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kleinbl00  ·  3117 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How "normal" people use the internet, and how can we fix that behavior?

Jesus, dude. cryptolockers scare me. I legit called my wife and had her turn my Synology off when Synolocker showed up; I'm impressed that the hackers sold it all back. I suppose on the one hand the ecosystem is rewarded by propagating the notion that BTC does provide salvation, but at the same time, honor among thieves and all that.

THAT SAID: dublinben makes some mighty-fine points as to the unnecessary complexity involved in day-to-day security. It's a rare user that feels any comfort in the command line but if you want to keep yourself safe, you have to get comfortable there. Networking protocols and their configuration are not written in civilian-parseable language and you can obfuscate a lot of malevolence. When I show people how to view source on their emails and how not to demand-load images, they think i'm a wizard. You'd think every ISP under the sun could agree to pop up a yellow "there are suspicious redirects in this email" but my experience is even when implemented, "this message may be a scam" mostly means "this message was sent from a smaller ISP."

My suggestion? If you can figure out a way to make self-security empowering rather than degrading, you're halfway there. If someone can be convinced that having the skills to manage their own internet security is a cool thing (rather than the mark of a prole) they might just take it on.