Linked by Alcibiades on Wed 4th Jan 2006 18:04 UTC
Like a lot of people who have worked in the business, I find myself in conversations about computer security with people who are having problems or know people who have problems. I wrote this to save me from explaining the same thing over and over again to different people, and to save them the trouble of having to make notes as we talked. It was meant to be something you could give to a 'naive user' and have them be able to read and follow it more or less unaided, and while not being a complete guide, at least be something that made them more secure than before they got it.
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Member since:
2005-07-08
Which is where user education comes into play, my wife and daughter know better because I take the time to educate them. With my daughter it is standard procedure, if she is not sure she asks me. Music downloads (and we all download music in our house) is limited to samples through approved web sites (CD Baby, Amazon, etc.). She also uses IM (both AOL and MSN), no downloads are allowed at all. The end result is few if any security issues.
Most of the users you reference fall into what I call the "clueless" category, either by accident or design. And unfortunately for many it is by design, they prefer not to know because it is "too hard to understand" or "too much to learn". With children it is also a lack of parental control, or the parents being "too busy" to see or learn what Johnny is doing (thus the situation where the kids know more about computing than their parents). When I did phone support for Canon I took a call where the parents handed the phone over to their son because he knew more about the problem than they did!
It is too easy for many people to skate by and expect their more knowledgeable friends/neighbors/workmates to bail them out when they get into trouble (I know, I get the frantic calls from my wife's friends). And until these people decide it is their responsibility to maintain their computer hardware and software, no amount of guides will help them out.