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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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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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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The original joke was about Microsoft airbags asking the user to validate.