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I went to my aunt's house once and she was distraught because there was a pop up on her screen that said she had a virus and needed to click here to clean her c
by fnid 17y ago
I went to my aunt's house once and she was distraught because there was a pop up on her screen that said she had a virus and needed to click here to clean her computer.
I said, "Don't click that, it's fake." And she looked at me shocked. I said, "It's a popup malware thing from the website. It's not real!"
She said, "How do you know? How do you know what is real and what isn't?"
Man, that really hit me, not just in the virus case, but metaphysically. How do we know what is real? I had to really think about it. How did I know that popup was fake, but she didn't? How could I teach her to know the difference?
It really made me aware that computer skills are a gift. Some people have them and some don't. People just know what is going on.
For many of us here, knowing the difference between what is real and what is fake on the computer is fairly easy. Is it also that easy in real life? Do you know when that business man is lying to you? Do you know when some investment is a bad deal or a startup is a scam?
Don't be so hard on the users.
- axod 17y agoSure. I get what you're saying. It's not a simple matter. I was just meaning it's in no way facebooks fault, and not much facebook can do about these sort of scams. I think everything will be a lot better once the average user doesn't have the ability to run executables. All they have is a browser, which in a large number of cases is all they need.
- fnid 17y agoI'm not sure it's valid to say Facebook can't do anything. They did take infected apps down. That's one thing. They could have an approval and monitoring process to protect their users. People blame Microsoft all the time for viruses and being an unstable platform, which is mostly due to bad software running on windows than it is windows itself. Sure you could say they could improve their scheduling or compartmentalization of apps, etc. My point is that Facebook is the medium and they can do something. Apple does something with the app store. I am biased though. I don't have a lot of sympathy for facebook or their users. I don't have a fb account and don't really care to, but that's beside the point. Facebook is the vector for the vector and they can do something and have done some things already. They could do more. Why don't they? because any restrictions slow growth and that's all the care about. They don't care about the individual users, they care about the graph.
- axod 17y ago>> "Why don't they? because any restrictions slow growth and that's all the care about. They don't care about the individual users, they care about the graph." I think that's pretty bizarre. I seriously doubt they're purposely not removing apps that try to get the user to download executable code, in order to grow their userbase faster.
- fnid 17y agoI didn't say they purposely weren't removing apps to promote growth. I'm saying they aren't doing other things to avoid inhibiting growth. Things like a review process, monitoring, etc.