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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.
"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!!!!!!!!!@!
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
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...
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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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Why not? They outnumber slashdot readers by orders of magnitude.
Wrong question. How much would they pay to have somebody give them clear, plain English instruction on what to do without the fat slice of contempt on the side?
I amazed at how unselfconsciously many geeks can mock things like ebonics, then without missing a beat drop into their own "e-bonics".
I'm not saying jargon is a bad thing, just that it doesn't in itself say anything about the superiority of the tribe.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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?
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
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.
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
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...
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'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
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.
"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.
We did, and it wasn't good enough (browsers, not OSes). There was a time when browsers couldn't execute anything - they just rendered html. But you wanter more. You wanted forms, and shopping, and banking. Eye candy and became more important than information; convenience more important than security.
If you remember DARPAnet, you know what the internet looked like in the late 80s/early 90s (which is when I got on). It was simple, obscure, and relatively safe. There were still explopits, but they were mostly beased on social engineering.
Let me ask you - if someone calls you on the phone and says they're from your bank, and they need your [SSN, credit card number, password] to [reactivate your account, authorize your automatic debit, enable your direct deposit, process your loan application] do you do it? Of course not! You've leared through countless ads and news stories that scammers will call you up to get your infomration, then steal you blind. But there are people who still do. Nobody is saying that the phone system is too hard to use or too filled with jargon to be "safe."
This isn't levelled at you personally, it's just that you've taken up the cause of the stupid people (see my sig and journal for explanation). I don't do "mission critical" stuff with technology or tools I don't understand.
The problem is that if you make it so simple that anyone can use it, it will probably be so simple that everyone will use it. Good for marketing, bad for safety. Press the button on that circular saw and the blade spins really really fast. As simple as that is, there are still multitudes of people who manage to cut their fingers off "accidentally." No matter how many safety devices there are, you'll always fiund someone who has mananged to circumvent them, either unintentionally or intentionally - usually in the name of "efficiency" (can you say "password file?") Expanding more, there are no doctors hiding behind the shed ready to make money by enticing you into cutting your fingers off. There are people on the internet who have a finacial interest in figuring out how to trick you into misusing your powerful but dangerous online financial tools.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
My cousins that died in Nazi deathcamps are not equivalent to chickens.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...unless you work at hooters.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
If you can read this, you are a monster geek, and I'm an even bigger monster geek, perhaps even a T.Rex geek, because I worked out that slashdot stripped the trailing less-than.
/\r3 @ |V|0|\|$+3|2 &33|<
And if this works, then I can eat T.Rex geeks for breakfast: 1|= y()u (4|\| r3@d 7#][5, y0|_|
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?
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.
Because the proper dialog box:
"You're fucked."
Offends users rather than merely confusing them.
...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
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.
You do realize that the word "holocaust" refers to mass death (usually by fire), and not just a single event that happened during WWII, right? Or were you just trolling?
-------
"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
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.