Disabling security in the name of availability

[doctormo-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org (Martin Owens)]

>    This is a discussion, and your points are helping me to change my
> mind as I read what you say.

Always good to hear ositive feedback *evil laugh*

> The lazy ones are the experienced ones
> who decide that Apple, Microsoft, or Ubuntu. . .etc are responsible
> for making the system work, even though they are perfectly and easily
> capable of helping themselves.

Being capable of helping yourself and then not wanting to leads to
either the abuse of community support or lots of money to pay for
commercial support. I'd rather they paid for it to be honest; although
too many people confuse a lack of ability to ask the right questions
with laziness so as a community support person you always have to give
people the benifit of the doubt until they put their foot in their
mouth.

> At first, I did think of the
> everyperson user.. but now I realize that many people should not be
> asked to know so much.  Not everyone can become good at using
> computers.

No everyone needs to understand how they work in order to get useful
things done is what I'm saying; being good on computers is a very
subjective idea, I know plenty of cartoonists that are brilliant on
computers... drawing things on them. The idea that you must know how
to look after a computer should not be comparable to knowing how to
use one to get what you want done. Although it would be helpful if
users knew how to look after their computers, all we can do as
programmers is create tools which are very easy to use and understand
in order to automate or reduce the amount of understanding that's
required to do maintenance.

>   But to ask that every user should never have to know anything?  That
> is a bit far, in my opinion.  The security issues at hand seem to
> arise not from how the system works, but how it is worked by the user.
>  Phishing, spam, the 419 scam...etc. are great examples of the user
> problem.  People are being educated, but it is still happening.  Is
> this due to laziness or inexperience?

Well fraud is a problem, and the user needs to be educated about
scammers just like any other form of scam in the high street. But your
computer should never help you compromise your own security, it should
only do so with explicit instruction; things like easy sharing by smb
for instance aren't good because they allow people to turn things on
that are dubious; having protections in those tools which warn the
user for instance if he's directly connected to the internet etc etc.
there are things that we as programmers can do to help here too, we
just need to think of the users when we make our programs.

Best Regards, Martin Owens

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