In an ideal world, interface design is the art and science of helping users accomplish tasks in a timely, efficient, and pleasurable manner. This paper studies the inverse situation, the vast emergence of deliberately constructed malicious interfaces that violate design best practices in order to accomplish goals counter to those of the user. This has become a commonplace occurrence both on and off the desktop, particularly on the web. A primary objective of this paper is to formally define this problem, including construction of a taxonomy of malicious interface techniques and a preliminary analysis of their impact on users. Findings are presented that gauge the self-reported tolerance and expectation levels of users with regard to malicious interfaces as well as the effectiveness and ease of use of existing countermeasures. A second objective of this paper is to increase awareness, dialogue, and research in a domain that we consider largely unexplored but critical to future usability of the WWW. Our results were accomplished through significant compilation of malicious interface techniques based on review of thousands of web sites and by conducting three surveys. Ultimately, this paper concludes that malicious interfaces are a ubiquitous problem that demands intervention by the security and human computer interaction communities in order to reduce the negative impact on the global user population.
In today's era of the global ubiquitous use of free online tools and business models that depend on data retention and customized advertising, we face a growing tension between the privacy concerns of individuals and the financial motivations of organizations. As a critical foundation step to address this problem, we must first understand the attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and expectations of web users in order to create an environment where user privacy needs are met while still allowing online companies to innovate and provide functionality that users desire. As security and usability professionals we must identify areas where misperceptions exist and seek solutions, either by raising awareness, changing policy, or through technical means. In this paper, we explore these issues and report the results from a survey of 352 college undergraduates and a comparison group of 25 middle aged adults The results were at times surprising and even contradictory to the views held by security professionals. To summarize our findings, the students we surveyed believe that "an honest man has nothing to fear."
Assessment of student learning outcomes is a key process used in education to both evaluate students' level of achievement and to identify opportunities for continuous improvement. The most prevalent technique for analyzing data collected from direct assessment methods is to distill the data to a single measure of central tendency, typically the arithmetic mean. Despite well known awareness and understanding of the limitations of the arithmetic mean, it is still commonly used because it is easy to calculate from the readily available data and is familiar to most educators. This paper argues that use of arithmetic mean alone is a poor assessment practice, and an alternate evaluation technique is presented in detail. To illustrate our conceptual arguments, a case study involving the assessment of an intermediate, collegelevel information technology course is presented. For the evaluation of an outcome in this course, assessment of student performance for the embedded indicators of that outcome are shown using both the commonly used arithmetic mean and what we believe to be a better, more meaningful assessment technique that places individual student performance data points into categories using an Individual Indicator Metric and then evaluates the group's overall performance based on the distribution of these student performances across the categories using a Group Indicator Metric. The paper's concluding section briefly addresses integrating indirect (subjective) evidence, combining all data source evaluations to evaluate an outcome, identifying and acting on opportunities for improvement, and reassessing changes. The central theme of the paper is that the veracity of assessment can be significantly improved with minimal extra effort.
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