Slashdot Mirror
Internet Explorer Users Have Low Risk Intelligence
First time accepted submitter benne2011 writes "A hoax report earlier this year claimed that people who used Internet Explorer had a lower IQ than those using other browsers. Inspired by this bit of fun, Projection Point decided to carry out a real study comparing the risk intelligence (RQ) of people using different browsers. We found that Internet Explorer users performed worse than everyone else; they had lower RQ scores and were grossly overconfident."
So first we called them stupid, and now they are grossly overconfident according to another study.
I predict the next study will show that their mothers are fatter than average, and ugly.
...Of my lack of faith in these studies.
This study would be a lot more believable if they didn't use phrases like " users of monopoly software" and actually linked to the test they gave.
(For the record, I'm not an IE user either. But the article isn't too far from spelling Microsoft with a dollar sign)
Most of your Window users are technologically illiterate. IE is there it works why fart around with it. To use a sort of car analogy how many people look under the hood of their car? Never mind improve it beyond stock. Now I bet the guys that heavily modify their cars have higher intelligence than the average stiff. Any person inclined to tinker with or improve things most likely is smarter than the average Joe. Average Joe is most likely to push the largest shiniest button with a flashing red light whatever the case may be, especially is the button say "Do not touch".
From Wikipedia: The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to recognize their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their own abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. Dunning-Kruger Effect Study was done in 99, so they are only 12 years late on this one.
From their website: "We define Risk Intelligence as the ability to estimate probabilities accurately."
Are they not aware of the pioneering and Nobel prize awarded studies of Tversky and Kahnemann in the 70's which demonstrated beyond any doubt that humans are terrible at estimating any kind of probability (especially risk-related ones)?
What about the 10-step percentage scale they used? Seriously, is any person able to differentiate between being "70% sure" and "80% sure" regarding any statement?
What about latent variables like the OS used? How can one possibly compare any feature of a Windows user with features of Mac or Linux user?
I can't locate any samples of the questionnaire used and I don't need to see any, because I'm 89.345943% sure they don't know what they're talking about.
All first world countries have required ultra low sulfur gasoline about as long as they've required emissions controls, because sulfur will poison a catalytic converter. The trucking industry fought it for several decades, but as of 2010 even diesel fuel is required to be ultra low sulfur in the US.
I suppose you could be talking about some kind of African country where high sulfur fuel is still allowed.
It's psychological research... ofcourse it's not a real study.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
The study size was 350 participants.
If you break down the percentages, they are variations of two or three people in each sample.
This is so far from statistically significant, it's laughable.
Ok, it's not strictly instead of Firefox and Chrome, but it's my default browser on my primary work machine. I'm currently running VMware Player, with a Linux machine on it, and that runs Firefox, which crashes Way Way Too Often, usually because of Flash. I do most of my web browsing there, and have NoScript, Ghostery, and AdBlock Plus, and usually a couple of other safety tools. And I keep another Virtual Machine around, with a stripped-down Linux distro with Firefox in Private Browsing Mode, which I use to read Facebook, because I don't want Facebook contaminating anything else, stealing cookies and history files, or whatever. (If there's a way to keep VMware Player paged in, using the whole 1GB I have allocated for it, instead of swapping itself out when it's not busy even though there's spare hardware RAM left, I'd appreciate pointers; I haven't found them.)
I'm also running Chrome natively, mostly for a bunch of electronics blogs like Hackaday, and occasionally for Gmail, and it's really bloated - burns almost 2GB if I have it turned on with my usual set of tabs. I'm not sure I entirely trust Google to behave themselves with Chrome, but they already know everything about my Gmail account (which I don't use for anything sensitive), and the electronics stuff doesn't get much personal information except when I'm buying equipment.
I used to run Firefox natively as my default browser, but there are a couple of problems with it - it Crashes Way Too Often, and it's also a memory hog (though better than it used to be, and not as bad as Google), and there are a couple of work applications that don't run cleanly except on IE. Until recently, it was my default browser, so if I clicked on a link in an email message, FF would either start from scratch or open another tab, spin the disk for a while while it sucked down memory, and then run, hopefully without crashing itself or crashing something else by hogging memory, and then be its usual friendly self. But I found that usually when I'm clicking on links from my work email, they're either sites I trust, or else they're work related sites like the HR website or web conference bridge that are happier running in IE, and I got tired of that.
That takes us to IE. It's IE7 because the Desktop Support department at work finally let us use IE7 instead of IE6, but is too scared to go to IE8, at least on Windows XP, and they made their saving throw against Windows Vista a couple of years ago - my next set of hardware will run Win7. And it has tabs, so it's not totally obnoxious to use, and it really doesn't crash much, so it's less obnoxious than Firefox, and it usually doesn't use a lot of memory, because I don't usually let it keep more than a couple of tabs open at a time, though it would happily be a memory pig if I let it.
