Earlier today I got a call from a journalist at a media organisation (I won’t say which one to spare their blushes..) with a plaintive cry:
“I think we might have been hoaxed. Could you take a look and see what you think?”
It turned out that many websites (CNN, BBC, NPR, CNET, Forbes, the Daily Mail, Mashable, the Daily Telegraph are just a handful) had been duped in recent days by supposed research from AptiQuant showing that users of Internet Explorer scored lower than average in IQ tests.
A claim like that is obviously going to be essential reading for anyone with a technical bent, and it was unsurprising to see so many websites report the story.
Of course, when many people read the story they probably thought – as I did – that the research was bound to be a bit shonky. You can, after all, easily mislead people with statistics or use a biased sample to get the results you want.
But, fascinatingly, it wasn’t just the research that was…
Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.
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