This page is under active development. I haven't gotten around to writing it all out but the TLDR of it all is that my name is Cora, I enjoy programming, modding games, and writing the occasional news article on local politics because those are always a mess and somehow I always end up in the thick of it. Anyways if you haven't already, feel free to check out the rest of the site to see what I have done.
Have questions or found a spelling error? Feel free to contact me at [email protected]
Terms
The following are a list of terms to know when browsing the internet. Please note that this written to include folks that don't know very much about the internet. The intent is not to infantilize them. Just provide the information to help them navigate better.
- Open Source; open source refers to when a piece of software, an app, a program, a game, or really anything that you find on the computer has made it's code visible to others. Meaning that you or I could go and look at it and see exactly what happens under the hood. Think of it like a car. When you drive a car you often times never think about what's going on in the engine and most of the time, we have no idea what's going on. When software is open source, it allows anyone to go and review what's happening behind the scenes. And sometimes the creators will allow people to modify or contribute to it. Although this is usually heavily moderated to prevent bad actors from inserting malicious code.
- Browsers and the internet; A browser is a program that runs on your computer that allows you to access the internet. The internet is, well it's a lot of things but essentially it's all the websites you go to, such as Google, Gmail, Youtube, Netflix, and any other sites you can think of.
- Secure/Insecure Sites; All websites begin with either http, or https, http stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol.I have linked to the wikipedia article in case you are interested in reading more. But honestly it can be quite dense. For now, this is what you need to know. If the website you are visiting just has http and does not have the s at the end, this means it is not secure and it would be easier for hackers or people with malicious intent to steal your passwords. If someone sends you a link telling you to click on it, and it is not secure (meaning it does not have the s at the end of that first part of the url), DO NOT CLICK IT. An example of a dangerous url would be http://goggle.com notice the, start is http and not https, also notice that google is spelled wrongs. These are both signs to stay away.
- Built on/Built off of; Sometimes someone may say that something is built off of something else. For example, Chrome is built off of chromium. Chromium is an open source browser. the company Google took that project and added a bunch of stuff that made it there own, they added there logo to it, they added code that the original developers of chromium would not put in. Then they rereleased it as there own software. Because of the licensing of chromium this is absolutely allowed and in some places encouraged.