In This Article
On News
On Fun
On Searching
On Email
Internet Ettiquette
On Safety
On File Sharing
On Nothing
You can keep up to date on the latest NON-BIASED world news articles through the BBC or CNN at www.bbc.co.uk/?ok and www.cnn.com respectively. You don't have to stick with the local Salt Lake Tribune which contains articles that only pertain to what the church or the conservatives want you to read. You have the freedom of choice, of independent thought. You can read the New York Times at www.nytimes.com, or Chicago's Daily Herald on www.dailyherald.com or go west and read the San Francisco Chronicle at www.sfchron.com or wherever you take your news. If you're feeling really adventuroud, you can fly around the world and check out what's going on in Japan, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/. The point is that it opens up your mind to new ways of thinking, and in return, you become more informed and less likely to just follow the herd.
There are a lot of fun things to do on the internet. You can play games, chat in forums or on message boards. You can join a social networking site like MySpace or Facebook. You can start a blog on www.blogger.com or www.wordpress.org. They're kind of like a journal, only online. You can choose to publish them for the world to see, so only your friends can see, or so only you can see. Most television network websites like NBC or CBS will let you watch the latest TV episodes free online. If those networks aren't your flavor, run over to Google or Yahoo.com and do a quick search for "tv networks." I'm sure you'll find a million. You can read comics or stories or watch funny animation. There's a really neat one called Ninjai: the little ninja at www.ninjai.com. If you're into the NFL or NASCAR I'm sure they have some websites and things you can do. Just do a search for them.
Did you know that "Google" is in the Webster's Dictionary? It means "to search or seek out". There's a reason for this prestige. It's a reliable search engine. Just type what you're looking for in the Google Custom Search at the top right of this page and see what comes up. There are probably about 3 million websites and pages that pertain to it. But, Google is not the only one. There's also www.yahoo.com and www.ask.com and probably a few others.
THINK BEFORE HITTING THAT FORWARD BUTTON!
Get two email addresses! Use one for signing up for services and newsletters. Use the others for you're friends and family and guard it with your life. Why? For your own internet privacy. You're going to get spam, lots of it. Plus, you can and will be searched if you haven't already and more often than not, you're email address will be listed somewhere. You'll be searched mostly by people who are just curious. I do it all the time.
If you don't know already, you'll soon come to find emails that are mindlessly forwarded to "ten of your friends or [something bad, something good, something else]." Dont' forward me that shit, especially the ones with some fake, lovely, partiotic or upsetting story thats claiming to be a fact when it's not. Stop spreading lies! If you do send me this shit ... do your fucking research and find out if it's true or not. Otherwise, I'll do the research (it takes 30 seconds on Snopes.com,) and spit your garbage back in your face. I won't be as nice about it as I am right now, either. If that offends you, then don't feed me garbage. It's pretty simple. I'm not saying this to try to be mean, just think about it.
Jokes, I like jokes. Send me jokes, but do me the courtesy and remove and the "FW: FW: fw: RE: fw: fw: re: fw:" shit. I don't want to open 15 email attachments just to get to some lame picture of a masturbating monkey with a rubber duck. It kind of destroys the mood. One of the most magical keystrokes on the internet today is copy and paste (ctrl+c & ctrl+v.) Copy the relevent and good stuff, and paste it in a new email, or delete the other garbage. If it's a photo or video attachment, then delete the comments from the peanut gallery. I don't care about your "friends" opinions. If I want them, I'll ask.
Oh. I give out my email address because I develop a certain level of trust, don't break it. I don't know your friends, likewise, I don't trust them with my email address. I don't want them to have it. I would suspect your friends would feel the same way about their email address, too. You may already know but, you can edit any email you forward or reply to. It only takes a few seconds to remove all that personal information.
One way a spammer collects email addresses is to send something to all his email lists with some bogus/cute/hateful/patriotic email and wait for it to come back (as they all eventually seem to do). With the naive people who simply forward it on to everyone they know, the spammer eventually receives an email with a full list of new addresses to sell. It's disrespectful to give away someone's personal information without their permission so don't do it.
Collaboration is how problems get solved and we can work together on it. If you find an interesting article or email, send it. But please, let me know what you think of it. For example, " I like this article because it expresses how I feel about [this] or [that]," or "Isn't this guy a douchebag? How can he say this when... [something, something, something]." If you tell me what you think, we can engage in an actual adult conversation. We can be friends instead of "someone who spams me." But remember the research part.
The web-ernet truely is endless; hundreds, if not thousands, of new websites are added to it every day. Looking back on my life, the internet has been one of the single most valueable tools I've ever used, and that's the key: it's a tool. It's packed with information and people just waiting for you. You just have to know where to look. You can find anything and just about anyone on the internet, as well as an assload of nothing. I've included a bunch of links here that you might be interested in. That being said, one must also be gracious on the internet in the same manner as if they were standing right next to you.
Don't say anything that might earn you an unhealthy ass-kicking. You wouldn't want to be found, filmed while being beaten senseless and put up on YouTube.com for everyone to see, would you?
Respect that others have an opinion, you may not agree with it and that's okay. Move on.
Do your research! No one can respect that you even have an opinion if you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
Don't spread viruses, spam or other malicious items. They just suck and you will lose friends quickly.
