What is DNS?

A survey released today reveals that not many people know what “DNS” stands for. It’s a computer networking term that specifies the system used to convert internet names into the physical address of a computer. They say that this is bad, but I think they were asking folks the wrong question. If they’d asked folks “what is robmiles.com?” most of them would probably have said it’s an address on the web. Which is just about all you need to know about DNS.

What folks do need to know however is that robmiles.com costs me a few pounds a year to keep active, and that when I set it up nobody checked that I was really Rob Miles. A Domain Name (which is what robmiles.com is) can be bought for a tiny price and there is no process of checking that the names represent what they imply. Today I can buy the domain name “bbcradio.media” for less than two pounds. I can then set up websites with that address and pretend to be the BBC

You could be the BBC for less than a couple of Quid!

So the important thing to know is that internet addresses are easy to get and very cheap, which means you need to be seriously careful when you go onto the internet and start looking for things. You also need to be careful when you get emails from people claiming to be from a particular organisation or company.