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Comment Re:Are people this ignorant of basic online securi (Score 1) 79

Fortunately there is an easy fix. Education.

If education was an easy fix, we'd have an educated populace and ClickFix wouldn't be a problem.

The fact is, we live in eternal September. No matter how many people we educate, there's a unending firehose of exploitable n00bs arriving to replace them.

Comment Re:WTF? (Score 1) 79

The second link is more interesting (and shows how can users be manipulated in doing that):

In an exemplar campaign from June 2025, when the victim searches for a macOS-related issue — for example, “macos flush resolver cache” — they receive a promoted malvertising website in their search results (Figure 1). Users located in multiple countries — including the U.S., UK, Japan, China, Colombia, Canada, Mexico, Italy, and others — received these advertisements; no victims were located in Russia.
...
The fake help pages provide victims with false instructions for how to fix their problem (Figure 3).

Here it seems that the main problem is that sponsored links from scam actors can appear as first results in a Google search. From then unfortunately... people have already been trained to copy/paste arcane commands in terminal windows to solve problems. This one even encrypts the curl command in a base64 string to look more innocuous.

Comment Re:Go for it (Score 1) 95

I come down on the side of Tsiolkovsky: âoeEarth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.â

A baby in a cradle is the wrong analogy -- a better analogy is an internal organ inside a body. Yes, you can (with advanced technology and at great expense) remove the internal organ from the body and keep it alive externally for some time, but it's going to be unpleasant for everyone involved, and sooner or later the disembodied organ will wither and die, unless it is returned to the environment it was specifically evolved to live within.

Comment Re:Say hello to Wirth's law (Score 1) 79

OTOH the nice thing about software is that it's easy to update, so anyone is free to replace their slow/inefficient software with a faster/efficient version as soon as they obtain it, at which point their fast hardware should run the efficient software very quickly. Nothing (except possibly bad management decisions?) is preventing anyone from creating efficient software, either.

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