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Ad blocking has become a safety issue. My parents are at an age where they fall for things. If a malicious ad pops up and offers to install McAfee, some other
by beloch 1mo ago
Ad blocking has become a safety issue. My parents are at an age where they fall for things. If a malicious ad pops up and offers to install McAfee, some other form of crapware, or outright scamware, they'll click that ad and install the thing. Then I'll get called over when the computer starts acting screwy. If Google, MS, etc. had ever gotten together and developed a way to filter malicious ads out of their own ad services, maybe we wouldn't be having this conversation. They didn't do that and probably never will.
If my parents get a new machine, the first thing I do is uninstall or, at least, delete the icons for Edge, Chrome, etc.. On goes Firefox, uBlock Origin, and a couple other extensions. They don't care what browser they use. They can't even name it. I just try to make sure they use a browser that isn't horribly unsafe.
We should all do this for people we care about. Don't ask them what browser they prefer. Odds are they don't know or care. Don't try to convince them to install Firefox themselves. They won't. Just do it for them. Think of it like picking up a rusty nail that's on their lawn. Sooner or later they're going to step on that thing if you don't.
- tdeck 1mo agoGoogle doesn't care about this. Try searching for a locksmith in your area on Google and the top results are all scans.
- arcanemachiner 1mo agoHow would this scam work? Why would someone pose as a locksmith specifically?
- jagged-chisel 1mo agoSpecifically? Because it’s something people search for. Because it’s something people pay for. If the scammer can get you to pay for “a visit“ upfront, and never show up, they’ve made money.
- PokeyCat 1mo agoI've had this happen to me personally on vacation - we were locked out of our rental car, asked a person at the nearby place to call a locksmith to get me back in, and they didn't quote price over the phone. When they got there, they popped the lock and then wanted $200, cash only so you couldn't chargeback, which I learned after the fact is completely outrageous for that service. They had a lot of fake Google reviews that were glowing, overshadowed by the real ones calling out the scam. I've heard worse happening in other cases where they drill locks and then quote much higher than $200 after they do it, it's sadly common.
- WarmWash 1mo ago$200 for an emergency specialty service is shockingly...fair?
- tdeck 1mo agoThat's exactly what I would think if I were in trouble and hadn't done any research, but in fact it is not. When I needed a locksmith a few years ago, at night, it cost $70.
- lossyalgo 1mo agoProbably depends highly on location, company and type of lock. I needed to get into my mailbox after losing the keys. They wanted 150 for literally 5 minutes with a screwdriver (lesson learned!). Of course I'm paying for those years of experience as well as the drive over. I was able to talk them down to 120. Oh and it was during the weekday! I also did research prior and called a few places, they all basically said the same thing: "depends on the lock but probably minimum 100".
- what 1mo agoThe person charging you more than you think is reasonable in hindsight doesn’t make it a scam? It also doesn’t mean you can do a chargeback?
- coryrc 1mo agoInstead of getting a local locksmith, it's a "lead gen" service which charges the locksmith $100 or something to get your info. They're placed on the map, but aren't actually there. The only thing that should come up is actual local locksmiths.
- technion 1mo agoTo give my example, if you search for locksmiths or plumbers or any sorts of trades you'll land on a page for "small family locksmith in your small suburb name". Except the site has thousands of urls with the same exact content and pictures, one for every suburb in Australia. Gary the small business owner does not live in my street. As far as I can tell its a national company with an overseas call center, the scam is that it looks like a local company - at least they can sell a lead gen to someone that can open my lock.
- tdeck 1mo agoThey send out someone in an unmarked van who doesn't have a locksmith license (at least in CA these are a legal requirement and they are required to show it to you). When you ask to see it they tell you they keep it at the office for "safety". That was the extent of my personal experience. I've read that if you let them work on your property, they will claim your bog-standard lock is unpickable, and charge you an exorbitant amount to drill it (destroying the lock) and replace it. Almost everyone who calls a locksmith is in a hurry, dealing with something unfamiliar, so people are susceptible to this.
- cwnyth 1mo agoThe better thing would be to hold Google directly accountable for every malicious ad they allow through their network. If they cannot do that, they should not be in business selling ads then. Yes, that means amending the law (in the US). But the law as it is written facilitates crime.
- siliconc0w 1mo agoAgreed It's not just malicious software ads, they also sell ads to entities mitming every government service.
- bborud 1mo agoHow would one hold Google accountable? By fining them $1bn? $10bn? $100bn? To them it is just the cost of doing business. We're beyond holding huge companies accountable. The only way they could be held accountable is if there was personal risk involved for the CEOs. There isn't.
- mschuster91 1mo ago> How would one hold Google accountable? By fining them $1bn? $10bn? $100bn? To them it is just the cost of doing business. Percentage of global gross revenue like the EU's GDPR does seems to work effectively enough for a scare tactic.
