Popup Study Confirms Most Users Are Idiots

danieltdp writes "Testing students at a University, psychologists made many of them click on a dialog box that in effect said: 'You are about to install some malware. Malware is bad. By clicking yes you are failing the Windows Darwin Test.' Nearly half of them said all they cared about was getting rid of these dialogs."

Comments

Summary is WRONG

[AKAImBatman]

"You are about to submit a bad summary. The summary is bad. By clicking yes you are failing at Slashdot Darwin Test."

"Testing students at a University, psychologists made many of them click on a dialog box that in effect said: 'You are about to install some malware. Malware is bad. By clicking yes you are failing the Windows Darwin Test.'

Doh!

For those of you just joining us, the article says nothing of the sort. The article actually says that they created fake "Application Error" dialogs with various numbers of "fake" aspects. e.g. The cursor turning to a hand over the "Ok" button, reverse colored text, browser borders, etc. Basically, stuff that should have made it obvious that these were malware windows. Nearly half of those tested "accepted" the dialogs to get them out of the way. Some of them simply minimized them for later.

The text referred to in the summary is an image created by Ars Technica with the caption, "Even this warning might not have helped".

The actual text

[KingSkippus]

The actual text was "The instruction at '0x77f41d24 referenced memory at '0x595c2a4c.' The memory could not be 'read.' Click OK to terminate program." You're right, this is not "basically" (or even remotely close to) the text in Ars's little joke screenshot or what was posted in the summary.

Re:The actual text

[ari_j]

The legitimate error messages of that form often do, indeed, surround "read" with quotation marks.

Re:The actual text

[Anonymous Coward]

That's typical for these error messages in Windows. The error message is legit, this is something that a regular Windows user might see (I don't want to use the word "commonly", but it's relatively common as far as Windows error messages go). From look at the error message it looks to me like it's a basic Windows error message where the OS fills in the quoted strings (source address, target address, IO operation). All of them are double-quoted. The actual error in Windows would be printed exactly like this:

The instruction at "0x77f41d24" referenced memory at "0x595c2a4c". The memory could not be "read". Click OK to terminate program.

Even though I assume that's a template for several error scenarios, I've never seen one during my own usage that didn't specify "read". The actual text is a regular Windows error though, the display of the text was what was supposed to alert users (browser status bar, borders, close/minimize buttons, colors, etc). So it's not the error message that was supposed to be suspicious, just the context that it's shown in.

Even more importantly...

[hellfire]

The bottom of the article has the actual conclusion that the article was trying to make:

Follow-up questions revealed that the students seemed to find any dialog box a distraction from their assigned task; nearly half said that all they cared about was getting rid of these dialogs. The results suggest that a familiarity with Windows dialogs have bred a degree of contempt and that users simply don't care what the boxes say anymore.

The authors suggest that user training might help more people recognize the risks involved with fake popups and the diagnostic signs of genuine Windows dialogs, but the fact that the students didn't appear to spend any more time evaluating the fake dialogs raises questions as to whether education is enough.

The fuunt thing is

[geekoid]

the people writing the dialog boxes assume clicking no just shuts down the dialog box.
You could easily have events fire on the No as you do on the yes.
It takes a little work, but it is doable.

Re:Newsflash!

[danbert8]

Incorrect... Diffusion is a flow of material from high concentration to low concentration. Osmosis is the diffusion of water across a membrane.