Author's Note: Dan and Shane wrote some pretty wonderful articles yesterday, so I am feeling pretty nervous about this one.

NetSecure Technologies' security guru, Nima Sharifimehr and I were having a conversation about this blog and some articles we hope to write together. After a particularly enlightening conversation on fields like privacy, social media, information security, and sidejacking methods, I asked him for a list of things that he would teach every internet user in the world about security.

The creative, information addict in me was expecting a list of esoteric security methods, technical speak and a whole wack of acronyms I had never heard of before. After all, Nima really knows his security. But his answer surprised me. If Nima could teach you anything, he would teach you about basic infrastructure. In his mind, knowing how the internet fits together is the best way to protect yourself when you are online.

So, I decided to start writing articles about how the interweb works. These articles are designed for non-technical users - people who have an interest in, but no formal training in information security and/or computer science.

This first article is going to start right at the beginning (good place to start, don't you think?), with an intimidating sounding acronym - TCP/IP.

Articles like this traditionally start with technical definitions and this one will be no different. IP stands for 'Internet Protocol'. IP is all about addressing and is the protocol responsible for making sure that information gets from the host to the recipient. TCP stands for Transmission Control Protocol and it is all about reliability. TCP makes sure that none of the information is lost and that it arrives in the correct order.

If you do not come from a technical background, you may find it easiest to understand these concepts if you use a simple analogy. Rather than trying to picture packets streaming across data lines, imagine that you are writing a letter to a friend. You write a nice, four page letter then put the pages in an envelope. After the envelope is sealed, you address the envelope to your friend, put your return address in one corner, stamp it and put it in the mail.

The address is quite similar to IP - in a perfect world, your post office uses the addresses to make sure your letter goes to your friend and not a complete stranger. The envelope is quite similar to TCP - it keeps the whole letter together so that your friend does not receive the third page on Monday, the fourth page on Wednesday, the second page on Friday and a badly mangled first page two weeks later.