Feb 9, 2022 • 7M

Episode #53: The Free Tool You Need Right Now

Change Your Network Settings And Change Your Life

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David Koff
TechTalk is a podcast that's meant to help absolute beginners and non-technical people learn about technology in a fun and informative way. We don't talk over your head! Instead, we use everyday language to make sure that you understand all of the important subjects and challenges that we discuss. Tech is important: let's learn about it together in a fun and funny way.
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I’m frequently asked by friends, family, and readers if there are simple, free tools I can recommend that can help save time, money, and effort all while increasing privacy and security.

And, oh, I’ve got LOTS of those recommendations! Services like BitWarden, 33Mail (affiliate link), and Malwarebytes are among my faves to recommend.

But when folks ask me to ALSO recommend tools that are also easy to set up and use, one tool in particular moves to the top of the list: Cloudflare.

What Is It?

Cloudflare is a company best known for providing a DNS resolution system to customers. Translation: they help point your written browser requests into numeric browser requests.

Huh?

Yeh, so when you type “google.com” into your browser’s URL bar, you’re not really going to a website called “google.com”. Instead, you’re ACTUALLY going to a website called “172.217.11.174”. Oooof. NO ONE is going to remember a website with that kind of name, so the Internet uses DNS so we can all use a more convenient and memorable naming system: words.

Think of this as a fancy version of using words in phone numbers. The letters we dial each correspond to numbers. As a result, we can dial the easily-remembered “800-Microsoft” instead of the less-easy-to-remember “800-642-7676”.

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