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Kazaa Usability Study
Anonymous Coward writes "We have just finished a study that shows how user interface design flaws allow users on Kazaa to share their personal files without their knowledge. In a laboratory user study, only 2 out of 12 subjects were able to correctly determine that Kazaa was sharing their entire hard drive. We looked at the current Kazaa network and discovered that many users are sharing personal information such as email and data for financial programs such as Microsoft Money. To see if other users on Kazaa were aware of this and taking advantage of users ignorance, we ran a Kazaa client for 24 hours with dummy personal files. During this time, files named "Inbox.dbx" and "Credit Cards.xls" were downloaded from our client by several unique users. The tech report is online, or see our lab web page."
why do you think napster grew? people didn't know they were automatically sharing their files, and even if they did, they didn't want to turn it off or figure out how to stop people from getting their files because they wanted to use it to get other peoples files.
if during install there was an option "DO YOU WANT TO SHARE YOUR FILES" 90% would say no... then no network.
P2P RELIES on ignorance of its user base, and the good will of a small fraction of its tech savvy users.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
Well, it's not like I don't receive everyone elses personal files through email, courtesy of the Sircam worm.
Ouch, clueless users sharing their credit card and bank account information? Gives new meaning to "Fools and their money are soon parted."
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
idiots who can't navigate a UI to determine what they are sharing, deserve to have their *extra sercret* stash of porn and inboxes full of spam stolen.
Since Kazaa is spyware in the first place, what personal information is there to hide?
Also, in a related topic, piloting planes is reserved for those who know what they are doing.
How will I be able to download all those handy .pdf's, .ppt's and .doc's that I need to fulfill my desire to see other people's private stuff!
If the average user is too ignorant to know what their program is doing (or could do) to their system, they should leave it alone. This same argument is used for ignorant users running open relay servers.
If KaZaA users don't understand how to know what they are sharing, they deserve the consequences.
Adversive
My cat's breath smells like cat food.
That Most People are lazy! Sure, I will agree that the UI stunk, most programs out there have poor interfaces, but you can't just say 'Oh it's pure crud...' without concidering that most of the people that use programs, especially programs geared at music swaping, are lazy and are too intent on getting onto the service quickly, as opposed to taking their time and going through the entire program making sure it's set to their liking before jumping onto the service.
I doubt there's a perfect GUI out there, but it would be nice if more designers and developers took a bit more time taking a stab at one instead of just being content with it looking pretty.
======
Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish. - Euripides
Gives a whole new meaning to the term spy-ware...don't you think?
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Once again, tech-savvy users end up protecting themselves, having probably noticed the sharing and taken steps to prevent it.
Other people get to share their precious private data. They also probably click on binary attachments, and forward mail that ask them to do so. Screwed up. As always. Do they even know? Do they even care?
Can Kazaa be held responsible for that? Well, I don't think they get anything particularly good from that. More likely, the interface wasn't thought out properly when created. Can Kazaa change that? In the next version of their client, perhaps. But do they have any incentive to do so? Unless people on the web unite... I don't think so.
Perhaps what we do need is a law. Argh, a law. Not a law to remove more freedom than what has already been taken, but a law that gives some rights back to the user. A law that puts some liability on the makers of the software. So that badly designed interface can get sued. So that insecure architectures can get sued. To no more than their income, else free software is doomed.
Yeah, I know this sounds a bit idealistic, but well, it's good to hope, sometimes.
This strongly supports my "83 percent of people are idiots" theory.
why do you think napster grew? people didn't know they were automatically sharing their files, and even if they did, they didn't want to turn it off or figure out how to stop people from getting their files because they wanted to use it to get other peoples files.
Napster restricted users to sharing ".mp3" files only unless you applied a third-party patch.
On the other hand, most people accept the default directory of "My Shared Folder" or whatnot. If you are sharing your entire drive (which you need to go out of your way to do) then I'm sorry, you're an idiot.
