Home Users: A Public Health Problem?

Hello,
A license to use the computer ... problem solved.
Nice one, ron.
Mrk

 

When color television was new, and also when it frequently broke down, my father used to have to take out suspect vacuum tubes, bring them down to the local drug store to test them, and buy the replacement tubes. Fortunately, solid-state electronics (and better Japanese-made sets) improved the reliability of color television in the US, so Saturday mornings could be better spent.

Our quality of life and global standard of living depend upon what tasks we no longer have to spend our time doing, so we can be more productive (wealthier), or more entertained, or relaxed, etc. For most people I know, Saturdays are better spent than trying to figure out how to use and secure their computers.

 

I remember that. Also the sticker sets. Place one sticker on the tube & another matched # sticker where you took the tube from. Wow. Think that was like 45 yrs ago.

 

Interesting comment from both sides of the discussion, which I happen to agree with:

and

My own take is that most people really fail to understand what complexity in developing a solution really means. It's not neccessarily intrinsic difficulty, it's number of steps to a given goal. I observed this all the time while teaching. Take a one-step problem and almost the entire class could answer it. Turn it into a two step problem in which one of the previously provided bits of information had to be calculated in a single step to basically yield the previous problem and the success rate dropped dramatically. Turn the second case into two single step problems which were not connected, the success rate went back up.

The same issues apply to computer security. While many folks can wade through the complex type of solutions, and many actually embrace this path for the learning experience, if you want to deal with problems like botnets and users adrift in a morass of malware, any solution needs to be low complexity, explicit, and with a very limited number of steps and options. This is why, at least IMHO, approaches that require continual user interaction or input will simply never gain mass market traction even if they have a high level of intrinsic power.

Blue

 

Agreed. Unless you are a "geek" or someone who has nothing else to do with all of your spare time to read up on every nuance of computer security, a novice or PC "dummy" will never stand for super duper "in your face" security programs.

 

I don't see the typical user putting in the time or effort it would take to learn what they'd need to develop and maintain an effective security policy and package. Some who's willing to do that would be at least a hobbyist if not more. Software alone won't get it done. No matter how good it is, it can't make all the decisions for the user and can't undo the damage one bad user decision can cause. As long as users run an OS that lets them install whatever they want, this problem will only continue.

There is another option. Instead of pushing security software at the users, offer them a service that would update and maintain their systems for them, either a remote administration service or a regularly scheduled visit to their home, where an actual person takes care of the updating, configuring, cleaning, etc. While this would be impractical for the install happy user, it would be viable for those who want a stable platform that they aren't constantly changing. With a remote administration service, the maintainer could use the top of the line security apps that a typical user has no chance of configuring. The initial setup would be time consuming, but once done, it wouldn't be that much different that dealing with multiple user accounts on one PC. It's a wide open market at the moment.
Rick