Coding Horror

programming and human factors

Free as in Beer

Here's a data point supporting my hypothesis that users will jump through any hoops to get things for free as in beer. It's the SourceForge top downloads list:

sourceforge top downloads

Seven of the ten top downloads are pure p2p file sharing clients. The other three directly relate to media ripping. Somehow I doubt freedom of speech is high on most users' priority lists.

Even running as a non-Administrator account is unlikely to protect users from the fifty percent of shared executables that contain malicious code.

Written by Jeff Atwood

Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here: https://infosec.exchange/@codinghorror