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If only the voting public understood about statistics, false positives, and false negatives. Even if Firefox did a full virus scan, there would still be false

by yodon 8y ago

If only the voting public understood about statistics, false positives, and false negatives. Even if Firefox did a full virus scan, there would still be false positives and false negatives in the results. The system designer always has to put their reporting threshold somewhere, and that always means making a decision to bias towards false positives or false negatives. Eliminating false positives means exploding the number of false negatives. Unfortunately, people like the OP don’t understand this, and yell angry things like “Firefox is lying to me!” Others here suggest FF should inject a bunch of weasel words like maybe and could and might. That’s a seemingly rational thing to do if you believe you’re informing a customer population that understands things like false positives and false negatives, but we have pretty clear evidence that they don’t. So FF makes a conscious informed decision to prefer reporting false positives over false negatives and then allows the user to override if they believe they know enough to do so. Sure, there are some costs to false positives, but they are dwarfed by the cost of false negatives.

rileymat2 8y ago
I would suggest it might also force some sites to more actively police their site for malware to get off of the list.
xg15 8y ago
And if only developers understood UX. The "lie" the author was complaining about was that Firefox is miscommunicating what it did: It warned that a concrete file was containing malware when it actually found a suspicious domain. Depending on context, that might make a huge difference - e.g., if a user got such a warning for a file they uploaded themselves, they might get the wrong impression that their system is compromised. As the author noted, simply describing the actual threat would clear this up. > Sure, there are some costs to false positives, but they are dwarfed by the cost of false negatives. This strategy has blown up a number of times already. If you present too many false positives, users might lose trust in you and ignore your predictions altogether.
- deathanatos 8y ago
  > And if only developers understood UX. I've upvoted you, since I think your point is good, I'd just add that as a developer, I've found myself on more than one occasion pushing for the type of UX being advocated here, and getting pushback from designers/PMs. Typically, the issue I run into is a desire for the UX to be "simple", sometimes simpler than the system underlying it actually is (or is even capable of being), and so instead of clear and correct messaging, you get simplified and incorrect messaging. (My current example of this would be ZIP codes. People like to simplify them to a geographic area in their heads, and then think of them as polygons, and then from there, think you can ask "is this lat/lng inside this ZIP?"; ZIP aren't polygons (they're defined as segments of roads) so answering that question requires approximations; those approximations are sometimes wrong.)
  - ssivark 8y ago
    IMHO, the most reasonable solution is to have a link for “More details” for the interested/advanced users to dig into. It’s hostile for software to fail because of incorrect assumptions and then give them no way for the sensible user to handle the collateral damage.
  - ryandrake 8y ago
    Yea, that s happens all the time in software. It’s the developer’s job to push back and explain the probability distribution of the results to the designers/PM so they understand the algorithm’s limitations, and everyone’s job to fight for the user. It needs to be a conversation, not a contract. Designer: This label is required to say what store the user is at given his location. Developer: the location sensor is imprecise. We could have 20m of precision or worse. The store location data is also known to be inaccurate and incomplete. We can provide top 10 candidate stores with their probabilities. The “top” one we return could be 95% likely or 35% likely. Your move! Bad Designer: Too much numbers for my brain. We’ll just show the top result. YOLO! Better designer: We could only show a result if it’s above a certain threshold. Or we could show top 3. Or maybe we need to talk about changing the requirement. Better developer: There may be other signals and inputs we could use to help make the results more confident...
nebulous1 8y ago
Unfortunately people like yourself feel the need to respond to articles without reading them first.
sandov 8y ago
And why the hell should the browser act as an antivirus?. It's a browser, not an antivirus, it should assume the user knows what he's doing, not treat him like a toddler. It's just a huge annoyance with no considerable benefit.
- konceptz 8y ago
  In the web security space its typically called the browser security model and there are differences between browsers. The browser is not just a portal forwarding/displaying the intentions of the developers. If you want to see one of the more obvious examples look at the same origin policy and how it’s implemented across browsers. Having said that, I do agree that browsers shouldn’t implement lots of crazy features but I personally don’t mind if they have some kind of malicious file scanning feature.
- Sidious 8y ago
  How likely do you think it is that this has something to do with some of the organisations 'donating' to Mozilla? As anti-piracy lobbying for instance.
- phobosdeimos 8y ago
  As an advanced user you can disable a lot of "helpful" features. Including safe browsing. Its in about:config Browser.safebrowsing.malware.enabled Just set it to false IF you consider yourself a poweruser.

