Sins of the Internet

One of the most common misconceptions among new (and sometimes advanced) internet users is that "if you can grab something it must be free". Add to that a touch of naiveté and a hunger for cash or fame, and you've got a formula for disaster ... or at least for some sins. This leads directly to one of the most common and most self-destroying sins of them all - that of the Signup Junkie. Just about everyone that I know went through this phase - it's typical for most newbies. They sign up for ...

One of the most common misconceptions among new (and sometimes
advanced) internet users is that "if you can grab something it
must be free". Add to that a touch of naiveté and a hunger for
cash or fame, and you've got a formula for disaster ... or at
least for some sins.

This leads directly to one of the most common and most
self-destroying sins of them all - that of the Signup Junkie.
Just about everyone that I know went through this phase - it's
typical for most newbies. They sign up for everything. Why?
Because so many companies and organizations make promises which
seem to offer solutions, riches and help that it's hard to resist.
The end result is, at best, lots of useless spam and at worst
the loss of lots of money, time and effort.

Other sins are more subtle. For example, one day I was looking at
my site statistics when I noticed something very unusual. My
bandwidth usage was way too high. You see, my site had been doing
about 15gb a month, which is about 500 mb/day. Suddenly my daily
report showed my site was doing 2gb/day! At first I was thrilled -
my site must have gotten a great ranking in the search engines
or been profiled in one of the big magazines!

My joy was short lived, however, as I continued reviewing the
report. I soon realized that my site was not more popular -
someone had linked directly to one of my images. It was a very
high traffic site so every time this page was displayed it hit my
site - hammered it hard. If it kept up it became obvious that I
was going to get charged for bandwidth overcharges, and it would
not be a small bill.

You see, webmasters usually pay a fixed fee for their bandwidth
usage up to a certain amount. In my case, it was 27gb/month. Any
usage over that amount costs a small fortune, somewhere between
$6 and $20 per gigabyte over the ceiling.

I was glad that I looked at my statistics because I was able to
do something about it. I added a few lines to my htaccess file
and more or less removed the link. If I hadn't looked at the
reports, though, I may have had a bill of several hundred dollars.

This is an example of one of the most common and most difficult
to understand sins of the internet. It's called bandwidth
stealing, and it's just theft, plain and simple.

One very popular sin is that of copyright infringement. You know
what I'm talking about - you've seen it all over the place. Those
great Star Trek or Star Wars sites with lots of photos and
scripts from the series? Guess what, they are infringing upon
other's copyrights.

Spamming is very popular, and a great way to lose friends, make
enemies and generally annoy people. It's not a wonderful way to
make any money, as all but the truly naive hate spam and delete
it immediately without reading. Spamming is a sin and has more or
less lost it's usefulness long ago.

A more obscure but still popular sin is that of spamming the
search engines. You see, search engines try really hard to
present useful information to their users. However, some poor
misguided souls want to manipulate the system to cause their own
sites to appear higher in the results list (and thus get more
hits). They do all kinds of strange things to fool the little
search robots, then curse when their sites are dropped forever.

If you really want to annoy your friends, you can send emails to
lots of different people using the carbon copy feature. This is a
common sin among newbies who don't know any better. What's the
problem? Well, including a list of email addresses exposes all of
those addresses to everyone receiving the message (and anyone it's
been forwarded to). This often results in quite a bit of spam, as
well as lots of useless messages being sent back and forth if
anyone replies to the message.

Then you find people who seem to think that banners and popups
are good ideas. Don't you just hate surfing to a site which
consists of dozens of mindless banners and two or more popups?
And worse yet, it's not like they are advertising something
useful. Most often, these silly advertisements want you to
purchase something that you don't need, don't want and wouldn't
give to your worst enemy on a bad day.

Oftentimes, all of these sins are the result of misunderstandings
as to the purpose and usefulness of the internet. I mean, you
would probably not be likely to purchase furniture from a banner
stapled to a telephone pole, so why would you buy one from a
banner on a web site or based upon a spam email? Most people
would not run power cables to their neighbors house to get their
electricity, so why would they steal bandwidth?

How do you avoid all of these sins? By learning about the
internet; By understanding how to use it effectively to help
meet your goals; and by acting ethically and responsibly. What
does that mean? Think before doing, and don't do anything you
would not like others to do to you.

It's as simple as that.

Some other articles on internet sins that you may find of interest
are listed below.

Sins of the internet- Bandwidth Stealing
http://www.internet-tips.net/Legal/sins_bandwidth.htm

Sins of the internet- Banners
http://www.internet-tips.net/Legal/sins_banners.htm

Sins of the internet- CopyrightInfringement
http://www.internet-tips.net/Legal/sins_copyright.htm

Sins of the internet- Not Using Bcc
http://www.internet-tips.net/Legal/sins_notusingbcc.htm

Sins of the internet- Money Making Programs
http://www.internet-tips.net/Legal/sins_moneymaking.htm

Sins of the internet- Pop Ups
http://www.internet-tips.net/Legal/sins_popups.htm

Sins of the internet- Signup Junkie
http://www.internet-tips.net/Legal/sins_signupjunkie.htm

Sins of the internet- Spamming Search Engines
http://www.internet-tips.net/Legal/sins_searchspam.htm

Sins of the internet- Webring Spammer
http://www.internet-tips.net/Legal/sins_webringspam.htm

To see a list of article available for reprint, you can send an
email to:
mailto:article-list@internet-tips.net?subject=send_article_list
or visit
http://internet-tips.net/requestarticles.htm

ABOUT THE AUTHOR