Pantha Corporation

User Education Is Not the Answer to Security Problems (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

I spotted and appreciated this glimpse of the author's political opinion :
" Second, user education puts the burden on the wrong shoulders. It's like the old Wild West, where the answer to crime was that every man carried a gun. In civilized society, we've abandoned this approach in favor of a professional police force to deal with criminals. When there is a mismatch between technology and people, the answer should not be to change the humans. The answer should be to change the computers. Computers and the Internet were both developed under the assumptions that everyone was trustworthy and there would never be any crime. That's obviously no longer true, and we need to rearchitect the technology accordingly. Even the Old West eventually transitioned to laws, courts, police, and jails."

A comparison right on the spot !

Posted by the only a at 12:09 PM | Permalink

I love this guy. Having spend at least 2 hours on trying to figure out (once again, will I ever learn?) how to position an element with CSS instead of TABLES I did a google search on why CSS sucks and landed on this magical site. The author speaks me from the heart. There are many benefits of CSS but there is a point where you have to stop wanting to go "all the way" with it. Because HTML was at one point a language that was readable and structured! CascadingStyleSheets can - if positioning and tag-raping (like using uls to display table-like structures) is not used across the place - help you. No doubt. And I love it when it comes to controlling how things look like but NOT where I position my elements.
Here and there, I admit to use CSS to even do that. But look at our navigation header. It took me about 15 minutes to do it with table. Can you do it in that time (having it work across browsers btw) in CSS? Please, I challenge you to. Maybe I'm getting old and lame.

Posted by bjoern at 06:43 PM | Permalink

A funny feeling when certain ideas swirl through meme space and similar thoughts occur to physically very distant people. This occured to me when I read a column on PBS from Cringely (link). He talks about creating a distributed network of nodes to backup data to. One of the basic principles he states should be that users could backup only as much they provide to the system at large.
Couldn't agree more, I came to that exact conclusion myself a couple of months ago. I was thinking of a general purpose storage system at first. However, an associate of mine pointed out that it would be great to have an easy to use backup software and boom I came to the same idea as Mr. Cringely.
The challenge might be of a technical nature at first. Once the technology is in place though I see that the issue will more be one of 1) building a software that will be ultimately easy to use and 2) finding a working business model if ever you want to make money with this.

Posted by bjoern at 03:58 PM | Permalink