In Internet Basics, learn about the basic components of the World Wide Web and common tools that can make or break your Internet experience: search engines, Web browsers, RSS, spam and more.
It's happened to almost all of us at some point in our Web surfing experience -- you're visiting a new site when all of a sudden your screen begins to fill with boxes advertising goods and services. Enter the pop-up blocker. See more »
Short for Really Simple Syndication, RSS is a way to subscribe to a source of information, such as a Web site, and get brief updates delivered to you. So what should you subscribe to, and what happens next?
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You block it, you filter it, you unsubscribe from lists you actually want to be on, and still it lands in your inbox. If you have an e-mail account, chances are you also have spam. Learn where spam comes from, who's doing the spamming and how to stop it.
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Streaming video and audio has come a very long way since the mid-to-late 1990s, when streaming media suffered from poor quality and slow load times.
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Someone at the CIA is editing Wikipedia entries about lightsabers. How do we know? The Wikipedia Scanner. Virgil Griffith created the WikiScanner to catch politicians, corporations and government agencies in the act of trying to change their Wikipedia entries anonymously.
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The evolution of dance, a laughing baby, Filipino inmates performing Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video: This is what we watch on YouTube. How did it get there?
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Podcasting may be the ultimate democratization of radio. Anyone with an Internet connection and some inexpensive audio equipment can produce their own podcast and make it available online.
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The basic idea behind any wiki is very simple: It's a collection of articles that multiple users can add to and edit freely on-line. Learn all about wikis and the communities that keep them alive.
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It's been called a Google killer, but Stephen Wolfram's computational knowledge engine doesn't work like Google. So what does it do, and does it live up to its hype?
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If you've joined MySpace, Facebook or one of the Web's other communities, you've accepted their terms of service. If you break those terms, did you break the law?
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Whether you keep it short and sweet or you're a spam champion, you've no doubt used e-mail. But how much do you really know about it? Take our quiz to find out!
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Right now, your computer has an array of tiny files that are keeping tabs on you. Test your knowledge of Internet cookies, one the most misunderstood aspects of the Internet.
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Since its popularization during the 1990s, the Internet has become a big part of many of our lives. But it's changed a good deal since then -- test how much you know about the Internet.
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"Howstuffworks.com" is a domain name. The com portion of the name is called the top-level domain name. See the other standard top-level names and who uses them.
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The funny little "a" with its tail circling back around it is probably one of the most commonly used symbols today. So it is truly amazing to learn that there is no official, universal name for it.
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Cookies have, for some reason, gained a rather sinister image, but a cookie is just one or more pieces of information stored as text strings on your machine. Find out how they work and how they got their dangerous image.
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Your IP address is one of 4.3 billion unique numbers that identifies your computer on the internet. Learn the different IP classes and why businesses and government get different numbers.
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Five years after the debut of IE6, Microsoft released the first truly upgraded version of its Web browser. Take a look at what made it such a dramatic improvement.
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Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 appeared only two years after its predecessor. What improvements are included in this next-generation Web browser?
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Many people assume that the World Wide Web and the Internet are one and the same. But despite its size, the Web contains only a small fraction of the content on the Internet.
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The Internet is a giant system made up of smaller systems. If it's one thing, does it have one owner? Is there some person or entity that controls it?
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