Eszter at CT says that only 9 percent of Internet users answer "Yes" to that question.

I think a person has to be a hard-core blogger to be surprised by that. I think a study of the average person's awareness for how the internet works would be much more interesting than numbers about the latest-and-greatest geek toys. How many people have a genuine working understanding of what, exactly, a "server" is, and how many people know how "IP addresses" work?

Finding out how many people have ever used an RSS feed is like asking how many people have a DVD player. You can gauge the extent to which people are keeping up with new toys, but not a single person has to know what a "Content Scrambling System" is.

And, in general, people don't need to know how CSS works. But as the Internet becomes a bigger and bigger part of people's lives, and as companies and evil-doers become ever more interested in intruding on people's privacy and fair use, it behoves people to acquire a more techinical understanding of their toys.

Some details which are interesting include

Of concern from a privacy/security perspective is that only 29% have a good idea of what “phishing” means, 52% for “Adware”, 68% for “Internet cookies” and 78% for “Spyware”.

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