RE: https://chaos.social/@jollysea/115694256001019814

Interesting article. A group distributed a bunch of USB drives for the purpose of seeing how often people check the contents of the drives. Predictably they got a variety of results.

These things make me a little sad, because the security experts always a have the foregone conclusion that scams and abuse are inevitable, and prosocial behavior (wanting to return a device to its owner) is what should be trained out of people.

It is also kind of optimistic though, because the findings of the study are that prosocial behavior is resilient even after years and years of messaging warning people not to plug in strange flash drives.

I don't think living in a maximum security prison of digital paranoia is good for us as a culture

at any rate I think it's clear that trying to train prosocial behavior out of people is just as absurd as trying to train antisocial behavior out of people if not more so, and maybe we can start looking for better solutions

@aeva I'm all for engineering the environment people are placed in such that it's impossible to do something dangerous or having common sources of danger contained to be safe. IT admins should be making their computers resistant to attacks from weird usb drives instead of putting the respobsibility on users