My favorite part of the article:
The word "folder" is singular, implying one folder, and does not hint that all folders below it will be recursively selected to be shared with others.
So it's sharing the stuff in it, but it's not? Riiiight.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I wish that the company that released kAzaa would have had the foresight to make the project Open Source. There is a tremendous number of highly experienced developers in the Open Souce Community.
Only when a high-profile application such as KaZaA learns how to harness the power in the available libraries of the Open Source movement, can we make any progress against the stranglehold that MS has.
Sorry Judge, I didn't realize I was sharing all those ripped DVD's with the world... whoops!
If you told someone that by using this, all of their private documents and files would be able to the rest of the world to download, I'm pretty sure most would care. Privacy is a big buzzword these days, remember?
Most people are idiots when it comes to technology, that isn't a surprise. Look back when cable modems first started to take off and you'll see lots of stories of people running PC Anywhere without a password, or using Windows File Sharing and sharing their entire drive.
Computers are complicated devices. Unless they are stripped down to do only one or two functions, like a play-only VCR, the majority of the public will not understand. Many of them don't WANT to understand -- they just want their e-mail, IM, MP3s and pr0n.
Case in point -- KaZaA. It is KNOWN spyware, and has an embedded secondary network (Britewave?) yet despite this being well publicized (CNN, FoxNews, regular geek news like Slashdot) it is wildly popular.
Why? It is *very* convenient, and people will put up with a ton of shit for convenience.
What would be a real interesting study, is get this one publicized as all get out then do it again in 1 year. I bet the stats would be about the same.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
They're going to be gone soon, anyway.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
"Thank you for your credit card number, 'l33tp3t3'."
Well, I could find out what I was sharing ok Kazaa when I used it. Yes, we all know that if it was designed better the users would have more control - but, one of Kazaa's better features is it's ease of use. That's why it's popular. The fact of the matter is that the people just don't care enough to change anything. For the people that have sensitive data on their computers, they should be responsible enough to guard it, just like not keeping your credit cards on your front porch.
Get Firefox!
This is exactly why these P2P apps are banned at my office....that and the illegality of most of the downloads. It's just too big of a risk for a user to share out their whole drive with all sorts of documents on it.
I remember that one of my teachers last year had Kazaa on her laptop, the same laptop that she had her grades on and the same laptop that was connstantly connected to a wireless network, with a little searching im sure i could have gotten the spreadsheet (yes spreadsheet) that the grades were on. Granted this isn't something i would do, but it makes you think..
Carpe meam simiam!
however, using a MICROSOFT product to store sensitive financial information unencrypted IS.
what he meant was that anyone who relies on microsoft (general MS bashing here) to handle thier finances isnt all that bright in the first place, and does not realize that "MyCreditCard#s.doc" is being shared by kazaa.
of course, kazaa is for morons anyway... (the network in general, kazaalite is about worthless as well. winMX for mp3s, edonkey2000 for everything else)
and yes, edonkey requires some tweaking before it will work well, but it DOES.
How many out of the 12 subjects were able to correctly determine that KaZaA installed spyware on their machine.
Windows Users Are Idiots, film at 11.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
..for folks who unknowingly open their shares to the world with Kazaa. If they weren't trying to steal copyrighted music in the first place, they wouldn't have to worry about it.
I like the way computer geeks think anyone who doesn't know as much about computers as they do are idiots. I freely admit that some people are idiots, but others are just ignorant. Can you repair your own car? Build your own house? Hell, can you cook your own food? Then why are these people dumb because they aren't computer experts? I have worked helpdesk and user support for years and have run into more people who are perfectly normal nice people, who are afraid of their computers than people who are just morons. They can turn them on and (hopefully) get their job done, but thats about it.
I shared videos of me dancing and nobody wanted to download them. It makes me cry every day when I look at the results of my scientific study.
