So you think you know a thing or two about the internet, right? Well,
maybe not as much as you assume. Today I'm going to be going over 10 common
myths and misconceptions about the internet in general, and some of them might surprise
you. So let's just jump into it. Starting off with number one, did you know that the
terms "World Wide Web" and "Internet" are actually referring to different things?
The internet is probably what you're imagining, and it refers to the global network of computers
and servers all interconnected and have different protocols running on them,
like IP or TCP for connecting websites, all that sort of thing. Whereas the
World Wide Web refers to the part of the internet that is basically just websites.
That's pretty much it. So that includes things like HTML files for displaying
a website or the HTTP protocol for transmitting information across a
network about a website. So if you say you're going to browse the internet,
you could also say you're going to browse the web because it's technically a subset of the internet.
And it should be no surprise that that's why we have things called web browsers. It's literally
for browsing the web part of the internet. Alright next up, we have two more terms that
are commonly conflated, which are the Deep Web and the Dark Web, which are actually
two totally different things. The Deep Web is not actually as mysterious as it might sound.
It basically just refers to any part of the internet that is not indexed by search engines.
So this could be anything from a private social media profile to something you have to log in
to see, or even files you have hosted on a cloud service provider. Or in other words,
any part of the web that is below the surface and not publicly available.
Now the Dark Web, on the other hand, consists of websites that require
special software to even access at all. The most common example is the Tor network,
The Onion router. And that has Onion sites that can only be accessed when
using a Tor browser. However, there are other similar examples you might not have heard of,
such as the Invisible Internet Project, or I2P, and something called Freenet.
Moving on, the next few, some of you may consider common sense, but these are actually still pretty
common misconceptions. The next one being that using private browsing mode on your web browser
makes you invisible, such as incognito mode. In reality, it does no such thing.
It basically just deletes the local cache of web history and cookies for that particular session.
But anything you do on the web, like going to websites or searching something on Google,
obviously Google is keeping a copy of anything that you're doing in web logs,
and same for most other websites. So just deleting the local copy of that isn't going to do much.
Another misconception I've mentioned before is that any website where you see it has the lock,
meaning it's a HTTPS secured connection, that means that the website is trustworthy.
And that is absolutely false. A lock or HTTPS connection only means that
the connection between you and the website is secure and no one can really see what
you're doing there. But it says nothing about the security or trustworthiness
of the website itself. It could still be a malicious website,
and you could still download a virus from it, no matter what kind of connection you have to it.
Next we have a misconception in regards to download speed. And that is the difference
between megabytes and megabits. And I blame internet service providers for this. Obviously,
they want to be able to advertise the highest number. So they say 100 megabit internet or
something like that, without telling you that one megabyte is actually equal to eight megabits.
So if you're paying for 80 Mbps, that's only going to translate to 10 megabytes per second
when you go to download a file. And most of the time, when you do download something,
the operating system is going to show the speed in megabytes per second,
because that's usually how it shows in the file explorer for file sizes.
And really, the only other place you see megabits used as the units are networking equipment. And I
guess it has to do with the fact that storage on computers historically has been in bytes,
because one byte equals one character. So if you were storing text files,
it made sense to just use bytes. Whereas with a internet connection or network connection,
it could be transmitting any type of data.
So I guess it kind of makes sense. But it still is confusing to a user
who don't know that the capitalization of the letters makes a big difference.
So if you ever wondered why when you went to download, it seemed like it was a much
smaller number than what you're paying for, that's why. Now before we continue,
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And with all that being said, let's continue. Next up, we have another one having to do with download
speed, but this one has been propagated by internet service provider marketing departments,
and that is a higher internet speed always makes everything faster and better. For some
examples, we need only look at any ISP's product page for their internet plans.
Like Xfinity. Did you know that 400 megabits per second is "good for multiplayer gaming?" No,
not 200. It doesn't say it there. That's not enough. But if you get
1,200 megabits per second over a gigabit, you get "pro-level gaming." But the funny
thing is that gaming online uses an extremely low amount of bandwidth.
I'm talking usually well below even one megabit per second, yet it's a marketing
point that all the ISPs use for some reason. Or we can look at Verizon Fios' gigabit plan
page. "Everyone in your home can work, game, and stream with ultra-fast upload speeds."
OK, what is your family streaming? Uncompressed Blu-ray rips?
"High upload capacity for better video calls." Look, the only way gigabit is
going to make your video calls better is if you're streaming your Zoom meetings in
IMAX. So when would paying for a faster internet connection be worth it? Well,
it's going to depend on where you're coming from. So if you have 50 megabit internet and
you have a family of four people, and there might be multiple people trying to watch Netflix in 4K,
which from my understanding is about 25 megabits per second, yeah, actually going to maybe 100 or
150 would actually free up enough bandwidth for everyone to be doing it simultaneously.
But basically, anything above 100 or 150 megabit
per second is only going to benefit if you're downloading large files,
like games from Steam. Which may definitely apply to you, but just be aware that not all
websites that you may be downloading from can even support or allow that download
speed. So Steam is one where it'll basically max out your connection up to gigabit or more.
And a lot of other game services like Epic Games and stuff will max out your
connection. So it might be worth it there. So just be aware the next time you go to
buy an internet service plan, realize what you actually might be using it for. OK moving on,
the next misconception is that you can only get a virus if you click and download something.
