Free Cyber Cinderella by Christina Hopkinson

course you may, but my name’s not Dan. Does that make a difference to your request, Izobel?”
    “Oh gosh I’m so sorry, how very silly of me.” I slapped my head and then segued the gesture into the twiddling of a lock of hair. From what I’d seen of the office manager’s dealings with the IT support staff, technical people required some outrageously mechanical flirtation. “Gosh, what an airhead I am. One day I’ll forget to get dressed in the morning and come into work completely naked.”
    He looked skeptical. “My name is Ivan.”
    Ivan, of course, IT Ivan or Ivan the IT man. That was his name, though one of the assistants called him it-boy on account of him being passably attractive. For a techie.
    “Ivan, yes, of course. Ivan, can I buy you a coffee?”
    He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got fifteen minutes between appointments. I need to get over to one of my other clients.”
    “I thought you just worked at our office.”
    He looked like it was his turn to hit my forehead in a “duh” move. “PR O’Create wouldn’t keep me in chewing gum; my business services about forty companies that size.”
    “Oh, I see.” I feigned interest as we walked to the incongruously greasy spoon that nestled amid the chains of latte purveyors lately embedded in the West End. “What does your business do exactly, Ivan?”
    “Systems administration.”
    Two such dull words, like “mechanical engineering” or “natural sciences.” “Really, how interesting. What does that mean?”
    “My company makes sure computer systems run efficiently— we install hardware and software, solve problems, make sure there’s appropriate server capacity. That sort of thing.” He raised an eyebrow. “You probably think that sounds terminally dull...”
    “Terminal dull,” I attempted to quip.
    “But without me, well, me and my team, you wouldn’t be able to e-mail or look at the Internet and you’d all be up in arms.”
    “You’re absolutely vital, I can see that.” We ordered our teas, both black with sugar. “What do you know about the Internet?”
    “What do you know about public relations?”
    “Not a lot actually. I see what you mean, that is a bit of a big question, isn’t it?”
    He grinned. “Well, it’s not exactly ‘is there a God?’ and ‘what are we here for?’ but yes, it’s a difficult one to answer. Can you be more specific?”
    “Say there’s a Web site on the Net. What would you be able to tell about its creator from its address?”
    “What sort of things?”
    “Could you find out a name of the person who owned the Web site or where they lived or anything?”
    “I could find the DNS servers in Whois and from that the ISP and then maybe a registered name. Or another route would be via the IP address I suppose. Yes, either, although there are no guarantees that it wouldn’t be registered under a false name or business name once you’d got there.”
    “Stop, stop, too many TLAs,” I said. “Three-letter acronyms. I have no idea what you mean by IBS unless you’re referring to Irritable Bowel Syndrome.”
    “ISP,” he corrected.
    “Isn’t that when you’re psychic?”
    “Internet Service Provider. The people who provide access to the Web for users, but also host the sites themselves.”
    “If the Internet is a town, these are the landlords,” I posited.
    “Exactly. And IP stands for Internet Protocol and an IP address is a thirty-two-bit numeric address.”
    I looked blank again. He looked pained.
    “That means it’s a binary number of thirty-two digits. But that would be difficult for humans to process, although machines would have no problem with them, so it’s expressed in a decimal form with dots separating each bit of what would have been the eight-figure binary number. So you’re left with something like two-one-seven dot one-seven-three dot two-six et cetera to identify a particular host on that network. It’s called dotted quad notation.”
    I nodded in a way that I