The Internet is a scary place. Criminals on the Internet have the ability to hide behind their computers, or even other peoples computers, while they attempt to break into your computer to steal personal information or to use it for their own purposes. To make matters worse, there always seems to be a security hole in your software or operating system that is not fixed fast enough that could potentially allow someone to hack into your computer. Where does this leave you? Are you supposed to cancel your Internet access, or is there something you can do to protect yourself?

When using the Internet most people connect to web sites, ftp servers or other Internet servers by connecting to a domain name, as in www.bleepingcomputer.com. Internet applications, though, do not communicate via domain names, but rather using IP addresses, such as 192.168.1.1. Therefore when you type a domain name in your program that you wish to connect to, your application must first convert it to an IP address that it will use to connect to.

For many of us, the Internet and Web Browsing has become a daily activity. Whether it is for checking stock prices, buying food, doing work, ordering books and music, or just to browse a favorite site, web browsing has become an institution in our lives much the way television is. Have you ever wondered how this whole web thing works, though? This tutorial is designed to explain the history and concepts of the Web and how it works technically. After you browse to a site, you will understand actually how it is done and how your computer retrieves this information. Our first stop, is the history of the Web.

For the past couple of years there has been a new threat introduced to your computer that anti virus software does not as of yet remove. This software is developed to track your movements on the Internet, create statistics of what you do on your computer, or even worse, actually hijack your web connections to direct you to pages that you did not ask for. These types of Malware are called Spyware, Browser Hijackers, and Dialers. Malware is the generic category of any programs that perform a detrimental effect on your computer without your knowledge or permission. Other more notorious types of Malware are viruses, Trojans, worms, and backdoors.

Every machine on the the Internet has a unique number assigned to it, called an IP address. Without a unique IP address on your machine, you will not be able to communicate with other devices, users, and computers on the Internet. You can look at your IP address as if it were a telephone number, each one being unique and used to identify a way to reach you and only you.

If you have ever worked with computer graphic images, whether they be from digital cameras, found on the web, or you create them yourself, then you know there are a lot of image file formats that are available. This is because each format stores the image in a certain way that makes it the best choice for a given situation. This tutorial will cover the most common image formats that you will find on the Internet or with your devices, such as a digital camera, and how they are used. Before we go into the discussions on the actual image formats it is important to discuss the various attributes that image file formats can have.

Many times you will see software for sale that is listed as OEM , Academic, Upgrades, or Full Versions, all at different prices. This may lead to some confusion making you think that they are all different products. In reality they are all the same products, but are priced differently.

A very common question I am asked is which is more important, the speed of the processor or the amount memory. This is a difficult question to answer and it would help if we had some understanding of what each component does and how they relate to each other. This article will strive to teach you the fundamental tasks of both memory and the cpu and how they relate to each other. Hopefully at the end of this article, you will be able to answer this question yourself.

When you use the Internet, you use domain name and hostnames all the time. These hostnames and domain names when put together become the Internet address that you search with. The domain name without a hostname is also the most common email address. This article will explore what hostnames and domain names are and how they are used. We will also discuss TLD's, or Top Level Domains, such as .Com, .Net, .Org, etc.

A key component of the Internet and how it works revolves around the Domain Name System, otherwise known as DNS. The underlying technology behind the Internet, is that when a computer needs to talk to another computer on the Internet, they communicate via the computer's IP Address. The IP Address is a unique set of numbers associated with a particular machine, which will be discussed in a separate article. An example of an IP Address is 216.213.19.27, which is the IP Address that corresponds to www.bleepingcomputer.com.