User-Friendly Firewalling [Re: ZeroConf in Ubuntu Edgy]

[Micah J. Cowan]

On Tue, Jul 04, 2006 at 06:21:59PM +0200, John Nilsson wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-07-04 at 11:37 +0200, Oliver Grawert wrote:
> > could you try to keep this terms off list in the future please ? 
> > thank you.
> 
> Or better yet. Understand that there is no "idiot users", only bad
> usability design.

I understand what you're saying, and I will refrain from using that
term... however, if you truly believe there are no such thing, you
obviously haven't spent enough time doing customer support/help desk. I
realize that many people who get termed as idiots are actually only
ignorant (for which you cannot fault them: knowledge comes through
experience or teaching)... but true idiocy does in fact exist (they are
often actually quite knowledgeable: knowledge != wisdom).

I do understand, though, that most things that get written off as PEBKAC
are actually fundamental UI problems, and not user problems. I would
submit that the firewall solution I was talking about was a more than
reasonable interface for the newest of users: the cited problem was that
it would teach people to ignore the pop-up messages. I have not seen
this to be true for Windows Firewall (though I'll admit poor experience
in that area), but I really believe that, if someone is consistently
ignoring helpful and well-written instructions, the problem really does
exist outside of the physical computer.

Security is (as I think I mentioned before) a concept which can never be
entirely "no-brainered" away. It will always require at least a minimal
amount of thought. Even if that minimum is to look at a pop-up dialog,
and think for half-a-moment whether the indicated program is something
to which you wish to enable connections.

Just my $0.02, naturally.

-- 
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer...
http://micah.cowan.name/