One thing that I like about the ".txt.vbs" trick is that: Ok, Windows was hiding the file extension, so users where not seeing the ".vbs". But users that were s

One thing that I like about the ".txt.vbs" trick is that: Ok, Windows was hiding the file extension, so users where not seeing the ".vbs". But users that were still seeing the ".txt" and thought that was a text file, even though a real text file would have had its extension hidden! In other words, the "social engineering" trick only worked because users had been previously trained to look at the file extension to identify file type, and then Windows took away the file extensions. HN is frequently talking about how harmful the impact of UX changes that we push onto users can be. Here's a 20-years-old example!