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You can't protect against the 80 year old Marthas who IS GOING to click the link regarding her 10,000,000$ payment from the Nigerian prince. She IS GOING to dow

You can't protect against the 80 year old Marthas who IS GOING to click the link regarding her 10,000,000$ payment from the Nigerian prince. She IS GOING to download and install the bank transfer program, and she is going to compromise the entire network. You can't get rid of the Marthas because the Marthas have been here 30 years and hangs out with everyone from the company on weekends, and probably knows more about the business than anyone even if you wanted to get rid of her.

handrous 5y ago
Worse, it's not just ancient Marthas. A high percentage of younger generations—including those who grew up with desktop computers, so you can't just say "oh it's the iPhone's fault"—use computers essentially by rote and habit, without a conceptual understanding of much of it, and I don't mean in a theoretical CS-type sense, but more like plugging in a USB drive and knowing one specific place on one specific kind of window, reached by clicking one particular icon to find it in, and being totally lost if it's not there and/or concerned or confused if it's got a different name than the totally different USB drive you used last week, versus having some sense of what happens when you connect a disk and the sort of place you might be able to find it. It's the difference between "I get there by clicking this, then that" and "I get there by opening my file manager and navigating to what I need". They're saying the same thing, but one implies some understanding, and a resultant resilience and flexibility in use of the computer. The former are following a script with most everything they do, while the latter have enough understanding to think in categories of behavior and to predict or explain things, at least a little, which doesn't make them immune to phishing, but does make them significantly harder targets. The latter sort are less common than one might hope, even among those younger than Martha, though, which becomes clear if you talk to people who work in non-technical offices—bearing in mind that all but the oldest workers are now mostly Gen X and Millennials, with only a few raised-on-phones Gen Z so far. Overall, I'd say all signs point to every general-purpose desktop operating system being a usability and security disaster for at least half the population of non-oldsters.

handrous 5y ago

Worse, it's not just ancient Marthas. A high percentage of younger generations—including those who grew up with desktop computers, so you can't just say "oh it's the iPhone's fault"—use computers essentially by rote and habit, without a conceptual understanding of much of it, and I don't mean in a theoretical CS-type sense, but more like plugging in a USB drive and knowing one specific place on one specific kind of window, reached by clicking one particular icon to find it in, and being totally lost if it's not there and/or concerned or confused if it's got a different name than the totally different USB drive you used last week, versus having some sense of what happens when you connect a disk and the sort of place you might be able to find it. It's the difference between "I get there by clicking this, then that" and "I get there by opening my file manager and navigating to what I need". They're saying the same thing, but one implies some understanding, and a resultant resilience and flexibility in use of the computer. The former are following a script with most everything they do, while the latter have enough understanding to think in categories of behavior and to predict or explain things, at least a little, which doesn't make them immune to phishing, but does make them significantly harder targets. The latter sort are less common than one might hope, even among those younger than Martha, though, which becomes clear if you talk to people who work in non-technical offices—bearing in mind that all but the oldest workers are now mostly Gen X and Millennials, with only a few raised-on-phones Gen Z so far. Overall, I'd say all signs point to every general-purpose desktop operating system being a usability and security disaster for at least half the population of non-oldsters.