- dylan604 1mo agoAt this point, breaking them up into smaller companies. Then start fining the individual companies so the balance sheets feel the fine more. Increase the fines exponentially for each violation.
- cwnyth 1mo agoThe other option is jailing those who direct companies to break laws. It works for criminal organizations, why doesn't it work for companies?
- 1mo ago
- wtallis 1mo agoAd blocking has always been a safety issue.
- noisy_boy 1mo agoRaspberry pi + adguard + tailscale could be a good solution for you. Browser agnostic, you get an admin dashboard to manage the white/blacklists, see logs of the attempts and other goodies. Bonus, this combination works on mobile too. The only nit I have is that after restarting the phone, tailscale may not auto-start.
- dylan604 1mo agoYou could also set it up to be administered remotely so that you don't have to make that in person visit.
- CobrastanJorji 1mo agoTangentially related, but has anyone else noticed a big increase in fraud attempts over the last year or two? I hardly remember any a while back, but I've gotten probably a dozen calls this year that go "hey this is AmEx please confirm your credit card number" or some such.
- nickff 1mo agoPhone call scams seem to ebb and flow depending on which 'sucker lists' you're on. Online scams appear to be persistently on the rise, both against consumers and organizations (businesses, non-profits, and governments). I suspect that LLM-AI will be a boon for scammers of all sorts, but particularly for phone and video-call scammers.
- beloch 1mo agoEvery now and then I hear advice to the effect that saying even a single word to a robocaller will get your number flagged for more, so you should just answer silently and hang-up. Whenever I follow that advice, I get more and more calls. Then I start engaging with callers to waste their time and resources. I press numbers, try to get to speak to a human, and then generally mess with them if I do get a human. That usually takes care of the calls for a while.
- pocksuppet 1mo agoMy credit card number is 1234 5678 abcd efgh. What do you mean it has to be numbers? I can read it right here, it says abcd efgh.
- saghm 1mo agoMine is actually all letters, it's G U L L I B L E. If you're having trouble remembering, I heard it's written on your ceiling right above you.
- AlotOfReading 1mo agoIt's partially a product of the widespread availability of LLMs. Criminal organizations that would previously have been limited by the language fluency, scale, or technical competence of the labor available to them can now use LLMs to supplement their operations. It's also helping them target new populations that you're more likely to be in alongside traditional victims like the elderly, the desperate, previous victims, etc. They're pretty slow to adopt new technologies, so scam usage is still ramping up.
- yakz 1mo agoA problem is that the platform owners argue that this kind of stuff is why they need to put up a security gate that prevents you from installing whatever you want on your own device while also allowing you to install the malware from the ads (... maybe because they want to control what you can install more than they care about the malware?)
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- Eueudhsbsj32 1mo ago> On goes Firefox, uBlock Origin, and a couple other extensions. They don't care what browser they use. I did the same with my mom, but then her broker and doctor's websites started complaining that they will only run on a supported browser, i.e., Chrome. I've gotten her to still use Firefox for most other things, but it's not easy.
- zhivota 1mo agoYou can try Brave, it's Chromium under the hood so it's usually accepted and has built in ad blocking, and a one click way to turn it off for a specific site if you have an issue.
- TylerE 1mo ago[flagged]
- magackame 1mo agoDid you try spoofing the User-Agent?
- beloch 1mo agoA user-agent spoofer like Chrome Mask is helpful here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-mask/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-mask/ It's off by default and has to be turned on per site, but will automatically stay on for subsequent visits. Test the site with it to be sure it works for your mom. Most sites that insist on enforcing Chrome-only user-agents run just fine on Firefox. I've encountered a few that run even better on Firefox than they do on Chrome.
- pocksuppet 1mo agoEvidently whenever money and safety are opposed, money wins every time. Ad blocking is existential for Google. If everyone blocks ads, Google stops existing. They will do everything they can to prevent it, without going so far they stop existing for regulatory reasons either.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- WarmWash 1mo agoIt's not just Google, the Internet stops existing. I know people have rosy eyes for a BBS/IRC comeback, but that will never happen. By and large, people don't care about having to look at tide and Toyota ads to watch YouTube.
- _carbyau_ 1mo ago> It's not just Google, the Internet stops existing. Uh? No? The internet existed before being overrun by corporate presence. It still does. Advertising pays a lot, but take the ad money away and let it scale accordingly.
- WarmWash 1mo agoThe worst thing about the modern internet is people's innate expectation that others will work/pay to entertain or inform them for free. What existed in 1993 was a cultural blip, it's never coming back, so let it go.
- _carbyau_ 1mo ago> What existed in 1993 was a cultural blip, it's never coming back, so let it go. Ha! I am under no illusion it is coming back. But even though it flows like the unstoppable tides, ad money is not a requirement.
