¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Same user, more than one computer?

I’m guessing that you had to take this photo in January, so your face is fully healed from the feline claw marks by the time Christmas comes along.

This is now what spammers are doing. I’ve got about 50 different “companies” offering their services complete with follow up, meeting bookings, reminders and encouragement to sign up now, then come the threats or request for acknowledgement, then they change their email address and start from the top.

Come to think about it, it’s probably more like 100 different attempts, each with their own repeating thread.

99% automatically land in my spam folder, but it’s just ludicrous. It also makes actual commerce via email pretty much impossible.

I’ve had offers for lead generation, appointment setting, transcript services, SEO, website redesigns, app development, social media marketing and management, investment opportunities, offers for speaking engagements, conference sponsorships, purchasing and product offers, the list is endless.

People don’t agree on anything, ever. What you think of as “normal” is absurd to someone else and vice versa.

I’ve always wondered what posesses someone to down vote a genuine question, but I’ve made my peace with it by looking at it as “people will be people”.

Today I try to read and contribute as I feel the urge. I don’t follow many, if any, people or communities and just take the feed that comes past my eyes as a slice of life.

It’s made for a lot less stressful experience and it allows me to (dis)engage as my energy levels permit.

I hope you find your way … life is amazing and diverse and there’s plenty of fun and interesting things to experience.

Consider the complexity of getting this right:

https://youtu.be/D89ngRr4uZg

Where are you hearing this?

And now you know why we’ve been telling you not to use Telegram.

Right here is where the rubber meets the road. If the GDPR isn’t enforced, the outcome is worse for everyone because the companies in breach will point out that nobody has successfully won a judgement against them, so in other words, they’ve done nothing wrong, whilst all the while they’ll sell your private information out the side door to the highest bidder.

She LOVES you.

Also, sleep with one eye open at all times …

For me the icing on the cake on that image is the “Translate” link which makes me wonder how you might translate this into say Klingon or CEO talk or ELI 5.

Other than that, it’s a sad state of affairs that we’ve allowed this to happen unchecked and wholesale across the planet.

You don’t need to.

By using metrics like IP address , age, gender, race, religion, city, workplace, application, website, favourite song, colour and flavour, throw in a few more questions and you can lucratively target specific groups of people.

By COMBINING those metrics you can target extremely small groups of people, groups with precisely ONE member.

No need for a unique GUID at all.

I’ve been writing software for a very long time. Users are essentially stupid and lazy. They don’t read what’s on a screen, even if it’s the only thing on the screen, even if you don’t give them any other options than clicking “Ok”.

When I say stupid, it’s not that they’re dumb, it’s that their mental model of the world doesn’t match the computer one, saying things like: “well, that’s stupid, it should be like this”, followed by a completely illogical and unimplementable world view of the problem they think is being solved.

For the majority of humanity, computers are magic and no amount of arguing here is going to change this in our lifetime. It’s why AI is welcomed with open arms and no thought to its reality.

That’s not at all true. We no longer expect drivers to change sparkplugs (or batteries), even checking oil levels is beyond most, let alone using a manual gearbox or disabling airbags.

You have to understand that the fact that you’re here in this community participating in this discussion already puts you in a very small subset of humanity with technology skills not in evidence in the general public.

I don’t think anyone is advocating turning off the side loading features, unless I missed something, but the complaints here appear that you have to do extra work to bypass security, which is not something I understand.

It appears that you think that I’m holding contradictory opinions. It’s possible.

The “ICT aware” population is not what I’m concerned about and whilst that likely excludes both of us, it’s the retired widow who needs a phone to track her diary and call an ambulance, it’s the pig farmer who uses 123456789 as their email password and uses internet banking to pay his employees, it’s the impatient mother of three who is running between venues to get her kids to drama, soccer and music lessons.

I have made house calls to these actual people and hundreds more who do not, will not, cannot, read warnings. They simply don’t have the context to understand their severity. They don’t understand why a camera has no requirement to read your address book or connect to the internet. They don’t understand what a calculator needs to keep your screen on, or not. They “don’t have anything to hide” and have no understanding how their address book and diary can be used to defraud them of their life savings.

I’ve spent a lifetime educating people like this. It’s a drop in the ocean and all that happens is I’m pissing in the wind getting wet.

Is locking down Android helpful for you and I, perhaps not. But if I don’t get a phonecall in the middle of the night because one of my clients just lost their life savings because their phone got “hacked”, I’m a happy little vegimite.

Linux isn’t ready for prime time because novice users have no chance to just do simple stuff like plug in a phone, download a video and tweak it, let alone open a spreadsheet or make a Christmas card and print it out.

You and I can do this, my partner cannot.

Another way to look at this is a 30 year academic with Mac and Windows experience who cannot figure out how to migrate to Linux.

Actually, no you cannot. You need to adjust and grant permissions for anything you install on a Mac OS system today.

Source: I own a Mac, it’s less than six months old. Installing stuff is full of permission requests.

As for Linux, I’ve used and installed it for over 25 years. It’s not ready for 3 billion home users and at the rate it’s going, it won’t ever get there.

Yes, I know, Android is Linux, well done, here’s an elephant stamp.

Happy to debate.

According to the article there are now more than 3 billion Android users. I have no information to the contrary.

How do you expect to attempt to secure that many devices by allowing the platform to continue as it was?

You call it dumbing down, which I understand, but how do you stop all the click-happy people from installing the next nefarious “game”, when they already have little to no chance to avoid email spam and SMS scams, let alone LLM generated “custom targeted” exploits.

I get that there are users who use this (now) vanishing functionality, but are they representative of the total user base, or edge cases? Neither you nor I have any hard data on that, but I know that as an ICT professional, I’m an outlier.

I’m no friend of Google’s business model, but I don’t believe that they’re purposefully shooting themselves in the foot,mind you, I’ll concede that it has a poor track record in the past few years.

Let’s progress the conversation.

How would you protect essentially computer and security illiterate users from malware in a scalable and sustainable manner?

As an aside, I’m a long term (25+ years) Linux user and have used pretty much everything since the 6502 was part of the picture. In my professional opinion we haven’t begun to figure out how to do this in the desktop world, Android is so far the closest we’ve managed and I’m not seeing anything here (yet) that makes me see this as a mistake.

You have a very distorted view of security. The Apple computer ecosystem closely mirrors their phone and tablet system.

Microsoft Windows is an absolute shitshow and continues to get worse at every iteration.

I’ve been an Android user since the HTC Desire in 2010.

I’m unsure what the author of the article is advocating, since the “raw deal” appears to be geared towards making the Android environment more secure.

The author laments that they now have to manually enable security bypass settings and that some (they call it developers, but I’m not sure if they’re referring to Application Development or Phone Platform Development) “developers” can lock down with further API checks.

I’ve been an ICT professional for over 40 years and security is always a balance. On the one end it looks like a phone in a locked room, inaccessible to anyone, on the other end it’s a free-for-all, open to anyone.

I’m not at all sure what the author wants, except for wanting to roll back time to something less secure.