How many was that again?

It's generally claimed but probably not true that IBM president Tom Watson said the world would need five computers. In 1980 many people thought the world needed just over four billion Internet addresses - wrong again! We know they believed this because that's how it was designed. All Internet addresses are numbers. The addresses we use - www.Braley.com for example - are immediately translated into a number (the real address of the site) before they are sent whizzing off to their destination. Imagine that you were setting up the records for a small town and decided to record every resident using a three digit number - after all it was a small town. Of course when person number 1,000 moves in, you have a problem.

That's exactly the predicament faced by the Internet - the 4.2+ billion Internet addresses are almost used up. People have seen this coming for a long time and created a new addressing system  that will be phased in over several years. Internet addresses are called IP addresses for Internet Protocol. The current version is IPv4 and the new version will be IPv6. IPv4 addresses consist of a 32 bit string of zeros and ones - bits. IPv6 will be 128 bits long. Keep in mind that every bit you add doubles the size of the maximum number. The fact that everything from cell phones to printers and refrigerators may get an IP addressed assigned in the future is no cause to worry since a 128 bit address is inconceivably large - a 4 followed by 38 zeros - just shy of a duodecilion!

What's a TinyURL anyway?

Internet addresses often look like "tinyurl.com/abdef". TinyURL.com is a web site that changes long web addresses (URLs) into short ones. TinyURL.com looks like this

You can type or paste a URL into the first box. You may enter a "vanity URL" in the lower box. The vanity URL is one that is unlikely to represent an existing address. Here's an example using the address of my November newsletter. The actual address is:

http://app.e2ma.net/app2/campaigns/archived/1402118/04524839befdceac7d3801bfcf3f7292/

Since the vanity address (Braley012) has not been used, TinyURL provided the following short vanity address

You can now use www.tinyurl/Braley012 in place of the longer original version. NOTE: The first part of a web address - up to the first slash following the .com, .edu, etc. is NOT case sensitive. Anything following that slash may be case sensitive.

TinyURL is not the only game in town. You might also check out

goo.gl, is.gd, kxk.me, tiny.cc. bit.ly or tr.im

The shortened URL is an intermediary web page set up by the shortening service. When you click to go there, you are immediately redirected to the desired page (with the original longer address.) For more information go to http://bit.ly/9g6sth

More info about spotting dangerous web site links

 A reader ask for more information on this item from a previous post.

An address you see in an email message or web page may look legitimate but the link connected to that address may be entirely different. The button or words you click on are totally arbitrary and the underlying web address (the hyperlink) is what matters.

There are two easy ways to discover the real address of a clickable button or text phrase. You can "hover" over the item - move your mouse pointer over it without clicking - and see the real link displayed - usually at the lower left border of the browser window. You can also right click on the text or button and choose "copy the link" or "copy the shortcut". Then past this into your browser window address bar or any other document and see the actual link displayed. Both approaches - hover and copy/paste should also work with email messages that include links.


As mentioned in the earlier post, you should look closely at the Top Level Domain Name - which includes .com, .edu, .gov and country codes such as .us, .ch, .ru, etc.