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'Geek Speak' Confuses Net Users
jonney02 writes "BBC News is running the following story 'The average home computer user is bamboozled by technology jargon which is used to warn people about the most serious security threats online.' "
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" a survey for AOL UK has found Bright bunch they are...
The sad thing is that most computer users dont give a shit. They have been trained out of it.
They are hit with so many fucking dialog boxes and 'warnings' that they aren't sure of , that in the end they just ignore ALL of them.
The average user just wants to get the job over and done with, and they couldn't care less if it the tool they use needs patches or virus checks or god knows what else.
"Why is it so hard" they always cry.
All we can do is keep educating, and hope that they listen.
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
I have to say so? Most people don't even know what a mother board is let alone what it does. If we dumb it down to "There's an ickky virus going around which sill hurt your PC!" then it's no use to us geeks with a clue. Just leave the real explination and put "Install this to fix the problem" at the bottom of the page for the idiots.
I like muppets.
... to learn more ? Not much, I believe.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Yes, I'm con-flibberty-gasted when I see all these new-fangled words...
But seriously, this happens in any technical discipline. And removing virii is quite a technical thing.
One good turn - gets all the covers.
"If internet users can't understand the language used to describe these risks, they are going to find it hard to protect themselves from being ripped off."
So I am reading a book and I come across a word I don't know. What do I do? I take note of it (if I can determine what the sentence is trying to convey without knowing the word) and I go and look it up later.
So, you're on the net and you're reading an article about computer security. You come across a word you don't know. What do you do? Google for it (define: foo) or dictionary.com or whatever.
Come on. If people aren't willing to expend even the most minimal amount of effort to learn their world around them I have no sympathy for them when they get 0wn3d by the v1r11!!!!!!!!!@!
AOL users stupid!
Pictures at 11... or just watch the next AOL commercial, they run every 45 seconds or so.
Thank God Microsoft is here to help newbies understand all that computer talk with their parent's primer to computer slang
While it has many nicknames, information-age slang is commonly referred to as leetspeek, or leet for short.
Non-alphanumeric characters may be combined to form letters. For example, using slashes to create "/\/\" can substitute for the letter M, and two pipes combined with a hyphen to form "|-|" is often used in place of the letter H. Thus, the word "ham" could be written as "|-|4/\/\"
Three Squirrels
"A quarter said they knew what "spyware" was, although almost one in 10 of those thought it was a computer program that kept an eye on unfaithful partners."
LMAO.
Two freaks, no foes. It takes absolutely nothing to make some people angry.
As it was a study by AOL UK I bet they asked among AOL customers ;-)
and it confuses me!
Reading at high threshold levels is group-think.
This study comes from AOL UK which just happens to be pushing a big advertising campaign in the UK about how "safe" AOL is, what a surprise.
That is because thier PC has been assimilated as part of a bot-net because the default administrator privileges when never disabled and malware was drive-by installed by exploiting Active X. A though Scan in safe mode with the running processes killed would help, but they can't fix it because "the internet is broken".
g33k 5p3aK 15 1337 d00d, 1+ wi11 r0x0r y0uR 80>0rZ!
god I feel like such a tool...
Distributed proteome folding @ WorldCommunityGrid.org
Team Slashdot - Members:#1 Run Time:#1 Points:#1 Results:#1
maybe they are 2st00pid
www.weberseite.at
here - just kidding.
You can't expect someone to easily understand the things talked about on the internet.
The only way is for them to learn, and to be taught.
That is ultimately the best way to protect yourself from malware, viruses, and the like.
It's like wrecking things with large equipment, it looks and seems straightfoward, then you get behind the controls and don't what lever does what.
Remember children, all generalizations are wrong.
Users are happy in their little world of the little blue 'e' taking them to the interweb. Why would they want anything to change and have to actually care what goes on?
"Some of the terms being bandied around are more suitable for a computer programmers' convention than for people who want to go online at home," said Will Smith, AOL's net security expert.
Wow, he's gone from uploading viruses to alien spaceships to helping keep AOL's network secure.
Perhaps they should have called it malicious-program-disguised-as-legitimate-software , or MiPDALS for short. I mean, that's way more obvious that what a trojan horse could mean.
I blame societies obsession with sex.
Guru: So click on the icon.
Luser: Woah dude, what's with all this technical mumbo jumbo? Click? Icon? We don't all have CS degrees like you pal.
Guru: See this, this is called a mouse. You put your hand on it and use it to move the cursor to that little picture.
Luser: Oh, man, I have no idea what you just said. What's a 'mouse'? You mean the foot pedal? Also, are you saying we should swear at it? I do that all the time.
Unknown host pong.
Ok, sow most pc users are dumb in the topic so let's downgrade ourselves to express the threats in a more easily understandable form, right ? So now instead of terms like phishing we will write 10 lines of text at the end of which these people will still not understand the subject since 1). they are still not swallow tech stuff easily 2). they still do not care about trojans, viruses, phishing and the like 3). they just simply forget what the first 1-2 lines were about till they get to the end.
So, insted of switching to longish and dumb and dull explanatory descriptions, just fill the text with links to wikipedia terms and it's done. If joe6p want the explanation, can go there and educate himself. For the others, quickly to the subject. In time, the others might just catch up.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Viruses bad. Okay.
Gator bad.
Firefox good.
Outlook bad.
Thunderbird good.
Email saying they will give you money, bad.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
It is its own language, and most geeks accept that. There is nothing quite like trying to explain a network/computer problem that your dealing with only to have the person your speaking to have thier eyes glaze over and start drooling. Its far worse being the only geek in a large workplace, everything could be going to hell and a handbasket and there's nobody around to translate your plain english!
This is the world I currently live in since comming to work 10 minutes ago.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise. -Fight Club
Isent this having the desired effect? I mean thats whats is for isent it? To keep the unwashed masses (or washed as the case may be) out of IT as much as possbile. That was why latin was chosen for the church sort of like a private code that only the initiated could understand.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
These people have to take responsibility for their online actions just like in real life
If they go giving away their CC details because they didn't understand the security warning about phishing (rubbish name by the way), then they really shouldn't expect to not get taken to the cleaners.
Would you give me your CC details in the street if I asked nicely? No? You Sure?
How about your National Security Number (Social Security Number for you yanks)? Why? Because its sensitive data and you don't want to get ripped off?
Then don't do it online without being aware of your actions.
Rant Of The Angry Brit Over
A while ago I kept seeing the word "forceware" on various tech sites. I assumed it was related to spyware/maleware in some way. I assumed it related specifically to spyware you were forced to install to get some other program, e.g., all the spyware you're forced to get with Kazaa.
Eventually I learned with ForceWare really is. But for the life of me I cannot understand why nVidia chose such an asinine name for their drivers!
Other than some S&Mers I know, who really likes being forced to do anything?!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
My internets are slow. I don't know what to do. I can run my microsoft works, and that goes fine. But when I start up my internet my entire computer slows down. I asked the boy that sold me my computer at best buy, and he said I should put more ram in it. So after I got my computer back from him installing the ram, it is a little faster, but the internets are still slow.
What part of teh suXXor don't you understand?
( OK )
I get tons of scammer emails from all the usual sources .. Ebay, Nigeria etc. And like most readers I recognize them instantly and delete without thinking about it.
Recently I was horrified to see that my dad had received an email from his "bank" asking to verify his financial details - it was an obvious scam from my POV, but my dad of course tried to reply (thankfully the email link had been banned by then so no damage was done). For the record he's got 3 degrees in physics, so I could hardly chalk it up to him being dumb. There is still a very high level of trust amongst users for the internet.
However, I'm pretty certain I could still scam people into giving me their credit card info by just phoning them and bsing something. So you can't blame the technology entirely.
Most users simply do not see the internet and all these threats the way we do. An big issue since we're the ones supposed to be helping them.
Just incase some "normal" people are here.
:)
"phishing" - Setting up a fake website to steal credit card numbers. Usualy done via e-mail as a "we lost your details, please.." type thing
"rogue dialler" - A virus which uses your PC torepeatedly dial a peak rate number so it costs you alot of money.
"Trojan" - A program which lets others connect to your PC with little to no effort giving them full control over it.
"spyware" - Spyware is software which monitors what you do and sends it back to a company usually. It's not dangerous but on mass it slows your PC to a crawl.
I'd put fixs but most are "get a firewall, virus scanner, spybot+adaware and firefox.". Infact that's exactly what I told a "normal PC users" yesterday
I like muppets.
"Where is the 'ANY' Key?"
The true problem here is several steps removed from the survey. For instance: why does no one bother to ask why people have computers to begin with? I'd say better than half the people using these things don't really need them, and aren't smart enough to have them in the first place. As for the UK, well, from my viewpoint, the British could use more tooithbrushes and tooth paste and orthodontists than computers. Plus they would have been better off keeping all their colonies. A lot of the world's problems exist today because the British just got tired of running all of their empire and decided to leave the work up to us.
So we invented the PC, and allowed Microsoft to become dominant, and now you see the kind of crap that happens.
Then, somebody feels the need to put out a survey whcih finds that British people are "bamboozled" by their PCs.
What did you expect?
Spike Lee was unavailable for comment. In related news, revlon is trading higher in anticipation that the "average computer user" will be convinced that staying clean from viruses requires wearing blackface.
ALPHA GEEK The most knowledgable, technically proficient person in an office or work group. Ask Larry, hes the alpha geek around here.
Read More
Nothing to see here
In that case, most computer users are idiots as well. When you go to a bank to get a mortgage, you need to know about APR, Interest Rates, Identity Theft, PMI, Adjustable Rate Mortgages, basic percentage mathematics, credit scores, and buying down points. When you use a computer, you should know how to update Windows, how not to click on the link to install spyware, and how not to open suspicious e-mails. It's not more difficult, it just takes a little bit of awareness of the environment around you. There is no excuse for the average user not knowing these things.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Should we rush to the "common denominator" then? I don't think so ("Press that thingy and watch the blinky..."). Anyway - having skimmed the article - I don't see what's so "geeky" in "trojan" at least as opposed to "virus". What other non-newspeak-like word should we use for "spam" or "spyware"? If anything they'd better campaign against corporate-speak and legalese.
:) I looked in my dictionary and I don't think it means what they think it means.
PS: WTF is "bamboozled"?
"medical speak confuses patients" and "mechanic speak confuses car owners"..
Some professions require profession specific language. Deal.
Geek for a really good investment idea.
Someone you trust is one of us.
'The average home computer user is bamboozled by technology jargon which is used to warn people about the most serious security threats online.' What is "bamboozled" ? I don't even understand regular jargon :(
Of course AOL users don't understand geek speak.
</ENGLISH VERSION>
<AOL VERSION>
OF COURSE AOL USERS DONT UNDERSTAND GEK SP3AK111!1 OMG WTF LOL
</AOL VERSION>
http://ssshotaru.homestead.com/files/aolertransla
Cause we all know the ultrageeky main demographic of AOL and what a good browser it is, right?
Duh! Tech jargon like "DON'T OPEN ATTACHMENTS YOU AREN'T EXPECTING" is obviously too complicated.
This sort of wilful ignorance annoys me. How else are we supposed to describe these things if not with actual words? It's not rocket science; it's learning a new word and understanding what it means. Sheesh.
