go into one specific port, your
mouse in another. And then in the ninety nineties that
began to change. That's when we saw the introduction of
the USB standard. USB allows for the transmission of data
(28:18):
and power over the same cable, and it did not
take long for computer accessory manufacturers to start making stuff
like USB keyboards or USB computer mice. Uh. And later
on we saw more stuff like computer printers and docking
stations and stuff like you know, you know, a docking
station for an MP three player, that kind of thing.
(28:39):
The USB standard itself also evolved, with more recent versions
capable of carrying far more data per second than older versions.
And this meant that now suddenly you had a universal
kind of connection port and universal cable system where you
could connect all your different stuff to any of those
available ports on your computer. You didn't have to remember, oh,
(29:00):
this one is for the printer, this one is for
an extra display, Like if it was a USB then
you can plug it into any port that was USB
on your machine. With the USB three point oh standard,
we're looking at transmission speeds of five gigabits per second
and beyond. USB three point two generation two by two
(29:21):
has a top speed of ten gigabits per second across
two lanes of transmission, which gives you a total of
twenty gigabits per second bandwidth. So now we can use
USBs for stuff far more demanding than just powering a
computer mouse. Now, there's still the issue of various connectors
even with USB. I mean, there's nothing like mixing up
USB B many with the USB B micro, with USB
(29:46):
C connectors and all that kind of stuff. But still
it's leagues better than the old days of the mishmash
of connectors, and it makes managing that stuff way easier. Next,
we have v g A, the stands for video graphics Array.
Speaking of connectors, this was one of them, and some
computer manufacturers continue to support v g A connections, though
(30:08):
not nearly as many as they used to. These connectors
support computer video output, and so this is a port
that you would use to connect a computer to a
compatible display or monitor. The connectors have three rows of
five holes in them, and those line up with the
fifteen pens that are in the cables. You would use
to connect your computer to a display. These days, you
(30:30):
typically see this replaced with more recent technologies like hd M. I. Okay,
we have one last batch of acronyms and initialisms to
get through. Let's see if I can do this without
running super long. But first, let's take a quick break.
(30:52):
All right, here we go. VM. This stands for virtual machine,
which I touched on a little bit in this aries.
A virtual machine is the emulation of a computer system.
You might use specialized software, some specialized hardware, or a
combination of the two in order to make this happen.
And there are a lot of reasons why you would
want to run a virtual machine on top of actual
(31:15):
physical hardware. For example, you might have a really powerful
computer and you want to run separate processes that should
not intermingle on a single machine. So rather than buy
a second machine and then divide up the tasks, you
create virtual machines on your one physical computer, and each
(31:35):
virtual machine acts like its own standalone computer. They handle
a specific task, and the two tasks won't come into
contact with each other. Virtual machines can each have their
own dedicated computer resources. Or maybe you've got a computer
like a Mac, but you want to run PC software
on it, so you create a virtual PC machine running
(31:58):
on top of the MAC system. The virtual machine emulates
the physical hardware and architecture of a PC and allows
you to run PC software on this virtual platform. Virtualization
is also really important for stuff like data centers, but
I'll say further discussion for a future episode. Next, we
have VPN. This stands for virtual private networks. These are
(32:22):
means of creating a private network connection, particularly when you're
on a public like WiFi network. The purpose of a
VPN is to encrypt your Internet activities and disguise your
online identity, something that can be really important if you
happen to be working from say a public WiFi hotspot
like in a coffee shop or something. The way this
(32:44):
works is that you connect to a VPN directly. Your
machine essentially makes a connection with the VPN. Then the
VPN access kind of like your liaison. When you want
to visit a website, for example, your request for goes
to the VPN and the vp N kind of acts
like a proxy to retrieve the website data, then sends
(33:06):
that data to you and it's all encrypted. To the
website on the other end, it looks like all the
requests are coming from the VPN, not from you, So
you know, if you were to go to how stuff
works dot com, how stuff works dot Com would see
the traffic coming from the VPN, but would not see
that go further back to you. This is handy if
(33:28):
you want to have some secure connections and not worry
about someone, whether it's a hacker or an I s
P or the admin of the hot spot that you're using,
to know what you're doing. Some companies require employees to
use a VPN before accessing internal systems to help mitigate
the risk of hacker intrusions. Another way people use VPNs
is to bypass region locking. So let's say you want
(33:51):
to access a service in another country, but you get
a message saying that you're not within the regional service
area for that and this happens a lot with media
based services like streaming video, So you could use a
VPN to make it appear as though you are in
that country and while you can access stuff. That is
(34:13):
assuming that the media company hasn't blacklisted the VPN servers
IP address and said this is a VPN, we don't
want to allow traffic to it. I don't advocate for
this approach. I would rather see region locking just kind
of go away, rather than suggest you find ways around it.
