In computer news this week, 10/15/2002

The internet today part 4 - How do you know who people - specifically websites - really are on the internet?

In our series we have found that there are at least 30,000,000 registered websites on the internet. But when you surf to any of these websites, you really don't know who you are talking to.

One quick way you can find out a little bit more about the website you're on is to click in whatever browser you're using on View - and then Source or page source. This lets you see the actual code behind that page you're looking at , and sometimes in this code you can see a lot of things that don't show up on the page itself; like comments, company names, and even little programmer jokes and such.

But the best way to find out who is behind the website, is to use the whois function of the internet today. One way to do this is to go to www.networksolutions.com - and you'll be switched to a page that lets you find out who is the actual owner of a website.

For example, it's late afternoon as I'm writing my show, so lets see if there's a pizza.com because I'm hungry. Ok, I find there really is a pizza.com but I see it's not a real website - it's a temporary site for sale - I'll bet right now that some entrepreneur bought and registered the name pizza.com but hasn't been able to sell it to anyone. And there's a place on here where I can click to email an inquiry about purchasing this name.

But now let's use our whois function to see who really owns this site. Using the who is function I find out a lot more information.

Pizza.com is owned by a guy named Christopher who lives in Maryland, and it shows his exact address and phone numbers. He has an aol email address. And most important, I can see that he bought the name pizza.com back in 1994 and he owns the name through the year 2012. He probably though he was going to make a million dollars off selling this website, but we can see he's been waiting 8 years now without a sale. And in the interim now there's other top level domain names that people can buy like pizza.biz.

Let's do this now for a familiar website - kpbx.org. I see that the whois info on KPBX shows the Monroe street address, Dick Kunkle as the administrative contact, and I can see a couple other interesting things too. Whois shows where your website is hosted - or what server you have your website on. Most people rent website space on a commercial server, rather than run their own internet server. It also shows that the domain name kpbx.org need to be renewed next May 2003.

If you remember last week I told you that I and some of my clients got an official looking letter from some company that you would think by the letter was the official internet domain name registrar, because the letter tells you exactly when your domain name expires, and has a convenient renewal form with it.

But it turns out this company isn't even an official registrar !! It's just some company that know how to use this whois function to see when domain names expire, and they've obviously sent thousands of letters out trying to sucker people into registering with them !!

Still another internet trap ! Caveat emptor !!

Next week - the internet today part 5.

For Raw Bytes, This is Frank Delaney

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