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“.. makes sense for those who are technically savvy, but sadly may leave our less knowledgeable friends, neighbors, and family behind. Protecting those folks, w

“.. makes sense for those who are technically savvy, but sadly may leave our less knowledgeable friends, neighbors, and family behind. Protecting those folks, without forcing them to buy into a walled garden of one sort or another, is a difficult nut to crack.” Anyone have experience of doing work to bail family and friends out in a meaningful way? What did you do?

type0 6y ago
You can install LineageOS on phones and Linux/GNU on computers for your family members, unfortunately that may lead to inconveniences that they won't be happy about.
cdman 6y ago
Here are things I found that worked well for supporting family/friends that are not OS specific (of course, if feasible, I advocate for installing GNU/Linux): - make sure that auto-update is on. Recent OSs are pretty good about this. GNU/Linux / MacOS are also pretty good about updating 3rd party apps (since they come through the package manage / app store), Windows needs a little help (there was Secunia PSI which is now deprecated) - run the user as a "restricted user" (ie. not superuser / admin). Again, this is mostly given with recent OSs. This also mostly blocks them from accidentally installing software (I generally set up machines with all needed software - like browsers, office suites, media codecs, etc and tell them that they don't need anything else and if something/somebody tells them they need to install something else, they should treat it with extreme suspicion and call me first) - the big one: ad blocking. I usually combine hosts file based, DNS based and browser plugin based blocking (like uBlock Origin). Seems like lots of scams / malware are going through advertisement and since starting to blocking advertisement over a decade ago, the problems my family / friends are seeing with their devices went down dramatically.

type0 6y ago

You can install LineageOS on phones and Linux/GNU on computers for your family members, unfortunately that may lead to inconveniences that they won't be happy about.

cdman 6y ago

Here are things I found that worked well for supporting family/friends that are not OS specific (of course, if feasible, I advocate for installing GNU/Linux): - make sure that auto-update is on. Recent OSs are pretty good about this. GNU/Linux / MacOS are also pretty good about updating 3rd party apps (since they come through the package manage / app store), Windows needs a little help (there was Secunia PSI which is now deprecated) - run the user as a "restricted user" (ie. not superuser / admin). Again, this is mostly given with recent OSs. This also mostly blocks them from accidentally installing software (I generally set up machines with all needed software - like browsers, office suites, media codecs, etc and tell them that they don't need anything else and if something/somebody tells them they need to install something else, they should treat it with extreme suspicion and call me first) - the big one: ad blocking. I usually combine hosts file based, DNS based and browser plugin based blocking (like uBlock Origin). Seems like lots of scams / malware are going through advertisement and since starting to blocking advertisement over a decade ago, the problems my family / friends are seeing with their devices went down dramatically.