Photo from Futurama.

When training your loved ones how to keep themselves safe online, you should remind them of the rule your parents probably taught you: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Using a little common sense goes a long way to realizing that you aren't going to suddenly win the Spanish National Lottery when you didn't even know you had a ticket. That said, here's a few tips that you should share with your less-than-savvy friends and family to help them avoid falling victim to an online scam.

Never, Ever Click a Link to Your Bank or Financial Institution From an Email

Legitimate banks or financial institutions like Paypal will never email you asking you to click a link to verify your information, reset your password, or login to view anything. You should simply create a browser bookmark to your bank, and when you receive an email, use the bookmark or type in the bank name manually into the address bar.

Combined with training your parents to look for the special lock icon in the address bar, this should prevent them from giving away their bank login.

Never Give Out Your Email Password

It's become a trend in "web 2.0" sites to ask people to invite your friends to join by entering your email address and password into their web site—but this is something you should always avoid. Not only will you most likely end up spamming all of your friends with invite requests, but some sites will keep that information and continue to spam your friends forever. Of course, that is secondary to the fact that all your password reset requests will go to your email address—so if the wrong people get your password, they can access your entire online life. You should simply never give that information out to anybody for any reason.

Use Strong Passwords (and Secret Questions)

If your password is as simple as your spouse's name, it won't even matter if you give your email password out, since it can be guessed easily by scammers or hackers trying to get in. You'll want to make sure to read our guide on how to choose and remember a strong password—but your security lesson doesn't stop there. The weak link in your email security is those secret questions and answers that most sites ask you to enter to help you reset your password. Even if your password is tough, often your secret question isn't—so you should make sure to protect your email account with strong secret questions.

Do Not Buy Anything from an Email You Didn't Ask For

The easiest way scammers get you is by dumping spam in your inbox for everything from cheap watches to fake male-enhancement products—which is not only going to be bogus but probably redundant. The easiest and simplest rule is to never buy anything from an email. Sure, you could probably make an exception for email newsletters from sites you trust, like Amazon, but remember—it's relatively easy for scammers to pretend they're Amazon, just like it's easy for them to pretend they're your bank. Just make sure that you aren't buying, or even clicking on, anything from an unsolicited email. (You can always go straight to Amazon and search for the product they're advertising.)

Watch Out for Job Postings That Look Too Good

If you're out of work or just looking for a way to make some extra cash on the side, you should be very careful about the jobs posted on online sites like Craigslist, because there are scammers lurking there as well. It's not that Craigslist isn't a great place to look for jobs, but you have to be careful. Those jobs that say you can "Make $25+ / hour working from home!" or "Mystery Shopper Needed!" and promise tons of money for almost no work—yeah, they are completely fake.

The biggest thing to avoid is anything involving Western Union, Moneygram, wire transfers, money orders, or dealings with any financial transaction. The scammers will ask you to deposit a check or money order and wire transfer the money back to them—and it's not until later that you find out it was a forgery. I personally know somebody who was scammed out of $12,000 this way.

Do Not Give Out Your Personal Info or Social Security Number

This should go without saying, but no legitimate site is going to ask you to enter your Social Security number unless you are applying for credit. You should be very careful not to divulge your personal information to anybody online. The same thing goes for sites that ask you to re-enter your personal information, even though in some cases, like your bank, they should already have that information.

Learn to Use a Modern Browser's Security Features

The latest versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer have enhanced support for checking certificates from trusted web sites—you can click on the lock icon to see all the information about the certificate.

In addition, the latest browser versions maintain a list of phishing and malware sites, and will warn you any time you try and access a known bad site. Internet Explorer makes checking the URL even easier by highlighting the root domain name so you can more easily detect a new phishing site.

Ignore Web Site Popups Saying You Have a Virus

Last Friday half of my day was wasted removing a malware called Advanced Virus Remover from somebody's PC because they clicked an ad that said they had a virus, and then installed the "recommended" software, which proceeded to hold their computer hostage. These "scareware" viruses are becoming commonplace, and there are so many different names that it's impossible to keep track of all of them.

The simple solution is to pick a single antivirus app for your loved ones and train them to know exactly which one they have installed. My mom's PC came pre-installed with Norton Antivirus, and I've trained her to ignore any other messages unless they come from Norton—and that if she isn't sure, she should click the X in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, or even just turn the PC off entirely and restart it. It's not a perfect solution, and I'd rather have her using Microsoft Security Essentials, but she's used to it now and it's a whole lot better than spending a day removing a scareware virus from her computer.

Aren't sure which antivirus to choose? You've chosen your five favorites, and we've explained the virtues of the free Microsoft Security Essentials, so the choice is up to you.

The How-To Geek is tired of dealing with scammers and wishes the government would crack down on them more. His geeky articles can be found daily here on Lifehacker, How-To Geek, and Twitter.

The contact information of the person memorialized is privatized and the pages cannot be logged into anymore. You need to submit proof of death, but beyond that, I think this is going to make for some really tacky pranking. In the end, I find this to be a nice digital analogue to that which inevitably happens to all Facebook Users. [FB via BB]

He apparently laments all the trees and time that's been killed by people having to type and print out "http://" instead of just "http:" and whatever the address is. I'm pretty sure, though, that typing out all those slashes isn't quite the biggest waste of time on the internet, so I hope he doesn't beat himself up too badly at night. [Bits]

While you won't see a majority of the art (because, you know, you're actually looking at webpages), it's reassuring just to know it's there, lurking and judging. [Google via the newsmarket]

Also equally interesting: we have a higher percentage of male readers than the NFL, the NBA or even MAXIM. More women look at softcore boobies than look at gadgets! [Nielsen]

Say you want to buy a new Sharp LCD. You pick out a model on Amazon or Best Buy, and while you're inspecting the product page, a small drop-down may inform you that Buy.com (or one of 50 other comparison stores) has the television for 1% cheaper than where you were shopping.

