Popup Study Confirms Most Users Are Idiots 568
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."
Re:Summary is WRONG (Score:1, Funny)
Taco's starting the drinking early today.
Slashdot summary proves editors are idiots (Score:4, Funny)
From the article
Re:Newsflash! (Score:4, Funny)
Osmosis? They gain knowledge from us through the diffusion of water?
Re:The actual text (Score:5, Funny)
A university study confirms it? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Summary is WRONG (Score:5, Funny)
I've learned to just click through to the article without reading the slashdot summary. It doesn't seem to have hurt my computer at all, but I -- Oh, wait. I just heard a bell. Gosh, I feel hungry right now.
Re:Newsflash! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The actual text (Score:5, Funny)
To be 'fair', the dialog box they were going for does have those quotes.
Re:Slashdot summary proves editors are idiots (Score:2, Funny)
Human
Re:Summary is WRONG (Score:2, Funny)
It doesn't matter what the box said or how it behaved, the fact is they clicked on it without reading it. This is good for me because I am a tech and am happy to profit off of the stupidity of users. Keep clicking you morons and keep me in business.
Re:Correction (Score:2, Funny)
An idiot has lower cognitive and social ability than a moron. I would expect that if the university students are idiots, then most users are just bags of water and foul smelling gasses.
Re:Newsflash! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:woo, I won! (Score:3, Funny)
Buy a Mac, so that your stupidity doesn't damage your OS! Apple should start a new advertising campaign with that one.
Obviously... (Score:5, Funny)
Well, obviously, after clicking ok on a popup, another popup should open that contains a picture of the previous popup and a message "This is what you just clicked. Are you sure it's not malware?" That should take care of it. If enough of us send suggestions to Microsoft, there may be enough time to get it into Windows 7.
Re:The actual text (Score:5, Funny)
Did "read" really have those single quotes around it? That would have been pretty 'suspicious' to me. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
No, but the word 'Cancel' in the dialog box was replaced with the phrase 'Say No More'....
Re:Even more importantly... (Score:4, Funny)
She couldn't remember what it said. I told her it said to plug it in or it would turn itself off. Her response: "Oops".
And you decided to spend the rest of your life with this woman, and mingle your genes with hers, and have her raise your children????
People who wish to mingle genes and raise children with _female_humans_ generally learn to accept this. Not that I expect all /.ers to understand.
Re:Even more importantly... (Score:5, Funny)
And you decided to spend the rest of your life with this woman, and mingle your genes with hers, and have her raise your children????
$5 says your wife asks the same question when you leave the toilet seat up.
Re:The actual text (Score:1, Funny)
The legitimate error messages of that form often do, indeed, surround "read" with quotation marks.
Wouldn't that make it """read"""?
Re:Study confirms most popups are idiotic (Score:5, Funny)
Clearly popups don't work in an effective way, yet programmers continue to use them for the wrong purposes.... What would make more sense is for programmers to design their pop up use better so that it is more meaningful for the user.
You have 1024 infections on your computer!
Press REPAIR to fix these problems.
A friend of mine came for help because he couldn't open his drive C: I told him he probably had a virus. He said that he even used an antivirus program. Which one? Here's his answer:
One that said "Your computer is infected!"
Re:NOT: (was Re:Summary is WRONG) (Score:5, Funny)
I've even gotten used to the slashdot editors not reading the articles. After all, there are a lot of submissions and it's not like it's their job. The queue is long, the day is short, etc etc. I understand all that.
But when I realized that even the submitters don't read the articles they summarize... that is when I cried. Something broke inside me.
Even that was a couple of years ago, though. I'm all better now, and life is wonderful now that things don't have to make sense anymore. I feel so free!
Re:Even more importantly... (Score:3, Funny)
It's effectively impossible for any of your confidential information to be stolen as a result of leaving the toilet seat up...
Not true. Tell me this doesn't sound familiar:
"My husband left the toilet seat up last night."
"That's nothing, my husband hasn't been able to get it up for 3 months."
;)
Re:The actual text (Score:4, Funny)
No, it would just be ""read"".
Re:Even more importantly... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The actual text (Score:3, Funny)
Indeed, but sometimes the expert needs to stand back a bit and think from the point of view of a clueless newbie. Like my dad, for instance, a few days ago when presented with some sort of "unrecoverable error has occurred... [OK]" message, his perfectly legitimate reaction was to say "No, it's NOT fucking OK!"
These acknowledgement clickboxes have become little more than a sloppy way of avoiding the trouble of coding properly.
Re:Even more importantly... (Score:3, Funny)
The other choice is to be more selective in who you mate with.
So... How goes the hunt then, friend?
Re:Study confirms most popups are idiotic (Score:3, Funny)
Why is the slashdot time format "06:08PM"?
Because seconds since the epoch requires too much division for most people to bother with. ;)
Re:The actual text (Score:4, Funny)
If this is the dialog in question, then I think even I would have clicked 'Ok',
I would wonder what right IE has to proxy as my OS and terminate another program and I would get suspicious. Then I would think "oh yeah, this is Microsoft, they do stuff like that all the time." And then I would say to myself, "hey, this is some other person's computer, who gives a fuck?" And then I would click ok and finish taking the stupid test and get my $20.00 for being a test subject and get the hell out of there and then never think of it again, until I saw it on /. Then I would say to myself "Hahaha. Those dumbasses at PCU didn't know how to do science. Of course the subjects are going to click through whatever--they just want to get out of there. Looks like they got in a good journal. Man, that journal got duped. I wonder who the tards were who reviewed that paper...Hey look, a twitter post and I just blew my chance to mod this thread. Damnit."
Re:The actual text (Score:3, Funny)
The "read" version is definitely more common, though, for some reason.
Most computers spend more time reading than writing. I know this is insanely simple, but that is why you see more read errors.
There's a lesson here for slashdotters.
Re:stuff (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The actual text (Score:3, Funny)