denyerec.co.uk

Last night #webdev on the Quakenet IRC network suffered an attack of what I am now dubbing “Red Button Syndrome”. Red Button Syndrome (Or RBS for short) is a condition present in a great many humans and can be summed up with the following example:

“Dave? Dave, I’m off out now for about 5 minutes. Whatever you do, don’t press that big red button.”
“Ok mate, no worries, I’ve got you covered.”
*click*
-Insert embarrasing consequence here –

I don’t know whether psychologists bundle this in with “The Human Condition” (TM) or not, but it’s observable behaviour. Adam and Eve, Adolph Hitler, #Webdev… The incident in question relates to a rather nasty Internet Explorer exploit. According to my stats, 50% of my readers have still not taken my advice and are still running the default MS browser. Well guys, you’re at risk, so whatever you do DO NOT click on this link.

Fire away Firefox and Opera users, you’re good to go.

Why do we do it? I don’t know. Perhaps curiosity really did kill the cat, then we ate the cat and thought “Hey, curiosity isn’t such a bad thing afterall.” Maybe we’re all just hopeless at taking other peoples’ advice and will only believe once we’ve seen things with our own eyes. Personally, I didn’t click the link. I was told not to, because it was a virus, so it did not get a click. Why other people find it so hard I’ll never know…