Take the Zone Alarm Pepsi Challenge!

So, after all the jibber-jabber between Zone Labs and 180 Solutions, I went and had an objective play with some of 180's software.

Basically, I just wanted to see which Zone Alarm "alert" freaked out friends and / or relatives more:

The old one, with "Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!" on it, or the new one which is so long, it looks like an extract from the Koran.

The results? Well, pretty interesting, actually.

I rounded up ten people (some friends, some relatives), and sat them in front of a test box. This is where I get all MacGyver on you, because 180 Search Assistant is supposedly no longer in the wild. So, pop-quiz, hotshot...what do you do when you need to test something no longer in circulation, and the Zone Labs guys went and changed their Firewall warnings on you?

Answer is, you take the damn bomb off the bus, stop saying "Whoa" and knock together a cheap-assed powerpoint.

In fact, so cheap that homeless people would likely feel compelled to beg on my behalf, because they felt so ashamed of the vile mess I created in all of, oh, about three minutes (and that's being generous).

Did you know, one time a homeless guy tried to steal my cheeseburger as I walked through town, so (burger in one hand, flying fist of Judah forming in the other) I decked him and for three glorious minutes, he was in la-la-land?

True story.

And the burger rocked.

Anyway, back on target - Powerpoint.

So, yeah - I rigged it up and what it did was this - simulated my desktop (the joys of the Print Screen button), and when you clicked next, it popped up both of the below warnings to each person, one after the other, in no particular order:

















The things you do in your spare time, eh?

The results - well, they gave me a chuckle. Out of the ten gullible foo - er - willing participants, eight of them were more freaked out by the new Zone Alarm warning (the pocket Koran version), than the old one that got 180 in such a tizzy.

Their reasoning?

A vaguely unscientific "Lots of text looks bad, m'kay".

And out of those ten people, only two actually paid any attention to the large text at the top that started this whole mess - the one that used to say "Dangerous", but now says "Suspicious". I had to point this big warning message out to the other eight testers, and they really didn't care very much. To them, large (possibly flashing, and sometimes with woo-woo noises) messages like that are things they routinely ignore. Part of the "splat factor" - the stuff you know you're gonna' get when any detection program finds something on your PC. Yes, yes, you found something, oh noes, it is indeed the worst thing in the world ever, and oh my, you mean I have to pay / upgrade / donate my first born son to remove it? Well I never!

They were infinitely more concerned by the all new, improved and greatly extended) "may track / keystrokes, mouse clicks / movements, websites visited, user behaviours, who you bought your kitchen sink from and what size thong you take" blurb.

When pressed further (apart from demanding to be let out of my house), they said the new "uncertainty factor" - may / might / could / should etc - played a big role in freaking them out, too. It's the not-sureness of it all. Put it this way, you know where you are when something splats up a THIS IS TEH SUCK message. As soon as it all gets a bit vague and there's shades of grey spilling all over the floor, it's going to take a lot more than a quick press release to patch things up.

Now, maybe the ten people I selected are just douchebags and I need to research this further - put the knife down please, mother - however, from my little sample selection, the overall majority vote was that 180 would've potentially been better off just leaving well alone. Ideally, I'd have used twenty to thirty people for this, but I'm running out of places to hide the bodies, so...

I urge you all to try this for yourselves, and see what results you get. Hey, it's not exactly the Pepsi Challenge, but then I'm not charging you 15 million dollars to moonwalk through your front room.

I'm not going to yell "Sha'mon!", or grab my crotch in public either.

Always a bonus!