I don't hear people complain when mechanics talk about pistons and head gaskets. They accept that unusual or specialist concepts need unusual and specialist words. I sometimes wonder if "non-geeks" take pride in being ignorant and uninformed. In fact I'm damn sure some of them do. It's as though there's a post-modernist movement intent on embracing information technology while at the same time rejecting the accepted wisdom of the people who created it. I've lost count of the number of times people have asked my advice on what to buy and then ignoring me and taking whatever the sap in PC World wants him to buy this week.
Sometimes however, a luddite is just a luddite
STAYING SAFE ONLINE
Install anti-virus software
Keep your anti-virus software up to date
Install a personal firewall
Use Windows updates to patch security holes
Do not open e-mail messages that look suspicious
Do not click on e-mail attachments you were not expecting
Wheres "Install an alternative browser and use it"? firefox cures alot of these problems with just basic knowledge of it..
I like muppets.
My father-in-law calls the monitor the computer. The computer is "the drive". CDs DVDs and floppies are all "tapes".
Users need to learn at least a minimum of basic terms to even communicate, but many intentionally refuse out of an odd pride of being ignorant of all that techie stuff.
Best Windows Freeware
Look, the thing that always amazes me is that people are very willing to learn how to drive a car well, learn what all the parts are in it and how to fix it, but when it comes to a computer, one would think that they would at least learn a bit about how to do simple fixing tasks on it. While you can partly blame some things on poor design and documentation, when it comes down to it people still have a responsibility to at least learn the basics about what the hell they are doing.
September that never ended
All time since September 1993. One of the seasonal rhythms of the Usenet used to be the annual September influx of clueless newbies who, lacking any sense of netiquette, made a general nuisance of themselves. This coincided with people starting college, getting their first internet accounts, and plunging in without bothering to learn what was acceptable. These relatively small drafts of newbies could be assimilated within a few months. But in September 1993, AOL users became able to post to Usenet, nearly overwhelming the old-timers' capacity to acculturate them; to those who nostalgically recall the period before, this triggered an inexorable decline in the quality of discussions on newsgroups. Syn. eternal September.
Oh Dear!!! That is SHOCKING! What is next: Most people don't understand a word that their shade-tree mechanic is saying to them about their car? It is called jargon, every field has it, get over it.
Sex speak confuses them too
Wishing I was a millionaire since 1969.
I was told by another chap that my computer had a trojan in it. I took it apart and looked for 20 minutes for it but couldn't find it. Meanwhile, the Mrs. got tired of lying naked in bed waiting for it, and my John Thomas got a bit wangly, so I stopped looking and had tea.
GET FREE APPLE STUFF!
What's this? Laymen don't understand jargon? What a new concept this is. Thank goodness the Beeb finally clued us in! We certainly haven't been aware of this problem for longer than I've been alive...
But seriously, this is pretty much what jargon means. It allows us to express some fairly complicated concepts concisely enough to get things done in a reasonable amount of time. Remember, too, that these are words for things that the general populace doesn't really have a precise concept for already.
Come on..
In the UK, AOL have a lot of billboards out at the moment advertising their new internet package that takes care of all the security for you.
They claim they are "making the internet safer".
Their study is just a spread of FUD to sell their product.
I don't really see this as a problem. It takes time for new terms' meanings to come to be understood by everyone. It's not like we're going to replace the word Trojan with "Asneakyprogramthathidesonyourcomputeranddoesbadth ings." Instead we'll continue to use those words, defining them when asked, until most people understand.
Letters can be substituted for other letters that may sound alike. Using "Z" for a final letter S, and "X" for words ending in the letters C or K is common. For example, leetspeekers might refer to their computer "5x1llz" (skills).
... and also the example... FWIK X replaces CKS as is SUX for SUCKS and FUX FOR FUCKS...
MMmm.. I think they mistaken the use of the "X"
Mistakes are often left uncorrected. Common typing misspellings (typos) such as "teh" instead of the are left uncorrected
Lol so then everyone has something of 1337 inside him...
Leet words of concern or indicating possible illegal activity:
"warez" or "w4r3z": Illegally copied software available for download.
"h4x": Read as "hacks," or what a malicious computer hacker does.
"pr0n": An anagram of "porn," possibly indicating the use of pornography.
"sploitz" (short for exploits): Vulnerabilities in computer software used by hackers.
hehe... come on... I am sure that most |
Well, I had great fun reading that page... maybe it is useful for someone...
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Yet, only 39% knew what a "Trojan" was when asked.
A Trojan is a malicious piece of software which installs itself on a person's computer without their knowledge.
Wrong, a Trojan is a program which is installed by the user because he thinks it does something he needs/wants but actually does something else!
How else do you explain the renewed popularity of Macintosh computers. I work in tech support and you'd be surprised how many people can't get the concept of right clicking.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
well, here's what I don't understand... Everyone gripes at sysadmins and tech gurus for speaking "all that technical crap" when we're merely trying to teach them what it is. Dumbing it down for everyone is like going to a restaraunt and getting upset at the hostess asking wether you wanted to sit in a table or a booth because "hey, I don't work in the restaraunt industry, don't push your fancy words on me!" If they don't want to take the time to learn the jargon, that's fine, but don't blame the geeks
Why is terminology used on the internet any business of the "common user", as someone said earlier, if you don't know what a word means, look it up. Why should things be dumbed down more for them. Besides, how can words like spyware, trojan and virus be technobable, if they thought about it the words are self expaintory (also my spelling and typing sucks atm, got serious problems with my hands, no jokes pls), anyway,
spyware, software, spy...spyware must be software that SPIES on you
trojan, well everyone knows about the story of the trojan horse
virus, perhaps like a virus contracted my a person, makes you feel shitty and has wierd side effects.
Now that wasn't too hard was it.
W311, m4yb3 if p30p13 w0u1d 4(7u411y 5i7 d0w|\| 4|\|d 134r|\| |-|0w 70 u53 4|\| 4(7u41 (0mpu73r i|\|5734d 0f Mi(r050f7'5 d4m|\| GUI, 7|-|3y'd 4(7u411y u|\|d3r574|\|d. I7'5 ridi(u10u5 f0r p30p13 70 (0mp14i|\| w|-|3|\| 7|-|3y d0|\|'7 74k3 7|-|3 7im3 70 134r|\| f0r 7|-|3m531v35.
(Well, maybe if people would actually sit down and learn how to use an actual computer instead of Microsoft's damn GUI, they'd actually understand. It's ridiculous for people to complain when they don't take the time to learn for themselves.)
Due to financial difficulties, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off.
I work at a small private university with Ivy League educated faculty. These are not dumb people--well, not in their own fields. But, get them outside their comfort zone, and they're just as dumb as anyone.
...wait, is that my right your right?
Recent ID10T errors on my watch:
User: There are invisible folders and files in this folder. What happened to them?
Me: Hmmm. Let me see...scroll up a bit?
User: There they are! F*ck me! (repeating)
User: I'm not sure what to do...
Me: Ok, right click on the...
User:
User: My mail client is losing my e-mail!
Me: Really? Let me see...
User: See--it says I have new mail but it isn't here
Me: OK, sort them by date instead of subject
User: Wow! You're magical.
If users ever take a few moments to learn how to use their software, my job will be in danger.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
I think it is users that are so fucking retarded they don't "get it" even when you spell it out like they are some fucking retards.
I work all day with such people. There is no way I can get them to understand simple concepts. Even if you can train them to push certain buttons a certain way if ANYTHING changes they get freaked out and come ask again. I swear most people are just short of mentally handicapped.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
It seems like the writer of the article is confused about these "geek" terms as well, as he got the definition of a Trojan wrong.
From the article: A Trojan is a malicious piece of software which installs itself on a person's computer without their knowledge.
A Trojan, or Trojan Horse, is actually a malicious program that purports to be a legitimate application. To be classified as a Trojan, it must require execution by the user. The Trojan Horse of myth was left at the gates of Troy seemingly as a gift, but actually housed men who unlocked the gates to allow the invading armies into Troy. Hence the name Trojan Horse for the program.
Wikipedia says: A trojan horse computer program has a useful and desired function, or at least it has the appearance of having such. Secretly the program performs other, undesired functions.
Dear diary: Today I stuffed some dolls full of dead rats I put in the blender.
Hibbert: Homer, I'm afraid you'll have to undergo a coronary bypass operation.
Homer: Say it in English, Doc.
Hibbert: You're going to need open heart surgery.
Homer: Spare me your medical mumbo jumbo.
Hibbert: We're going to cut you open and tinker with your ticker.
Homer: Could you dumb it down a shade?
When I read this, my first response was "Hmm, that's interesting". See, Jargon beomes so much a part of us that we stop recognising it. Probably the one to avoid is the "409 scam" - that would be recognised by very few outside of the field. Even "Nigerian Scam" would also be beyond most persons.
So, simply, if you are talking of this to others, be aware that even such basic nouns as "spam" may well be missunderstood by them.
It's our language. It's also our responsibility to translate.
If a new thing comes along, perforce a word must be found to name it.
Their list isn't long. People are just going to have to pull their socks up and pay attention.
BTW: The word "bamboozle" means to con, to deceive. Our British friends seem to think it means to confuse or to mystify.
Can't these bastards get their American right after two hundred years?
Maybe we should just put a big red siren ontop of the computer that can go off when something is wrong with it. That definately would clear up some confusion. We wouldn't want to force people to actually learn how to safely secure their home computers.
Be sure to remember the Programmers Prayer
I'm sure when it comes to other things, cooking for example, they are more than likely to ask a friend for advice, get a book, or watch an educational television program. But when it comes to computers, especially AOL users (sorry for the generalization, no offense AOL/.ers) as in this article, leaving the realm of keywords, buddy lists, 10,000 smileys, punching munkies, and "you've got mail" is very unlikely to happen.
If it werent for the fact that they are going to end up becoming zombies that will aimlessly try passwords on my FTP and SMTP servers I could care less about these lusers, not for their ignorance, but their unwillingness to secure their stuff or learn.--Angry Sysop
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Hey, ask some 20 year old what spam is: he'll know. Ask his father or mom: they don't know.
In 20 or 30 years those "not-enlightened" generations will be dead and this same inquiry will have other conclusions.
Hmmm, let me rephrase that now I have thought about how my friends respond to those 'minor' problems of the internet:
In 20 or 30 years there will be only 10% of enlightened people around, the other 90% will be just the same as now!
Geeks: better start behaving as rabbits and go make some children and educate them!
Stefano
Twenty percent admitted they did not know what to do to protect themselves generally online.
Then you have to take into account the 70 percent that are to stupid to even realize they don't, they only think they do.
I'm baffled by the journalist's use of "bamboozled." It appears as if someone bamboozled this journalist with a gag thesaurus.
And don't give me any of that "language is constantly evolving" crap.
Is that users generally have no trouble admitting there just plain to stupid to understand what a puter acually is or should be used for, but yet they fail to show proper respect to those who do.
Once I told a user to read the error message:
Answer: I'm an accountant not a computer expert.
My answer: Hey, I just asked you to READ. Didn't you learn that in accounting school... (I didn't last long in user support LOL)
Will someone please tell these people to buy a Mac?
