Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 17th Feb 2010 12:29 UTC
Recently, a story about people mistaking a news story for the Facebook login page has received considerable media attention. It's currently being seen by many as justification for the recent trend in locking people out of their computers for their own protection - but anyone with even basic mathematical skills and a calculator should come to the conclusion that this story has been blown way out of proportion.
Thread beginning with comment 409806
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2006-03-27
If people confuse one site for another, when those sites look completely different, then what chance do they have against a phishing attack?
Exactly what I was thinking. Now we understand why phishing is so effective.
Another thing we should think about: I've heard people complaining about they should check "that little lock" before typing their bank credentials. It seems that people does not understand the freedom on which Internet is built upon, that there isn't any "central authority" that checks every site out there for frauds. This is the kind of people that the 20th century has grown up...
What we need to do is emphasize education. Let's make sure that anyone that goes through the school system takes a half-term on the Internet and Internet safety.
Yes. I don't know what happens elsewhere, but in Italy computing has been pushed out of the national school and is only "optional", and it has been mandatory for years! Looks like the elders at the government just can't understand that the school should prepare the kids for the tomorrow, not for the past, and computers and the Internet are here to stay (or evolve, of course).
Actually, someone proposed to push out every science at all in favor of poetry, music, and art.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 21:41 UTC
Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 17:04 UTC
"But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 13:17 UTC
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 12:06 UTC
"According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.More News »
Sponsored Links
Member since:
2005-09-21
I can understand they click on the first result without reading just out of habit.
I can understand they are surprised to not find what they expected.
But I cannot understand that, instead of trying to understand what's happened, they actually waste time to look for the comment box and write complains.
And not once during that entire process do they stop to think that perhaps if it doesn't quack like a duck, or look like a duck, it might not be a duck.
That I just cannot comprehend. One would assume that these people function in normal society, so they know what a newspaper article is. They know that just because an article mentions Ford they are not at the Ford website (or maybe not?). So what exactly is the process going on in the brain to lead to this? I think this could be a fascinating study for a psychology PHD.
The force of habit (I've done this a million times) is so strong that it overwhelms the logic centers of the brain in some people.
As for what to do about that? I don't think you can do anything. Google should not have had this site as the number one result, so perhaps we can work on better search algorithms so this happens less often.
I don't think anything else can be done though. If people confuse one site for another, when those sites look completely different, then what chance do they have against a phishing attack? What we need to do is emphasize education. Let's make sure that anyone that goes through the school system takes a half-term on the Internet and Internet safety.
We don't have any formal training and most of the people giving advice are wrong. Just like in learning how to ride a motorcycle, it has been found that if you learn from your friend you are the most likely to get in an accident. If you teach yourself you will be somewhat less likely to crash, and if you learn from a professional you are the least likely. Most people learn about the internet from their friends that barely know more than they do.
Barring formal education, one of the things we could do is to develop a really nice interactive tutorial that comes up the first time you open your browser after install (or after you get your computer). It would show you the basics of getting around on the Internet, and the major components of the browser, and internet safety. There are plenty of tutorials like that, but none of them are actually presented to the user when they need it (right at the beginning). I think a truly first class tutorial integrated into the major browsers would do a lot for new computer users.
Edited 2010-02-17 15:37 UTC