I mean copyrighted software is simply that; copyrighted, and not free for other people to take from another person's computer. Theft is theft, it's as simple as that. The movie industry and software companties will be going after Kazaa in a big way soon.
Programs like Microsoft Money are expensive, and even more expensive to create; like console companies, Microsoft loses money on selling external softwarre and makes money on Win XP and IE. By stealing something a company loses money on already, really hurts them in the long run. This is not just Microsoft, but Apple computers and even VaLinux.
i'm sure everyone with a fast connection has come across this before, your downloading something on kazaa and u hit someone with a 2 megabit connection, you click on findo more files from this user, but when the search results come up you find the person has shared their entire drive, if you want anything else from them you have to scroll through thousands of files
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Just out of curiosity, I ran the install myself, and I observed that while the sharing scheme isn't 100% clear or too concerned about the user's privacy, it's still not nearly as bad as the outright installation of spyware, which Kazaa does anyway. I also asked a small group of novice users to try it out, and found that:
1) The default shared folder is C:\Program Files\Kazaa\My Shared Folder. A vanilla user with a vanilla install would not have had that directory, and would not have any private files in here to begin with. Most novice users I polled understood that this was the folder which the public would access, and that private files should never be placed there. So... simply clicking "Next" on the install repeatedly doesn't endanger the person's privacy. (well, spyware is still installed, but you get my point)
2) When selecting another folder to share, I found that all of the novice users I polled stored their music in a directory strictly for music, and that subdirectories would contain nothing but music. So, if someone is sharing C:\My Documents\My Music\, they would not be sharing files in the parent directory, where private documents are stored. Realistically, I can't think of too many cases where someone would store private files in a directory made specifically for music. Granted, the user could still accidentally put files there, or accidentally share C:\My Documents, but at that point, it's user error.
3) When selecting an entire drive to share and download music, eg, C:\, all (yes, all) of the users were unwilling to proceed, as they didn't want files piling up in the root directory, and they didn't like the idea of sharing the entire drive. (though this was never specified in the software)
So... what I'm saying is: Common sense and "install: next, next, next" seemed to prevail in the small group of novice users I polled... While I agree wholeheartedly that Kazaa does *NOTHING* to discourage or warn users of sharing their entire drives, I guess this shouldn't come as a surprise considering the company's history.
Just thought I'd share...
Now we can all get on Kazaa and grab credit card numbers so we can buy porn and cds and dvds and software and computer games and books and even computer games about porn........cause all these things still have to be bought right? its not like i can just get them free through some program......
Find an inbox and do search from the same user.
No wonder the Kazaa search is so slow.
You search through a lot of uninteresting crap to find what you need. Of course it could be to your advantage if you are Peeping Tom or a ignorant maniac who wants to steal credit card numbers.
...compared to Napster and Limewire. I don't know about the particular issue being discussed, as I never had a problem with it (I hope). But in general, I find Kazaa to be kind of byzantine, and a pain to use. Napster and Limewire are still the champs in this department, and it's probably one reason for their initial success. If you want to design a good app, just copy them, at least for a start.
I always went in (when I used Napster and now Gnutella) and changed the upload slots to 0. As paranoid as this may sound, I don't like people being able to get into my files, even if it is just stuff I downloaded from other people.
How the heck does this relate to inventing new products?
weeeee, no that it's been published every script kiddy in the world will be stealing mail box files... and infect themselves at the same time... then we'll have yet another surge in worm activity.
really, some people just shouldn't get computers, it's nothing against them, i'm sure they are smart in different ways, it's just the truth
Last April of this year a former coworker of mine called me and asked me to come over in a plea of help. He had downloaded Kazza and installed it onto his computer. Four days later he discovered that his second hard drive that he had been keeping all of his most valuable data upon had suddenly lost a lot of data. His most important files were gone, deleted from his hard drive. He had turned on this file sharing utility without knowing what it was actually doing to his computer. Users over the Kazza network had randomly gone and deleted files across his shared drives over the course of the four days that he had first used Kazza.