I _like_ Windows - but I recognise that looking after my PC requires effort, due to the security problems - I haven't been hit by a virus in 8 years, because _I know how to use my computer_, but I recognise that most users just want to check email/surf the web - which a Mac does just as well as a Windows box (and arguably better).
My Journal
My wife is not exactly computer literate. In fact she only uses firefox. That's it. She reads her mail trough webmail and browses from time to time. Period.
And still... When my sister inlaw called to ask her how she should copy a CD she was able to guide her through all the steps just by repeating "read the screen" My sister in law had Nero 6.0 with smart start enabled. All she needed to do was find the wordt copy-CD and click it. (plus a few more on screen instructions...) apparently she needed big sister to help her with that.
When users become to f**king lazy to RTFScreen nothing else will help them.
TIA!
I have said this before, it would be a good idea to regulate internet use with licenses similar to that of HAM radio. This would reduce spam and the spread of viruses, as well as force people to know what they are doing when the aquire an internet account. Yea, I know that most of you will have some argument aginst this bu your entitled. I personaly think this would help solve many problems.
Most home users have jobs. Many of these jobs require computers. These same users bring their ignorance into the workplace where people like me have to support them.
I try my best to educate them on the theory that an informed person is less likely to repeat the mistake. This is supposed to make my job easier. But they don't care, they find some slightly different way of making the same mistake over and over again.
It doesn't stop with spyware, trojans, and viruses either. I've had laptops come in so filthy that they hade to be taken apart and cleaned out before they would boot. Coffee on the keyboard is common. So are cracked LCD displays (although they aren't often repeated).
The most dangerous user isn't the uninformed one though. The most dangerous user is the one who knows just enough to be dangerous. They will give themselves Admin rights using a disk freely available on the internet and then try to change things that they shouldn't. By the time I get the computer it is a real mess and they know enough to plead ignorance. Those ones really torque me.
When I think about that sub-set, I think I'll take the ignorant user thank you very much.
I hate to burst AOL UK's bubble, but your average person is bamboozled by specialized terms outside their own experience no matter what the field. Exactly what do they think we should do? (Other than switch to AOL, of course, because it will protect us... if we can get it to stop screwing up our computers.)
We use terms like "phishing" because typing out "faked e-mail pretending to be from a legitimate source in order to solicit personal information for use in identity theft or illicit entry into controlled systems" gets a little old.
It's not like the terms are not explained when used in the general press. They are. And if a person wants to know what something means, they can easily look it up. There are also a lot of basic computer articles from publications like PC Magazine that explain terms. Hell, I offer a free class for the public at my library to explain what different terms mean and how to deal with computer security.
I think there's a distinct difference between saying "People don't know the meanings behind these terms!" and saying "People will never be able to protect themselves because you're using terms that are too technical!" The second is assigning blame for users not protecting themselves. The problem isn't the words--it's that people in general haven't read up on the issue.
I guess I'll go complain to my bank that I don't understand the differences between all the different stocks and bonds available, so they need to change their names to long, explanatory phrases...
THis problem has existed with ever single industry around. Every talk to a car mechanic about what's REALLY wrong with your car? What about an electrician? How may people actually know what GFI is, other than that little button in your bathroom? And don't get me started about the legal industry.
Anything that is complex comes with technical 'jargon', and anything that is widely used is going to expose that 'jargon' to people who aren't familiar with it.
It's all about education. If you can't explain to someone in simple terms how a 'cookie' can be used as 'spyware', them you shouldn't be dealing with end users.
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
So people admit they are too stupid for computers and too ignorant to actually learn to use them properly. That is neither "News" for me, nor "Stuff that matters", it simply summarizes what I have been trought with several of my customers.
I think those guys should not be allowed to actually own a computer or get net access. If I want to learn to drive, I have to read signs, so I have to learn to read them. There is no such need to learn even basic techspeak for Net-Newbies, and this is just plain wrong.
Screw the FSM - Real geeks believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn
No wonder so many home computer users experience a virus.
They might learn more here: http://slate.msn.com/id/2114132/
How about just put up a big button saying "No" unless they go into the control panel and put "Allow Yes to stupid questions" on
corevps.com - Root Servers from $7.99/mo
1|= y()u (4|\| r3@d 7#][5, y0|_| /\r3 @ IVI0/\/$+3|2 &33|
Source: Magical Hacker
Also, 1f u c4n r34d +h1$, u r3411y n33d +0 g37 141d
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Part of the issue is that reporters, journalists and so on, in trying to appear hip or with-it start using tech jargon in mainstream consumer reporting without nary a meaningful explanation.
I think that if local news reporter Trisha Takanawa spent less time trying to sound in-the-know by reporting about 'phishing', '419 chains', 'spyware' and 'trojans' and instead talked about 'email financial scams' and 'online snooping' people would be more likely to get it. She might not get the points with the kewl kids, but at least she'd be doing a public service rather than some self service.
***Foucault is watching you..***
First off, a lot of people in the media have no idea what 'phishing' is, they're just reading off of a teleprompt.
Secondly, so users don't know what all of the terms mean. They don't need to know as long as they know what is okay and what isn't. e.g. When the check engine light comes on, how many people can diagnose the problem? "Not many, that's why we have mechanics. How many people know how to buy on margin? How many people know how to dispose of a dead body?
Thirdly, if you are an expert in technical mumbo-jumbo, you know you have to numb-it-up for non-technical people.
I'm not a doctor, but I play one in bed.
As programmers, we have to consider communicating with our users better. For instance, Apple has the right idea when it comes to dialog boxes: always make the options for each button a verb. Yes/No/Cancel buttons require users to read a usually convoluted sentence and then interpret what they're agreeing to. This causes all sorts of usability problems.
To run with the parent poster's dialog, a more usable dialog would read:
Just by reading the button text a user will know precisely what each option will do.
This is something that programmers both open-source and closed can do right now to enhance usability. Apple has the right idea, and there's no reason why we should have software that confuses our users with unclear dialogs.
I just had a brainwave. It may look a bit silly, but it might work.
Writing explanantions don't work - people don't like to read. So why don't you add a cartoon
Phishing: A sinister person is holding a fishing rod over a fence. Beond the fence there is an obvious dummy (filled with straw) marked "BANK" holding a bank form (also attached to the fishing line) with two fields: NAME and BANK NUMBER. A sweet nice person unwittingly fills in the form.
Keylogger: A siniter person looking over your shoulder as you type the password (you know because it sais ENTER PASSWORD on the monitor)
Whaddjoutink?
Yet, only 39% knew what a "Trojan" was when asked.
If someone doesn't know what a Trojan Horse is it is not geek-speach fault.
this post contain no useful information, no need to mod it down
Cool, I think Will Smith is absolutely the right person to be security officer!! Is he also going to shoot these pesky worms with his big shiny guns?? :))
I'm not a "car" person. I can't stand them and don't understand them. Unfortunately everyone uses them and I'm forced to use one everyday, even at work! They're stupid devices which just annoy me. All this techno mumbo jumbo. "Steering Wheel" and "accelerator pedal" and "right-of-way". It's all just a mess. And it's only for Nascar fans anyhow. ... and the prices of gasoline! WOW! Also, I don't understand "oil changes"? I thought it came ready for me to go, I don't want to take it every 3 months or 3,000 miles. That's ridiculous!
Why must I do the "speed limit"? What's a "turn signal"? And worse of all, my "gas meter" is on E! What's that mean? Noone told me I'd have to take it to someplace and get it "filled up"
FLR
These reporters need to stop using jargon. What does "bamboozled" mean?
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
You got your regular legit software, you got your viruses, and in the middle you got your virusware. It's not a virus, but a software that uses misleading virus techniques to get itself installed, etc. Includes most of the spyware junk.
It also gives it the nasty sounding name that will turn people off of the garbage even if they don't quite know what it means.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Why are they idiots because they dont know about technology? Not everyone can understand the complexity of a PC the way we can.
Or, heaven forbid, the IT admins and sysadmins and sysops or whatever stop handing money over to the most insecure OS on the planet, and break away from that filthy shitpile Windows OS already. Stand up to your bosses for once, and tell them that Windows is crap, that no one needs 90% of the shit that's in there. STAND UP AND FIGHT, PUSSIES! OTHERWISE SHUT THE FUCK UP BECAUSE EVERY USER LOOKING TO WEB BROWSE AND EMAIL ISN'T A WINDOWS SECURITY EXPERT.
"A surprising 16% had never heard of the term 'spam' to describe unsolicited e-mail..." which is surprising considering where the term comes from.
"And nearly 95% failed to find the use of the term 'faggot' for a cigarette even mildly amusing."
lusers and the dumbing down of things for them are the reason my stupid browser at work says "Shortcut to $filepath at $website", making it actually unreadable.
AOL is using FUD to convince users to stay with them where they can be safe, and not at all bothered by all this scary-sounding stuff nerds talk about. They're also telling investors that they have done their homework and that this should work with a significant percentage of net users.
That was a waste of time to RTFA... oh well.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
It's the mainstream media that chooses to use these technical terms when it's scaring and/or confusing consumers. People in technical fields use field-specific vocabulary like "phishing" when communicating with others in the same field, and it improves efficiency and clarity. There's nothing stopping the media from using "faked email scam" instead, however.
- An inability to do research?
- In inclination to not be bothered to do research?
- Lack of intelligence?
- Ignorance?
These are more issues with the user themselves than computers. Computers are inherently complex and people buying them need to understand that. Like law, medicine, aviation and space travel, it has its own terminology which has arisen over time through trial and error and through good reason. It also makes sense if you understand other areas of life (Virus and Trojan for Pete's sake - come on people!) and will stand you in good stead as time goes on. At least it's not like legal Latinese. If it's too taxing, get training - just like driving a car really.There's a lot more that the end user could do to make things easier for themselves before harping on about it being too difficult - it's like those folk who move to the country then complain about the sounds and smells of animals...
Eighty-four percent did not know that phishing describes faked e-mail scams.
phishing = faked e-mail scams
I don't think the wording used in the second part will really appear clearer than the first one...
Bye!
SeqBox
Those 84% computer-users who don't know what a trojan is wouldn't know either if it was called different. So what? They can't be bothered to learn those gritty details, some are even downright proud of it (the "I don't even know how to program my VCR" fraction).
Now it's supposed the geeks fault that the average computer user is to lazy to learn a few simple concepts? Because no matter what you call it, if you don't understand the concept you can't understand the word. It's really fascinating: tell them something vital about computers and their eyes glaze over within seconds but they know the tiniest details about every player of their favourite soccer- (baseball-, football-, basketball-, Wrestling-) team to their heart.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Found this, it's pretty neat: Internet Slang Translator. It takes all that crap like lol, idk, bbiab, ufia, and ilotibinlirl and translates it into something readable.
The subject says it all. I'm sorry if you can't or don't wish to learn. Get with it or get left behind.
All the humor goes away when you have to explain it. Or maybe it wasn't that funny to begin with. I was merely making the comparison between normal people, and techies (as the article does..RTFA!)
Average Joe will not be seen sprinting to a newly hung bulliten board, grabbing a tack, slamming it through the cork and yelling "First Post!"
