Dubious Computing Conventions -- that hurt us.

Speaker: Aaron Peterson

Room: CC 235

Time: Sun 9:30 am – 10:00 am

Format: Lecture (30 Min + Q&A)

Difficulty: Introductory

Track: Security / Privacy

Presenter Location: In-person

Experience: several-th time speaking

Description:

Our computer systems will fail — often without even trying. As developers and designers, we *can* and *should* protect users from unexpected errors, data loss, and the many pitfalls baked into decades of computing conventions.

This talk categorizes harmful or fragile conventions into five groups: Physical, Legacy, New‑for‑Newness, Cultural, and Security. Aaron explores why some corner cases are so difficult that we collectively ignore them, even though addressing them would require only thoughtful defaults and better user‑interaction patterns.

Examples include:

Filesystem case sensitivity

Character encoding chaos

Mis-clicks and