This paper presents the results of a laboratory study involving Mailvelope, a modern PGP client that integrates tightly with existing webmail providers. In our study, we brought in pairs of participants and had them attempt to use Mailvelope to communicate with each other. Our results shown that more than a decade and a half after "Why Johnny Can't Encrypt," modern PGP tools are still unusable for the masses. We finish with a discussion of pain points encountered using Mailvelope, and discuss what might be done to address them in future PGP systems.
The PDF of the study can be found here.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Sunday November 08 2015, @02:42PM
Maybe it's time to start having "Encryption Parties". Gather some friends and interested parties. explain what needs to be done and why. Help create and publish keys for people. Personally (as a user of KMail & ThunderBird, and occasionally Outlook with an Entrust plug-in) it's pretty easy once it's set up.
I try not to assume everyone's incapable of learning. Many people are more adaptable than you think.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 08 2015, @05:02PM
That goes against the mantra put out ever since the release of Windows 95. Before then, the lowly secretary was perfectly capable of typesetting professor's papers in LaTeX or troff or whatever. They were perfectly capable of using DOS command line tools and curses-like interfaces. Ever since then, we are to think of people like this as idiots. All you heard from 1995 onward was how linux not only would never catch on, but fundamentally couldn't catch on because your standard user is too stupid to use any other interface than Windows. The whole argument for not switching institutions from Windows to linux was the horrible effort it would take to "retrain" everyone to use the new system, yet the UI for Windows changes dramatically from major release to major release, but somehow the "stupid" users are able to cope without companies going under from the weight of their re-training budgets.
It isn't just on the Windows side either. There are plenty of people on the linux side (and you can see them in various posts here) who discourage neophytes because they fancy themselves to be computer gurus versed in the holy ways, and we can't sully ourselves with stupid "Joe Sixpacks" in linuxland. For some, we can't have "normal" people using linux because it might get popular, then it wouldn't be cool. For them it is far better to keep out the "lusers" while at the same time berating them for running proprietary software.
Meanwhile my general-purpose linux computer at home is gladly used by my kids because they don't give a rat's ass about this crap. They move the mouse and click on stuff and it Just Works for them.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Sunday November 08 2015, @05:18PM
While I agree with your premise that telling users that computers are hard and they're too stupid to get it is a part of the problem. It's not the only problem.
The main problem is that there's just a much larger portion of the population using computers and people are using them for things that wouldn't have needed computers previously. And there used to be a lot more consideration paid for people actually using the software. DOS was a PITA mainly because of the technical limitations of the hardware. The names of the commands could be a bit much to memorize, same goes for the flags, but you could learn the ones that you wanted and they tended to be relatively stable through releases. With Windows, you need to know where the command is located and that changes regularly depending upon the release. They've gotten a bit better, but there's no excuse for the moving around of various functions from one place to another in most cases.
Those receptionists were probably not expected to know how those systems worked without training. Formatting things correctly isn't necessarily as straightforward as it might seem, and I'm sure they were getting help from somebody.