But anyway, VPNs are an important component to secure web browsing.
(34:37):
It's also good to research VPNs before joining one. Some
vBNS keep a record of users that could potentially become
a problem if some other entity ever got hold of it.
Other VPNs make it a practice to never maintain any
kind of record at all, so your use of the
service would never become public knowledge, even if, say, law
(34:58):
enforcement were to go out after it. Next up is VR.
This one's easy. It's virtual reality basically refers to any
system in which some, most, or all of your sensory
input is coming courtesy of a computer system. Typically we
associated with systems that include head mounted displays. That means
that everything you see comes from a computer source, and
(35:19):
it's usually paired with technology that allows for head tracking,
so that when you turn your head, the computer reflects
this with a change in your perspective. It's a subtype
of mixed reality, along with a R or augmented reality,
which we covered way back at the beginning of this series.
Next is W three C. The number three so W
(35:40):
three C. This stands for the Worldwide Web Consortium, which
is a group that develops standards for use on the
Worldwide Web. Tim berners Lee pops up again here, as
he founded and currently leads the organization. The Consortium mainly
focuses on getting all the various players in the Web
to work on an agreed upon on set of standards
(36:01):
so that the experience of accessing the Web remains consistent
no matter what browser or platforms someone happens to be using.
Next up, W A N. This is a wide area network.
So in a previous episode we talked about l a
N s lands or local area networks. Well, a w
a N is just a really big network. It's one
(36:22):
that spans a large geographic region. So we're talking about
a network that measures at least half a mile across,
but can be much larger. These networks, like lands, can
be purely self contained. That means you can have a
w a N that does not connect out to the Internet,
or they might have interconnections with other types of networks.
(36:45):
Next up, we've got w e P. This stands for
Wired Equivalent Privacy. It's a type of security algorithm for
use with wireless networks. So the idea is that this
security algorithm would provide the same sort of privacy that
you would experience if you had physically connected all the
computers in your network together with cables. So you're trying
(37:07):
to prevent the chance for some outside force to snoop
in on what's going on with the network. And obviously
this is something to be concerned about when you're dealing
with wireless networks, right. I mean, all communications are relying
on radio waves, which can be intercepted by anyone with
a compatible tuner and antenna. W EP became a security
(37:28):
standard back in n It uses encryption to protect network communications,
but w e P has fallen out of favor since
the mid two thousand's. It's not seen as being particularly secure.
And our next entry will pick up where w EP
left off, so let's move on to it. That would
be w p A. This stands for WiFi Protected Access
(37:51):
and this family of security systems are the current recommended
ones to have in use for Wi Fi networks. There
are three generations of this current LEE. You've got w
P A, w P A two, and w p A three.
To get into the full details of this will require
a separate episode because it gets really technical, but it's
(38:11):
a good thing to remember that if you have options
to set your network security to either w e P
or w P A, you should go with w p A.
More and more devices infect Almost pretty much every device
made now is going to be w p A compatible.
If you're working with really old tech, you might have
some that aren't, but generally speaking, networks should be w
(38:34):
p A, preferably w P A three. Next up, we've
got whizzy wig or w y s I w y
G whizzy wig. It stands for what you see is
what you get, and it refers to any type of
editing software in which what you're seeing as you edit
(38:55):
is pretty much what you're going to get with the
final finished product. This is easier for me to explain
with an old example. So if you've been listening to
this series, you heard me talk about when I was
making my first web pages decades ago, using a text
editor to write out all the HTML code. The text
document was a collection of markup language tags and then
(39:17):
the content, and on casual glance it looked like a
real mess. I mean, you could scan through the document
and kind of get an idea of what the web
page was all about. But if you just looked at
it casually, it looked like a bunch of symbols and
letters and numbers and didn't have a whole lot of
meaning to it. Flash forward a few years and companies
began to develop software that would let people develop a
(39:40):
web page without having to manage the actual HTML code.
It was more like a word processor. You could view
the document as if it were a web page in progress,
long before you ever uploaded it to a server. So
what you see is what you get. The view you
have of your web page in progress is what it
would look like if some one were to visit it
(40:01):
through a browser. Now, there tends to be trade offs
with whizzywig interfaces. You can see right away if something
is working or not, but you might have to dig
a bit deeper in the user interface to get to
some of the more fine tuning controls. If you're coding
stuff the hard way, you typically have way more precise
(40:21):
control over things if you know what you're doing, but
it does require a lot more back and forth to
make sure that everything's coming out all right. Man, this
is making me think of the old days when I
would use word perfect to make documents, and I would
have reveal codes on all the time, just so I
could see where stuff was, like an underlying section, or
where hard returns were, stuff like that. And those were
(40:44):
the days, man I miss those. Next XML. I touched
on this in a previous entry, but it stands for
extensible markup language. This language allows users to create and
define their own tags, and so this is a meta
textual markup language. Another way to think of it is
that x m L is information that is wrapped in tags,
(41:06):
and xm L doesn't actually do anything on its own.
