Removed garbage thoughts, small edits

1 files changed, 78 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.md/tutorials/www/how-to-use-the-internet.md b/.md/tutorials/www/how-to-use-the-internet.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..925f367
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.md/tutorials/www/how-to-use-the-internet.md
@@ -0,0 +1,78 @@
+## Why?
+
+Changing times and a forgetful youth have forced me to write this guide.
+
+I am increasingly disturbed by the amount of people I meet (young and
+old) that navigate their lives at least in part online, but are unable
+to use the internet for it's intended purpose: finding infomation.
+Writing to someone or posting a picture of your cat seems to be second
+nature for most people, but converting a picture from a PDF or looking
+up a study (or even a word!) you saw in an article is something else
+entirely.
+
+For the most part, it is not anyone's fault or laziness. It's
+the fault of what the internet *has become*. For one, there's just so
+much more *stuff* now; it's hard to know exactly where to start and who
+to trust. And so much of that stuff is now *garbage*, either in the way
+it's presented--with disruptive ads that don't close correctly--or in
+the way it's written--vague, misleading, or straight incorrect. But for
+seconds: no one really teaches you how to use this thing do they? There
+are no courses on "How to use a search engine" or "How to find good
+posts on a forum," yet these are the kinds of skills you really need if
+you want to navigate the modern world without getting constantly
+distracted, misled, or totally lost.
+
+There are of course, countless guides on "netiquette" geared towards
+every possible internet subculture you can find. While many of them have
+influenced this document and give many helpful tips on writing good
+informative posts, none of them really go over what I think is
+most important: what to do with the information you're reading.
+
+This will probably be an evolving document as new services and websites
+become available (or go down), but much of this material in the
+beginning should be pretty generally applicable no matter what services
+are available.
+
+## How to use a web browser
+
+## How to use a search engine
+
+As for which search engine to use: you should use all of them, until you
+get the results you need. In my experience, none of the major search
+engines are particularly good and I get inconsistent searches on all of
+them depending on what I'm searching. There is much preaching these days
+about privacy concerns, but to be honest I don't believe any service is
+more "private" than another. These are all privacy nightmares, your best
+bet is to just search often and as varied as you can.
+
+## How to read and find scholarly articles
+
+### How to use Wikipedia
+
+A common complaint lodged at me whenever I recommend Wikipedia is that
+it's not a source of truth since they found X mistake somewhere, or made
+Y edit when they were a teenager that's still there. No one has ever (or
+should ever) claim Wikipedia is reliable. Frankly, you should not
+consider *any* source to be reliable, but that's a separate issue. If
+you know how to use Wikipedia you can use it to get closer to a true
+understanding of whatever you're studying.
+
+For starters, as a general rule, you should not trust anything you read
+on a topic that is less than 20 years old. We're still living through
+the history at this point and new things can come to light.
+
+### How to find articles with Google Scholar
+
+## Advanced Topics
+
+### How to use tor to browse anonymously
+
+Many in the advertising world will boast about using a VPN for
+anonymity, or using a VPN in conjuction with Tor to "increase privacy."
+This is simply a misunderstanding of terms. A VPN provides *privacy* of
+the user's connection since it provides encryption--only the VPN
+provider can "see" what is searched. The goal of Tor is *anonymity* not
+privacy. Anonymity means "no one knows who you are" not "no one knows
+what you're doing." Technically, traffic is encrypted between nodes of
+the Tor service, so some level of privacy is provided as well, but this
+is most effective when using hidden services, not using Tor in general.