As such, our good friend Joe will be totally at a loss when his counter part Slashdot John does just this. Joe will be at a total loss when John sobs continueously becuase someone beat him out, and what he thought would be a first post was only a lowly 3rd, or much worse, lost in the post fields...
See John
See John Get First Post
Post John Post
See Joe
See Joe Get First Post
Big Freakin Deal
I can do this, because I have Karma to burn...so, hit me again Ike, and this time, put some Stank on it!
This sig has been removed pending an investigation.
I am of the unpopular and absolutely elitist opinion that these people don't belong online. And yes, I know I'm talking about 90% of the internet populace. I don't necessarily believe everyone should be a programmer or technician to so much as receive email and look at boobies, but if you don't know how to *operate* a blasted computer, you shouldn't be using one. And the internet is like playing in the street - fairly safe if you know what you're doing but entirely stupid if you don't.
So the question isn't whether or not we should dumb things down, but recognize that the internet and general purpose computing is "not ready for the desktop", and is beyond the grasp of the everyday person. Like automobiles, it will eventually become so commonplace, tweaked from experience, and "tamed" that just about anyone can use it, but it's not there yet.
The worst thing about all of this, is that for every person who doesn't care - or hasn't the willpower to learn - about how to secure their computer on the internet, makes my own machine even more vulnerable. That means that more people get duped into installing some trojan or the likes, to aid the malicious users to attack other machines.
This space is intentionally left blank.
Plus, the chicken is fresh.
I've been eating it (from time to time) for forty years, and my cholesterol is very normal.
Slashdot entertains. Windows pays the mortgage.
And this is coming from somone who was on the Internet when it was still DARPAnet, so I can call to have your sorry ass kicked off, punk.
If Joe Average wants to get a car, he's already been told a thousand times basically "cars are a difficult and dangerous thing. Keep your fingers off until you've been through driving school." There's honesty in that.
What the computer industry lacks is precisely this kind of honesty.
Joe Average is _bombarded_ with ads telling him "hey, our computer/program/card/whatever is easy! Grandma could use it! You just plug it in and it runs!" (Runs a DDOS zombie, a spam proxy and a couple of RPC viruses, that is.)
In the computer industry noone gives a fsck about the user. We only care about sales. Products are shipped intentionally with security disabled ever day, because asking Joe to first set his password or generate a WEP key is perceived as too hard.
Nah, let's make it look easy at least until we've got Joe's money. Then, ha ha, sucks to be him. We'll just call him an idiot when he gets bitten by _our_ lack of security.
Joe is also told "nah, you don't need to learn anything! This is so easy even grandma could use it right out of the box!" That's the message that marketting is pumping into Joe. (Because otherwise they might lose sales.) So let's stop with the acting surprised when the product is actually bought by a Joe who isn't interested in becoming a computer expert to use it.
Want less "idiots" using your program? Fine. Tell your boss that your company should stop the lie campaigns. Advertise the product as "not for people without extensive network admin experience" for example. Then I do believe that you'll have a lot less idiots to complain about.
Of course, you'd also have a helluva lot less sales.
And I'll tell you another difference between computers and the car industry. In the car industry they don't act like arrogant "I'm a god because I know how to change oil" idiots. They actually try to make a better product, instead of calling the user names.
Let's say an automobile company finds out that, say, the bucket seats on sports models get worn out because the users put a leg over the raised edge. And I'm picking the bucket seat because that can't be dismissed as "oh, they only do that because cars can kill." No, it just has to do with user comfort. You know what the manufacturer will do? Try to design a better chair, and spend weeks testing it.
Whereas in the computer industry we'd just call the user an "idiot". I mean, geeze, it may not be anywhere in the manual, but the user should have just _known_ to not put a leg over the seat's edge. The user should, in fact, do all sorts of uncomfortable tricks to make up for _our_ failure to design a good product. Otherwise he's an idiot.
You know... maybe in this industry it's not the users who are idiots. Just a thought.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If these people aren't willing to take a few moments to learn a couple of definitions, then unplug that PC and take it back to Best Buy. Sure there are a plethora of words and phrases to learn but most have their purpose and replacing them all with "bad thing" does a disservice to notice and geek alike.
Of the examples in the article, only "phishing" is word that is really unnecessary and could be replaced by less hip, more descriptive language. The rest (ex: rogue dialer, Trojan, spyware) are descriptive enough to be useful and are could be deciphered by someone with zero computer experience but enough common sense.
Nobody is asking these people to learn MC680X0 assembly, just to recognize a couple of phrases. They seem to think that being able to identify the CPU, keyboard and mouse thanks to their $30 investment in the Time-Life series on computers ends the learning curve and everything else should be so "user friendly" that they'll be hand held though everything.
AOLer: "PHISHING IS A MUSIC?? RITE?" ....... ME TOO!!!"
*flashy*
AOLer: "so i newsed a test to see it worked rite, and
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Maybe all you elite wonders of networked computerdom can get together and give us a system that can't be brought to its knees by a script kiddie or other bored teenagers. Yeah? Maybe? Am I asking for the Sun & the Moon here?
Or is it just easier to sit back, sip a Mountain Dew and badmouth people with a different skillset than yours?
Oh, and heavily armed ED-209s have been dispatched against all those who posted car analogies.
Hmm. A Mountain Dew sounds good right about now.
When you own a car, you either learn how to change tyres and set a proper ignition anticipation angle (or whatever it is called in English) or (if you can't be bothered to learn these things) you pay someone to do this.
Why should it be any different with computers? You can even buy yourself counterpart of the "car with a hood welded shut" (Macintosh). Or, if you have to own a PC, whenever I open any local newspaper on classifieds pages I see dozen of "computer emergency" ads. And this is Poland, I wonder how many of these are in US or Western Europe.
Robert
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
Zing!
The car analogy is utterly broken. If you can't see the difference, well, there's probably no way ever explain it to you. You're just not going to get it.
The point is that the machines should not have such deep flaws that they can ever BE insecure. That fact that they have all these holes that need patching is the problem, and that should be addressed at the source, and not by heaping blame on the victims (the users).
If you must use car analogies, the holes in the OS are life DEFECTS in a car that causes an accident or engine fire or something. The flaw can exist long before a patch (or recall notice) is released. Another broken car analogy, but it should illustrate the difference to some extent.
The article says that a virus is "Malicious program designed to damage data; usually spread via infected e-mail attachments". This is a quite common, but wrong, point of view. A virus is a program that replicates itself into host code, such that execution of the host code implies execution of the virus. It doesn't have to perform any destructive action to be called a virus.
The BBC's definition of a virus would be more appropriate as a definition of "malware". By giving this incorrect definition, the BBC is upholding the popular belief that a virus is a program that will somehow magically appear on your computer and damage it, unless you buy an "anti-virus program" or "firewall", which will magically protect your computer from viruses.
"With great power, comes great responsibility" -- Stan Lee
Power is always going to be proportional to risk. Users are fine with being able to send messages to people all over the world, make their own CDs, and read news/events from anyway in the world on their PC. It's a pretty damn powerful device.
The telephone gave people one of those abilities, and most people know how to deal with telemarketers. There's little difference between the worst telemarketers and phishing.
Most people know if their car is broken, to take it to a mechanic, but there's also just certain things they just shouldn't do. Like drive with the parking break on. Or drive on the left side of the road except in England/Japan/Australia/etc. Maybe, oh I dont' know, not opening e-mail attachments could be an analogue. Is taking your car to get a tune-up every once in a while really that much different than running Windows Update (or your OS's equivalent)?
The computer simply allows people to do more things more quickly than any other invention has in the 20th century (except possibly the car). With all this power, users must take responsibility for their actions, or at least know who to take stuff to when it goes wrong. A user with a trojan is like a person driving a car with bad brakes -- a danger to themselves and everyone around them.
As the technology becomes older, I think knowing these terms will become as common-place as their older equipmnt, but I think that'll take at least one generation for society to work out -- just as it did in the previous cases.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Interesting that the primer-writer at MS noted: "Non-alphabet characters can be used to replace the letters they resemble. For example, '5' or even '$' can replace the letter S."
Spiritus ex Machina
"The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we CAN imagine."
The car analogy no longer holds. Sure, your little Apple II in 1980 might have been a car, but today's machines are jetliners.
And yes, I expect an airline pilot to know exactly what every damn light on the cockpit panel means. I even expect them to be able to make reasonable guesses as to what most of the diagnostic lights might mean in the engine compartment when the jet is undergoing inspection down on the ground.
This is not unreasonable.
If your Apple II has trouble, you can't play pacman anymore, just as if your car fails to start, you sit in the driveway.
If your Windows XP machine has trouble, everyone on the net pays for your stupidity, just as if your 747 crashes into a populated area.
The biggest thing there is to battle when it comes to understanding what all this jargon means is the lack of wanting to understand. Or, in short, they simply don't listen. (I believe they don't think they should have to 'learn' to use the computer. It should just work.)
a simple point-in-case:
Whenever I see someone using the [tab] key to move to move between fields and they reach for the mouse to go back a field, I tell them they can use [shift]+[tab] to move back one. 9 times out of 10, they tell me that they don't know anything about computers before I can even finish my first sentence.
(For those who are about to chime in with a check list -- stop! Checklists are helpful and specific starting points. For the others that will chime in with a tool -- stop! It's been said many times; security is a procss not a product...and that includes open source tools too. Firewalls, router configurations, and taking various percautions when setting up systems or physically securing them...are starting points.)
Since 1337 speakers apparantly love obfuscation, |-|4/\/\ might be a synonym for $p4/\/\?
I really think what needs to happen is a cheap crippled version of windows needs to come out for those who don't want to be an admin. Generally it would allow you to surf the net, but it would need authentication that your wares are approved by MS to not hurt your computer. While this is writing newer users into a box, it's like giving them the crappiest thing possible while allowing them to have the same freedoms. I think this could also be a nice step in stopping malware by prehaps disallowing cookies by default since most servers have reasonable session timeouts?
What really needs to be done for unexperianced users would be something very similar to what WebTV was. However they could still be able to make their own documents and save images from the net. However they wouldn't be able to get cookies or modify system files without MS's approval tag.
Why bother giving warning boxes if the user isn't going to read them anyway? I mean they could always put out 'Beginner Edition' (Crippled), 'Advanced Edition' (something close to the home longhorn.), and finally 'Power User' (The full version of Longhorn.) I really think with what I've read about Longhorn, MS is taking a step in the right direction.
From TA: "If internet users can't understand the language used to describe these risks, they are going to find it hard to protect themselves from being ripped off."
And if road users don't understand warnings like "Slow down" and "Icy road", then they shouldn't be driving.
Oh, and their definition of "trojan" is a bit wrong... "a malicious piece of software which installs itself on a person's computer without their knowledge"? Software doesn't install itself. Something or someone installs it. And with classic trojans, the user installs or runs it thinking it is something else.
Follow me
"Seems you're about to fall for an e-mail scam!"
(click here for more info)
Then reveal some terms used for security threats. Ta-da! Like it's that hard?
