by Tom T. » Wed May 06, 2009 9:14 am
Nan M wrote:I'm at the same time growing a touch irritated with the assumption evident here that most plain users have no clue about web stuff in general.
I'm a plain user and I picked the general story up about tracking and data mining quite easily as I went along over the years; no surprises that there are manipulative forms of Capital out here in the wide world.
Advertising and polling didn't begin in the 1990s, after all
You most definitely are NOT a plain user. Your posts, your teaching a library group, your being a mod here (even if no longer actively modding), and the level of knowledge in general are far above the masses.
I don't hang with the dev crowd, cuz I'm not a programmer. I don't hang with the serious-puter-enthusiast crowd, except for those here. I know in my own family, one relative has AOL (there's a n00b give-away right there) but thinks she "knows all about that web safety stuff" just from "don't open attachments in spam emails". Others blithely accept all cookies presented, and put their entire personal and sexual lives on Facebook or MySpace or whatever. People with whom I do business evince no knowledge of the Web other than how to browse and use email -- and some don't know much about that, either. I have talked to BANK customer support people, complaining about them sending me HTML-enriched email. They told me how to enable it in my browser. I said, You @#$%^&* jerks, I KNOW how to enable it. I don't WANT to. I want YOU to stop sending it. They had no clue. A financial institution has added an "authentication": they email you a link to click before you can complete your login. (Of course, I copy/paste it, delete it, delete it from trash.) I told them that experts are trying to tell users never to click on links purporting to be from a bank or whatever, as it's a common phishing technique. These bank people weren't aware of that advice, nor was the vendor who sold them this "enhanced" securiity.
I could go on, but I'll close with: I have a friend who has a Master's Degree in Computer Science, but from before the invention of the WWW, and 26 years of sw programming and program management (but not Web-related), and still needs help now and then with the finer points of Web safety in general and NS in particular.
Bottom line: Average user: Open box, take it out, hook it up, turn it on. That's why XP was a ridiculously easy target for 12-year-olds until SP2 turned the firewall on by default. It was there from the first release of XP, but off by default. All these "knowledgeable users" Nan M refers to had no clue. Hence the spread of MSBlaster etc. etc.
At the risk of repeating what I've said elsewhere, it's hard for knowledgeable people in *any* field to empathize with zero- or low-knowledge users. Perhaps that is the unique gift I can contribute to this forum. Having had no idea how to even use a computer until the late 90s, and having never owned one until y2k, I can still empathize with the vast majority who have neither the time nor the energy nor the ability nor the desire to educate themselves beyond how to make documents, surf, email, etc. Granted, most of them will stay with IE forever, but since the US Dept. of Homeland Security recommended Fx and NS in response to a specific threat, we're getting some of those low-knowledge users, not just the cognoscenti. I just converted a Medical Doctor to Fx -- he loved it, said much better than IE -- and when he's ripe, will try to get him to use NS. (He knows of my affiliation, the discussion of which is what prompted him to try Fx.)
In the arguments over revenue and user base, Giorgio himself said that NS is a "low-retention extension". (Nice poem, descendant of Dante Alighieri! ...and Hell was sooo much more interesting than Heaven!) People d/l it, get frustrated, and drop it. Ask Giorgio or search for the thread -- it's bedtime here. I would like to see that retention rate increase dramatically. I think that's achievable, while still offering finer controls and tools to the power-users.
If I have to get more personal and brag about being successful teaching the clueless when Olympic gold medalists couldn't, I will, reluctantly. Or just trust me: I'm not as knowledgeable in coding as most or all of the other Mods, but I'm learning as fast as I can, so I have one foot in each door. I can empathize. Most power-users can't. It's not anything to be ashamed of. Just please consider the POV of him who speaks for the masses, who don't/can't spend lots of time on this stuff, but would really rather not have their security and privacy compromised if they were aware of the threats and given usable tools to protect themselves.
And *please* don't reply that "they deserve it". You can't fault someone for not taking steps against something of which they're not yet aware. What they *deserve* is a safe Internet and a safe operating system. Unfortunately for both purposes, the Internet was designed when there were, like, five computers in the world, or at least, no concept of untrusted or malicious users. Hence, no thoughts of safety whatever in the original Net. All patched on later. And Windows, like Apple, was designed before the WWW, and commendably strives to keep back-compatibility. Gates himself admitted that the popularity of the Web among home users took him completely by surprise. We're talking somewhere between Win 95 and 98 here. By then, there was so much legacy code in the codebase...
So we have to add the safety that wasn't built in at the start, not because anyone was evil. No one thought it would be used like this, and certainly never anticipated that the Web would deliver executables and that the browser, itself an application, would switch to becoming a platform for applications.
