Posts by Stephen Harvey 3 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Nov 2007
Yes, IE may default to Live Search, but when we got my 11 year old a new computer and he was using it for the first time to search for something on the internet for his homework, he typed "Google" into the Live Search box, which took him to the Google home page, and only then did he enter his search terms. Dominant mindshare, or what?
At that point I set his default search engine to Google, although I was laughing so hard it was pretty tricky to aim the mouse accurately.
Not that I am keen to add more fuel to the "Kiwis are a bunch of weirdoes" flames, but many years ago, before parents were dissuaded from naming their children "inappropriately" there was a gentleman who rejoiced in the name of Malcolm Gramophone, and called his two sons Jesus Christ Gramophone and Gabriel God Galaxy Gramophone.
I know about this because my mother was a consultant psychiatrist, and was acquainted with Malcolm Gramophone on a professional basis...
For anyone who is interested in looking at some of the reasons why "user" security is such a problem, I would recommend reading Peter Gutmann's draft document at http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/usability.pdf
I don't think that claims of Darwinism in action really stand up to scrutiny when IT people, and particularly IT security people, can't understand that their systems are actually used by genuine human end users.
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