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.
> 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.
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.
