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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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It's Easy to Infect People With Malware If You Pay Them a Few Cents
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Good day for a change of scene. Repaper the bedroom wall.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Tuesday June 17 2014, @01:58AM
Conversely, about 20 years ago there was a casual study done at LAX by one of the local TV news stations: Coins of various denominations were scattered fairly obviously around the passenger terminal, then watched to see how long it took them to be picked up.
What they found is that most people can't be arsed to pick up anything smaller than a quarter.
Not me... I'da scoured up every coin in sight. Money is money, and my time is worth very little. At the time it was pointed out that Bill Gates' time was so valuable, that stopping to pick up a quarter would cost him a thousand bucks.
But I still wouldn't run unknown software from Mechanical Turk (or anywhere else), at least not on my main machine. I do like someone's idea of running it on a junk box or VM for as many hours as they'd pay me for. :D
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.