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How about treating people like adults for a start? How about starting public awareness campaigns about proper digital hygiene. Not everything has to be nanny st
by Maskawanian 18d ago
How about treating people like adults for a start? How about starting public awareness campaigns about proper digital hygiene. Not everything has to be nanny state garbage.
- pjmlp 18d agoMany of us have routinely cleaned computers from adults that installed several Ask Jeeves and Yahoo toolbars.
- compass_copium 18d agoAt some point computers need to stop being treated as magical boxes that no reasonable person can learn how to use safely. We expect people who use cars to learn how to use them safely, we expect people who use lawnmowers to not stick their fingers in them. Computers have been a part of daily life for normies for decades at this point, it's infantilizing to suggest that average, non-tech savvy people can't learn to use (not necessarily build, repair, etc.) them properly and need to be protected from them.
- pjmlp 18d agoPeople have to successfully get through a state exam in order to drive cars in first place, can be jailed, get fined when not driving them safely, or forbidden for life to ever drive again. People that accidentality cut their fingers in lawnmowers due to lack of safety features are allowed to sue the lawnmower company. What I would agree is that it is about time computing gets the same liability laws that the rest of the world already has in place and no EULAs that work around local laws should be considered valid in any form or shape.
- voakbasda 18d agoDo you hate open source and want only projects where their authors can afford liability insurance and are willing to put themselves in the firing line of a legal system that can be both arbitrary and capricious? Because that’s what you seem to want.
- pjmlp 18d agoEven people selling on the street or doing charity work have to account for liability of their actions. Lets stop talking about open source as special snowflakes where everything is excused.
- voakbasda 18d agoAnd that’s how you prevent bake sales, lemonade stands, and more. You create a barrier to entry that gets raised little by little until only the biggest players can afford the game. Software liability would end all small open source projects.
- pjmlp 18d agoBake sales and lemonade stands are perfectly fine as long as people don't land on hospital urgency, due to careless work on preparing them with spoiled ingredients or lack of hygiene. Lets strive for quality in software.
- Dylan16807 18d agoNow do that again without careless work or spoiled ingredients. Do you still want them punished or facing so much regulation they can't exist? Because you'll definitely get that with software; even really good development will have flaws, and single flaws can lead to a thousand or million hacks.
- pjmlp 18d agoAll humans face scrutiny in their interactions with others. Software only got this bad, because we educated users broken tools are acceptable and fixable with computer reboots and anti-virus.
- Dylan16807 18d agoI dunno, people seem to accept most kinds of tool being fussy or flaky. But the special thing about security flaws is that they turn a one in a billion error into a guaranteed attack. It's moderately hard to make something that doesn't feel buggy, but ridiculously hard to be secure. If you hold to the standards of a bake sale it's the former. If you want full security then nobody releases anything outside very strict contracts.
- dml2135 18d ago>People that accidentality cut their fingers in lawnmowers due to lack of safety features are allowed to sue the lawnmower company. Anyone is allowed to sue the lawnmower company. Did they win?
- lightedman 18d agoThe amount of "Do not put hands here" labels I've seen on lawnmowers would suggest that, yes, someone did sue and win (or at the least got a settlement) and thus the lawyers forced the companies to put disclaimers and warnings on the lawnmower, directly on the top of the deck in plain sight.
- close04 18d agoOn power tools, appliances, etc. the safety features are at the user's latitude to bypass. They are usually a hint (don't microwave your dog), not a hard barrier ("I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that"). A spinning blade is covered by a grill you can trivially remove without permission from anyone. I agree that the defaults should be secure, but you can't force security on people without creating parallel issues which are maybe worse. Centralizing this power in a single point can have orders of magnitude bigger blast radius than a security failure on an app. At some point users have to take responsibility and be accountable for their actions. We can't just infantilize them forever as if a magical hand will always be over them protecting and having their best interest in mind. And we certainly shouldn't punish every user for the sake of some of them. The worst part is that Google gets the benefit of putting itself as the central point of control over the ecosystem based on a promise to keep users safe, but without any of the liability from failing to keep that promise. When the app store is chock full of malware I'm really starting to suspect that their goal is actually only the control. And all those people defending it with "but people don't know better, they need a hand to guide them" were equally misled. What do you think?
- pjmlp 18d agoYes, and when they fail to do so, there are laws in place for liability of third party, or when their own irresponsible actions affects others.
