Study Shows People Willing to Install Unknown Programs in PCs for a Dollar

[Seracen]

In a sand box - sure.

Agreed. I totally have an ancient PC that I don't care about. For a a couple hundred a month, I'd be happy to load that POS up with more POS, then wipe the damn thing and start over again.

 

[Nemu]

In my experience people are willing to click through most things if it presents it's self right. Installing a hard .exe is a pretty extreme red-flag occurrence in these days of insecure Java and infected adverts you don't even need to click to get malware. I find it so surprising people would ignore blatant red flags though. Maybe it's because modern windows throws up so many alerts so often you become numb to them.

22-43% is an odd face figure to give range. I think you could better represent what percentage of people were willing to install for what price as the study has quite a wide range of scenarios.

Indeed. I had literally just gotten home from a vacation a week ago and got a message from my mother about needing to fix her computer (due to pop-ups and slowed processing). I went over and looked at her machine and found that she had inadvertantly installed a bunch of random, unnecessary crap (screensavers and "Pc boosters" of varying types).

It's really easy to just bombard and/or frighten people nowadays when it comes to computers and security (lol LifeLock...) that I'm never surprised to hear from people who need help "fixing" their machines.

 

[Waaghpowa]

The "average" computer user is a drooling moron. I work Linux tech support at a web host and there have been a few times where people submit support tickets to help them block incoming spam containing .zip files with an infected executable, and the server owners mail users open them up. As if that's OUR problem.

Easiest solution, DON'T OPEN THE DAMN ZIP! If you don't know what it is, or who it's from, don't touch it!

Literal quote from a customer: "You can't fix stupid"

The people who are just as bad are the people with Macs who insist that there's nothing wrong with their computer, because Macs are so perfect it's surely someone else's fault!

I partly blame the education system for being so far behind in teaching basic computer science in schools, and I also partly blame software companies like Microsoft and Apple who mislead people who buy their products. Because "Capitalism".

 

[Grabehn]

And this is why I'm constantly looking over my mom's shoulder when she's on her PC, or my nieces, or any other family member.

OMFG the amount of times I've had to check my GF's PC because her mom just clicks away on anything that says "install", to the point were one time even the anti-virus got disabled. To then check the install log and see ten thing installed on the same date just cause.

 

[Strazdas]

Oh it's even better; one of the first times I got a drive-by infection, UAC let it right in, and then tried to prevent me from removing the malware.

It also didn't prevent Google Earth from getting silently installed on one of my machines due to a bug in Google Update. I'm no longer sure what UAC is really for, to be honest.

UAC was created to annoy the users to maximum degree, and whats quite ironic is that Vista of all things was the only windows version where you can actually turn it OFF, and i mean trully OFF not just this "its still working just does not give you warnings" crap. No, i WANT to run programs with admin priviledes. yet i have to force windows to do that every time because microsoft decided im too stupid.

 

[FalloutJack]

Oh, well now. If I have any real complaints about this poll, I can actually go on up to the guys at CMU and talk to them about it. Does the KGB have anything to do with this or just an independent sort of test?

My main beef: This only proves that you can fool some of the people all of the time or all of the people some of the time, which we have known for a long while.