Article Interpretation and xbmc Part 2

The article that I chose to write about comes from the January 2010 issue of Computer magazine.


In their article titled "Online Security Threats and Computer User Intentions", Thomas F. Stafford and Robin Poston theorize on the phenomenon of user apathy regarding online security.  In this article they do not address why people should use antispyware software, but why they choose not to use such software.
One of the first statistics cited in the article is that, out of a survey of 252 consumers, only 22 percent of them consistently used security software of some kind.  Another study done by AOL saw that 55 percent of the people polled either did not use or did not know whether or not they used antispyware software.  As a CS student I find these results troubling and somewhat confusing.

I find them troubling because when users do not use security precautions on their personal machines, for whatever reason, they can unknowingly contribute to the proliferation of malware and spyware.  I find it confusing because the first thing I think about, at least on a Windows machine, is whether my virus definitions are up to date.  But it seems there is a possible reason for the shocking numbers that were cited.

Stafford and Posten have put forth a theory they call Protection Motivation Theory.  Simply put, the theory says that when presented with a perceived threat, such as the possibility of a keystroke logger on your computer, an individual must be sufficiently motivated to deal with that threat.  According to Stafford and Posten, the biggest obstacle that prevents users from using available software solutions is what they call Protection self-efficacy, or a user's lack of confidence for using and installing said software.

This is really interesting stuff, and while they do not go too far into possible solutions to this problem, it seems that the onus is on developers and the tech community.  Through rigorous education of the lay-user and continual re-development of easier to use security software, we might be able to see these statistics begin to change direction.

And on a quick side-note, I finally was able to get xbmc up and running.  Through the helpful posts of my team members James and David, I realized that I needed to add the xbmc PPA  to my system in order to get all the necessary dependencies.  After installing the PPA, I ran the following command: sudo apt-get build-dep xbmc.  This built all the dependencies that I was missing and I was then able to finish configuring and making the project.