This was a case of failure to design a product which requires the user to know what they are doing before they can use the product.
It was also a failure of the user to understand what the product was doing to his computer.
I blame the user more than the software in this case because I had previously warned him that Kazza sucked, included spyware, and to use Gnucleus instead of Kazza to perform file sharing. The Win32 version of Gnucleus is currently read only, and does not allow write access to user's systems, which is ideal for the design of the network. He listened to someone else instead.
Bad him.
He made dinner for me while I used a hard drive sector scanning utility to undeleted some of the lost data. Not all of his data was restored. A good portion of it was permanently deleted. This included business and personal contact lists, his most prized data.
Dammit.. if there was one thing that teachers taught it was to reduce your fractions!
1 out of 6
Least that's the way they were with me.
sam files and loft crack, even more good script kiddy fun...
I noticed back in november of last year that most of my friends had kazaa set up to share everything on their hard drives. At the time I was working on a project on the Reformation movement. I was stuck so I typed in 'Reformation' under Documents and I got a couple reports. I got some good facts and I think I got a 90% on the project. I used it for a couple more project and found it helpful on bigger subjects. Why buy Clifs Notes if I can download projects?
I would like to know those people... 2 were current people... the other 10 were people from mental clinics, or, at least, people not capable of using a computer for simple things...
And they managed to download and install the program? whoa...
So what? Everything is already shared via Echelon file sharing system...
What are these usernames with @fileshare? @kazaa is pretty obvious, and there used to be @morpheus, but I have never seen the fileshare one. Anyone know what client that is?
It's called Brilliant Digital.
I have often wondered how to inform non-techie people (let's call them 'normals', for the sake of the discussion) about these problems. Considering KaZaA's reputation, I always advise my normal (and sometimes even techie) friends and family not to use it. But I always seem to find that they either don't know about KaZaA's problems or don't appreciate the security risks.
As we can't rely on KaZaA's makers to fix these problems or to warn users, what can we do?
If you think about the security and virus problems with Microsoft Windows and Email programs, most normals (at least the ones that I know) seem to only get warnings about these issues from those annoying group forwards or virus warnings sent by someone's father/brother/uncle/friend who works for IBM/Norton/Symantic/FBI/CIA/Government Agency. For better or for worse, normals do seem to believe these warnings, so perhaps this is the only way to inform people about KaZaA.
What does everyone think? Is this method too evil to be used for good purposes?
You break all the laws of physics and you seriously think there wouldn't be a price?
1) Computer software is COMPLICATED.
2) 90% of computer users are IDIOTS.
3) Spyware peddlers are UNETHICAL.
You needed to write a paper to investigate these completely unobvious claims?
Where do I get some of that action?
I want to get some academic funding to investigate whether hot strippers, on average, have big titties!
Now I know what to look for! I am getting sick of pr0n anyway! hehehe
The same sort of thing happens with Bearshare too. I once came across a woman with a heap of confidential information being shared. Unfortunately I couldn't find an email address among it to warn her.
Somehow these people at HP convinced their boss to do a "Kazaa Usability Study". In other words they spent all day downloading MP3's, Bootleg videos, and whatever else they could find on the Kazaa network. Maybe their next project will be a "Porn Website Usability Study".
http://www.kubuntu.org/
It was a rather large inbox file, and after downloading about 50% of it, I took a quick look at it. I found out the person's full name, mailing address, several email addresses, what they bought online from some clothing store. If I had downloaded the entire thing, I probably could have come up with a credit card number.
So why do I say this? It's freaking scary that I could find this all out by reading a single file, and that this person obviously had no idea that this information was being leaked. I sure as hell am not the only one who would have seen this. I should have emailed them to let them know so that they could close up this hole -- I doubt other, more malicious users would do the same.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but when you install Napster (or Kazaa... or Kazaa Lite... etc), it asks what files you want to share.
