I tend to agree with Kingbee. I deal with the most completely non-tech savvy people you can imagine, and I have found that there is simply no replacement for educating people. I agree with Larry that many people don't have the tools to protect themselves, but the "let us worry about that" policy that MS projects actually makes the situation worse.
A small example. I am working on a guy's machine that has become slow and often unresponsive. I find that most of the security settings have been turned off, and he's working with somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 different spyware programs running.
When I ask him about it I get the standard "Ain't that terrible that people do that" look, and he gives me the same excuse I hear over and over. He turns off the security items when he finds that they prevent him from clicking x, opening y, or doing z. I mention the Symantec antivirus product he has and he says "Yeah, that thing keeps popping up all the time, is there any way you can get rid of that too?
I'm not kidding, he said that. I realized then that to him, the security popups, the malware popups, etc., were all the same thing. Annoyances. When he bumped into a malware annoyance, he tried to get rid of it, and when he found that his security was getting in the way, he tried to get rid of it. MS and other folks who make security products tend to build walls around ignorant users, and ignorant users hate nothing if they don't hate a wall.
I can run around a year without any virus checker on my PC before I finally get nailed. With his machine burdened with numerous security programs, I am back at that guy's house once ever 2 or 3 months like clockwork. He's the perfect everyman example of people running compromised PCs. Kingbee's example is very apt, he doesn't know what the extension of the file he's clicking is, because unless I set it to show, he never sees the extension.
I am happy that MS is fixing a lot of their old flaws, and making serious headway into securing their OS. I feel that much of it, though, isn't what it appears to be. As long as they work well, and don't build walls between the user and what they want to do, they'll be fine. WHen they are used to oversee 'ignorant' users without making them understand what is going on, they'll just be considered built-in annoyances.
