The problem is that you're focusing on the tech and - over time - you WILL lose track and get tired of the tech, because it happens to literally everyone. I'm extremly techy. But there are some things that are entirely in the realm of tech where I think "Oh, come on, this is nonsense, why can't I just do it the old way?!" (e.g. systemd, which I find to be the universal bane of anything I want to achieve).

That will come to us all. We're already doing it. Why do I have to ID myself to access this website? Why do I have to jump through MFA hoops just to sign in to my email? etc. etc. etc. All with good intention, good reason, and with purpose, but increasingly we, the users, will get frustrated with it all while the 20-somethings will just treat it as normal because they grew up doing it, and then get frustrated with whatever comes after when they are 50-somethings.

The tech is not the problem here. The problem here is sheer, utter, idiocy. Maybe in the form of someone far outside the normal mental bounds being solely in control of their finances (for example), but idiocy nonetheless.

And the cure isn't tech-training. The cure is "being a suspicious / paranoid bastard". I'm a suspicious / paranoid bastard. Good luck trying to scam me because even when there are legitimate processes, I am happy to just stop and say "Nope. I'm not going to do that." Look at the nonsense in your posts and the OP - buying Amazon gift cards, buying gold and giving it to a courier, etc. etc. etc.

It doesn't matter how sweet-talking someone is... I ain't gonna do that. Letting people take over my computer remotely? I don't even let people I know and love TOUCH my computer (and they know that). Nobody touches my computer. Nobody logs into it but me. Nobody knows that password. And no, even my kid, doesn't get to "just browse" on it, nor on my phone. I have other devices if they want to do that.

Scam-prevention isn't about learning the latest tech and keeping up to the date, it's about being an entirely suspicious bastard about everything. It's why my dad distrusts electronic transactions. He'll do them but you know what he does? He gets me or my brother to CHECK first. Others in my family have been scammed - credit card cloning in restaurants (good, luck, that card doesn't leave my sight... and, yes, I've had that argument with restaurants and pubs... card reader behind the bar? Okay, then bring it here? No? Then I come there? No... oh look you CAN do it in front of me but you just didn't want to...), mum accidentally signed up to a new electricity company on the doorstep (but UK contract regulations mean we shut that down once we heard about it), I've had a guy at my door trying to insert a key into a pre-pay electric meter in my house who said - explicitly - that he was "from your electricity supplier". He wasn't. He was from a rival, committing fraud on my doorstep, trying to force me to switch supplier to him without me noticing. And me, being the suspicious bastard, refused to let him do so, and warned the rest of the street (the police came along eventually, shut them down, and asked for evidence, but I didn't have any CCTV recording audio near the porch or I would have nailed him to the wall). He looked all official in his little hi-vis, and they were blanketing the whole street the same way... and people fell for it.

My dad REGULARLY asks me if "that was you on the texting again the other night" - because he gets texts with the "Hi Dad, I lost my phone and have no money...." He never responds but he always checks in with me afterwards just to make sure. And I think him realising how often it's NOT ME makes it clear just how widespread scams are so he's even more suspicious.

We just need to teach people to be suspicious and make official processes official enough that they are NOT suspicious. This requires absolutely no fancy tech or tech-training at all.

It just needs people to think "What the fuck am I doing buying Amazon gift cards to pay my tax bill?"

Everyone caught onto the fact that it's nonsense that's nothing to do with AI.

600km is 0.0020014 seconds at the speed of light.

Or 2 milliseconds.

Birth rates are at record low since WW2:

www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/united-states/birth-rate

So there are fewer people, but they are living longer.

Which is probably the balance required, and probably explains WHY they're living longer too.

Gosh, that must be worth at least a trillion dollars.

Better scramble and invest in their hype of... a handheld box that can run AI... like... phones do.

So, I don't understand why it's taken them all this time to add logins to prevent anonymous access.

But that aside... why is "old Reddit" anything more than a skin / display layer over "new Reddit"?

It's the same shite that always happens. Hey, we completely redesigned everything from the ground up, but it's an absolute impossible to just... make it look like it always did.

It's just skinning/theming, effect. This is the whole point of things like GUI libraries and CSS. The content is the same. The metadata is the same. The only thing that differs is how you lob it at the screen. Why that requires keeping running decades of old legacy code, or destroying backwards compatibility is always beyond me.

Same with everything from Office to Windows to websites. "Hey, we're changing how we look, which shouldn't affect anything one bit, but in the process we've trashed the service and half the stuff doesn't work any more and, by the way, there will never be any going back, even though we could offer a "legacy theme" running on the new system as easily as we could build any of these junk new features that we insist on shoving down your throat even if you don't want them."

