the.com/ports
holes in your computer's soul, each one a tiny door to a different room of the internet.
means a numbered virtual endpoint that lets a device sort incoming and outgoing network traffic by service, so one ip address can run a thousand conversations at once.
from borrowed straight from shipping ports, the physical gateways where cargo enters a country. early internet engineers in the 1970s and 80s needed a word for the logical gateway where data enters a machine, and the metaphor stuck perfectly: same idea, no boats.
total count65,536 possible ports per ip address
reserved rangeports 0-1023 need admin privileges
oldest assignmentport 21 (ftp) dates to 1971
security theatermost attacks scan for open ports first