End of soapbox. "Good night, and good luck" (Edward R. Murrow)
[quote="Nan M"]I'm at the same time growing a touch irritated with the assumption evident here that most plain users have no clue about web stuff in general.
I'm a plain user and I picked the general story up about tracking and data mining quite easily as I went along over the years; no surprises that there are manipulative forms of Capital out here in the wide world.
Advertising and polling didn't begin in the 1990s, after all :-)[/quote]
You most definitely are NOT a plain user. Your posts, your teaching a library group, your being a mod here (even if no longer actively modding), and the level of knowledge in general are far above the masses.
I don't hang with the dev crowd, cuz I'm not a programmer. I don't hang with the serious-puter-enthusiast crowd, except for those here. I know in my own family, one relative has AOL (there's a n00b give-away right there) but thinks she "knows all about that web safety stuff" just from "don't open attachments in spam emails". Others blithely accept all cookies presented, and put their entire personal and sexual lives on Facebook or MySpace or whatever. People with whom I do business evince no knowledge of the Web other than how to browse and use email -- and some don't know much about that, either. I have talked to BANK customer support people, complaining about them sending me HTML-enriched email. They told me how to enable it in my browser. I said, You @#$%^&* jerks, I KNOW how to enable it. I don't WANT to. I want YOU to stop sending it. They had no clue. A financial institution has added an "authentication": they email you a link to click before you can complete your login. (Of course, I copy/paste it, delete it, delete it from trash.) I told them that experts are trying to tell users never to click on links purporting to be from a bank or whatever, as it's a common phishing technique. These bank people weren't aware of that advice, nor was the vendor who sold them this "enhanced" securiity.
I could go on, but I'll close with: I have a friend who has a Master's Degree in Computer Science, but from before the invention of the WWW, and 26 years of sw programming and program management (but not Web-related), and still needs help now and then with the finer points of Web safety in general and NS in particular.
Bottom line: Average user: Open box, take it out, hook it up, turn it on. That's why XP was a ridiculously easy target for 12-year-olds until SP2 turned the firewall on by default. It was there from the first release of XP, but off by default. All these "knowledgeable users" Nan M refers to had no clue. Hence the spread of MSBlaster etc. etc.
At the risk of repeating what I've said elsewhere, it's hard for knowledgeable people in *any* field to empathize with zero- or low-knowledge users. Perhaps that is the unique gift I can contribute to this forum. Having had no idea how to even use a computer until the late 90s, and having never owned one until y2k, I can still empathize with the vast majority who have neither the time nor the energy nor the ability nor the desire to educate themselves beyond how to make documents, surf, email, etc. Granted, most of them will stay with IE forever, but since the US Dept. of Homeland Security recommended Fx and NS in response to a specific threat, we're getting some of those low-knowledge users, not just the cognoscenti. I just converted a Medical Doctor to Fx -- he loved it, said much better than IE -- and when he's ripe, will try to get him to use NS. (He knows of my affiliation, the discussion of which is what prompted him to try Fx.)
In the arguments over revenue and user base, Giorgio himself said that NS is a "low-retention extension". (Nice poem, descendant of Dante Alighieri! ...and Hell was sooo much more interesting than Heaven!) People d/l it, get frustrated, and drop it. Ask Giorgio or search for the thread -- it's bedtime here. I would like to see that retention rate increase dramatically. I think that's achievable, while still offering finer controls and tools to the power-users.
If I have to get more personal and brag about being successful teaching the clueless when Olympic gold medalists couldn't, I will, reluctantly. Or just trust me: I'm not as knowledgeable in coding as most or all of the other Mods, but I'm learning as fast as I can, so I have one foot in each door. I can empathize. Most power-users can't. It's not anything to be ashamed of. Just please consider the POV of him who speaks for the masses, who don't/can't spend lots of time on this stuff, but would really rather not have their security and privacy compromised if they were aware of the threats and given usable tools to protect themselves.
And *please* don't reply that "they deserve it". You can't fault someone for not taking steps against something of which they're not yet aware. What they *deserve* is a safe Internet and a safe operating system. Unfortunately for both purposes, the Internet was designed when there were, like, five computers in the world, or at least, no concept of untrusted or malicious users. Hence, no thoughts of safety whatever in the original Net. All patched on later. And Windows, like Apple, was designed before the WWW, and commendably strives to keep back-compatibility. Gates himself admitted that the popularity of the Web among home users took him completely by surprise. We're talking somewhere between Win 95 and 98 here. By then, there was so much legacy code in the codebase...
So we have to add the safety that wasn't built in at the start, not because anyone was evil. No one thought it would be used like this, and certainly never anticipated that the Web would deliver executables and that the browser, itself an application, would switch to becoming a platform for applications.
End of soapbox. "Good night, and good luck" (Edward R. Murrow)