Beyond that, you can selectively CHOOSE C:\ to be shared. Or only C:\Program Files\Kazaa Lite\Shared Folder. Etc.
Obviously it will share all of your files if you chose a folder and your files lie in a folder that is recursively included in that selected folder. I guess the question is whether or not files are being shared that are explicitly not included to be shared.
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
It is also not limited to the Internet or computers. It is all too easy to find a large group of people of which a fair percentage is susceptible to some kind of deceit because they don't know better. They often have no way of knowing. A year ago we had this twisted local who dressed up as a policeman, walked up to tourists and said he was looking for couterfeit money and demanded to see their wallets. Too many fell for it and saw the fake policeman walking away with their cash.
I just went out and took a spin on kazaa lite to check out just what was out there...
:)
Man! stock reports, semester schedules, scads of phone lists...phone extension lists...business documents...
Wow! I'm gonna have to call the GF tommorrow and run some tests just to be absolutely sure and run the same tests on her sharing connections.
This is so neat
when all is said and done, all a man has left are his blades and his honor.
After reading this story I decided to do a little test of my own: Do a search, under type of file choose "Everything" and search for ".wab" (Windows address book) or ".doc" ...
I do not even want to think what is out there as far as QuickBooks or other financial software files. What a bunch of idiots!
During a boring week last November I decided to see just what I could find on Morpheus. Here is some of the great stuff I found:
Financial info and a company database for an office furniture wholesaler on the east coast. Everything from salary history to SSN's. Based on the contents, I'd say that junior was playing with p2p on mom's home office computer.
One guy had tons of Christian propaganda. I skipped the Bible and his prayer journal. What caught my eye was a little file called "purity pledge". It was the standard stuff, no sex, no oral, no petting, and no porn. I guess his big stash of hentai didn't count.
Little billy was a good lad. He sent thank you notes to grandma. It looked like he did his homework too. His favorite subject was hung studs in raunchy gay fisting action.
The best one of all was a guy who was looking for a mail order bride. It looked like he narrowed his choices to four girls. He had lingere shots of each of them and quite a few nudes of one girl. Funny thing, she wasn't the one if the wedding photo.
There was a ton of diaries, porn, budgets, and shitty access databases. I came to realize one crucial fact: most people are boring.
Perhaps they should have called this a LOSABILITY study.
Who moved my sig?
> Or do you put all your groceries on top of the
;-)
> stove and hope for a gourmet meal?
I assumed that she was at the grocery store because she hoped for/planned a meal, but after she put the groceries on top of her car, got in, and then drove off; I am not so sure anymore.
It wasn't all that funny when it happened, just a mess of food spread over the parking lot, coke cans spewing brown foam, oranges bouncing and rolling towards the storm drain, eggs showing white and yellow in the sun, but after reading your post, I cracked up!
Thanks.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
is that the commercial entities (including a university), finance a study of something that should be patently clear in the first place. The people who petitioned for this study already knew the conclusion. I hate to complain, but the financiers involved in this study should be at least somewhat knowledgable of computers and the security risks involved when you put a monkey in front of one. The people who conducted this study took the easy way out; they didn't think of something worthwhile to research. They simply wanted their names on an 'official study', and it's in PDF format, so it must be official.
File sharing is a dubious business at best, and most of the companies involved in it will try to manipulate your machine in one way or another.
So...let them. Let them prat about with your machine to their heart's content. Let them install all the spyware in the world. Let them share every file that's ever been placed on it. Just one thing - make sure it's not a real machine.
In other words, make use of the virtual machine programs kicking about. VMWare for most, Virtual PC in my case. Use that machine for nothing but running your P2P clients. No email, no web browsing, nothing. Just run your clients and enjoy. Let them spy on everything happening within that machine, because the only thing happening on that machine is the running of their own software.
Cheers,
Ian
what if you have file sharing disabled? does it still share them anyway, and what if you're using kazaalite?
see sig. see sig run. run sig run.
