I have figured out what happened related to the account signup process today in King 27. When the room was reconfigured over the winter break, the computers were networked to a single IP address. This was done because the university only has so many IP addresses to go around and they need to limit how many are in use at any one time. But the result of this was that it appeared to Twitter and WordPress as if a single machine was attempting to sign up for multiple accounts simultaneously. This caused the services to deem our requests spam and reject them.
The relationship between IP addresses and the Internet is interesting and something that we will be talking about over the course of the semester. In short, IP addresses identify devices on a network. For the most part, clients are assigned a new IP address every time they log into a network. They look something like this: 172.16.254.1. This address allows other devices on the network to talk to that device. However, when devices are behind a Network Address Translator, they are assigned local IP adresses which are hidden from external sites. So, all the machines in King 27 appeared to be a single computer to both Twitter and WordPress.
The “backbone of the Internet” is a combination of the Domain Name Servers (DNS) and IP. Each server on the internet has an IP address. So, if you want to go to Google you could enter the IP address and your browser will take you there. Try it. One IP for Google is http://74.125.224.72/ and for Facebook it’s 69.171.229.11. But that’s hard for humans to remember. For this reason, the DNS system was developed in the early 80′s to allow for human-friendly Internet addresses. So, the DNS system translates www.google.com to 74.125.224.72. The fact that don’t have to know any of this to use Facebook or Google is what has allowed the explosion in use of the Internet by non-geeks since the middle 1990′s.