And simply visiting a website won't do anything as long as you don't do anything. While this
is generally true with modern web browsers being pretty good at security for individual
websites and isolating them and stuff like that, there are exceptions. For example,
there are occasionally so-called zero-day exploits that may be released for a web browser where it's
a exploit that an attacker could use to bypass the security of your web browser and potentially
execute code on your system and download a file without you actually doing anything.
And the reason it's called a zero-day is basically because it was known about
for zero days before it was known to the public. When this happens,
software developers, no matter what kind of software it is, web browser or not,
usually scramble to patch the software and get people to update it as soon as they can.
And you might not realize that there are several of these generally that
happen every year with Google Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers. So
it is absolutely critical that you keep your browser up to date. Now,
Chrome and other web browsers these days are really good at auto-updating in the background.
A lot of people don't even realize that's happening. So keep your browser and also
your operating system especially up to date. Don't put them off because a lot of times,
they're security updates. Ok this next one I've seen occasionally, and that is that social media
websites own anything that you post as the user, when in reality, it's a little bit more nuanced.
Yes, you do grant social media websites a license to use what you upload pretty
much in every way they want. But you don't actually transfer ownership. You usually
keep the ownership. So you're just granting them a license. And usually, it encompasses,
again, pretty much being able to do anything with it.
You'll see it's royalty-free worldwide, whatever words they use in the terms and conditions. And
a lot of that is actually necessary because technically, displaying the image that you
post for your friends to your friends is distributing, it and stuff like that. So
they need that ability. Or sometimes, they may use it to profit off it, of course.
But just be aware that you still do own the copyright to anything you produce.
And you don't actually need to register a copyright for you to own the copyright. You
own it from the second that you create it. I guess it's another misconception,
but I'll throw that in there. Alright, next up we have one that's pretty big.
And that is the assumption that all web browser extensions are safe,
just because you're downloading it from the Chrome Web Store or whatever. But in reality,
historically, extension app stores have not really been policed as well as other
app stores, like on your phone. Definitely not as much as Apple.
And even the Google Play Store for Android apps has had troubles with malicious apps
being on there. But Chrome extensions, it seems like Google really doesn't keep an eye on the
security of these extensions to a degree that I think they really should. Because it's easy
to find articles with examples of hundreds of malicious Chrome extensions being discovered.
And they were just allowed to sit there on the app store, hundreds of them. And a malicious
Chrome extension can do just as much damage as any other kind of virus. You may notice
when you install an extension, sometimes it will ask to be able to access the data
on all websites you visit. Sometimes that's essential for the purpose of the extension.
But if a malicious actor wants to just ask for that permission that
most people are going to grant that's totally unrelated to the purpose of the extension,
they could change things on the website. They could steal anything you type in,
potentially. I mean really, the sky's the limit to what they can do.
And they have in the past. OK now finally, we have one that's kind of
like two in one. And that is that VPNs and Tor network guarantee absolute anonymity.
There are separate reasons for these two. But generally, it is possible in some circumstances
to be de-anonymized when using services like this. I would say this is more so with Tor.
Because the way Tor works is you're routing your internet connection through many different
nodes. So you have an entry node, a bunch of other nodes, and then an exit node. And what
governments will usually do, like the FBI, is they will operate a whole bunch of these nodes
themselves. And you better believe that they definitely do operate a lot of these nodes.
So if your connection to a website has a FBI entrance node or exit node,
or especially both of them, they can do some things to unmask you. And especially
for exit nodes and if they have both. I'm not going to get into detail about the
different techniques they use. You can look that up yourself. It's pretty well known.
But one example is they could use what's called a correlation attack. Because the
entrance node can see the actual originating IP address of a connection. And then the exit
node can see where a connection is going. But you can't necessarily match up the two,
because there is nodes in between. But what you can do is look at the timing of the connections.
And you say, "every time this person sends a few packets, another one comes out this end"
every single time," it's probably the same person. And then you can make the
connection. "This person is trying to access this website." Now with VPNs, or at least
good ones that don't keep logs, you generally don't have to worry about this kind of issue.
Because you're connecting directly to the VPN server, which is then connecting directly to
the website. But if a government agency has enough resources, which they probably do,
and the determination to catch you specifically, I'm sure there's a lot of things they can
do. Like potentially going to your internet service provider and getting a warrant there.
And tracking anything you connect to. Even if it's a VPN, then they could maybe go to the
data center for the website they believe you're visiting. And again, they could do some kind of
correlation that way. I don't know, that's a random idea I had. I'm sure in reality, the
government has a whole bunch of tricks up their sleeve that they're not gonna tell anyone about.
So I think that covers 10 misconceptions that I've seen about the internet. Let
me know in the comments though, if I missed any. And also check down there,
because maybe someone left one that I didn't mention. Thanks again to Mine for sponsoring
the video. Be sure to visit SayMine.com and start reclaiming your own data too.
The link's in the description. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to give it
a big thumbs up for my YouTube algorithm overlords. And if you wanna keep watching,
the next video I'd recommend is one where I was talking about some hidden features
in Microsoft Word that I think a lot of people will find useful.
You can just click on that right there. So thanks so much for watching,
and I'll see you in the next one.