This conversation’s grammar was defined in 1982 by Jon Postel, one of the Internet’s heroic forefathers, who used to literally run the most important servers on the net under his desk at the University of Southern California, back in the paleolithic era. Now, imagine that you hooked up a mail-server to an IM session. You could send an IM to the server that said “HELO littlebrother.com.se” and it would reply with “250 mail.pirateparty. org.se Hello mail.pirateparty.org.se, pleased to meet you.” In other words, you could have the same conversation over IM as you do over SMTP. With the right tweaks, the whole mail-server business could take place inside of a chat. Or a web-session. Or anything else. This is called “tunneling.” You put the SMTP inside a chat “tunnel.” You could then put the chat back into an SMTP tunnel if you wanted to be really weird, tunneling the tunnel in another tunnel. In fact, every Internet protocol is susceptible to this process. It’s cool, because it means that if you’re on a network with only Web access, you can tunnel your mail over it. You can tunnel your favorite P2P over it. You can even tunnel Xnet — which itself is a tunnel for dozens of protocols — over it. Domain Name Service is an interesting and ancient Internet protocol, dating back to 1983. It’s the way that your computer converts a computer’s name — like pirateparty.org.se — to the IP number that computers actually use to talk to each other over the net, like 204.11.50.136. It generally works like magic, even though it’s got millions of moving parts — every ISP runs a DNS server, as do most governments and lots of private operators. These DNS boxes all talk to each other all the time, making and filling requests to each other so no matter how obscure the name is you feed to your computer, it will be able to turn it into a number. Before DNS, there was the HOSTS file. Believe it or not, this was a single document that listed the name and address of every single computer connected to the Internet. Every computer had a copy of it. This file was eventually too big to move around, so DNS was invented, and ran on a server that used to live under Jon
223 · LITTLE BROTHER
221 2.0.0 mail.pirateparty.org.se closing connection Connection closed by foreign host.