Unhappy Security Dialogs

To be fair, there is a very good reason for the "wait three seconds before you click install" thing in firefox:

http://www.squarefree.com/2004/07/01/race-conditions-in-secu...

You know, I've clicked on those warning messages for the better part of 10 years now, and never once noticed that some of them were red and some were orange.

It's exactly the same dialog, with exactly the same fields. The only difference is an icon that you'd never realize was different unless you had two dialogs open side by side. If a guy who writes software for a living can't tell them apart, I don't think the average user stands a chance.

If they actually want to fix this, they need completely different looks for the two popups. Or better still, simply skip the warning altogether for signed apps. If you downloaded it off the internet with the intention of running it, you're going to want to run it. Popping a dialog in your face isn't going to change that fact.

The redesign looks better, but conflates "this program is by example.org" and "this program is trustworthy" even more than the original.

The basic issue, of course, is that those are completely different statements, and only one of those can be easily checked.

Just my two cents: I think that the updated version still doesn't do enough to make the two dialogs look different. For something like this, I would like the two to be distinguishable even when you're standing six feet away from the screen.

Or you can go iOS route and allow users to install only the apps you've approved. Here, the user doesn't have to worry about installing a virus/malware but it results in a walled-garden situation.

IE9 doesn't even let you open unsigned binaries any more without going through quite the amount of questions and expanding collapsed UI elements, so that might actually be a bit better.

On the other hand: the only thing that accomplished is that I now stopped using IE even if I quickly have to download something inside my development VM.

The author's main issue seems to be with the explanation that running software from the internet is risky, since he removes that in both dialogs. And yet it's unquestionably true - running code from the internet be it signed or unsigned is a pretty risky thing to do unless you know what you're doing. His main argument for why you'd want to remove it is that most people ignore your warnings anyway. However true that is, it's certainly not true for everyone.

The advice really doesn't seem to fit the real world. Suppose you had a place with a dangerous undertow and a sign to warn people about it. If five people died one year after choosing to ignore the sign few people would agree that a sensible course of action would be to remove it.

Every time I see a dialog like that, I think to myself,

"Yes, I want to run it. That's what I told you to do, stupid computer. What kind of moron do you take me for, anyway?"

"a SSL certificate isn’t a 100% gauruntee of safety"

What have SSL certificates got to do with code signing? I have a feeling it involves speaking authoritatively on a subject you clearly don't understand ("properly-encrypted checksum" indeed).

I can fix the security dialogs to help dumb users even more. I see a solution where the operating system runs an MD5 Sum against the executable code, then updates the user satisfaction results to a common website that other operating systems can query.

When you download a program, you will get one of three results, a big green bar, indicating lots of users who used this code were happy, a red bar, indicating lots of users who used this code was unhappy, or a grey bar, where nobody has ever used this code.

Red = Do not run this unless you want pain. Grey = It's new because it's probably new malware. Green = It's probably good, (though it could be a virus masquerading as a useful app)

You could get around this system by spoofing positive results, but it makes the job of the virus writer harder, because they have to work hard to "make it look legitimate".