Usability and privacy: a study of Kazaa P2P file-sharing
ABSTRACT
P2P file sharing systems are rapidly becoming one of the most popular applications on the internet, with millions of users online exchanging files daily. While primarily intended for sharing multimedia files, programs such as Gnutella, Freenet, and Kazaa frequently allow other types of files to be shared. Although this has no doubt contributed to P2P filesharing's growing popularity, it raises serious security concerns about the types of files that users are aware of sharing with others. Users who accidentally or unknowingly allow their private or personal files to be shared risk disclosing their private information to other users on the network.
In this paper, we use a cognitive walkthrough as well as a laboratory user study to analyze the usability of the Kazaa file sharing user interface. We discover that the majority of the users in our study were unable to tell what files they were sharing, and sometimes incorrectly assumed they were not sharing any files when in fact they were sharing all files on their hard drive. We also looked at the current Kazaa network, and determined that a large number of users are currently sharing personal and private files without their knowledge, and from our dummy server we were able to see that other users are indeed taking advantage of this and downloading files such as "Credit Cards.xls" and email files.
Keywords: Privacy, peer-to-peer networks, security, usability, user studies
Nowadays, it pays to have a 'junk PC' for running all your spyware/crapware. I have a machine that I built once and ghosted the image. I then run kazaa and some gnutella and napster clients. I download all sorts of junk and test it there. I keep the thing in a DMZ. The occasional virus or worm results in my having to rebuild the image. It's worth the trouble to keep from having to rebuild my primary machine with stuff I actually need.
Duh? We know that people are stupid and will make mistakes such as what the article shows us by sharing an entire disk drive. But I question who is dumber? The people paying for this "research and analysis?" The people who believe this to be a security flaw? Or the two paid hit-men who wrote it?
So HP has nothing better for their employees to do? I suppose that HP's announcement of firing 10% of its work force a head of schedule is really NOT a head of schedule. Or should I say, here are two volunteers?
The average "user" is the son or daughter of the owner of the box and is largly unsupervised in their use. Should it be different? Sure.
Of course it should be different! These unsupervised little rugrats are always hacking into the pentagon's computers or some such thing. It's true, I saw it on a documentary. Or, wait, maybe that was a bad Hollywood movie . . .
I'd suggest you don't use Slashdot as your only news source, or you will suffer permanent brain damage.
My god, can't you string two sentences together?
. . . integrating the GUI into the operating system was a dumb idea
Oh yeah, because you just know most users are plenty comfortable with the command line.
I'd suggest you don't use Slashdot as your only news source, or you will suffer permanent brain damage.
It seems like you could pass a pretty sweet virus around by creating a doc called credit card numbers.doc and making if available to the world through kaaza.
The U of M's OIT (office of information tech.), outlawed kazaa and rate limited it, so you'd think they'd hate it enough not to study it... (hey, it was a big deal while I was in The Dorms)
They must have done it at HP to get around Packeteer.
dont any of you use kazaa lite?
just got the update with the
auto-find more sources for download
function and let it roll while i sleep.
very nice, no spyware.
You know, I don't see how this is bad. First, I have to deal with all of these "Kazakites" sucking up bandwidth to do mostly illegal stealing of copyrighted material. This causes my bandwidth supplier to freak, and therefore causes me grief. In exchange, the "Kazakites" are going to let me look at personal information; that I can possibly sell or use. Seems fair to me. Maybe I download their cache logs, emails, and personal correspondence, and sell the "family data". If only I had a low enough moral sense! I can't get my mind wrapped around the concept of actually installing Kaza (sp?) yet. Maybe I WILL install it, solely for the purpose of data mining.
What is interesting here (and this is something I find REALLY funny), is that using this Kaza thingy for mining personal information is actually legal, whereas using it to share music and videos isn't.