- pocksuppet 1mo ago
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- hackernud3s 1mo ago> My parents are at an age where they fall for things. If they're falling for things that they didn't used to fall for, that's sounds more like dementia than age.
- fn-mote 1mo agoThere’s a long way between perfectly functioning and dementia. I want to say that I hope you never find out, but the twilight of life is tough either way.
- jolmg 1mo ago"Being at an age" can include having age-related illnesses.
- hackernud3s 1mo agoRight but an age-related illness that affects cognition is generally just called dementia.
- beloch 1mo agoNormal cognitive decline comes gradually with age to most people. Dementia is more severe, often more sudden, and can be caused by a host of things, from Alzheimer's to brain injury. Regardless, you're not going to take away somebody's computer because their brain isn't quite as sharp as it once was.
- hn_acc1 1mo agoOr maybe there are more things using the same tactics / scammer's reach keeps increasing. My parents "fell" for fundamentalism early (as kids - raised in it), for televangelists in their 40s, and Fox News in their 70s/80s. Fox News so recently only because they didn't get it very often until about 10 years ago when they moved into a retirement home (didn't have cable before that).
- hackernud3s 1mo ago
- sergebakharev 1mo ago> They don't care what browser they use. They can't even name it. You could even extend that to OS as well.
- sneak 1mo ago> If a malicious ad pops up and offers to install McAfee, some other form of crapware, or outright scamware, they'll click that ad and install the thing. This has been solved on iOS. It’s not an ads problem.
- krackers 1mo agoHow? Can't apps link you to the app store where you have to make an in app purchase?
- dylan604 1mo ago> the first thing I do is uninstall or, at least, delete the icons for Edge, Chrome, etc. Does this run the risk of reverting with OS updates? History is full of OS vendors resetting defaults, whether that was maliciously intentional or inadvertently doesn't matter. If you set up Firefox as default browser yet the OS resets to using Edge, would your parents even notice?
- saghm 1mo agoMy favorite story of just how little people who aren't as tech savvy don't differentiate between different parts of the browser UI (which naturally leads to clicking things that are best left unclicked) is when my grandmother told me her "internet was broken" and asked me to fix it. I was mentally preparing for a call to Verizon or something, but no, when she finally showed me, it turned out that one of the bookmarks on her toolbar in Safari had gone missing (presumably she accidentally deleted it). After I added it back and she clicked it to see that it opened properly, she was satisfied that I had fixed the internet. To her, when she opened Safari, it was all just "the internet"; she didn't differentiate between the local browser UI and the web, let alone different elements on a single webpage being from different sources.
- jxramos 1mo agoLow resolution conflation of things is a very understandable outcome. It’s a lot of vocabulary to absorb to speak precisely about UI in general. I’m glad your grandmother has someone like you in her life.
- saghm 1mo agoNot at all evident from the story I told, but she had a stroke a few years ago and then only survived another year after that. She lived a long and from what I could tell happy and fulfilled life though, and to the end seemed far more concerned about how others were doing than herself (during my last conversation with her, the first thing she wanted to know about was how my then-girlfriend-now-wife was doing because she had developed an autoimmune issue out of nowhere around the time that they had met a few months prior). On the whole, she was actually pretty admirable in how gracefully she aged. In her 80s she decided on her own to move into an elder living community not because she actually was having any issue doing things on her own, but because she knew that it was inevitable that she would start needing help and wanted to make sure she was somewhere that was equipped to handle it when it happened. She also decided on her own to surrender her license because she didn't think she should be allowed to drive anymore and took advantage of the community's shuttle buses when she needed to go places. I think she would have been the first one to say that she did not think she should not be the one trusted to make sure that she could use her computer safely and that systems that required people like her to know what to click are unethical!
- lossolo 1mo agoA few days ago, my mother asked me to fix her YouTube because she kept getting something telling her to update. I looked at YouTube on her iPhone and saw an autoplaying video ad that displayed an animated fake system style pop-up button, designed to look like an important iPhone OS security update. The ad even showed an animation of the button appearing on the screen, making it look even more like a real system notification. This needs to stop.
- rectang 1mo agoMoney from confused seniors getting scammed is a critical revenue stream. Without scams, ads are far less viable.
- jwrallie 1mo agoThe problem is, Microsoft and Google themselves are doing shady things. A full screen advertising for using OneDrive on Windows and a full screen random request to use Google App when doing a Google search on Safari comes to mind. Apple is no different, when I press my Bluetooth button, it opens Music on macOS. I’m sure we can find rather strange things going on Ubuntu too and bending the definitions a bit, there are several pleads for donation like on Gnome, Vim and Wikipedia that are a bit questionable.
