HOWTO


How to make dotless IP URL's to amuse your friends

Web URL's like www.microsoft.com are merely alphanumeric representations of IP octets. What I mean is that for every hostname, like beesky.com, there is a corresponding ip address. In our case it is 198.88.0.2. A dotless IP is a 32-bit number (http://3327655938) that the IP stack resolves into its equivalent dotted IP format (198.88.0.2).

The dotless IP address, also called the "decimal address", can be easily calculated with this formula:

decimal=aaa*16777216+bbb*65536+ccc*256+ddd

If you get a url like http://3327655938/?key=5?index=beesky.rocks.com, just stick it in the first set of numbers, in this case 3327655938, into this form below to find out who it's really from.

Enter IP, dotless IP, URL, or hostname:
The fact that IE and Netscape accept dotless IP's as a valid addresses is a pretty serious little bug. After you are done playing around please go to http://www.microsoft.com../windows/Ie/security/dotless.asp for more info and the Microsoft patch.

The C program used in the cgi-script above is a modified version from http://www.norad.net