by yodon 8y ago

rileymat2 8y ago

I would suggest it might also force some sites to more actively police their site for malware to get off of the list.

xg15 8y ago

And if only developers understood UX. The "lie" the author was complaining about was that Firefox is miscommunicating what it did: It warned that a concrete file was containing malware when it actually found a suspicious domain. Depending on context, that might make a huge difference - e.g., if a user got such a warning for a file they uploaded themselves, they might get the wrong impression that their system is compromised. As the author noted, simply describing the actual threat would clear this up. > Sure, there are some costs to false positives, but they are dwarfed by the cost of false negatives. This strategy has blown up a number of times already. If you present too many false positives, users might lose trust in you and ignore your predictions altogether.

deathanatos 8y ago
> And if only developers understood UX. I've upvoted you, since I think your point is good, I'd just add that as a developer, I've found myself on more than one occasion pushing for the type of UX being advocated here, and getting pushback from designers/PMs. Typically, the issue I run into is a desire for the UX to be "simple", sometimes simpler than the system underlying it actually is (or is even capable of being), and so instead of clear and correct messaging, you get simplified and incorrect messaging. (My current example of this would be ZIP codes. People like to simplify them to a geographic area in their heads, and then think of them as polygons, and then from there, think you can ask "is this lat/lng inside this ZIP?"; ZIP aren't polygons (they're defined as segments of roads) so answering that question requires approximations; those approximations are sometimes wrong.)
- ssivark 8y ago
  IMHO, the most reasonable solution is to have a link for “More details” for the interested/advanced users to dig into. It’s hostile for software to fail because of incorrect assumptions and then give them no way for the sensible user to handle the collateral damage.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  Yea, that s happens all the time in software. It’s the developer’s job to push back and explain the probability distribution of the results to the designers/PM so they understand the algorithm’s limitations, and everyone’s job to fight for the user. It needs to be a conversation, not a contract. Designer: This label is required to say what store the user is at given his location. Developer: the location sensor is imprecise. We could have 20m of precision or worse. The store location data is also known to be inaccurate and incomplete. We can provide top 10 candidate stores with their probabilities. The “top” one we return could be 95% likely or 35% likely. Your move! Bad Designer: Too much numbers for my brain. We’ll just show the top result. YOLO! Better designer: We could only show a result if it’s above a certain threshold. Or we could show top 3. Or maybe we need to talk about changing the requirement. Better developer: There may be other signals and inputs we could use to help make the results more confident...

nebulous1 8y ago

Unfortunately people like yourself feel the need to respond to articles without reading them first.

sandov 8y ago

And why the hell should the browser act as an antivirus?. It's a browser, not an antivirus, it should assume the user knows what he's doing, not treat him like a toddler. It's just a huge annoyance with no considerable benefit.

konceptz 8y ago
In the web security space its typically called the browser security model and there are differences between browsers. The browser is not just a portal forwarding/displaying the intentions of the developers. If you want to see one of the more obvious examples look at the same origin policy and how it’s implemented across browsers. Having said that, I do agree that browsers shouldn’t implement lots of crazy features but I personally don’t mind if they have some kind of malicious file scanning feature.
Sidious 8y ago
How likely do you think it is that this has something to do with some of the organisations 'donating' to Mozilla? As anti-piracy lobbying for instance.
phobosdeimos 8y ago
As an advanced user you can disable a lot of "helpful" features. Including safe browsing. Its in about:config Browser.safebrowsing.malware.enabled Just set it to false IF you consider yourself a poweruser.