Is there anything that actually gets users to fix their computers?

Sat Oct 4 17:01:07 UTC 2003

At 8:02 PM -0400 10/3/03, Terry Baranski wrote:
>Obviously, this is by no means specific to computer patching.  People
>are either "busy", lazy, apathetic, etc.  Most don't pay attention until

I've played the user-notification game myself in fighting hoaxes (do 
a search on wormalert at somewhere.com sometime--and consider what 
happens when tens of thousands of people add it to their address book 
and then forward the latest joke/hoax/virus to everyone in their 
address book).  I used to send auto-replies debunking the hoax--but 
then they'd report them as spam to their ISP, and their ISP would 
block my domain.  Others would just delete them.  Often the only way 
to get their attention was to send mail to everyone they'd cc'd, and 
ask *them* to contact the offender.

There is no question that people don't understand their computers. 
It's all magic to them.  The idea that the energizer bunny will 
appear on their screen when they send mail to five friends is no less 
likely than the idea that dropping a file on their email icon will 
bring up a compose window.

But in fairness to the users, this isn't all their fault.  They've 
been told right and left not to open mail from strangers (a 
completely bogus concept, given that viruses tend to come from 
friends).  What I found was that they take that quite literally. 
Mail from mailer-daemon (now there's a scary name), mail from 
postmaster, mail from anybody they don't personally know; gets 
deleted.  And that includes mail from their ISP.  They can't tell 
spam from purchase receipts from viruses from fake warnings from 
legitimate warnings.  Consider the latest "microsoft patch" virus. 
That was a professional looking job.  Do you really expect the user 
to know not to open that, but to know that the notification from 
their ISP about their machine being infected is legit?

They either need to be contacted out of band, or their email software 
needs to support a secure channel of communications that they can 
really trust.

-- 
Kee Hinckley
http://www.messagefire.com/         Next Generation Spam Defense
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/  Writings on Technology and Society

I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.