And Windows is a huge red flag for this. Literally two OS’s working at the same time make it a shit product. One OS for legacy users who know what cmd and control panel are and the new junk system where they want to circumvent the first OS and slither all of your information to their shit tier One Drive. One Drive is iCloud without security.
Absolutely garbage and cannot wait to feel confident in a dual boot or just straight Linux because this is just stupid tech making people helpless and hamstringing them as per usual.
What are you talking about? How does an OS relate to the scams described in the article?
It sounds like they are saying that the operating system is dumbing down for its users, meaning users could be less intelligent and still use it.
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl and I believe two OS’s refer to MacOS and Windows, in regards to how they are protecting users privacy. Furthermore I think your point on the Steam Deck is in line with that commenter is postulating; that people have been getting more stupid and less able to navigate the technology they own. I think in this commenters perfect world, the Steam Deck wouldn’t have needed to have been locked down in that way.
At least, this was my takeaway from their comments. I’m not them so I can’t say for sure of course.
I’m somewhere in the middle of both of you, though more with you. In terms of usability, Windows just works. For as much as I’d like to prefer Linux, I think it’s absurd that I’d have to know the entirety of the ins and outs of the OS in order to use it at a basic level, which is probably rooted in growing up with GUI’d programs. I’m fine with CLI, I just get frustrated because projects I’ve tried using it for rarely work all the way through the guide. Basically, it feels like if you try to find any guide on Linux and any guide on Windows, the likelihood of (me) someone being able to complete that guide all the way through will likely side on Windows, due to the insanely diverse nature of Linux it feels like there’s a higher chance of things going wrong due to the number of steps. By having the ability to do anything and everything, you then actually have to do everything. Also, permissions and networking are just a pain…
Personally I think that’s just as crazy as having no control at all, so I’m never going to win lol.
@admin this is a result of the enshittification of technology. You’re no longer forced to learn, you’re only displayed a button that you need to press. Doesn’t matter what will the button do behind, just blindly trust that it does what it says it does.
Install our software! Just pipe a curl download of some random script into a root shell, it’ll be fine.
@Bitrot scams no longer mean malware anymore. Phishing is also a thing for example. And hiding full URLs from a browser’s bar doesn’t help with this either
This seems needlessly gatekeepy to me. Are you saying everyone using technology needs to learn exactly how it all works? People aren’t allowed to just use the tools provided to them? Like are cameras worse now that you can just point and shoot vs having to go through many steps for the photo to maybe turn out ok?
@chloyster I’m sorry if I sound so. No, I do not mean to get into the technicalities of the stuff. What I meant was the fact that technology needs to be a bit more transparent about what is doing, and to have companies stop trying to hide stuff just for the sake of a better user experience. We just need to educate more people into using technology, rather than trying to make it more accessible by sacrificing some power user features and capabilities.
It’s the same like knowing some basic economics to understand things like ponzi schemes or other types of scams (or simply being able to save more money).
I see what you’re saying. I do agree that people should have the opportunity to be educated to at least a baseline understanding of some things. If for nothing else but to avoid being scammed.
I mean ideally I would just like these companies to be held responsible for doing shady stuff behind the scenes, I don’t think having easy to understand UIs (and as a result, a bit obfuscated from what’s actually happening) and such have to be a bad thing. But maybe it’s too idealistic to want that and expect companies to actually be held accountable if the obfuscation is hiding bad stuff
That is not what enshitification means.
Enshitification refers to a very typical capital-driven developer pattern in which (particularly social media) platforms gradually forsake the things that make them great for their users and business partners in order to increase profits, ruining the platform in the process.
It has nothing to do with technology being easier to use. Being easier to use is better. It’s about technology becoming a worse product, the opposite of being easy to use.
We should not be deliberately gatekeep technology to make it hard to use to weed out less knowledgeable users. That is some elitist bullcrap. We should hold all the platforms to a higher standard when they facilitate these scams and we should be serious about investigating and getting rid of the scammers.
I have to say that learning how to pick out the actual download button from all the other “download” buttons is one of the most crucial steps in making yourself resistant to online scams.
