I always tell my very wonderful, yet fairly computer illiterate wife to be very careful of suspicious looking messages and prompts while browsing the Internet, especially ones with poor English or unexpected requests. Being an unusually cautious user, she often asks me what to do when she encounters something she hasn't seen before. One day last week she showed me her laptop and asked me what to do with this one:
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Since the only option is an OK button, my first instinct was to just go ahead and click it, but due to the strange wording of the message I was second guessing myself this time. Was this a cleverly disguised attempt to install some sort of spyware?Only after I Googled the error on another machine did I trust that clicking the OK or close buttons would not bring the otherwise perfect system to a grinding halt. It turns out that this is simply a generic error message from Picasa Web Albums, but without any context and with the odd choice of wording, it could easily be confused for one of those "suspicious" prompts that my wife has sworn never to click on without a second opinion.Google, if you're reading this, please consider changing this behavior to avoid adding yet another layer of confusion for the average Internet user who is already overburdened with so many other baffling messages.
"Baffling Error Messages"
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