[cbozeman]

> The average non-technical user doesn't "see" "[municipality].[state].gov". They aren't familiar with the concept of a domain hierarchy at all. They just memorize "[municipality_website]" and move on with their day.

You've just highlighted the problem. This is something every single human being in America should know, and arguably almost the entire world.

This falls directly under the rubric of Basic Computing Knowledge > Basic Internet Knowledge.

Every single time I see someone searching for "microsoft" or "apple" I immediately stop them and tell them, "You've already done most of the work. Microsoft and Apple are commercial entities. Add .com at the end, which is what .com means. Commercial. You're adding extra work for yourself."

Yes, a few people pop off at the mouth at which point I remind them ignorance is of a thing is easily remedied with a little give-a-damn, and saves everyone time and money.

Talk about a fucking miserable failure of education. I'm 44. I expected the generation 20 years younger than me to be impossibly skilled with computers to the point that I wouldn't hope to even match them, much less surpass them. Instead what we got was a world where we dumbed every goddamn thing down so even the most drooling moron can utilize it.

It's pretty disappointing, to put it mildly.

[pests]

I think your view on the world might be a little skewed. Every human in the world needs to know how domain names work? What?

[xp84]

They should know the basic principles! For the same reason they should know what a noun and a verb is. For the same reason they should know that you can multiply something by 10 by adding a zero. When so much of our lives revolve around the Internet, basic literacy about its fundamental mechanics makes a lot of sense. The alternative is the world we live in now, where it’s trivially easy to scam people because they believe www.irs.gov.login.html.b3293.cn/login is functionally equivalent to www.irs.gov/login.html?b3293.cn

Imagine if people were this bad at counting, or at knowing the difference between US currency and monopoly money.

[pests]

> so much of our lives revolve around the Internet

This was my core point, that this is true for you but is not actually true for everyone. To claim the entire world needs to know this when people get by just fine every day without being online or being on a device is absurd to me.

[xp84]

I wasn’t only talking about nerds. There are not a lot of people anymore who are not impacted by the Internet and who don’t usually use it.

And they don’t get by just fine every day.

People get phished and scammed constantly, in many ways that could be prevented if people had and remembered like a 2-week unit in high school on how the Internet works.

I’m not saying they need to understand even the fact that DNS converts names to IP numbers. Merely that it’s a hierarchy and how to trace responsibility (originating from the right side).

That’s no more difficult to grasp (if taught properly) than how to read the address on an envelope and understanding that “San Francisco, California” means a city in San Francisco located in the state of California.

Other lessons in the unit would include how email works including its lack of guarantees of authenticity. And finally, what encryption means and applying that knowledge to safe and unsafe ways of storing and transmitting information.

[nightfly]

Everyone should know how phone numbers work too, no different