[Openmcl-devel] Apple To Require Sandboxing For Mac App Store Apps - Slashdot

[Tim Bradshaw]

On 7 Nov 2011, at 21:34, Andrew Shalit wrote:

> That's why all those certificate warnings in web browsers have turned out to be so useless.  People say, "oh, but this is citibank so the fact that the certificate is invalid must just be a little mistake.  I trust citibank so I'll click okay anyway."

My intuition is that this is a presentation problem.  The people who wrote web browsers assumed a nerd user who would understand the implications of some obscure message about an invalid certificate.  But the actual users[*] don't understand at all: what they need is a huge flashing red light to appear on top of the machine with wailing sirens and a loud mechanical voice repeating "THIS IS NOT CITIBANK" every 3 seconds.  It should be impossible to proceed without signing, in a mixture of your own blood and that of a close relative, that you were happy to do so, and receiving a substantial electric shock from the keyboard. And, of course, that is the way browsers are going (this is, in fact, annoying to those of us who use remote console access GUIs which almost invariably have expired/wrong certs, but in fact the right answer even then is to make the cert right, because you probably don't want to be typing a root password to something which even might be an impostor, and some day some financial organisation is going to get screwed by that and, well, serve them right).

My idea is that things in the app store (any app store) need to deal with this: provide levels of safety but present it in a way that makes sense to non-nerds.  Apple are *good* at the presentation thing, they can do it if anyone can, if they want to.

OK I'll shut up now.

[*] I include myself in this.