Nothing on the internet is private. Let me say that again. Nothing on the internet is private. You're information CAN be shared/stolen by "third parties". On the otherhand, companies invest millions of dollars to keep your information safe so you can do business with them. Don't be afraid to shop online. In fact, you can get some really amazing deals and even find stuff you can't get anywhere else. Just make sure you know the company before you put your credit card or social security number down. www.Amazon.com and www.ebay.com, are good shopping sites, as well as www.bestbuy.com. Truth is, if you like a particular store, chances are, they have a website. Hell, you can even order groceries online and have them delivered. How easy is that?
Get some anti-virus software and keep it up-to-date. This may cost about $30-$40 a year, but it's worth more in protection. I use Norton Antivirus but there are many out there, McAfee is another. Skip pop-up blockers. There's a GREAT built-in one on every major browser such as Opera, Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer. The safest is Opera (according to Secunia.com - an internet vulnerability web site) , but not always the easiest to use. The reason you skip pop-up blockers is: the pop-up blocking companies know how pop-ups work. So, they know how to build pop-ups to show ads from people who pay enough money. Then you still get pop ups, only this time it's from them.
No one from Nigeria, England or any other country claiming to be any relative wants to give you money and you're NOT their heir/benefactor. I'll guarantee it. They'll ask you for a small amount of money or a bank account number so they can start the process or whatever. It's fake! The only way you can become beneficiary is if you're directly named or you're the next of kin. If you're directly named, chances are pretty good that you've at least met this person before. Being "next of kin" means every person who's "next" in your family will have to die. Your grandparents, grand aunts and uncles, parents, uncles and aunts and any older siblings (even if you don't know about them) will all have to be dead before you're name comes up. Are you really the next in line?
Bill Gates and AOL are not handing out money just by forwarding an email. No one is. Who would?! They're scams. NEVER GIVE OUT ANY INFORMATION IF SOMEONE YOU DON'T KNOW IS ASKING FOR IT. EVER! No respectable company will contact you and say, "click this link and enter your credit card/account number/social security number to verify your account." The only time you should ever give your information is if you contact them first, NOT if they contact you. If you're not sure, contact the company by phone. You can even Google it or go to Snopes.com. Hell, you can even ask me and I'll do the research for you, for a small "donation". *smiley face*
File sharing is illegal, no matter how you look at it. Some companies allow you to make a single "back up" or digital copy, free of charge. Trouble happens when you let your friends have a copy and their friends have a copy and so on ... It doesn't matter if you're not making money from it. The point is, you're friends aren't buying it and the record company didn't make money on your friend's copy. There's a little thing you may have heard of called a "Copyright". It means, "the right to copy/distribute". Do you hold any copyrights? If no, then you don't have any right to make copies unless given permisison by the copyright owner, artist or record company. Don't install Napster, Limewire, Morpheous or any other Peer-to-peer program for illegal downloading. It's a federal crime, traceable and you can be fined lots of money ... there are other (non-tracable) ways.
You can find all the free music, movies, software and porn online that you could possibly need or want. Just make sure you're tracks are covered. There are only two ways I know of that are "safe." FTP is okay because you connect directly to one persons computer through a username and password. The downside, they have ratio requirements, where you have to give them something in return. Some even demand a sort of "donation", which defeats the whole purpose of "FREE!" The second is the most reliable, fastest and anonymous. Bittorrent. You connect to multiple people and it uses all your bandwidth to transfer as much information as possible without shutting down your connection. The downside: it slows your internet surfing down massively during a transfer. To start, you'll need a program to open the ".torrent" files. I one I trust is called "Vuze", by Azureus, you can get it from SourceForge.net. Then just do an online search for whatever you want plus "torrent" and you'll soon find it all. Have fun and happy downloading.
Don't be afraid of big internet. It's a big, wide, wonderful world out there. Have fun with it! You're not going to break it. If you do, I'll personally make sure a new one is up, right away. If you get a virus, you can format your hard drive and start fresh, virus-free. (It really, really, really sucks to have to do this which is why companies spend millions of dollars to prevent it.) One of the great and scary things about the internet is it's mostly anonymous. Here's a little quote that might explain things:
"We start, then, with nothing, pure zero. But this is not the nothing of negation. For not means other than, and other is merely a synonym of the ordinal numeral second. As such it implies a first; while the present pure zero is prior to every first. The nothing of negation is the nothing of death, which comes second to, or after, everything. But this pure zero is the nothing of not having been born. There is no individual thing, no compulsion, outward nor inward, no law. It is the germinal nothing, in which the whole universe is involved or foreshadowed. As such, it is absolutely undefined and unlimited possibility -- boundless possibility. There is no compulsion and no law. It is boundless freedom."
Charles S. Peirce, "Logic of Events" (1898)
Porn is good. Sex is healthy, but in moderation. There are psychological arguments that say it can become an addiction and ruin your life, so be careful. Use it in moderation. It's the #1 business on the internet. And I know how to get A LOT of it completely free. Without subscription to anything so, don't subscribe to anything. Even if it says "Free Porn", "no credit card required". The "no credit card" ones are just a site full of sample pay sites.
- here's a personal favorite.
- and some adult games
Happy Surfing!
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