It's not the only plug-in of its kind, and I was able to beat that tested deal pictured above by searching myself, but the visually quiet interface may keep you from uninstalling the thing by the end of the week.

As an Amazon addict (on small purchases), I've basically sold my soul for convenience, accepting that 5 minutes of googling may have saved me 20 cents. But having the comparison shopping cruising in the background...we'll see whether or not I reassess that position (whether I'm cheaper than I am lazy). [Invisible Hand via Red Ferret via LifeHacker]

Gundotra reiterated a lot of what we already know. Google believes the future of the computers lies in the browser, with apps coded according to web standards and data existing in the cloud. However, what stood out as interesting was that Gundotra, who isn't directly part of the Android team, referenced all this in the same breath as the rapid evolution of mobile browsers and mobile data plans. While he never explicitly referenced Chrome OS, it seemed evident that the upcoming, browser-based platform was in his head as he spoke.

After all, part of the point of Chrome OS is that it scales—from netbooks to desktops, so why not down to phones? And if the future is in web apps, why wouldn't Google move its web app OS down to phones once the ubiquitous connectivity is there? In Google's worldview, native apps are already just about archaic—just a necessary evil in Android's case.

He also spoke on how browsers and web standards are advancing so quick, that web apps will be more powerful than people realize: "Steve Jobs had it right when he said build for the web. But timing was an issue." And it looks like for Google, the time is now. [Chrome OS]

It has a little thing for everyone: Skynet, HAL, African vs European swallows, the meaning of life, Bob Dylan, love and hate, and even programming jokes. I wonder how many more nutty Easter Eggs the thing is hiding. [Thanks readers]

It happened less than two decades ago, when Tim Berners-Lee released version 0.1 of his web server—CERN HTTPd. June 1991 was the month. A Next Cube workstation was the box. The heir of Hypercard was put online for the first time on August 6, 1991. It will continue to shape the world for decades to come. [Flickr—Thanks Rick]

RunPee is a movie review site.

However, it won't tell you about how bad Terminator Salvation is. It won't tell you about how bad the Terminator Salvation plot is. Or about how bad is the script it. It won't tell you about its crappy editing or its awful direction or the stupid John Connor trying to pull a Batman while shouting at everyone and everything.

No. RunPee will tell you what are the best parts to leave the movie for a few minutes, so you can run to the loo. Unfortunately,the site is down now, but I'll review Terminator Salvation for them here, so they can put it online later:

Stay at home and poop for the duration of the movie. You will end with the same result, and a much satisfying experience. [Runpee via A Welsh View via The Daily What—Thanks Rebecca]

Sure, the island nation is slowly falling underwater, but all hope may not be lost yet. Valleywag points us to a USA Today article from 2004, which says there are exceptons—.su domains from the old Soviet Union are still active. But DomainNameWire refutes this, mentioning that factoid came from a VeriSign, a company that handles all domain transactions for Tuvalu, and their reasoning might be skewed. They instead reference an ICANN rule which states that domain names from any defunct country must be phased out.

So who knows what will actually happen when Tuvalu decides to swim with the fishes. But seeing that .tv domains have big time marketing appeal, I'd have trouble believing they'd just nix the domains. Still, I'm no internet domain lawyer—domain squatters, you might want to heed this warning: BEWARE OF SINKING ISLAND. [Wreck and Salvage via Eddie Codel via Boing Boing and DomainNameWire]

This has a decidedly '40s-'50s aesthetic, but still, I can imagine even as a kid in the Reagan years, it would have been considered an incredible service to fill out a post card with a research query, send it out to some no-name town in California, and in a month or so, receive a packet of sourced information from around the world on your topic, for free.

Fuck, I can't believe the internet sometimes. This, ironically, surfaced as a design for an e-card you can send via the Dutch site Boomerang. [Boomerang via FFFFound]

By pulling GPS metadata from uploaded photos (and then skinning that data in a neat 3D visualization), users can see how photographers/tourists see a given area. There's overlap, yes, but that's entirely the point. It's a project more about capturing stereotypes (like the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Statue of Liberty in NY), than giving a Google Street View objective turn by turn of an area. Add tags like "party" to the mix, and that worldview is altered in very interesting, less predictable ways.

As strange as this may sound, I could totally picture this visualizer on the PlayStation 3. The platform has focused quite a bit on a unique photo experience, and the style isn't so far from Sony's. All they'd really need to do is network it. [MIT via GearCrave]

How direct do the quotes get? One simply states, "This place sucks."

I've found that Yelp (and similar sites) have been a pretty reliable means of finding good food in an unfamiliar city. But just like letters to the editor, it's usually the most upset or ecstatic people who will find the need to vent publicly about the experience.

In other words, I'd love to see a few "the pizza ensured a prosperous life for my child!" quotes as a counterpoint. [7x7 via boingboing and Pizzeria Delfina]

Everything is controlled using a web page, which is connected to the huge setup using X10 power control systems. Alek Komarnitsky says that this year he's using wind energy too, helping with the power demands this thing requires. The system will be online until January 1st between 5:00PM to 10:00PM (GMT -7).

All is completely free, but Alek does it for a good cause, not just to showing us who cool he is and how puny we and our ACME instant tree-in-a-pizza-box are. If you like the show, consider donating some money to the University of Maryland Center for Celiac Research. [Komar]