(n/t)
They don't understand the jargon? Flat out, too bad really. If they want to use a computer, be connected to the Internet, be up to date, and prepared with what is going on in terms of security threats, reality is, they better prepared to learn this "jargon" unless they have the money to have someone babysit their computer for them. Unfortunately, this "geek speak" is the most efficient way to get the message across at the moment and it's not about to change for people who don't take the time to learn what they are getting into.
Let me give you an example. I moved to Canada from Peru about 10 years ago. When I was living in Peru, I could care less about the weather since it was always the same. It was sunny and warm 99% of the time. When I came to Canada things changed. I had to learn about the various ways of describing the current weather and how they affect me (POP%, Wind-chill, visibility, HUMIDITY %, dewpoint, etc). Partly cloudy and warm did not cut it anymore. Should people start complaining that this "geek weather talk" confuses them? No. Educate yourself about what these terms are and learn to recognize which terms are relevant to what you need to know. Plain and simply, stop being so lazy.
[alk]
don't help either.. of course the editors make sure the title's clear when it's an Apple story.
LART and 0wn3d.
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome. - Isaac Asimov
I remember a halcyon time, before the web, when getting online was sufficiently obscure and difficult that only the most motivated and technically proficient could accomplish it...it was a golden age...no spam, no newbies, very few disagreeable folks. Enlightened people, reasoning together...we never should have let the mundanes in, the unwashed masses have ruined everything...
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
"we would not see the public resistance that we have had to national exams"
Most (if not all) European countries have national exams. Why does the US public have such a problem with them?
And 1337 $p33k and AOLspeek (aka tEeNyBoPpEr sPeaK) confuses. Win-win isn't it?
In America, you spam computers In Soviet Russia, computers spam you!
I can still remember the first time I ever heard the word "software". It was in 1980. I had no idea what it meant at the time. I was 17.
About 10 years ago, I got my first PC. I was very confused about the terminology that I had heard others using for years. I read "PC's for Dummies". The authors' most important observation about other books on the subject at the time, was that they weren't good for beginners because they assumed that the reader understood terms to which they had not previously been exposed; RAM, hard drive, GUI, operating system, etc. The "for Dummies" and The "Idiot's Guide's" and other similar books are useful to help others navigate initially unfamiliar terms. (Assuming you can get them to read the books). (RTFFDB, Read the f'in' for dummies book.)
SRR
From TFA:
...including the author of the article, it seems.
:rolls eyes:
Yet, only 39% knew what a "Trojan" was when asked.
A Trojan is a malicious piece of software which installs itself on a person's computer without their knowledge.
Actually, it is more like you are driving a car, and the "check engine" light comes on.
Now that light means absolutely JACK SQUAT to the driver, other than "you need to take your car in". For those who like to work on their own cars, like me, I can check my own engine code and probably fix it myself. I had to buy a $200 tool to do so, but for me it was worth the money to have that control and knowledge about my car. Not everyone is willing to do that.
The light is just an indicator of a problem, it offers no more information. In fact, Check Engine offers NO information. There is no way to simply check your engine. It is just an alert so that you can look into a problem before it gets worse.
And some people will just ignore the Check Engine light. If they do that, they are taking the risk that a bigger problem will occur down the road. Those are the idiots.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Nobody would give their credit card number to a scraggly guy on the street, but that's not what phishing is. Phishing is more like stopping by your bank on the way to work. Or at least it looks like your bank, is in the same place as your bank, and acts like your bank. But actually some scammers bulldozed your bank, built an exact replica, and are collecting all of the private info that bank customers routinely give.
Or, more realistically, phishing is like building a phony BP gas station along an interstate highway. Drivers recognize the brand and swipe their credit cards to pay for gas without hesitation. But the operators are actually collecting credit card numbers to rip off later. This scam has actually happened with phony ATM's (bank machines).
The guy on the street is more like an email from bum@hobo.com saying "Hey, could you spare some money? I accept credit cards."
You know a lot of things that other people don't. I know a lot of things that you don't. If ignorance is stupidity, then there is not one smart man in the world.
Phishing is a bad name -- I heard the term several times before I realized that it was slang for phony Web sites. The general public should be warned about phony Web sites; they don't need to know the definition of phish.
AlpineR
I think a lot of people posting here are missing the point. I've taught a computer literacy class in a community college setting to people who could barely use a mouse. The amount of information they had to absorb and that I had to learn how to convey in lay terms was truly daunting.
I've beent he CTO of a number of sizable companies, and I moved out to the middle of nowhere for a while. It was while I was there that I did some of this teaching -- mostly to get myself off the ranch.
Anyway, if you get a "check oil" light, you can usually engage in conversation wiht almost any of your friends about it, but a lot of computer problems are too *daunting* to understand and describe for people who don't have the vocabulary and the extensive experience that we do. We know the difference in iterations of behaviors and the subtlety of variations. Most people see things to us are obvious and they don't see it at all.
My wife's got a PhD in Political Science and can rattle off names and theories of power that make my head spin. I wouldn't call her average.
I work with doctors who a routinely called upon to diagnose and treat some of the more complex biological systems on the planet (read: humans). I wouldn't call them average.
I teach honors students who are literate, thoughtful, articulate, and and curious to learn. I wouldn't call them average.
Yet somehow, each of these kinds of people, highly developed in their own baliwick, is supposed to be "average" when it comes to their intimate knowledge of how a computer works?
They spent their time mastering their own domains. I may be able to repair a corrupted installation of the OS on a surgeon's workstation, but I wouldn't trust myself to perform open-heart surgery. Why expect it to work the other way around?
Computer expertise is a specialty field, not a life skill (whatever we may think of that situation). We're talking about a deeper understanding of how a computer works: one that goes beyond "turn it on and double-click the picture on the screen." Computers are complex systems of inter-relating processes which all must be understood if any are to be used with maximum efficiency.
Also, I don't know where the transmission on my car is, and I'm only about 10% sure I know how the distributor works. Does that make me a bad driver, or just a lousy mechanic?
Hey!the more they dont know the better chance computer techs,admin,programmers and the rest will keep their jobs.
In short, efficient computer users must be constantly learning. Many people are too lazy to try and learn, some moreso than others.
Ignorance kills, complacency kills, hatred kills, but usually not the ones guilty of them.
lol!
As one of the many techs who spew this 'Geek speak' at lusers, i have adopted a "scared straight" approach.
When I'm called to someone's home to fix a "slow, broken computer" they think they need a new one almost off the bat. Upon inspection, I typically fnd it infested from top to bottom with spyware, virii, etc. I run a adaware sanity check (it i can get it to install on the heavily fsck'ed boxen), after which i tell them I can salvage the computer in two ways: spend 6 hours trying to remove every bit of garbage with a less then 50% success rate, or spend 4 hours reinstalling everything (after a data backup, of course). they usually go with option two which gives me the opportunity to configure their system the R I G H T way... ya know, firefox, a real virus scanner, adaware, SP2 w/ autoupdate, etc, as well as sure up their hardware firewall (if they don't have one, i get one of em and charge em accordingly...)
When the box is returned, they happily pay me and the next time i hear from them is when said box has a REAL problem, because i've tought them that "ignorance = lost $$$, knowledge + effort = saved $$$"
works every time.
Logistical Chaos Officer http://www.slagg.org - LAN Gaming in Sarasota FL,USA
I suppose they should consider changing all of this to something like:
And then they'll understand all they need to.The alternative, and this is the scarey part, is that all the ISP's will provide for you all your computing needs on a leased machine with centeralized data stores.
..I would give this test to everyone in my organisation and immediatly fire anyone who does not get a perfect scroe. Excellent way to destroy management, and incompetant staff.
he kept using technical terms like "breaks" and "accelorater" lol am i a phizzycist now?/?
Seriously, any field has specialized terminology, usually because we want ONE word to describe something, not two or three. That's what words are used for.
Most people have *heard* of terms used in other things, but don't bother to learn them unless they are used every day. Since they don't want to learn computers to the same extent that they want to learn many other things, they don't know all the technical terms.
It doesn't help that the technical terms are basically slang, of course- but "trojan" is a very good term. All you need to understand it is a concept of "the code running on my machine is doing everything: if I run the wrong code (or if something runs the wrong code for me) then things will go wrong". That level of abstraction isn't hard, but many don't care.
What would they suggest? That we use terms that are multiworded to help out the 87% of people who aren't reading stuff anyway? That's like attacking artists for being too obscure, except that you are attacking engineers for being too precise.
If they cared and were not idiots, they would type:
phishing definition
into google.
First thing:
"
Web definitions for Phishing
In a phishing attack, a fraudster spams the Internet with email claiming to be from a reputable financial institution or e-commerce site. The email message urges the recipient to click on a link to update their personal profile or carry out some transaction. The link takes the victim to a fake website designed to look like the real thing. However, any personal or financial information entered is routed directly to the scammer.
"
trojan definition
Makes you click on a link to find the term defined.
I doubt anyone is complaining. The study looked like it asked people who don't care. Those that do care have this knowledge or can retrieve it inside of three minutes: those that do not care don't have it, but nothing could have given it to them- because they don't care.
'g33/< $P3@/<' c0NPhu$3$ n3+ u$3rz
/N0\/\/ +h@+ fi$hiNg d3$crib3$ ph@/<3d 3-M@i1 $c@Mz.
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/<33P y0ur @N+i-viru$ $0Ph+\/\/@r3 uP +0 d@+3
/<N3\/\/ \/\/h@+ @ "+r0j@N" \/\/@z \/\/h3N @z/<3d.
/<N0\/\/13dg3.
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i+ i$ p@r+icu@r1y iMP0r+@N+ +h@+ p30P13
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h0r$3 iN my pc?
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\/\/h@+ @r3 +h3 +hr3@+z 0N +h3 n3+?
y3+, 0N1y 39%
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@ $urPri$iNg 16% h@d n3v3r h3@rd 0f +h3 +3rM "$P@M" +0 d3$crib3 uN$01ici+3d 3-M@i1, 3v3N +h0ugh 76% \/\/3r3 \/\/0rri3d @b0u+ juN/< 3-M@i1$.
+\/\/3N+y p3rc3N+ @dMi++3d +h3y did n0+
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Anyone with even the most rudimentary grasp of history would realise that a trojan horse masquerades, even if they have never used a PC.
Well, it's interesting to note that AOL UK users are as dense as their North American counterparts. But is anyone surprised by this?
so there are actually people who don't understand geek terms...
does that mean there is actually a world beyond slashdot
you slashdot geeks only criticize people...finally a community where I'm not different
These people don't know what they don't know. Since they are unaware of the knowledge required to properly operate/repair a computer, it follows that they do not seek it and do not understand the terms when presented. As a result of this ignorance the computer user is more at risk to be taken advantage of.
This is not a problem unique to computers, it it true of every technological device people use. Does the average person driving a car actually know how a turbocharger works or the terminology used in talking about repairing one: waste gate, compressor, turbine, fluid bearing, intercooler? When they go to a repair shop to get the engine repaired, will they have any clue about what these things are? If I said "Your waste gate trim tabs are locked open and that's causing the grinding noise", would an average person know if I could even be correct? I think not (that statement is bogus by the way. there are no trim tabs on a turbocharger waste gate and a waste gate would not cause an audible noise.)
