Explaining URLs is Surprisingly Hard
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:
- www.paypal.com (that one is good)
- www.paypal.ru (bad, see the TLD is .ru and not .com?)
- www.paypal.co.uk (good, oh yeah, .co.uk is sometimes good)
- www.paypal.com.evil.com (see the evil.com is at the end? you need to read URLs from right to left)
- www.evil.com/paypal.com (well, except in this case)
- www.paypa1.com (bad, but very hard to see)
- <a href=”evil.com”>www.paypal.com</a> (bad, can’t you see the url in the chrome when you mouseover?)
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…
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caseyagollan reblogged this from benjaminsteinpro and added:
All old people should be snail-mailed...by their credit card company
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clearrants reblogged this from benjaminsteinpro and added:
granted. Sometimes,...forget how “hard” things are until I have to explain
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josephschmitt reblogged this from benjaminsteinpro and added:
while. Us techies get so wrapped up in our own little world, we sometimes forget...other...
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sebbo reblogged this from benjaminsteinpro and added:
Hey you, stop being…so unsafe! Smitty! Safen up!
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