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It's not an issue of permission, it's an issue of trying to make a computer that's safe for grandma to use. Criminals can and will convince grandma to navigate
by chongli 8mo ago
It's not an issue of permission, it's an issue of trying to make a computer that's safe for grandma to use. Criminals can and will convince grandma to navigate a byzantine labyrinth of prompts and technical measures in order to drain her bank account. That's the threat model we're dealing with here.
- nkrisc 8mo agoAt a certain point you have to let adults be adults and make adult mistakes.
- ceejayoz 8mo agoTried that. Didn’t go great.
- bigstrat2003 8mo agoIt went just fine. But more importantly, it's completely immoral to treat adults as if they were children.
- Der_Einzige 8mo ago[flagged]
- chongli 8mo agoWho's to say the criminals won't use a genAI agent to call grandma and social-engineer her so they can drain her bank account?
- apothegm 8mo agoThey pretty much already are.
- lostlogin 8mo agoThis attitude is worse than Apple’s.
- skeltoac 8mo agoWe are all creeping toward old age. Let’s be kind to our future selves.
- fsiefken 8mo agoI helped my mother out with a computer, gave her a mac after she called twic a wee about a windows popup. Eventually she became a grandmother, and later in old age, with dementia she stlll using the mac more or less successfully to google and e-mail. Intentionality, coordination are important for keeping cognitive faculty. It all sounds so easy, but letting her send e-mail through voice could create confusing situations.
- Gud 8mo agoNo thanks.
- anthk 8mo agoApple is the personified Enshitification among Microsoft.
- lokar 8mo agoI think a time-lock feature to enable “I know what I’m doing mode” for a year, after a 48h delay would be ok. Or something like that
- miki123211 8mo agoI like Chrome OS's approach where you essentially choose your security level at initial setup, and need to wipe your machine if you wish to change it.
- fc417fc802 8mo agoBut what if a scammer walks grandma through backing everything up, unlocking the machine, installing a rootkit, and then restoring from backup? /s (Joke is on you. You thought you'd be given access to app data to back it up? That's against the security model.)
- Gud 8mo agoNo, that would still suck.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- anthk 8mo agoAny inmutable distro with Flatpak will solve this forever. No need to restrict anything.
- wtetzner 8mo agoIs that really true though? It kinda just feels like a way to force people to have to pay $100 per year, own Apple hardware, etc.
- chongli 8mo agoHow else are you going to have the ability to revoke malware’s signing keys to get it to stop running on every machine immediately?
- NewsaHackO 8mo ago>make a computer that's safe for grandma to use People also forget that it makes it safe for people who aren't grandmas. The reason why you think it's just grandmas is because, for you to get a virus or your computer hacked now, it requires so many user gaffes for something like that to happen. In addition, it almost always involves typing in or telling someone your password when you shouldn’t. In the early 2000s, I still remember there was some ad affiliate for the cyanide and happiness webcomic website that, if you let it's ad load, instantly infected your computer with adware just from visiting the site. That’s unheard of now because of increasingly protective/restrictive policies set by technology companies. It’s one of those situations where if a system is working correctly, you won’t even know it’s working at all.