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by userbinator 4136 days ago
give them the resources to educate themselves

Exactly. Instead of encouraging an environment of healthy suspicion and "I don't know what this does, maybe I should find out more first; else I shouldn't run it" type of attitude, we've gotten into a situation where people are seemingly loathe to educate themselves - and have been conditioned to trust whatever some piece of software says about whether something is malware or not.

As this comment a few days ago mentions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9032087

Exposure to malware helps build the "immune system" in users. This is similar to the biological concept too:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis

1 comments

I appreciate your desire to improve user security, but it is a huge uphill battle, and many things that you imagine will help will just make users switch to something that nags them less.

Teaching users to be safe -- assuming that's possible -- is a battle that has to be won in very very small steps.

>make users switch to something that nags them less.

Or perhaps even worse, conditions them to bypass any nags automatically without thought as to if they should or not.