Frost wrote:I work in computer security, and this has thus far been an intractable problem. People are fundamentally gullible*. Education is effective in reducing risky behavior, but only to a point. Add the fact that many players are not yet grown (with limited ability to assess risk) and we will forever be dealing with scams.
Maybe the general problem is that most people trust computers too much. They believe that a machine is more trustworthy to keep their data confidential than a person. Most people would rather tell a machine a password than they would tell it a living person. The machine could be programmed to immediately reveal this information to a real person, but this doesn't occur to them.
In the same manner that it's easier to ask google to recommend you some kinky porn than it is to ask the clerk in a video rental store.
Or another example: When you pay with your EC card in a store, you usually type your banking pin into a machine. Imagine the clerk would ask you to tell him your pin directly instead, would you tell him? No? But how do you know that the machine you are typing into doesn't show him what you are typing? Because he got it from the bank you trust? Can you verify somehow that he got it from them and not from somewhere else?
The machine is suggesting trustworthiness which doesn't exist. When you trust a machine, you still have to trust a human - the human who build and set up the machine. And instead of the clerk standing in front of you, you can't even look that person in the eye to decide if you can trust him or not.
tl;dr: never trust a computer you haven't programmed yourself.