Really, yeah, people today use computers on more than an hourly basis. But that doesn’t automatically make someone more technologically literate. It’s no longer a hard requirement to understand how a computer (I’m lumping smartphones, PCs, Macs, etc.) works in order to do useful operations with it.
Stupid article, most of Gen Z aren’t even 21 yet, of course they’re gonna fall for scams, they’re teenagers or younger lol. I got scammed loads of times on RuneScape as a kid, and that taught me better than anything else how to avoid scams.
Considering that Gen Z is usually defined as being born between the mid-late 1990s and early 2010s, I wouldn’t support the first half of that statement. Everyone born in the first half of 2005 or earlier are 18, making them adults, so about half of Gen Z is adults.
Now whether this article uses that age range properly or whether it’s just someone using the term to mean “young people”, I have no idea.
But the premise of the article that just because someone uses technology all day makes them somehow invulnerable to scams (something that has absolutely nothing to do with how much someone uses tech) was ludicrous from the start.
The US census used 1997 - 2013 as the range. Which gives us an age range of 10-26, making the median age 18 - and I was thinking of 21 as adult, rather than 18 - which is why I said “they’re teenagers or younger” - but yes, you’re right, “only” 40%-ish of gen Z are under 18 :p
Run the same survey again in 11 years and compare 21+ gen Z to 2023’s boomers and I bet the results aren’t even close.
You cannot determine median based on range alone. You basically need to know how your datapoints (people in this case) are distributed to be able to actually calculate the median, because the 50th percentile does not have to lie smack in the middle between the extreme ends of your range.
just someone using the term to mean “young people”
Rude. How dare they stop using “Millennial” to mean “young people”. They weren’t supposed to recognize that some of us are in our 40s now!
Millennials: we’re all adults now, we want to be taken seriously!
Time: passes
Millennials: never mind we’ve made a mistake let’s go back
Oof. Brings back the memories.
Though it was expensive, my Time Life 80s Music series (CD) was worth it and I still have em all. Thankfully, it wasn’t hard to cancel once I realized I was getting redundant stuff and they would never stop sending CDs as long as I kept paying.
“Gen Z simply uses technology more than any other generation and is therefore more likely to be scammed via that technology.”
That’s part of it for sure, but anecdotally I also find that Gen Z people often have quite a shallow, even naive understanding of the technology they use every day. Probably due to modern interaction design valuing simplicity above everything else.
Or because they’re probably 15 years younger than you are and are learning just like we all did. God imagine if crypto was a thing when we first got internet connections.
My point is that when we learned to interact with technology like computers, we had to start at a much lower level, that naturally gave us a deeper understanding of the technology because it was required to use it. I learned the MSDOS command line when I was 6 years old, not because I wanted to learn about the technology, but because I wanted to play games on the computer. It just happened to give me a basic understanding about how a computer’s file system works.
These days you don’t have to worry about any of that, as technology is for the most part effortless to use and doesn’t require any understanding below the surface. So naturally Gen Z people won’t pick up the knowledge Millenials did, not because they’re dumber, but because they don’t have to.
I mean part of it is as well a lot of the computer shit I was taught in school just isn’t fucking taught in a lot of school districts anymore even though many jobs these days will have you at least needing to know how to type at a computer
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“People that are digital natives for the most part, they’re aware of these things,” says Scott Debb, an associate professor of psychology at Norfolk State University who has studied the cybersecurity habits of younger Americans.
In one 2020 study published in the International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence and Cybercrime, Debb and a team of researchers compared the self-reported online safety behaviors of millennials and Gen Z, the two “digitally native” generations.
But because Gen Z relies on technology more often, on more devices, and in more aspects of their lives, there might just be more opportunities for them to encounter a bogus email or unreliable shop, says Tanneasha Gordon, a principal at Deloitte who leads the company’s data & digital trust business.
Staying safer online could involve switching browsers, enabling different settings in the apps you use, or changing how you store passwords, she noted.
Gordon floated the idea of major social media platforms sending out test phishing emails — the kind that you might get from your employer, as a tool to check your own vulnerabilities — which lead users who fall for the trap toward some educational resources.
But really, Guru says, the key to getting Gen Z better prepared for a world full of online scams might be found in helping younger people understand the systems that incentivize them to exist in the first place.
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