Head Tale

Quora has a great question about the best software mis-uses that people have seen.

Because my family members read this blog, I won’t mention some that I’ve seen personally (ahem, Googling for a common web site instead of just typing it in the URL bar.  You know who you are!) but I will highlight a few other gems…

My grandmother would send emails by typing up her email on Word, printing it out, then giving it out to my grandfather to type into an email and then he would send it. We didn’t even try to show them the error of their ways lol.

Here’s another great one…

My mom confirming her password:

Password: password1
Confirm Password: yes

..and to be fair, a response to the pet peeve I mentioned of family members who Google the names of web sites they could just enter directly, this is actually a great way to ensure you end up where you want to be:

This is not a direct answer to the question, but a response to the most popular response [about Googling for web sites you could just enter directly]. I too used to laugh at people who did this. But it’s actually pretty smart behavior. An easy kind of malicious behavior is to squat a mistyped name (and think of a company like the erstwhile Sovereign Bank: would you trust the general population to always correctly type “Sovereign”?). By typing into a search box, you get spelling correction and thus, for the vast majority of popular sites, will be guided away from malicious ones that might cause you harm.

Of course, this hands information to search engines, suppresses sites with similar names, etc. But it’s also very smart consumer behavior. Basically, Internet DNS is an idiot savant: it’ll do exactly what you ask for (modulo DNS record poisoning). Think of a search engine as an intelligent DNS.