[danaris]

Now, I'm not going to say we shouldn't try to move the needle. More education around this is unquestionably a good thing.

But this sounds an awful lot like trying to avoid changing the technology by changing human nature. And that's a fool's errand.

There are always going to be a significant percentage of users you're never going to reach when it comes to something like this. That means you can never say "...and now we can just trust people to use their devices wisely!"

Fundamentally, the issue with people clicking things isn't really a problem because it's new technology. It's a problem because they're people. People fall for scams all the time, and that doesn't change just because it's now "on a computer".

[AnthonyMouse]

> People fall for scams all the time, and that doesn't change just because it's now "on a computer".

But that's exactly the issue. You won't prevent someone from wiring money to Nigeria by restricting what apps they can install on their phone while allowing the official bank app which supports wire transfers.

If someone is willing to press any sequence of buttons a scammer tells them to then the only way to prevent them from doing something at the behest of the scammer is to prevent them from doing it at all.

But that's hardly practical, because you're going to, what? Prevent anyone from transferring money even for legitimate reasons? Prevent people from reading their own email or DMs so they can't give a scammer access to sensitive ones?

The alternatives are educating people to not fall for scams, or completely disenfranchising them so that they're not authorized to make any choices for themselves. What madness can it be that we could choose the second one for ordinary adults?

[Nursie]

Adults would choose a locked-down, secure phone for themselves.

Arguably they already do and the numbers wanting an open phone are relatively trivial and the market ends up the way it has.

I do these days, happily, and I speak as someone who owned a Neo Freerunner and an N900. My phone is far too important as a usable, stable device to want to fuck around treating it as an open platform any more.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Arguably they already do and the numbers wanting an open phone are relatively trivial and the market ends up the way it has.

The market is consolidated into Apple and Google and neither of them actually offers this. Taking away everyone's choices and then saying "look how few people are choosing the thing that isn't available" is a bit of a farce.

[Nursie]

It was not always this way though, there were other choices.

Nobody cared, so they went away.

[AnthonyMouse]

Android was sold as being "open" and at first it mostly was, so the people who wanted that got an Android device and everything else disappeared. Then Google closed Android over time, at first in subtle ways that weren't immediately obvious and now they're just telling everyone to DIAF. But by then the alternatives were gone.

I mean it seems like your argument is "nobody wants this thing that people keep getting mad that nobody offers". Obviously people want it; otherwise who are all of these people?

[Nursie]

> Obviously people want it; otherwise who are all of these people?

Half a dozen geeks on HN do not a market make.