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Most Techs (not all, but many)are the real newbies. They barely understand people. They refuse to read any books on GUI design (not taking their own advice to RTFM). Many of them consider the field of usability to be a bullshit field dominated by the psuedo-science of cognitive psychology. And then when non-techs get really confused by the crap they program, the techs are too dumb to know why it's happening. They're simply too stupid to learn the protocol of the end user.
Read The Fine Manual or shut the hell up and go back your server closet where you belong.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
As someone else pointed out, this might be considered a feature by the Kazaa crowd.
It does add network content.
Note, I do agree with you though. It should be something that the UI makes more explicit and defaults should be secure rather than unsecure to the extent possible.
Saying "you deserve it" is like saying "you should understand all the details of the lawyerese in any EULA before using the software". Who really does? Damn few. Even most technical people just click thru them because the choice is use the program (which might provide some key capability) or sit and spin. Does that make hiding nasty stuff in the EULA a good business practice or above board behaviour? I think not.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
> Users should not have to be "computer literate" to get e-mail. Or browse web pages. Or write documents. Or use an accounting program.
:)
Well, that's fine, but if they don't want to put forth the effort to get training before calling me, I'm gonna bill them for the full $75/hour I normally charge for more difficult problems. Their choice, I guess, if taking a class or opening a book is too much to ask. More money in my pocket for remedial shit!
> I don't think car repair professionals think their customers are idiots because they don't know how to fix a broken transmission.
My colleagues and I never expect people to know how to FIX anything - that's why they're calling us. All we ask is you give us the common courtesey to WORK with us. When you explain things vaguely and get pissy, don't pay attention to what you are doing, and don't listen to what I say (why are you calling me then?) then you are wasting both of out times.
To quote a line from Jerry Maguire, "Help ME, help YOU!"
Once upon a time, there was a thriving black market for arable credit card numbers. Then the FBI got hip to it, made some busts and things settled down.
Looks like the kids don't even need to go through all the trouble of phishing for cardz anymore; fire up Kazaa or Morpheus or Gnutella or... and search for *.doc or *.xls (or *.mdb, even) a few times a day. Done and done.
Brilliant! This will be even more fun for me to do than scanning people's hard drives and finding pictures of their dongs alongside resumes listing them as Young Republicans. Ha ha.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
But my dad, for example, has a slightly different mental model of how the filesystem works. He sees folders as streets, and files as addresses along those streets. So to him, /foo/ doesn't "contain" /foo/bar/ or /foo/zaz/, you just have to go through /foo to get to them. After all, his house is on Maple St, which is off of Victoria Ave, but he doesn't think of his house as being "contained" in Victoria Ave.
Users are often self-taught, so they have odd (to us) mental models of what's going on inside that beige box on their desk. They make up their own analogies that make sense for them, and are often wrong in subtile ways, such as the "contains" vs. "is a path to" distinction.
I like the way computer geeks think anyone who doesn't know as much about computers as they do are idiots. I freely admit that some people are idiots, but others are just ignorant.
;)
Can you repair your own car? Build your own house? Hell, can you cook your own food? Then why are these people dumb because they aren't computer experts?
Yes, yes, and yes. And anyone who can't do all three is also an idiot.
Look, in this world, it's all about what you know. If you're not capable of being self-sufficent in the crunch, then you'll be the first one dead when the revolution comes, yeah?
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." - RAH
Even better, now I can resell the tracks I've downloaded to other people. Finally! A reason to have Britney Spears resident on my hard drive! *shivers*
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
I also noticed that when I could see a user's entire HD, there were invariably filenames using high ascii characters, apparently an Oriental character set (judging by the English-readable filenames present).
I don't think this was a "poor English skills" problem, because if it were, other non-English language users should also have been affected, but I only saw it on systems as described above.
BTW I only used the web search interface, I never installed the Kazaa client; these users' drives were visible in plain old Netscape.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
wouldn't it be fitting if someone were to take and open mine - only to discover it was a virus ;)
caveat emptor (or in this case - "borrower" beware)