Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Could The Internet Send You The WRONG Thing?”.
The internet is amazing, you’re, streaming movies, downloading games, uploading files to the cloud and somehow all that data mostly gets from one place to another. Without getting corrupted, I mean it’s a miracle, isn’t it? No! It’S not it’s computer science in particular. We owe this Modern Marvel to checksums numbers that are used to verify that a file got sent or copied properly. But how does a simple number manage to perform this essential function? Well, it works thanks to cryptography, even if the data that you’re transmitting isn’t encrypted, or even particularly sensitive in applications that use checksums.
The protocol will run the contents of the file through a cryptographic hash function, which is basically a complicated math function that produces a lengthy and unique string of characters. The reason this works well for generating checksums is that, if you change even one byte of data, even in a very large file that string of characters or how cash will change completely – and this is actually the same way that passwords are stored securely on websites except Instead of storing the password in plain text, they’re run through a hash function that is virtually impossible to reverse that way. If a hacker breaks into the server, they only see a pretty much meaningless hash, rather than your plain text password, but coming back to checksums, they play an important role in digital security as well.
If you download a file from the internet, you make the assumption that the host is providing you a safe non-malicious file, but Bad actors can sometimes attempt to attack PCS by replacing files that are commonly downloaded. That’S why many responsible websites will provide a checksum so that you can verify that the file you download is exactly what it’s supposed to be. So with this level of importance, you would think that checksums are ubiquitous in Computing, but actually that’s not the case. In fact, in Windows, File Explorer doesn’t use checksums by default when performing a file transfer, even though generating a checksum would take a trivial amount of time for small files.
Like Word documents, it can take a lot more time if you’re trying to move around many gigabytes worth of data. However, there are ways to work around this. If you want to compare the checksum of a copied file to the original in Windows, all you have to do is fire up a command, prompt and type in this command, followed by the file path, because checksums will be very different if the file contents don’t match, You can usually just glance at them instead of tediously, comparing them character by character. You can also get third-party tools that do generate and validate checksums when you copy files and we’re going to have one of those linked down below we’re. Also going to tell you some other things, you do all the time that do rely on checksums right after we think brilliant for sponsoring this video brilliant is a Hands-On and interactive way to learn stem topics.
They offer thousands of courses with new topics to learn every month, like their Everyday Math course, simply honing your ability to learn and think will translate into everyday aspects of life and their services can be used to supplement a college education or you can use them to Deepen your overall knowledge, the first 200 people who head to brilliant.org techwiki, will get 20 off their annual premium subscription. Did you know that you can select validate files in Steam if one of your games isn’t running correctly, the service stores checksums of known good game files? So when you click this button, it Compares them to the checksums of the files that are stored on your PC. If there’s any discrepancy, the altered file can be quickly downloaded and replaced with the original, rather than forcing you to reinstall the entire game like we had to do in the old days and if you’re, a video editor popular editing programs like Adobe Premiere support.
The use of checksums to verify large media files to ensure that they don’t get corrupted when you’re copying them Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage solution for Windows also makes use of checksums in this case to make sure that your photos and documents were uploaded properly and if you Need to transfer lots of files at once. You can use checksum for zipped folders to quickly verify that all of your files are in good shape, in fact, tcpip. The data transmission protocols that underpin the internet use checksums on every packet of data to make sure that no bits were flipped in transit if the checksum that was sent doesn’t match the checksum generated by the receiver, that packet gets dropped and re-transmitted. So basically, every bit of data that you get from the internet goes through this verification process, which is cool, but keep in mind that this kind of checksum doesn’t really improve your security as, like I said, a file could contain malware from its origin, whether on purpose Or due to a bad actor, so it’s still very important that you take caution when dealing with files from unknown sources, as we learned ourselves. The hard way recently so go watch this video next to learn about how we recently got our Channel hijacked because it could happen to you too thanks for watching like or dislike check out our other videos and leave a comment. If you have a future facet Tech, Wiki video suggestion, we don’t call it that anymore.
I’M Rusty .