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> I think the sad truth is that computer engagement is required, but literacy is optional. You're right on, but I wouldn't call it sad. The population is expe

> I think the sad truth is that computer engagement is required, but literacy is optional. You're right on, but I wouldn't call it sad. The population is expected to operate vehicles without putting others in danger, not credentialize in how cars work. There are endless amounts of things we could demand people spend their precious time deeply understanding. We just like to demand tech-savviness because it's self-aggrandizing. Like everything else, the solution is to help people on their own behalf. At an online casino I once worked at, we ended up generating random passwords for our users. We had to, because otherwise attackers would lookup usernames in the large password dumps online and log in as our users. No amount of warnings on our /register page stopped password reuse. So we decided we could do better than that, and that "well, we warned you" was not an appropriate response. If you look around at everyday objects, everything is designed to protect the user. But for some reason in computing we're still in the dark ages of snickering and rolling our eyes at users for making mistakes.

esotericn 8y ago
> The population is expected to operate vehicles without putting others in danger, not credentialize in how cars work. Exactly! We require "car literacy" in drivers before we allow them to use them. Pretty much every advanced economy has mandatory driver licensing. A driver can trivially press a few levers and slam themselves into a barrier at 100mph. But they don't do that, because they know, through experience and education, that it's a terrible idea. That's the exact opposite of the approach that would have cars restrict their own usage into a narrow set of patterns and refuse to function otherwise. WRT the last half of your comment: I think that's reasonable. Generating random passwords for users is a fair approach. Account security exists on a spectrum. I don't think anyone (reasonable) is arguing against that, we're talking about mutable state here, actual _actions_. What I'm railing against, is this idea that every webpage on the internet needs to be behind a CAPTCHA that does a bunch of invasive data collection including probably asking the user to perform a Mechanical Turk task in order to _access a website_ without even logging in. It happens all the time. A website doesn't like my IP block -> forced through a bunch of nonsense. The site operator probably isn't even aware because they're using an upstream service which does it for them.

esotericn 8y ago

> The population is expected to operate vehicles without putting others in danger, not credentialize in how cars work. Exactly! We require "car literacy" in drivers before we allow them to use them. Pretty much every advanced economy has mandatory driver licensing. A driver can trivially press a few levers and slam themselves into a barrier at 100mph. But they don't do that, because they know, through experience and education, that it's a terrible idea. That's the exact opposite of the approach that would have cars restrict their own usage into a narrow set of patterns and refuse to function otherwise. WRT the last half of your comment: I think that's reasonable. Generating random passwords for users is a fair approach. Account security exists on a spectrum. I don't think anyone (reasonable) is arguing against that, we're talking about mutable state here, actual _actions_. What I'm railing against, is this idea that every webpage on the internet needs to be behind a CAPTCHA that does a bunch of invasive data collection including probably asking the user to perform a Mechanical Turk task in order to _access a website_ without even logging in. It happens all the time. A website doesn't like my IP block -> forced through a bunch of nonsense. The site operator probably isn't even aware because they're using an upstream service which does it for them.