The problem I see is the growing tendency in the U.S. to simply choose to NOT become informed/educated about how things in our lives work. In "the old days" people generally had a fairly good idea of how everyday things worked. Granted things were simpler, but there's no reason for today's population to at least know the basics. I think the knowledge of the average automobile driver is; the fuel goes there, turn the key to start and stop the engine, vertical pedal=go faster, horizontal pedal=slow down, and what buttons to press to open the windows and change the radio.
It's not very much different for the average computer owner: plug that in to the power outlet, that other thing in to the phone line, click the pretty picture to get on the internet. I'm not suggesting that every new user needs to be a CCIE, but we'd all be a lot better off if the ignorance pendulum started swinging back the other way for a while.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
I can't tell you how many users I have watched over the years dismiss every dialog box with an affirmative answer and then scream how much their computer sucks when it does what they told it to do. I always get the "oooh, I'm so lucky to know a geek like you, how do you figure all of this out?" when 90% of the time the answer is RTFM. Yes, some of what we do is deeply technical, but on the desktop it isn't nearly that mystical. Put some F'ing effort in people.
I was moving my father in-law over to a new PC last month, I had told him to burn his data to a CD so we could just copy it to his new PC (his old PC was sans network card and not worth investing in). When I came over he handed me a CD but said he had newer files that he also needed. I suggested he burn those to a CD while I started copying these over to his new PC... he asked me how to do that? I replied "the same you created this disk, just with the newer files" and he sat and stared at the desktop??? He is far from senile and a fairly responsible person at work (even holds a couple degrees) but doing the same task twice was simply beyond him? I discussed spyware and virus stuff with him, explained the Windows Firewall, etc... He was simply at a loss, even though I worked very hard to keep it simple. There comes a point where the industry can't make it any easier and people have to either commit to learning and find another interest.
Users are still dumb.
If you were posting on Slashdot, and compared a computer to a car, that means you are an idiot, correct? You've just started an insanely long pointless thread about how each person's car analogy is flawed and how the other person's car analogy is far better and...
Fuck, people, be more creative... Try comparing a computer to a LLama, or a piece of toilet paper, or a strange thought you once had while tripping on acid, or a bit piece of snot. But never, never, NEVER a car. It's pointless...
I'm not sure why this would be a surprise to anyone; the communications gap between IT professionals and the general population has been around as long as computers have. This gap is present in any technical industry, as well; how many of the great unwashed understand everything they hear from their doctor or their auto mechanic? The difference is that we've been conditioned to expect to pay doctors and auto mechanics for their skill and for explaining things in lay terms where necessary. Folks seem to expect computers to be "easy" and support for them to be free, for some reason.
You got me, I didn't understand half of what you wrote!
Try this with your doctors. When someone mentions "resuscitation" shout at them untill they say "It would appear, though there is an extremely small chance that I am wrong, that the patients aeortic pump has ceased normal functioning, and I intend to apply an electric shock in an attempt to restore proper heart function. I must, however, state that there is a chance that the patients heart will not resume normal function, ul;timatly resulting in the cessation of life, that is death.".
My wife doesn't give a crap about computers or technology or jargon. Once when I was in a really geeky mood she said, "WHO CARES?!"
She's more into the subtle readinbetweenthelines kind of person.
It's true though, nobody gives a rat's ass about this stuff other than us. It's not a male/female thing as I used to generally bore the tears out of everyone almost.
We pair each other off well because when shit breaks down I can fix it and she remembers that there has to be *SOMEBODY* who gives a rat's ass about this stuff.
Because the proper dialog box:
"You're fucked."
Offends users rather than merely confusing them.
This reminds me of everytime I see a TOS agreement and have no clue what the heck they are talking about. There has to be a way for people to cut through the jargon and get to the gist of it. What's the point of language if most people have no clue what you're talking about...?
Any system that relies on the end users for security is surely doomed.
As part of my job, I do most of the company's Customer Tech Support. Almost daily, I receive calls from customers who seem to use a computer only for what they need (i.e. work, internet, e-mail). They get many of their terms *almost* correct, but not quite...
For instance, when I get a call from a user who has trouble downloading something onto the device we make, that can mean they really are having trouble downloading something from our (or other) web site(s), but what it USUALLY means is they are having trouble copying a file from their computer onto their device, which is a completely different problem & solution.
Joe Computer-User generally does not have a very good conceptual model in their own mind of how a computer really works. We live in a world where people think AOL is the internet, all music file types are the same (collectively known as "music", not mp3's, wma, etc.), and that browser toolbar they just downloaded really IS helpful(!). They have work to do, families to raise, and just can't be bothered to take the time to really *understand* how to use a computer more effectively.
Since this is the case, how can anyone expect that these users to know or understand this intermediate-user terminology? (I suspect the terminology cited in this article would have at least a term or three that even intermediate users wouldn't quite know about...)
"said Will Smith, AOL's net security expert." I'd say so.
I don't keep a lid on my coffee so when I walk around I look busy -me
...write the warnings in plain, honest English:
Subject: New computer virus is attacking all home computers that run Windows and that have internet access.
Q. Are you affected?
A. You may be affected if your system is a Windows system purchased after 8/1/2000 and you haven't done any Microsoft recommended maintenance on it.
Q. What can happen if I get infected?
A. This virus will allow the programmer who wrote the virus to open all confidential information stored on your computer's hard drive. This includes personal e-mail, all history of web sites that you've visited (yes, even THOSE websites), any personal documents you may have created (word processor, spread sheet, database, photos, etc...). It also turns your computer into a "zombie" that is used to send junk e-mail (spam).
Q. What happens if I ignore this problem?
A. The people responsible for creating this virus may gain the ability to delete or destroy all of your confidential data. If your system is being used as a "zombie" to send junk e-mail, your internet sevice may cut you off until the problem is resolved.
Q. How do I know if I am infected?
A. Consider paying a professional to check your system for you. If you are infected, the cost of bringing your system back to a secure and usable condition may be very high. After that expense, consider it the cost of learning that it's cheaper to prevent the problem to begin with by maintaining your system. You get oil changes for your car, right? You cleanse your toilet bowl, correct? same thing... Maintina your computer either by learning how to do it, or paying someone to do it for you.
Computers are not simple machines. This problem is here for a good long while until the approach shfts.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
This is just getting silly. The entire article just irritated me so much. If you are stupid enough to give your bank details to someone you dont know, if you are gullible enough to download some file which "will give you a chance of winning 20 million dollars" then you deserve whatever rubbish you get. It's called common sense, and it seems a lot of people just don't have any. No one ever told me not to give personal details and credit card numbers over the internet, I reasoned it out using logic! With the majority of internet users this stupid, it is obviously that they don't know the meaning of spyware or "trojan". Another thing to note is that if they think that "spyware" is something to do with spying on their partners, it shows where their mind is focussed anyway. Probably why they don't bother thinking about their own safety when online.
Wrong. A trojan horse is a piece of software which pretends be one thing such as a screen saver, but which additionally installs something else such as a keylogger. Just like the wooden horse that the people of Troy pulled into their city which was filled with Trojan warriors. It requires the cooperation of the user who has full knowledge that he is running an executable on his system.
Of course the geeks are ranting about "clueless lusers" but it's not the users who are clueless, it's the geeks. What geeks simply can't imagine is that the average person sess computers as BORING complex machines. That's right BORING. SUPER boring. HYPER boring. SOUL-CRUSHINGLY BORING. In the western democracies most people know how to drive a car. But they know nothing about how cars work. Why? CARS ARE BORING to most people. They just want to get from point A to point B.
Stop faulting people for wanting to live their lives without having to understand yet another boring, super-complex technology and start thinking about ways to make their lives easier.
Automakers didn't rant about pussies who can't even crank a car. They developed the electrical ignition. They didn't rant about retards who don't have the coordination to use a clutch, brake and accelerator to shift a car. They developed the automatic transmission. They didn't rant about morons who can't remember to to turn their headlights off, they developed warning chimes and headlights that turn themselves off.
Get a clue.
Insert witty sig here.
what does ^H^H^H^H^H mean?
Google ignores the ^'s when you search, even if you put it in quotes.
I stand by what I've said: If your company's ads told them "you need to read a bookshelf worth of manuals to use our product", then you'd have less of those people calling you. Of course, the company would also have less customers, which is why they prefer to lie instead.
I know it's a surprising concept, but most people have better stuff to do with their time. A doctor or a lawyer's time is better spent, *gasp*, learning more about medicine and law, than becoming an expert in computing. Their time is more valuable than that.
It may come as a blow to your ego, but chances are your program isn't worth the time to go through the learning curve.
Here's some basic economics: The computer is just a tool for them. A tool which requires more time to babysit, than it would take to do the same thing by hand, is a bad tool. And most software falls squarely into that category.
E.g., the time and effort to babysit a computer (virus scanner, firewall, spam, etc) to just send an email is actually a worse use of even _my_ time than just using the post office. Just thinking that Joe Average has to spend some extra months to achieve the level of expertise you demand from him, just leaves me scratching my head: why would he ever want to waste his time like that?
Which, again, is why your marketting dept lies about it. If you told people "you need to read a bookshelf worth of manuals to use our product", you'd discover that, plain and simple, your product isn't worth that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So a hearty ->*FUCK YOU*- to your snide "luser" comments and endless whining. You don't like it, do your fucking job and use better products, you useless pricks. Or just sit back on your ever swelling asses, sipping Jolt cola and sign the next purchase order for Microsoft Bullhorn BloatyOS Service Pack 99,102. You're the laughing stock of the world, you know that? Just a bunch of Windows toadies sending corporate productivity into the shitcan every time a script kiddie gets bored somewhere in suburbia.
I've been in the industry for a while now, and it seems to me that the gap between the technically savvy (not just with computers, though they are the best example) and the non-savvy average user is becoming wider and wider.
Back when I got my first 'real' computer, the only people who had computers were people who had a genuine interest or need. To accomplish anything the average computer user had to know or figure out how to tinker to get what they wanted (ah the days of eeking out that little extra bit of memory to run the newest game).
Consider this, it is in the best interest of manufacturers (OS and Hardware) to make the systems usable to the largest body of potential buyers possible. To accomplish this, they make setup and launch as easy as possible. The end result of which is a completely ignorant user can assemble a pre-configured, color coordinated, round edged computer, install Windows, get on the Interweb, receive e-mail, and proceed to completely trash their system all without knowing a damn thing about what they are doing. These are the Eloi.
The entire time you have a much smaller population of tech literate folks who are more and more necessary, since the users are essentially completely ignorant. The manufacturers tech support or local tech support doesn't matter, either way the Eloi panic and call the Morlocks to fix it. They are unable to fend for themselves.
Anyone? Anyone? Beuller? Anyone?
This isn't something new. How many of you /.'s out there have been in a conversation with someone with basic computer understanding, and have started talking geek lingo? I bet you all have had someone look at you and say, "Huh."
/. everyday, and stay up on geek lingo, most people do not. I find many colleagues of mine who live in a bubble and assume everyone should know what they know.
/.), and rethink your approach to terminololgy, and they way you speak to non-experts. And who knows, maybe the gap can be bridged in the future because of the changes we make now.
While trojan, phishing and spam is common terminology in our world, where we read
This is hardly the case.
