Explaining URLs is Surprisingly Hard

All old people should be snail-mailed a paper copy of this by their credit card company to tape to their screen. The internet has its own strange language.

benjaminsteinpro:

I listened to a moderately interesting Security Now episode from a couple weeks ago.  The topic was explaining security best practices to non-techno people.  Specifically, can you tell if a URL is safe to click on.  Turns out parsing URLs is a suprisingly hard problem that nerds completely take for granted.

Try explaining the following rules about clicking links to your grandma:

It’s so intuitive for techies to see the good and bad URLs but there’s just no simple set of rules for explaining it.  I guess you could forward them the RFC…