Albert Weichselbraun

is a Professor of Information Science at the University of Applied of the Grisons.

Why Do Street-Smart People Do Stupid Things Online?

less than 1 minute read

Bratus, Sergey, Masone, Chris and Smith, Sean W. (2008). ''Why Do Street-Smart People Do Stupid Things Online?'', IEEE Security and Privacy, IEEE Computer Society, pages 71-74, 6(3)

The article elaborates on the "user interface problem", prohibiting users from making correct decisions based on their intuitions. Examples for such misinterpretations are: (a) How can reading a piece of paper (E-Mail, Document, ...) harm me? (b) How can a phone call harm me? (c) What is a safe versus bad double click? Practices like outsourcing (handling payments by other Web sites) and browser bars which cannot display the whole URL, etc. further inhibit the user's capability to make adequate choices.

The authors suggest that every time the user makes a trust decision, the interface shall evoke the matching "real world" intuition facilitating the user's decision making.

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Suffix array

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The suffix array is a memory-efficient alternative to the suffix tree which provides a sorted list of string indices indicating the string’s suffixes.