Showing only Notes & Links tagged security on art, design, creativity and, technology by Casey A. Gollan

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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…

Lock­ing the front door is a rit­ual we all per­form which pro­vides a gen­eral assump­tion of front-door-locked-ness. Almost like vac­ci­na­tion. One per­son does it, it’s mean­ing­less; every­body does it, it’s a big deal. And also like vac­ci­na­tion because, once every­body does it, you largely get the ben­e­fits even if you don’t!

Lock­ing the front door as col­lec­tive action. Hmm. I still don’t think it makes any sense. I still do it.

The assumption that all doors are locked «  Snarkmarket