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Kazaa Usability Study

Posted by michael on from the painful-lessons dept.

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."

11 of 279 comments (clear)

  1. this is really disapointing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

  2. Spyware by peterdaly · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Gives a whole new meaning to the term spy-ware...don't you think?

    -Pete

    --
    Soccer Goal Plans
  3. Re:out of the technical journal DUH. by SirSlud · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Um. What if the question was:

    Do you want to share:

    1) Your media files.
    2) Your personal files.
    3) Both.

    You contend the answer is 3. I say its 1. There is a big difference between sharing my mp3s and sharing my personal inbox.

    --
    "Old man yells at systemd"
  4. Re:out of the technical journal DUH. by gad_zuki! · · Score: 3, Interesting

    When I find people with that option on downloading from me they get cancelled and quick (i wish there was a way to automate this), especially when they're sitting on a fat T1 or better (dialups are ignored). Sure, I can't stop a lot of people but the messages and the blocking does cause a chilling effect.

    For those of you who just found this out, use at your own risk because a lot of the P2P community does care about keeping the network alive.

  5. i'm more interested in by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    How many out of the 12 subjects were able to correctly determine that KaZaA installed spyware on their machine.

  6. They are not idiots by Bamfsog · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:They are not idiots by Uksi · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I hear your argument a great deal. I used to think the same thing, but I've changed my opinion of the last couple of years.

      For once, the car analogy is moot. Not knowing how to drive a car can quite possibly hurt and kill people. Computers, on the other hand, aside from very limited appliations, are not as fatal.

      If cars were not as deadly as they are, people would learn how to drive them the same way they learn Word.

      "Computer literacy" is the excuse of computer industry for difficult to use software. It's great for companies to say "the user needs some training" and then ease their development effort by not having to worry about improving usability.

      Users should not have to be "computer literate" to get e-mail. Or browse web pages. Or write documents. Or use an accounting program.

      Why must every computer user these days know the difference between RAM and hard drive? And everyone must, because every program forces the concept of "unsaved" documents upon users. Have you ever, in real life, had an "unsaved" letter or a journal? When you take a journal off the shelf to write something in, do you make an "unsaved" copy to work on and leave the original on the shelf or do you just take the damn journal off? And does your shelf ask you whether you really want to save your journal when you put it back? No! So why do computers do that?

      There are many people out there who have accomplished a lot in their lives, who have respectable jobs and are considered to be great in their field of work. Their kids look up to them and call them smart. But if they have trouble using a computer, and they don't have the time to become accustomed to all the quirks and stupidity that computers inflict on us daily, they will fall behind technologically. They will be considered by "techies" as backward and they will be on the "computer illiterate" end of the digital divide.

      And that should not be the case. Computer industry (and that includes both commercial and open-source software) are in denial about the poor usability of their products. When they see people struggling with their software, they label them as as computer illiterate and make fun of them. That's quite a bit like sexism and racism: these folks are being "red lined" and left out behind the red line of "computer literacy."

      What necessary is for people that design interactive interfaces to learn proper interaction design. If at least half the programmers out in the world who deal with user interfaces were "interaction literate" (and note the emphasis on interaction and not interface), the world's computers would be much less frustrating to use.

      And programmers that deal with user interfaces don't have a good excuse to not be decently versed in interaction design: it's their job.

      Finally, a comment about learning. I think that learning is core to all computer use. However, too many interfaces these days impede learning or force much more to be learned than necessary. If one tries to avoid learning, if one builds interfaces solely around concepts that people are familiar with in the "real world" (that is, metaphors), one will fail badly.

      Users of computer software never stay newbies--they either learn and become intermediate users or drop off the radar.

      Consider the mouse. It's in no way an intuitive device. If you never saw a computer, how the hell in the world would you figure out what to do with this object? How could you possibly figure out by looking at the mouse that it moves the cursor on the screen? You may do some really silly things with the mouse, such as lifting it and moving your hand under it to generate cursor movement.

      But as soon as you put the mouse down and move it on the screen, you will see the cursor moving. You will learn how to use the mouse in seconds.

      Point is, if learning how to use Kazaa was nearly as easy as learning how to use the mouse, people would use it much more, they would be much more loyal to it, and more people would use it. And things like those described in this article could potentially be avoided.

      I may have veered off course a few times in this post--sorry about that. All information presented here is my opinion and not necessarily a statement of fact.

    2. Re:They are not idiots by dvNull · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Maybe I am coming off differently, but what I am trying to say is that if someone plans to use the computer as a tool, they should try to get a Basic knowledge on how it works. My response isnt toward the Kazaa interface or Windows..

      I am not saying that a person who bought his first computer should learn how to write an OS from scratch using nothing but obfuscated perl. All I am suggesting is that when a person buys a tool for a job, he/she makes an attempt to learn some of the functionality. I know people who can do magic with Excel spreadsheets but when it comes to asking them to double click on an icon they get lost. I mean come on! Whats so hard about double clicking? Or finding the start button on your taskbar ? Are you telling me that expecting users to find that button labelled START is asking too much ??

      I dont expect everyone to be computer whiz, but I *do* expect people to try and get a working knowledge on using the tool they just bought.

      dvNuLL

  7. Re:Seriously... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    it has always intrested me immensly, the people most worried about viruses and worms and spyware(other than /. readers(the non-trolls who know whats what)) are the people who only use thier computers for ims and email..lol

  8. Re:Fools and their money... by Jester998 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually, as a case-in-point:
    I just did a search in Kazaa Lite for ".doc", and came back with a whole pile of results. Downloaded a bunch just for kicks (I'm in the process of emailing the owners where possible... let's see how many get the hint. :), and believe it or not, one of the files was a copy-and-pasted e-commerce order confirmation. The real kicker? This document listed FULL credit card information (name on card, card type, card number, expiry date, billing address, everything).

    Scary.

    - Jester

  9. Great way to pass a virus around by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.