Before calling these people stupid, we should look at why they don't understand.
The influx of the internet is truly the main reason there are so many people out there who own PC's now-a-days, and these people are using them for recreation. To them the internet is what a computer is all about, and they have no reason to think they could be running into problems by using the same program that they have been using for the past 2 years.
I think that is the role of all the geeks out there to make it easier for the people who don't know what they're doing, by dumbing down the lingo, and really spelling out how certain things work with a computer. A lot of the posts here seem to be talking about computer servicing. This is another case where you don't have to do the work without getting paid if you don't want to, but if you explain things the right way, the user should feel more comfortable with having a professional do it.
Instead of bashing people for what you all are calling "ignorance", consider what you know nothing about (although there are a lot of know-it-all's on
...Or maybe not, maybe everyone else is stupid!
Over the long term, don't you suppose there will be some Darwinian effects from this as people who can't/don't learn are simply left behind (the weaker members of the heard) and picked off by predators?
I'd much rather see the OS manufacturer simply secure their lousy products. It seems 95% of the holes and explots involve things most people don't need or use.
Then you can either
a) Learn how to protect yourself.
b) Stop using the internet.
c) Shut the fuck up and stop complaining.
----------------------
It still amazes me how many "The hottest girls", "Grow two inches now!" kind of mails are there still being spammed. I suppose people still open them, otherwise they wouldn't be spammed. I thought everyone would be tired of them by now. Maybe granma doesn't know it's spam, mybe she doesn't know it's ilegal, but I'm sure she should be tired of them and just think, "Nah, it's just one of those strange mails again."
Windows does not do a good job of separating unprivileged user accounts from accounts that can install software and overwrite files that Windows and your applications use. That means that when you log in as yourself rather than the Administrator, you can still hurt your system. If that were the only problem, most users would be safe. Most people don't try to remove the door panels in their car with crowbars, and most computer users wouldn't try to do dangerous things with their computers.
The other half of the problem is that Internet Explorer, MS Office, Outlook and Windows itself provide mechanism for running programs that came in from outside. And they don't provide adequate protection to prevent some of those programs from being executed automatically the moment they are seen. Even in cases where the user has some choice, it is often not clear to the user that he is authorizing a program to run, or that that program will install, modify or delete important stuff.
Simply put, if you run Windows, you have already chosen to allow viruses, worms and spyware to use your computer. Microsoft is focusing on closing the security holes that have been exploited already. But they have created products around a fundamentally flawed security model. Until they scrap that model, breaking lots of applications and web sites, Windows will never be secure. The best you will ever be able to say, if you work really hard at it on a regular basis is that your computer is not vulnerable to any threats you already know about.
Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OSX are certainly vulnerable too. If you connect to a network, data comes in as well as going out. Other computers can reach yours. There are four reasons these operating systems are less vulnerable and less easily and frequently exploited:
It really is that simple folks. All of the rest is just the technical details of what was exploited and how.
and that's what the study shows ...
then what's the point in not just saying "It's broke and you broke it" to them?
Sometimes we're too darned nice. There's no cure for stupidity.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
There's a communication system that lots of people use and that has the potential to reach a great many people all over the world- it's not that complicated and it has been a hobby of many for years: ham radio. And it requires a lisence to be an operator. Question is: why can any fool with a computer get online without having to learn the basics first? Doesn't it make sense that to keep the online world safe and productive for everyone there should be an education and lisencing program? We need a lisence to drive, broadcast, own a gun, etc. Why not being online? It affects millions when so many users are ignorant of how to be responsible online, and the education we try to give does not seem to be working.
The article contained:
Firewall: Software to protect computers against hackers
A) The term he's looking for is "cracker" (someone who attempts to gain unauthorized access to a computer system for malicious gain), not "hacker" (someone who enjoys tweaking, exploiting, and otherwise pushing systems to their limits for fun and for the learning experience).
B) Firewalls are also used to protect against non-human threats, or even to "protect" against things that aren't always threats (campus networks blocking P2P apps, ISPs blocking web or mail servers on domestic connections, etc).
I would have said instead something like:
Firewall: Software which limits outside access to certain systems in a computer.
It's still not entirely accurate from a technical point of view but it gets the right message across, which the given definition does not.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
I've been working on phone support for a month or two. I've been mostly impressed by how the users are generally able to do clear paper jams from their printers, replace toner cartridges, and so forth. And then I remember that it's very important to tell them to power off the box on the floor, not just the monitor, because to them, that's the computer. (We have this paradigm already with DVD players and televisions. Why isn't it obvious with computers?)
Everyone at the installation I support has a uniform, centrally controlled environment, so I do get to make simplifying assumptions about a user's setup. And generally we distinguish between server and workstation problems by asking "can the next guy over access it?", so the problem you talked about generally doesn't happen.
Mostly I deal with "the so-and-so server is down", whereupon I check it and it is, in fact, down, and then I bother the site support people. If it's not that, it's usually "my password doesn't work", which means "I forgot my password", which is fine; I can reset it.
Then there's "my computer is slow", which means spyware. And I've learned to take harmless error messages (complaining that drive A is empty on startup when it shouldn't need to read from the floppy) seriously, because they also frequently mean spyware.
So it's been different than I expected. Users regularly thank me, and I've only had one user ever become really, really irate, when I didn't move fast enough for her. ("HELLO? [thwacking the phone] HELLO? HELLO?") Thankfully, that was the only really awful call I've had in more than a month.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
On the bright side, this is from the BBC, so it's not the US educational system at fault. =)
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Some people simply should not own computers.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Change Oil | Do Not Change Oil
You guys see low oil levels as a trigger for changing oil!?!
If the oil is clean, but you're old engine is merely burning oil quickly; a correct choice would be "add oil". If your engine is not known to burn oil, a correct choice would be "check engines", or rings or valves, etc.
What's your next proposed dialog:
Gas Level is low. Would you like to:
Change Gas | Do not change gas
Unless you're resurecting a car that's been parked for a year or more, there's little reason to change your gas.
I was as confused as a trojan phish by the word 'bamboozle'. According to Webster's obese dictionary, it means 'to deceive by trickery'.
People don't buy a car and expect to just drive it.
People understand that even if they can't fix their cars themselves, they still need to be able to explain to someone who can what's wrong.
You might not know how to fix the alignment, but you should be able to explain that your car is pulling to one side or that your tires are wearing unevenly.
You can't just show up at a mechanic's place and say "Um, it's broke."
You might not know how to change your own oil, but you should know to take your car to someone who can periodically.
There is no reason why people should expect computers to be different.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
News flash. this time based on reality:
a ug99/chicken1.htm
there are billions of people in the world. Billions of people require exactly zero chickens.
Feeding grain to animals and then eating the animals is incredibly wasteful, you loose about 90% of the protein in the transaction. Most of the calories you feed to the animal goes to maintaining body temperature and other life functions. Plus when animals are house in large numbers in one place you end up with an amazing amount of poop. This makes the local water taste funny, to say the least.
(how do you pronounce "Pfiesteria ")
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/daily/
They can use the jargon file, or just learn to read at all.
If not, then in the near future their infested computers will be dumped offline by their ISP until they can prove that they are clean again. If that means they've got a pile of Dells growing in the garage then so be it.
Interestingly enough, KFC no longer officially stands for Kentucky Fried Chicken. The 'f' word was making it increasingly hard to market, apparently. Hence they are gradually attempting to rewrite history to say that it stands for Kitchen Fresh Chicken.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Computers are a lot like automobiles. They are very powerful, sometimes dangerous appliances that most people are expected to own and operate. And in the same notion, people tend to learn about as much about their computers as they do about their cars: how the radio works, and where the pedals are. And when their rack-and-pinion or CV joint fails, they have about as much Clue as when they install spyware or take the bait on a phishing scam. The problem is not the terminology - we could pass along the word to refer to a Trojan Horse as a "malicious, security-breaking program that is disguised as something benign, such as a directory lister, archiver, [or] game" http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/t/Trojanhorse.ht
IMHO of course.
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
That's not information-age slang, that's stupid kids talking smack because it's easier than learning to spell. The distinction is vital, and I'm a mite disappointed that whoever wrote the guide blurred the distinction.
"Phishing", "open source", "kernel"---these are actual words which the layperson will not understand if they haven't been exposed to them before, but which can be readily looked up. "l33t", "w4r3x0rz", "$|^4/\/\"---that's fucking retarded, unless it's actually a short Perl script that draws the Mandelbrot set in ASCII. That'd be hot.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Thank goodness the Beeb finally clued us in!
Unfortunately (as is typical for mainstream news media outlets), they went on to try to make their users feel more educated - by giving them the definitions of a bunch of security-related jargon terms.
And (as is typical for mainstream news media outlets) they got several of them wrong.
(I'm reminded of the way "hacker" got corrupted when a self-proclaimed security expert used it in a presentation to some executives and the media got hold of it from there. Of course this article continues the misuse.)
With misinformation like this from the main sources of information for the non-specialists, it is no surprise that the general public is clueless about these issues.
Articles like this one are self-fulfilling.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Uh. Why not both?
This carries the scent of the Doom 3/HL2 "debates". Just get both, if not at the same time.
Computers often break down, catch a virus, get full up or messy, thats the view most people accept. Just like your pipes sometimes get blocked, your car sometimes gets broken into or your appliances sometimes blow a fuse. Of course on slashdot we know that this doesn't have to be the case, but the general population doesn't really care. Microsoft is responsible for an entire industry of tech support people cleaning computers on a monthly basis and earning money and we should be thankful for it! Other professions such as plumbers and electricians are in the same position - when your lights go out and you cant take a shit you get desperate, you just want to call someone up and say "it doesn't work, fix it, i give you money", same thing happens to people when they need to write an essay but their computer won't start or takes half an hour to do anything. Lets not dumb down the jargon, people dont care what it means as long as someone is there to make it work for them.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
How do you teach users to deal with bugs? They can be doing everything right, and suddenly get "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down". And if they ask me how to fix it, well, how the hell should I know?
He has "virus" as "Malicious program designed to damage data; usually spread via infected e-mail", completely missing that the defining characteristic is self-replication and that some viruses are reasonably benign (or very occasionally attempt to be helpful).
He has "spyware" as simply monitoring your surfing habits, rather than the catch-all for all malware that records your activities (keyloggers, audio/video bugs, registry sniffers, etc.) or otherwise automatically extracts sensitive info from your machine.
As is typical for a mainstream media outlet, they got the facts wrong, and trumpted their errors as well-researched truth. With this as the general public's main source for information on computer security (or nearly anything else), is it any wonder that the the bulk of the public is under- and mis-informed?
And is it any wonder that they're turning off mainstream media news and switching to the net as the primary source for their important time-critical infomation?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
He's still a tool. I had a better page describing precisely why he's a tool, but I lost it. Anyone remember where it was?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Apparently the BBC is among their own statistics, as the definition they give in the article for "Trojan" is wrong.
--QTone
Eagles may soar, but weasels never get sucked into jet engines.
If it's on the internet it must be true!
Guru: Just hold down B and press RIGHT on the + Control Pad. You can jump by pressing A.
Luser: A...? B...? RIGHT...? + Control Pad...? What about which are you talking?