- BLKNSLVR 1mo agoThey've all spent too long getting high on their own supply. The longer a company is able to profits from something, the less they'll be able to see that it may even possibly be a net negative for society.
- CGMthrowaway 1mo ago>Ad blocking has become a safety issue. My parents are at an age where they fall for things. If a malicious ad pops up and offers to install McAfee, some other form of crapware, or outright scamware, they'll click that ad and install the thing. I've been using the internet since the 80s. This has always been the case. Even before graphical browsers.
- transcriptase 1mo agoNonsense. Before the advent of those first “you’re the 1000th visitor” banners or relatively harmless “worms” spready by literal .exe files sent by email in the early 2000s… most of the internet could be trusted by default. And at that point the blast radius was so hilariously small, some rando compromising your computer was a nuisance versus a threat to your financial wellbeing.
- kevin_thibedeau 1mo agoViruses were common on FTP sites and BBSs. They weren't all benign. DOS in particular had zero protections against damaging code. Bot armies hadn't been developed yet so malicious destruction was just as likely an outcome.
- transcriptase 1mo agoYes, and what did the damaging code and viruses actually do in that era? Software, OSs, and the internet at large were comically unsafe from a safety perspective. There was also a very high barrier of entry in terms of the skills required to take advantage of that, and very little incentive to do so compared to today or even 20 years ago.
- kevin_thibedeau 1mo agoIf you got lucky, they just self-replicated onto floppies. Not so lucky, they would corrupt your hard drive.
- 1mo ago
- technion 1mo agoIt's not just elderly parents. I've sat in on many an incident where skilled people in accounts or HR similarly saw and ad and thought "I have to do this thing", leading to compromise.
- deepsun 1mo agoGet Chromebook for them, I know it is backwards, but at least they won't install viruses.
- kevin_thibedeau 1mo ago> filter malicious ads out of their own ad services It's worse than that. Google turned their exploit delivery platform into Google Tag Manager so they can be employed on more than just ads.
- BLKNSLVR 1mo ago> If Google, MS, etc. had ever gotten together and developed a way to filter malicious ads out of their own ad services This is the crux of it. If they can't block scammers from their own platform then they should be fined out of having the platform in the first place. The profit they make should easily cover it - unless they like profiting from promoting scams, in which case they should be fined out of having the platform in the first place.
- mancerayder 1mo agoI love Brave's seemingly easy and automatic ad blocking, but turning off shields for important things like banking and government sites is a chore. I struggled with domain whitelisting (if I'm honest I gave up on it some time ago as the recipes I found online didn't work). So I can't recommend it for less technical people. It's a step away from being the easiest way to control all that annoying content that comes at you when you're trying to do something else.
- ceroxylon 1mo agoThe kinds of banner ads that exist now are atrocious, as bad as they have ever been. Anything that masquerades as a legitimate internet or site service should be banned, I really detest the ones that are simply some sort of fake captcha, sign in, etc. They must pay the best because so many old forums that are/were near and dear to my heart use them to pay for servers, hopefully because they only saw the profit number and didn't consider the consequences, but you never know.
- LordDragonfang 1mo agoIt feels weird that everyone is talking like Google has banned adblocking in Chrome, when there's dozens of adblockers still in the extension store, including an updated version of uBO that works 90% the same. Ad-blocking is a safety issue, but luckily you can still block them just fine.[1] The only thing this heavily neuters is tracking blocking, but no one admits that because they know, deep down, that ~0% of the non-tech crowd cares, so it's not as good at stirring up outrage as being dishonest is. [1] If anything gorhill is to blame for the safety issue, since he refused to update his extension in-place, so any distant relatives will have the adblockers you installed for them removed, instead of updating to the fully functional Mv3 version.
- OkayPhysicist 1mo agoDon't try to deflect blame from the irredeemably evil fucks over at the Chrome team, who are sitting in their dark lair rubbing their hands together, scheming about how they can fuck the user over today. They are always to blame. gorhill made the reasonable move of not updating in-place because the new version is strictly inferior and you don't just make a massive downgrade like that without the opportunity to explain it to people.
- TiredOfLife 1mo agouBlock Origin lite is an mv3 extension and blocks ads.
- pieter_mj 1mo agoAdditionally, set a malware blocking dns in the router and a Mb-dns/DoH in the browser and move them to Linux.
- tim333 1mo agoYou can still use Chrome with uBlock Origin Lite. That's what I got for mum and mostly use myself. Works fine.
- mikey2410 1mo agoI've been loading OpenWRT onto meraki MX64s and installing Adblock home + tailscale. I have them report in to my Home assistant instance for firmware updates & can access the router ui over tailscale for admin. I've done this for my mom, my in-laws, and my brother.
- account42 1mo ago> They didn't do that and probably never will. They would if they were held liable for the damages caused by the ads they server, which they should be.