Legal Research

Don’t Blame the Victim

Ars Technica has posted a story entitled Fake popup study sadly confirms most users are idiots.

Forty-two students at North Carolina State University were presented with 4 different bogus Windows dialog boxes that popped at random times during a presentation of medical Web sites.  The dialog boxes warned about memory errors, but contained clues that would have helped a careful reader conclude that they were potentially malicious.  For example, one contained a browser status bar at the bottom.

The results: more than 50% of the users clicked the OK button on all the dialog boxes.

And so the author of the news item christened them “idiots”.  But they’re not.  Windows just gets in the way when you’re trying to get things done.  So you say, “Yeah, yeah, whatever,” in order to get the stupid dialog box out of the way so you can get on with your work.  Would you put up with that with your car or toaster or washing machine?  Of course not.  But we Windows users have to.  And no amount of “I’m a PC” ads are gonna make me them feel any better about it.

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on September 24, 2008 (boomark / email).