30 years ago, I imagined and was lead to believe, that in the future things would be commoditised and sensible. I could have Windows laid out how I wanted it. I can have Office use the old menus while still opening all the new files. And I could go to a website and say "No thanks" to the new theme and carry on running the old theme without having to accept that it would an atrocious turd of unmaintainable legacy code that nobody touches (Hello, Slashdot Classic!) even though they could just update it (Hello, SoylentNews with runs on the same backend as Slashdot but has been updated and works GREAT).

Hell I thought that in 2026, I'd be able to type a UK pound sign into a plain text box and it would render vaguely correctly. Let me try again:

£

(That was literally just a Shift-3 on a UK keyboard... not one other site has problems with that, not even SoylentNews based on the same software).

A problem that not one other developed country has had to deal with in years. Decades, even.

And are you seriously telling me that if the recipient AND the sender were to acknowledge that it was fraudulently cashed that the bank couldn't do anything about it? That the security is on an inked name alone? What ridiculousness. That's just awful consumer protection.

Maybe - yet again - wake up, get into the 21st century as a country, and start putting laws on the side of taxpayers and consumers rather than corporations.

"Following a three-hour trial at Wandsworth County Court on 14 May 2026, in which both sides were represented by barristers, the court found in favor of the claimant,"

So... no... AI didn't win a case.

He's also going to have to pay that money back, have all his assets seized to do so (proceeds of crime), and then the tax man is going to be asking "Hey, you earned £2m, right? Where's the tax on that?"

Now that he's been jailed, they have years to unpick it all, file additional charges, seize everything he owned, even take any "gifts" that he gave to friends and family, and build a case for tax fraud to jail him further.

You need to read The Secret Barrister novels, written by a real criminal-law barrister.

The UK courts are an absolute mess of chaos, that's not the lawyer's or the judges fault.

You would think that with a former-lawyer as the prime minister now it would get sorted, but they've made only token changes to an absolutely nonsensical court-appointment system that operates largely on constant fire-fighting and ill-preparedness and throwing lawyers to the wolves making them run from case to case with little to no preparation or warning.

It's continued because "that's how it's always been done" but the court system outgrew the capacity decades ago.

So does... Starlink own space now?

Maybe if you hadn't sent up countless thousands of satellites without asking anyone but the US, people will give a damn about where they were.

If you are using signed and end-to-end encrypted emails, let me tell you:

You're merely using email as a transport mechanism, where ANY OTHER SUCH MECHANISM would suffice and be just as secure.

Including things like Jabber, etc.

Email is utterly monopolised because if you want to send/receive email to the major players... you MUST abide by whatever ridiculous restrictions they put on things (e.g. 10 DNS lookups for SPF, blacklists, domain verification, spam categorisation, etc.) regardless. Even if you're only using it as a communications medium for encrypted, signed comms, you still have to comply.

Email as a protocol needs to die. The stuff we do by email can be done PROPERLY AND BETTER by just basing the same top layers on something else that actually works and does the end-to-end encryption, domain verification, signing, authnetication etc. for you anway).

Bolting shit onto email to make it "work" is no different to how bolting shit onto FTP to make it "secure" was. You still have to deal with NAT traversal, packet-rewriting, etc. and all kinds of other nonsense that come FROM that use of a terrible, inefficient, outdated protocol as the base of your communications.

Email just needs to die.

That's all there is too it.

It was designed for a different era, and makes many, many terrible assumptions, and throws most of them out of the window in the worst possible way at the worst possible time.

Plus, it's built on "honesty", and everything security, or authentication, or even just claiming who you actually are as an email sender are all bolt-ons that don't work to their full extent.

Even with DNSSEC+SPF+TLS+DKIM+greylisting+limiting.... there's still no way to reliably know who can see your email, and that it's secured end-to-end and that people are who they APPEAR to be, and no way to reliably discard email that you don't want to receive or people have no place sending in the first place.

We need to just bin the whole thing. POP3, IMAP, SMTP, the lot.

I have nothing Microsoft at home.

Yeah, sure, I'm an IT geek, but it's probably the first time that's happened since I first used a DOS disk back in the day (as before that all my computers weren't PCs at all but small home computers).

Windows 11 literally forced me off Windows at home, I haven't run Office at home in decades, and I now need to be paid to manage Microsoft systems of any kind.

Microsoft told me that Windows 10 would be the last version of Windows. And you know what? In my case, they were right.

One of the best things of running Linux instead of Windows is that even if I choose to install a binary driver, it doesn't come with a bunch of "companion" apps and background services and a 4GB LLM, a game launcher, an update program, and whatever other nonsense people want to shovel onto me.

Because if it did, distros would revolt and/or ship a version that was just the driver.

You're a graphics card. Act like it. All you need is a driver, nothing more, nothing less.