lonelyplanet. com, found out that it was 64.211.24.142, and got rid of all requests to different servers.
'That's still two hundred-odd possibilities,' she said. 'I thought you'd actually be able to look at the messages they posted.'
'No such luck. But we're not done yet. Anyone actually posting a message would use an HTTP POST method, not a GET, you use GET if you're just reading.' I eliminated all the GETS, and this reduced the spreadsheet to only three rows:
116.64.39.4, 11/4/00, 0:06:01, MAGELLAN, 64.211.24.142, 3140,
9338, 32473, 200, POST, /cgi-bin/post
187.209.251.38, 11/4/00, 0:06:01, COOK, 64.211.24.142, 2596, 1802,
31090, 200, POST, /cgi-bin/post
109.64.109.187, 11/4/00, 0:06:01, HEYERDAHL, 64.211.24.142, 0,
2847, 72, 500, POST, /cgi-bin/post
'Easier than I thought,' I said.
'So we've got three possibilities?'
'Actually, no. See that 500 on the last line?' I pointed it out. 'This means that there was a server error, so whatever was sent never made up to the Thorn Tree.'
'So it's one of the first two.'
'Right. But see that 9338 in the first one, and 1802 in the second? That's how many bytes went from the client to the server. That means the first one was a pretty long message. And the message our friend sent was… '
'… pretty damn short.'
'Exactly.'
'Okay,' she said. 'So we found the right line. I still don't get what that gives us.'
'That gives us the IP number of the computer he used to send it. One-eight-seven two-oh-nine two-five-one thirty-eight.'
'And every computer on the Internet has its own number?'
'Well… no.' I saved the spreadsheet, just in case, expelled the floppy and handed it back to her, avoiding her eyes. 'That was the way it was originally supposed to work. But it's more complicated than that. Basically as a rule of thumb any computer that's permanently on the Net has its own IP number. Unless it's behind a proxy server, or… well, there's a lot of issues. So this still might all be useless. On the other hand it might take us right to him. I can get a look at the router chain we go through to get to that machine from here, that might give us some idea where it is.' I opened up a telnet session to my Unix account, typed in traceroute 187.209.251.38 and examined the lines of cryptic gibberish the computer spat out in response.
'Shee-it,' I said. 'That, I was not expecting.'
'What?'
'That message came from Indonesia.'
'Really?'
'Looks like it.' I pointed at the last few lines of the traceroute response.
17 Gateway-to-hosting. indo. net. id (187.209.251.31) 641.612 ms 587.980 ms 590.526 ms
18 Quick-Serial-b. indo. net. id (187.209.251.2) 869.458 ms 669.086 ms 608.886 ms
19 187.209.251.38 (187.209.251.38) 620.897 ms 643.124 ms 588.700 ms
'See that dot-ID at the end of those last few lines? Each country has its own code. CA for Canada, UK for the United Kingdom, and so forth. ID means Indonesia.'
'Indonesia is a big place,' she said doubtfully.
'So it is,' I said. 'Let's see if we can't zoom in a little.' I typed in: whois 187.209.251.38 and the computer responded
IP Address: 187.209.251.38
Server Name: WWW.JUARAPARTEMA.COM
Whois Server: whois. domaindiscover. com
'What's that? Whois?' Talena asked.
'Basically it goes out and gets the name that goes with the IP number,' I said. 'If any.'
'Computers have names?'
'Kind of,' I said. 'Between each other they just use the IP number, but they figured out a long time ago that that would be hard for people to remember, so there's a system called the Domain Name Service that matches names to numbers. So you can just type in lonelyplanet-dot-com instead of sixty-four dot two-eleven and so forth.'
'How does that work?' she asked. 'Is there a big white pages or something?'
'Pretty much,' I said. 'It's a complicated descending hierarchy, but basically there's thirteen really big computers that work as the master white pages. What this just told us is that the name we're looking for is juarapertama. com, and that it was registered by a company called domaindiscover. com. Registration's turned into this big complicated mess, but basically if we go there we should be able to find out more… '
I navigated to domaindiscover. com and searched for juarapartema. com: whois: juarapartema. com
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
Mak Hwa Sen
Internet World Cafe
Kuta Beach, Bali, DKI 33620, ID
[82] 29 9210421 root@juarapartema. com
'Gotcha,' I said. 'Kuta Beach, Bali. Now what the hell are you doing there?'
'Let's take a break,' she said. 'I'll take that drink now.'
'Okay,' I said. She followed me out to the kitchen. I opened the fridge and glanced in. 'I've got beer and… um… water.'
She laughed.
'I just got back from traveling,' I said defensively.
'Yes,' she said, 'and you're a guy.'
'I do have some Glenfiddich,' I said, remembering that she drank Scotch.
'You do? Then you're playing my song.'
I drizzled some nectar of the gods over ice for both of us and we sat down on the couch. I felt surprisingly comfortable next to her. I'd never been able to relax around beautiful women, every moment I spent near them felt like part of a high-stakes job interview, but with Talena I felt perfectly at ease.
'It's a little scary that you can do this,' she said. 'So everything everyone does on the Web can be tracked down?'
'It depends,' I said. 'Like, if you're using AOL you're actually probably pretty safe from this stuff, because everyone on AOL looks like they're on the same machine. On the other hand the AOL people know everything you do. Yeah, as a rule, most of the stuff you do can be watched.'
'And when they tell you this is a secure connection, they're lying?'
'No, that's completely true, those are probably impossible to break into. But they'll still know what machine you're using to connect.'
'Well. Call me freshly paranoid.'
'If you really want to there's ways around it though,' I said. 'If he'd been careful, if he'd gone through Anonymizer or Zero-Knowledge or SafeWeb or something, we'd never be able to reach him.'
'What are those?'
'Sites you go through that basically clean up everything you do so you're anonymous.'
'But how do you know they're actually doing that?' she asked.
'You don't,' I admitted. 'I mean you can run tests and so on, but to a certain extent you have to take it on trust. Doesn't really bug me though. I mean, I've got nothing to hide.'
'You've got everything to hide,' she said, 'believe you me.'
'Meaning what?'
