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It's Easy to Infect People With Malware If You Pay Them a Few Cents

posted by n1 on Monday June 16 2014, @10:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the will-do-anything-for-cash dept.

AnonTechie writes:

Gizmodo reports:

A team of four researchers found [PDF] that 22 to 43 percent of their test subjects would download and run an unknown executable file for payments ranging from as low as $0.01 to $1.

The researchers used Amazon's Mechanical Turk to conduct the experiment. Participants were asked to download a program onto their systems and run it for an hour. They did not know what the program actually did. As the amount offered to run the program was increased from $0.01 to $10 over five weeks, the percentage of users who ran the program grew steadily and topped out at 43 percent.

 
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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Monday June 16 2014, @11:00PM

    by Jeremiah Cornelius (2785) on Monday June 16 2014, @11:00PM (#56138) Journal

    Now, all your base are belong to us.

    I keep being reminded... How does that phrase go?

    "You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem" [everything2.com].

    We better not go too "meta", and apply that critique to the entire proposition of Soylent... :-)

    --
    You're betting on the pantomime horse...
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  • (Score: 1) by zsau on Tuesday June 17 2014, @03:19AM

    by zsau (2642) on Tuesday June 17 2014, @03:19AM (#56211)

    Soylent is a sociological solution to a sociological problem, no? The rulers were unkind, so the eyeballs moved elsewhere using the same technology.

  • (Score: 2) by davester666 on Tuesday June 17 2014, @06:58AM

    by davester666 (155) on Tuesday June 17 2014, @06:58AM (#56261)

    Should have used

    Penny for your computer.