User:Aubray1741/How to Be Leet

This an article/book I'll be writing here, for some use in Wikipeida (I dunno where it'll go yet), on how to get the most out of the internet and all its resources. Aubray1741 05:00, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Protect Yourself
While most of the internet is positive, there are people out there that want to harm users. They generally fall into three catagories: There is also a fourth category, that exists inside a "grey area", that is, they aren't technically illegal, but mostly unwanted:
 * Thieves: These users want to break into personal data, corporate databases, or mine blogs for information they can use to steal money (like credit card numbers), identities (social security numbers), or other sensitive information.
 * Criminals: These users want to find personal information to directly harm another person or parties, such as the location of the school someone goes to.
 * Sabouteurs: These people want to validate thier existance by exploiting loopholes, crashing databases, ruining hard drives, and other acts that do nothing but show how smart they are and leave the mess for someone else to clean up.
 * Solicitors: These people want you to see their ads, buy their products, or use their services, and will pay through the nose to make sure you have as many chances to hear/see their ads as they can get.

Of course, you don't want anyone to steal your personal information, break your computer, or bombard you with ads. Contrary to popular belief, it is easy to protect yourself while using the internet. You can use these topics to better help you.

Firewalls
Firewalls are software or hardware that prevent unauthorized connections to your computer, or in the case of software firewalls, also prevent malicious programs from sending information about you across the internet.

Hardware firewalls are usually build into routers or modems and provide basic firewall functionality, such as blocking unrequested packets from online.

Software firewalls allow more customization of protection prefrences, and usually run in the background or on the system tray of your computer, out of your way. Some popular software firewalls include: