fakeout, convenient crutch

But first, a warning: On the way to understanding how your life will get better, you’ll have to read about some technical, fairly arcane topics. Trust me: it’ll be worth it.

In this case, the topic is your Web browsing, and the magic wand is a free service called OpenDNS.

You know how every Web site has an address, like www.google.com orwww.nytimes.com? Turns out that’s just a fakeout. It’s a convenient crutch for you, the human with limited brain capacity.

Behind the scenes, the actual address is a string of numbers (called an I.P. address, for Internet protocol) that looks something like this: 74.125.53.100. (That happens to beGoogle’s address.)

Nobody can remember those addresses, though they are no longer than a phone number, so the Web’s thoughtful designers came up with a secondary system: plain-English addresses like www.whatever.com. When you type that into your browser, a computer at your Internet provider performs a quick lookup. “Aha,” it says to itself in its little digital way, “you just typed www.google.com. What you really want, of course, is 74.125.53.100. Please hold; I’ll connect you.”

That, in a nutshell, is how D.N.S. works. (It stands for domain name system, in case that helps.)

fakeout

A term used in technical analysis to refer to a situation in which a trader enters into a position in anticipation of a future transaction signal or price movement, but the signal or movement never develops and the asset moves in the opposite direction.