- marcosdumay 18d agoWell, computers first stop being magical machines that no person can learn how to use safely, then. And, honestly, if you think the endpoint safety problem doesn't apply to you, you are part of the problem.
- compass_copium 17d agoThe endpoint safety problem obviously applies to me and every person connected to the World Wide Web, but the grandparent was talking about The Olds who install the AskJeeves and the Yahoo! toolbars and Bonzi Buddy and... If computers aren't safe enough that a reasonably competent user, who doesn't open random files they found online and obvious spear-phishing emails, can't use one without losing their 401k, then maybe we need to just reevaluate modern life and go back to bank tellers.
- misnome 18d agoUsing a computer wrong doesn't kill people.
- pjmlp 18d agoDepends on what those computers are responsible for.
- jprjr_ 18d agoYes and no. The computer itself won't really do anything. But I'm sure suicides go up when people lose all their money, or get personal private details leaked, and so on.
- m4rtink 18d agoehm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
- anonymars 18d ago> "One [software fault] was when the operator incorrectly selected X-ray mode then in 8 seconds quickly changing to electron mode, which allowed the electron beam to be set for X-ray mode without the X-ray target being in place" Therac-25 is an important software-development case study but a torturous stretch of "Using a computer wrong"
- deleted 18d ago[deleted]
- misnome 18d agoYou are right! Computer use should be taught, tested and licensed exactly the same way of steering several tons of metal at 70mph are!
- deleted 18d ago[deleted]
- esikich 18d ago
- sunaookami 18d agoAnd e.g. browsers cracked down on it, removed toolbar support and powerful add-on support AND enforced signing meaning everything goes through their gatekept extension store and these problems still persist (e.g. addons changing the search provider, new tab page or homepage). Locking everything down does not help.
- pjmlp 18d agoMore a problem of those stores still not being properly validated rather a dumping ground for extensions, than anything else.
- sunaookami 18d agoA problem that can't be solved, you can't check every single program out there much like you can't check every single human ever even with cameras installed everywhere.
- pjmlp 18d agoJust because some people still die with seatbelts, does not mean they aren't safer without them. Yes you can check every single program out there, when digital stores are the only acquisition mechanism. Or as alternative, signed binaries. Coupled with liability like anything else in our societies.
- no-name-here 18d ago> does not help Is that true - do you not see significantly fewer of those installs on random PCs now than you did years ago? And that's even with the current situation not being what I'd call fully locked down.
- sunaookami 18d agoNope.
- bigfishrunning 18d ago20 years of being tech support for countless family members and acquaintances says that nothing can possibly make people care about "digital hygiene". An iPad, Chromebook, or similar inflexible device is perfect for most people, and marketing more flexible devices to them has been a mistake since the beginning.
- NorthSouthNorth 18d agoI don't know. Literally every single person I help with tech support makes me doubt this is possible. People do not care in the slightest and treat suggestions to learn basic digital hygiene as if you've asked them to a computer science degree in its entirety. Even super basic stuff like remembering a single secure password instead of reusing the same 2 or 3 basic initials-dob-symbol permutations that were probably pwned 10 years ago seems insurmountable.
- osmukka 18d agoIMO in that case its their own fault. After all they have free will and can use it against their own good if they so choose. Let them get pwned a few times and see if they learn.
- diegolas 18d agothat's so dumb on so many levels... should we strip cars from active safety measures and let drivers who are not super good at driving just kill themselves on the road?
- myaccountonhn 18d agoMaybe a drivers license should be needed to have a phone.
- diegolas 17d agomaybe there should be alternatives to using the smartphone for everything, personal finances included. my bank stopped offering a home banking service for example (yes, of course the mobile app still sucks), and it's a trend.
- preg_match 18d agoWell cars kill people, granny using the password “password” does not. We can’t prevent all levels of stupidity and carelessness. If people want to have dumb passwords and download malware, then so be it. You think they can’t do that today with the google play store? Of course they can. Most malware on android comes from the Google play store.
- nik282000 18d agoYou expect people to treat devices with respect and responsibility? The VAST majority of people use their phones to stream an infinite sequence of clickbait, ai slop, and conspiracies for 6 to 8 hours a day.
- esikich 18d agoI've worked with dozens of businesses over the years and you can't even get businesses with real money and consequences on the line to follow basic security practices. My current project is updating dozens of windows domain controllers that are still on 2012 R2. Aka critical infrastructure that hasn't been getting updates for years.