Are you one of the less than 1% that understand the internet?

https://twitter.com/MishaDaVinci/status/1551211815358459904
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I understand even less now. All she did was throw around a bunch of buzzwords and then jump to web3. How does the internet actually work?

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I can try to explain

basically, the internet is a bunch of interconnected computers. Each of the computers has an unique identifier, the IP address. You get your IP address from your ISP. Using the border gate protocol (bgp), a rather sophisticated algorithm, it is possible to find the fastest route to the target ip address. This way, two nodes are able to exchange messages

However these messages are sent in raw ethernet sockets, which is quite unreliable and almost never used today. Instead, we use a protocol that forms an abstraction layer over raw ethernet sockets. By far the most common ones are TCP and UDP. This is also where ports are implemented. There are TCP ports, as well as UDP ports.

TCP is used whenever reliable communication is needed. When first establishing connection, the two nodes go through a three way handshake to prevent IP impersonation and such. After this, a tcp connection is established. TCP will periodically check that both are still connected and whenever a message is sent, tcp will make sure that it is received and not corrupted in an way.

The most common example for the usage of TCP are websites. They use HTTP, a very simple abstraction layer. HTTP is run on the TCP port 80. Instead of mutual messaging, HTTP uses a request-respond model. First your browser sends a http request. This may look something like this

# This is called the request line. It is the first line of  request and includes the method, the path and the http vesion
GET /image.jpg HTTP/1.1
# After the request line, there can be headers
Accept-Language: en-US
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux aarch64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/102.0
Host: rdrama.net
Cookie: login-token=abc

After receiving the request, the server responds with the requested content:

# This is called the status line. It includes HTTP errors such as 404 HTTP version, status code, status message
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
# headers
Content-Type: image/jpg
Server: httpServer


# after the headers and 2 newlines, the raw image follows
����JFIF��C%, #&')*)-0-(0%()(��C...

The HTTPS protocol is basically the same, except that it is encrypted with SSL. It is responsible for the green padloock that signals you that the website is secure.

UDP is used when speed is prioretized over reliability, for example in games. It doesn't matter if one movement packet times out. There is no connection or server in UDP, you just send some messages to a UDP port of the target and it might send some messages back. Another use case of UDP is the DNS protocol. The DNS protocol is needed to convert a domain into an ip address. For example when I run nslookup google.com, I get the answer:

Name:   google.com
Address: 172.217.168.46

and indeed when we open this ip address in our browser it leads us to google.

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Sorry ma'am, looks like his delusions have gotten worse. We'll have to admit him.

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