BookofthewebConcepts

What 10 concepts do you wish everyone on the internet understood?

[add your ideas, or edit ideas already here]

• Web pages are remixable and changeable. That's one of the things that makes the web different and more interesting than television.
• My information is on my laptop or my secure server vs. my information is on someone else's server.
  • Or something else basic that helps people understand when they are or are not in control of their own information.
• There are different degrees of privacy. I can (or should be able to) make choices about what information I share with whom.
• The internet is transparent. You can view source to see how it works (???).

• Email addresses and increasingly URLs are core to your identity online. It would be tremendously helpful if people understood the tradeoffs in using 3rd parties for this (e.g. gmail.com, wordpress.com, facebook.com, posterous.com, etc).

• There are a variety of ways that websites can store passwords. Some do a lousy job. If you reuse passwords and yours is compromised, you may have other accounts compromised (e.g. paypal.com, ebay.com, google docs, etc).

• If someone compromised your email, they have tremendous power to compromise your identity elsewhere. Never give out your email password and always use strong passwords for email.

• if someone's offering a service for free, there's usually a reason -- sometimes it's because they're just being nice; sometimes they're making money (or hoping to) off of your use somehow. understanding that is a good idea. (added: My fav quote about this is "If something is free, you're probably not the customer. You're probably the product.").

• the internet isn't magical -- it's powered by machines made by people, and by people interacting on it.

• almost anyone can put almost anything on the web, even you. Ergo, don't believe everything your read. ("don't believe everything you think" is also wise, but irrelevant)

• if something's too amazing to believe, look into it -- it could be awesome, it could be a scam - it's not that hard to tell the difference if you try.

• on the internet nobody knows you're a dog, and its corrolary - on the internet, the person you're talking to may not be who they claim they are.

• if you embed content directly from a third party on your website, you are trusting that third content not to serve malware to your users. Javascript embeds for instance are one of the most common reasons websites are hacked.

• without taking certain precautions, everything you transmit on the web or over email is sent as plain text. You should be comfortable knowing that a lot of people may be able to access that content.

• it is possible that a website you are visiting is not actually that website (DNS spoofing, phishing, etc).

• ssl certificates not only verify that data sent between a browser and a server is encrypted but also verify that the website you are viewing is actually the website identified by the URL you use to access it. never trust a web site with a self-signed ssl certificate (browser will warn you) unless you really know what you are doing.

• The big difference between a http:// and a https:// URL: One most probably provides security while the other certainly doesn't.