This is all related on some level to how hard operating systems are to use, still, after all this time. Your Uncle Dave’s been using and building his own computers for over 30 years, used to be a programmer, but is confounded at how hard it is to do certain things in Vista that were relatively easy in XP. Why have I got Vista? Recently got my first store-bought PC since I bought an original IBM PC in 1984 — laptops and Macs don’t count. How the frack can MS allow something to get harder to use? If I’m having problems, what is Granny Jones down the street doing who wants to try something more than just turn her computer on?

As for this study, if the young’uns who are wired up the beehind can’t figure out not to click on these dialogs, what hope is there of Granny not wiping out her photo collection and her computer becoming a malware and spam spewing infector to others?

Some researchers have tested how college students respond to fake dialog boxes in browser popup windows and found that the students are so anxious to get the dialog out of the way, they click right through obvious warning signs.

The authors, who work in the Psychology Department of North Carolina State University, crafted a set of four fake dialog boxes. All of them contained the following warning: “The instruction at ‘0x77f41d24 referenced memory at ‘0x595c2a4c.’ The memory could not be ‘read.’ Click OK to terminate program.” One of the warnings was indistinguishable from the standard Windows XP system dialog, but the remaining three were had a number of warning signs that should tip off users to potential malware.
[…]
Of the 42 students, 26 clicked the OK button for the “real” dialog. But 25 clicked the same button for two of the fakes, and 23 hit OK on the third (the one with the status bar showing). Only nine of them closed the window—two fewer than had closed the real dialog. In all cases, a few of the users simply minimized the window or dragged it out of the way, presumably leaving the machine’s next user at risk.