Webs of Cyberspace (Class 5)

Levels of people/ideas, documents (WWW), and computers(as in physical networks).

Giant Global Graph (networks of people and the communities they make).

Over-laid all is the Semantic web.

Location independence:

Point of access and point of storage is immaterial. Increasingly, there is little distinction between remote and local.

Code can be viewed as a formalised language of communication between two machines.

LAN--> W(ide)AN --> M(etropolitan)AN.

Internet

"Universal networking fabric" - not just an internetwork but THE - definite articles so add excellence.

Consistent trend of exponential growth of servers.

Designed to allow for outages of particular areas - stems from the development of ARPANET in the cold war.

Street Metaphor

The network is the street - the path you take to access the information you desire.

A node is a building on the street - the physical location of said information.

A port is an apartment in that building - the place on that physical location whence information may be accessed.

DNS

Interface human with machine: understandable by humans using the network. So is the primary way for those of us with opposable thumbs to locate what we are wishing to.

Hierarchical conventions of naming - most important last (see postal addresses in the West).

Branches and Leaves on trees - TLD(Top Level Domain)s are major branches on the tree off which the smaller branches, subdomains, are grouped.

gTLDS: .com, .net, .org, .name, .info, etc.

Country-Specific (ccTLDS).

Based on ISO 3116-1 alpha-2 - usually have generic subdomains.

Default is US (.mil, .gov).

Different countries have different conventions - e.g. .edu.au, .edu, .ac.nz, .ac.uk.

Nested subdomains-"subdivide and conquour": up to the domain owner to subdivide as they wish but they should remember that their DNS should be easily memorable by the opposable-thumb possessors who will use the system.

Various ethical issues of DNS assignment covered - including APNIC so we can have fun stalking the owners of a domain name. But, more practically, we can also track down the owner of malicious networks.

.su domain still accepts registrations even after the abolishment of the Soviet Union.

.onion TLD designates anonymous hidden services on Tor network-interesting to know.