You have to write some form of software to interpret
and act upon those tags. So, for example, if you
were to create a document and you wanted to use
some XML tags, you might create a tag that reads,
you know, open bracket, subheading clothes bracket. Then you might
(41:26):
type you know a message that you want to have
as a subheading on your document, and then at the
end of it you would type open bracket slash subheading,
close bracket. But that alone doesn't do anything right, that's
meaningless by itself. But then let's say you create some
software to handle how this document gets viewed, and in
(41:47):
the creation of that software, you lay out the rules
as to how that subheading tag should be displayed within
a view of the document. That's what x m L does.
It creates the opportunity to carry data in a specif
ific way as determined by the tags and the definition
of those tags. Now this is in contrast with HTML,
(42:07):
a different markup language which has predefined tags. And finally
we have HY two K. This was an abbreviation meant
to indicate a potentially disastrous problem when the calendar switched
from to two thousand. Some of you listening to this
(42:28):
might have been born after two thousand or he might
have been too young to know what this was all about.
And um I remember, and it was crazy. It mostly
boils down to people being a little lazy and relying
on work that was never meant to stand the test
of time. So let's get to it. Way back in
the day, computer programmers were facing some pretty big challenges,
(42:51):
and one of those was finding ways to limit the
size of programs, both for the sake of simplicity and
to conserve computer storage space, which was in short supply
early on in the days of programming. To that end,
when making programs that need to reference what year it
was a lot of programmers used a shorthand. They only
used the last two digits of the year, so for example,
(43:13):
this year would be twenty one for one. Now, this
started around the nineteen sixties, so let's be fair to
those programmers. They probably did not anticipate that the code
they were building was going to be dependent upon nearly
half a century later. I'm sure they assumed understandably so
that someone somewhere, at some point would make a better
(43:37):
version of the program. And you know, when stuff like
conserving computer storage space wouldn't be as quite a big concern.
You could have code with four digits and not have
to take the shorthand approach. But instead people kept on
perpetuating that particular form of programming shorthand. At least a
(43:58):
lot of people did, and a lot of systems, particularly
systems that would become legacy systems, ones that companies would
rely upon because it was just too expensive or too
difficult to upgrade everything, so they would just continue to
rely on this old infrastructure. A lot of that still
relied on that two digit format for the year. And
(44:18):
that works okay until you cross over the end of
a millennium. Then you potentially have issues. So when was
to become zero zero, people weren't sure what could happen.
I mean for systems that use the year to calculate
stuff like, you know, location data for things like airlines
(44:40):
or particular financial data. The worry was that the computer
systems would roll over from zero zero, and that the
computers would essentially assume the current year would not be
two thousand, it would instead be nineteen hundred, and that
could be disastrous. Now, this worry lead to a global
concer learned bordering on panic. In some instances, there were
(45:03):
fears that technology ranging from computer systems to airplanes to
microwaves might fail because of this oversight. Some companies spent
millions hundreds of millions of dollars to hire programmers to
go in and update code to reflect a four digit year,
and in some cases programmers needed to create complicated software
(45:26):
to adjust for hardware that was hard coded with this
two digit year approach. In the end, when the clock
ticked over, there were very few major problems with Y
two K, particularly here in the United States. Part of
that reason they have been just that a lot of
the most necessary work had already happened. A lot of
companies had spent much of n addressing the issue. There
(45:52):
were a few exceptions, one of which was a particularly
scary one. A nuclear energy facility in Japan had some
creation containment equipment fail, but fortunately backup systems came online immediately,
so disaster was averted. Some countries did see more problems
than others. These were typically countries that had not invested
(46:13):
nearly as much money into preventing the Y two K issue,
So like South Korea had some issues. I'll probably have
to do a full episode about Y two K and
talk about all those related issues with code, including some
that are similar and had uh you know, relating issues.
But that is it. We have finally made our way
(46:34):
through the alphabet. It only took six episodes, and honestly,
I also skipped over some stuff, like I didn't talk
about good news very much, but we will save that
for a catch up episode. If you have suggestions for
topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff
alphabetically or otherwise, let me know the best way to
do that is through Twitter. The handle for the show
(46:55):
is text Stuff hs W, and I'll talk to you
again really soon. Tex Stuff is an I Heart Radio production.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i
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TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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