Gadgetory

whenever you click on an enticing link in a web browser the website you're looking at knows to send whatever the link contains to your computer and not your neighbors because your computer sends its IP address kind of like a return address on an envelope but as it turns out IP addresses only get you as far as the modem you have in your house and these days most of us have tons of things connected to our routers especially wirelessly phones laptops tablets computers other people's phones consoles chromecast's oh and they're all connected nearly all the freaking time you don't really want to be thinking about it so how does your home networking equipment know to send those questionable videos to you and not your parents sitting in the next room well each device on your network has something called a MAC address yes even the PCs Mac in this case stands for media access control it identifies which device is which on your local network so here's how they work when data arrives at your home from the worldwide internet your router needs to decide which device to send that data to it does this by keeping track of the MAC addresses of all the devices connected to it then assigning what's called a private IP address usually starting with 192.168 to every device this is also why you usually punch in those numbers to access your routers control panel through your browser this is very different from a public IP which is what the rest of the internet sees as being your IP address for your entire home network and what comes up when you type what's my IP address into google your router keeps track of outbound requests such as when you click on a link so when the data you want arrives at your router it attaches the correct private IP address to the data packets ensuring that they got to your computer or device since all those private IPs correspond to the correct MAC address now this might understand Belize seem a little redundant since the computer now has both a private IP and a MAC address that can both individually identify it but in reality you need both since although both the public and private IP stay the same throughout this process the MAC addresses on the data packets are constantly being changed they only tell the data where to go for its next hop when your data gets to the next device the MAC address is changed in order to tell it where to go well next since your data might go through numerous servers and routers before it finally gets to your device MAC address information is crucial even though you have a private IP another upside of MAC addresses is that normally they always stay the same with many devices having their MAC addresses hard-coded into the firmware at the factory making it easy to spot a malfunctioning device on the network if you're trying to troubleshoot and if you want to protect your network by making it so that only devices that you approve can connect many routers use MAC addresses to restrict access to known devices very useful if you're worried someone might try to steal your Wi-Fi password or even plug in physically ISPs also use predefined MAC addresses to make it easy to provide you with the service you paid for so that your neighbor isn't the one getting that expensive gigabit connection that you're shelling out money for every month of course they also use these to block access if you aren't paying your bills however so take that as you will it is possible to spoof a MAC address however and you might want to if you're concerned about your privacy on a public Wi-Fi connection or you connect a new device to your network that your ISP might not recognize but be forewarned that this might not make your ISP happy depending on who they are actually Who am I kidding probably doesn't depend at all does it racing these two the clock is a freelancer challenging whatever you're doing yes I'm sure but with the growth of the Internet there's never been more opportunities for the self-employed to meet this 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our tech quickie and the how to be here about a section alright guys thanks for watching like if you like to dislike if you just like to get subscribed let us know in the comments down below if there's other things you would like us to check out on tech wiki check out channel super-fun I haven't been on there forever but there is a new like battle couch video coming at some point that I will be in so that's pretty cool and I'll see you next time I'm going to go play with PlayStation VR for an ltte video which you'll also see in the future