Online and Anonymous

Thanks in large part to the internet there are now tons ways to get hacked, infected, spammed, tagged, traced, keyed, and scammed on the internet. Luckily, there are also a bunch of ways to make internet a lot nicer. For free. No kidding.

Anonymizers
Your IP address is gold: its like your computer's social security number. So, you use things like proxies to do all the work for you: you simply send what you want to do to the proxy, it does it for you, and it relays all the information back to you without ever letting a website catch your IP adress. But you have to be careful: some proxies are set up by hackers and will extort personal information rather than protect it. To be safe, use Proxify. It has a great reputation and is perfect for people who are new to this sort of thing. If you know your IP address, set up a proxy and go to www.whatismyipaddress.com to make sure your proxy is working: if it doesn't display your IP address, then you're set. The only "side affect" is that websites may take a little longer to load. But if you're going to a questionable site, using a proxy is definitely worth it.

Email
There's nothing more annoying than finding a website that looks great and might be a little bit fishy and then have it ask for your email before you find out if the site is legit or not... Luckily there are ways to get around this. 2Prong is a nice site that automatically creates a new email account whenever you visit it and, given that you don't delete your browsing cookies, it will show any and all emails sent to the email address given to your new fake email. You can revisit an email account by going to http://2prong.com/[your fake email]. Its actually really simple and effective.
Another great site is Spambox, which creates a random email address and forwards any emails that it receives to your real email address. However, it comes in handy because if you start receiving spam, you can simply cancel your spambox account and kiss the spam goodbye. In addition, it also features a "timed delete" feature that lets you specify how long you would like your spambox account to remain active. This makes staying anonymous really simple.

Tor
Another great way to stay anonymous is through a simple program called (or formerly called) Torpark. It has since been renamed to xB Browser and now looks different but it's still the same program. Instead of sending requests directly to web pages, it instead channels them to a remote server which sends the requests through a random port. Then the information is sent to your computer, completely anonymous. The company that programmed xB Browser, called XeroBank, also offers a ton of other programs, most of which you have to pay a fee for. However, xB Browser works great, and will keep you safe.