(And then there's Safari and Opera, which I used to have installed - the IT department run little scanning robots that rat you out within a day if you install them, for reasons that sound more like the Software License Police rather than the IT department's normal reticence to have useful software running on our machines, and you get a call from some guy in India who's going to walk you through uninstalling them whether you like it or not. So I no longer run them.)
I suppose there's also Konqueror or other Linux-oriented browsers that I could be running in the Linux VM - are there times it's worth using them instead of Firefox?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Well I can tell you as a guy that has to fix the PC after they fuck it up that the IE users are a HELL of a lot more likely to fall for the major social engineering scams from what I've seen. Windows has actually gotten pretty damned hard to crack so being smart little bastards the malware guys just figured out how to get the users to do the dirty work and the IE users? Easy prey.
From what I've seen the big three are, in no particular order, the "ZOMFG you got teh viruz! Run "Iz_Not_Viruz_Iz_Cleaner" to kill it ZOMFG!" that has how you get your AV 20xx and Security tool variants, the "U want teh lezboz? We GOT teh lezboz! Just run "Iz_Not_Viruz_Iz_Codek" to see all teh lezboz!" which is where many of the trojans and spambot crap comes from, and finally the "Hey U R on teh IM? I'm on teh IM to! Please check out "Iz_Not_Viruz_Iz_cute pikz" to see me!" which is where a lot of the nasty rootkit and also spambot crap.
Funny part, second biggest cause of spam? firefox users that have yahoo accounts. The malware guys have figured out how to get Firefox to load an invisible iFrame that lets them load the Yahoo account and silently spam their address book while they look at "free porn" sites thanks to infected ads. This trick doesn't seem to work on the other browsers, not even IE, and it don't seem to work with hotmail nor Gmail, just Yahoo and FF.
I've found if you want to keep a PC clean a combination of Comodo Dragon or Chromium with ABP on Windows 7 with Avast Free works like magic. win 7 has sandboxing along with ASLR and DEP, Dragon and Chromium also sandbox and use low rights mode as does IE, and Avast Free (you can also use Comodo Security Suite which is free for business as well as home, but Avast is less fiddly) does scan before load on all web pages so any nasty crap on a page never gets loaded. Personally i prefer Dragon because of the Comodo secure DNS option, which doesn't mess with the system DNS and which is damned good at blocking phishing sites. Can't comment on Opera or Safari as i haven't really put them through the paces so i don't know how well they hold up.
But of all the systems that come through my shop it never fails that the IE users are the worst infected, bar none. be that because of TFA or because of flaws in the browser I can't tell you, hell it may just be PEBKAC, but if the user has IE only i know its gonna be a nasty mess.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Posting, even though I will lose my mod priv. for this page (and i'd voted up a couple of good 'uns too!);
I have to say that is one of the most thoughtful, intelligent as well as funny posts I've seen on /. in a good while! I love the "U want teh lezboz? We GOT teh lezboz" line. I may be stealing that.
What I actually wanted to post though was that I don't think you can blame IE for this; it is merely a victim of MS's installed-first philosophy. In short, only the stupid users use IE, because it's already there for them. If they were more savvy, they'd already have installed FF/Safari/Chrome etc., so really when you see someone that only has IE, you're seeing someone that is incredibly unlikely to be computer-literate.
And that means they'll be paranoid about not breaking it, and so will easily all for all the scams. In addition, if they're guys, they'll probably fall for "teh lezboz" scams, since they'll probably not know about real porn, and where to find it, for free!
/ As an aside, we have moron's over here in the Mac world, but the mac just does a better job of protecting them, and the lower market-share means most malware is aimed at windows. I wonder how many mac-users that arechallengedhave "setup.exe" files in their ~/Downloads directory. Or for that matter, a whole shit ton of "OMG_teh_best_lezboz_EVA.exe" in there as well // Second fark-style slashy; it took me about 5 minutes of carefully 1-cursor-point-at-a-time editing of this post to get all those "teh" to actually stay that way, since OS X knows best, and corrects it EVERY FUCKING TIME!!!
The truth shall always be free: Boris Floricic is Tron.
If she is using NoScript in a "medium" security manner -- meaning temporarily trust the parent domain of the site, but only whitelist external scripts (which means a fair amount of clicking "Temp allow akami / googleapis / disqus / some-image-service / etc") then that is MUCH better than Chome. Even NoScript in a "low" security method that temp-allows all scripts on a page but still blocks XSS, ClearClick, and anything else you choose like Java applets and iframes is still better than allowing all javascript and all plugins.
On the privacy front, try BetterPrivacy (never touch it after first time config) to flush all local Flash storage on browser start+stop. (You can of course whitelist LSOs from your bank or whatever.) Additionally, try CookieMonster in whitelist-only mode. It's just like NoScript, but for cookies so you can permanently allow all the sites she logs into, and temp allow any random page with a form.
Even just trying some extra plugins or stronger security settings will help everyone think more about security as they're learning more about security.