Guru: Those are buttons on the controller.
Luser: What the <CENSORED> is a controller?!
1-Crawl 2-Cnfg 3-ATF 4-Exit ?
Perhaps if AOL, one of the biggest ISP's, spent less effort on their usual "useful" burger-and-fries services, and more effort on a campaign to educate their users about the internet, we wouldn't have this situation.
... better-educated users ... probably wouldn't be interested in AOL.
Waitaminute
IRONY.
Global warming is neither science, nor politics. It is a religion.
Perhaps if AOL, one of the biggest ISP's, spent less effort on their usual "useful" burger-and-fries services, and more effort on a campaign to educate their users about the internet, we wouldn't have this situation.
... better-educated users ... probably wouldn't be interested in AOL.
Waitaminute
IRONY.
Global warming is neither science, nor politics. It is a religion.
All a computer user needs to learn about this stuff, are concepts related to trust.
- You shouldn't run software from unverified or untrusted sources. This includes both computer software, and
.. uh .. human software (i.e. blindly following someone else's instructions).
- You shouldn't run software that makes it easy to inadvertantly violate rule #1.
- Once you break the rules and your environment gets compromised, it is very difficult/expensive/painful to restore integrity.
That is all a user needs to know about this set of problems. Save your empty jargon. The rules aren't changing, and there's nothing to keep up with.As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I've been using computers for 27 years now, and for just as many years I have been faced with self-described luddites (cyberphobes) who fear that if they learn the first thing about a computer it will somehow taint them forever. Mercifully, a few of them actually aren't computer owners, so they're harmless. But the people that really annoy me are my friends who are deeply interested in music or graphic arts, and yet resist every bit of knowledge about Illustrator, Digital Performer, etc. -- even though these tools will forever be essential to their future prospects in the 21st century!
There isn't much you can do for such folks, except to keep showing them the same things over and over again, and get them to compensate you for your time doing their jobs for them, and gently cajole them for being lazy and irrational.
Their cyberphobic condition isn't without precedent. Such folks are dyed-in-the-wool "I don't know computers" people as much as others are dyed-in-the-wool "dittoheads." Their whole identity concept is strongly attached to having a certain attitude towards computers, as with others it is essential to be alpha-macho in their worldly attitudes. Such types are unlikely to change regardless of any rationale someone like me (a self-professed eco-geek) could provide that it is to their benefit to learn some computer skills, to learn some empathy skills, or to view things ecologically/systematically.
Can enlightened geeks do anything more to comfort such resistant souls? In my case, I try to avoid any and all "geek speak" whenever possible. I also try to say only one little thing at a time rather than rattle off a paragraph. When I need to use a geek term I always explain the meaning first, and I follow their actual usage patterns giving them cues and gently providing the rationale of the process:
"See, when you go to save your picture the computer asks you to choose a location. If the computer didn't ask then it wouldn't know where to put it or what you wanted to name it. And this is also meant to help you. Since you chose how to save it, it will be a little easier to remember where you put it. And see, when you go to the Finder/Explorer there's your file! Isn't that cool?"
It is essential that their time with me as a tutor be an experience of discovery, without pushing them to absorb too much, and without showing any impatience. When they don't get a concept, I will try to get a sense of how "low-level" their misunderstanding is. Perhaps they don't understand that there is a spinning magnetic disk in the box. Perhaps they don't know what a "hierarchy" is. You'd be amazed how few people understand and can visualize structured information, or who can think in terms of breaking things down into smaller steps.
Such deficiencies are inculcated somewhat by our carbon-copy educational system, and in the kinds of work most people are required to do nowadays. Complex problem-solving abilities - especially those skills connected to subconscious visualization - although innate - must be practiced and nurtured to become consciously available. By taking people through my own thinking processes, with sensitivity to their own terms, I find I am far more successful transmitting information to inexperienced users.
I do sometimes get impatient, but I do my best to quell it and just fall back to remedial topics. People will sense if you are becoming impatient and their minds will become distracted by discomfort over that instead of being open to the lesson. There are some who will simply resist any and all tutoring, and the best you can do for these folks is to show them where the door is, and where to get some manuals if they decide to apply themselves. Give them some helpful handouts and send them on their way.
-- thinkyhead software and media
That's not funny, it's insightful.
-- Terry
Somewhere in our tech support department is someone that does not know to adjust the slide in the paper tray after adding more paper, resulting in paper jams after they put the tray back in the printer and you expect joe sixpack to understand connecting a windows machine to the internet is like leaving your car running in an intersection while they walk in to the fast food joint to get some fries.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Not that I have very many problems, and they're usually my fault. Last time it was DNS -- not knowing any better, I'd told my Mac their DNS addresses manually. A couple of times, they've changed, leaving me in trouble. (I know enough to tell that the net connection is okay and that it's just the DNS.) One time, the tech remotely logged into his home machine to make sure of the DNS address! The last time, the guy pointed out that my router would get the DNS addresses automatically anyway. I just turned on DNSRelay in the router, told the Mac to use that for DNS, and now it all works as it should.
The point is that V21 has great tech support; I wish more companies did!
(Maybe my attitude helps; I try to be calm, friendly, precise, and attentive; and it's probably clear that I'm a techie myself, even if not in precisely the same area. Plus I don't take my frustration out on the person I'm talking to -- well, not without extreme provocation!)
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Oh, you mean the "Change Engine" light? At least that's what my motorhead friend called it when he explained to his mother how and why you need to check the oil manually and not rely on the light.
Plants are psychic. There is an experiment, repeated often by major Universities and verified every time, that proves this.
If you approach a plant with a sharp object, it will actually move away. Not very far, mind you, since plants aren't designed to move much (only to track the sun in most species - there are a few exceptions like the venus flytrap and the pitcher plant), but it is measurable.
However, they only move if you really intend to cut them, if you try to fool them they won't respond.
This suggests that plants could in fact be more intelligent than animals, that they could even communicate with each other psychicly, we just don't know because we can't "hear" them.
You might also try to find a copy of "The Psychic Power of Plants", by John Whitman (ISBN# 1039430024) for more information on other experiments proving the psychic abilities demonstrated by plants.
And don't give me the argument that you don't have to kill plants to eat them - fruits, vegetables, and grains are actually embrios. Plant fetus anyone?
Tommy
Open Source for Open Minds
When I go to the doctor and give him my symptoms, diagnosis and suggested treatment, I use the correct medical terminology. Bonehead then parrots factually wrong symptoms back to me, makes an incorrect diagnosis based on what he thinks he heard and explains it all in layman's terms, which I don't understand since they aren't precise enough. I just wish the quack would A) listen to what I say, and B) communicate using medical terminology instead of layman's terms.
At least the mechanic can communicate using the correct automotive jargon.
First of all, we as computer geeks and developers should do our part to lessen the technical jargon and try to make applications and functions more user friendly and easier to understand without a weathly background of computer knowledge.
At the same time though, users need to do their part. Ealier the anology to replacing car oil was used. What happens when someones car breaks down or doesnt start? They take it to the shop and the mechanics say one of the following...
"you need to replace your oil"
"you need to fill it with gas"
"you need to replace the battery"
and what if the user replies with something like "Do I really NEED to do that?" or acts like they are confused.
Now normally, any logical person who really wants or needs to drive is going to figure out what those terms mean and why they are important. I am willing to bet 99.9% of people driving know these things. I am also welling to bet that 100% of them did not know a thing about cars when they were born, and thus had to learn it. I am finally willing to bet that 80% of them are not "car people" and simply use a car to get from place to place.
But you know what people? Since the ability to get from point A to point B was so damn important they finally RTFM and put a little effort forword!!!
I am not asking a lot. A computer is a complex machine and things like spam and viruses just happen (to the nerd waving his hand in the back: yes... even on mac/linux/BSD/ect).
If people really need to use the computer then I think they can put forth five minutes a day to learn a new term or SOMETHING rather than ignoring the problem. It really isnt THAT Much effort to learn the basics and learn enough to stay safe online. Much of it is even pretty logical; firewall to protect from hackers, spam filters to block junk email, virus scanners to stop viruses; sounds logical to a pretty basic level to me without overwhelming the user with details.
Dont get me wrong, we as developers need to improve, but really! If users aren't willing to learn enough to protect themselves then I think they deserve to get an "I love you" message when printing their important resume or being keylogged while doing their taxes online.
I finish this post but with one more comment... those stupid users who supposivly NEED to use a computer, but refuse to learn the basics and then later suffer for it... my mom falls into that category to an infinate degree of precision.
Outraged vegetarian vs. Outraged cousin of deathcamp victim.
Who will own the word holocaust and get a chance to compete for the phrase "mass graves" against the upstart "Right to lifers", fresh off their stunning defeat of the "Anti-war movement."
Only on pay per view.
Actually, since I am born with canine teeth and incisors [sic], i prefer to eat the tasty, delicious delicacies known as animals. Especially cows. Cows are wonderful, magical, yummy animals.
Scores:- Insightful:5; Funny:5 -- Take your pick.
In, oh, let's say 1985, the net was free of spam, spyware, malware, trojans, pwnz0red PCs, and whatever else.
:D
My simple solution: everyone who cannot prove they had an email address in 1985 is kicked off the internet. Problem solved
The rest of us will breath a sigh of relief and go back to doing useful things.
I've done the same thing, and it hasn't worked for me. One story was me trying to update some drivers for my sound card, and every time the sound wouldn't work. Turned out after a long while that it was setting by default to mute speakers when something was in the headphones, which previously hadn't minded when there was an adapter without anything plugged into it in the jack. Another time I called my ISP to try and get them to change my IP address. They told me they didn't offer static IPs. Well I sent them back and apologized for not being clear (even though I had been) and they told me to restart my router (which I had already told them I had done, in both emails). Both responses were very fast, form lettered, and seemed like the techsupport person didn't even read what I'd written, but had looked for key words.
I'll tell you one thing: If you've lost your entire life savings due to a 'phishing' attack, your not going to bloody well forget what it means in a hurry.
... 80% of AOL UK users wouldn't know if I scammed them ...'.
Learn, people! The weak and stupid will be prey to the strong and unscrupulous. I'm a decent and moral person but the first thing that popped into my head as I read the article was 'Hmmm
The real problem is people assume they can't possibly ever know anything about computers so when you start trying to explain somthing to them they just tune out, but anyone who's managed to keep themselves alive for more then a few years in the modern world can surely figure out a simple computer! You just have to have a bit of faith in yourself. For years my sister would complain loudly every time I tried to explain something about her computer, not even trying to listen to me. Once I had to help her reinstall Windows XP over the phone; next thing you know she's installed the modem drivers from the device manager without any help. I almost fucking died of shock!
Computers are here to stay. So is the Internet. So are the scammers and the phishers and everyone else. It's Darwinism, baby: Adapt or fucking perish!
"Some of the terms being bandied around are more suitable for a computer programmers' convention than for people who want to go online at home, " said Will Smith, AOL's net security expert.
He went on to say that WWW actually stood for Wild Wild West, and if you don't like to get Jiggy Wit It, you're Welcome to Miami where I, Robot prefer to spend my time.
The beauty of the internet is that I don't have to hear the thousands of groans uttered as a result of the above sentence.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere