[miladyincontrol]

It absolutely is. I fear for the older generations and less tech minded people who google their bank, and get some random phishing site. Or similarly google what should be libre software and get some random malware on a site that looks 'close enough'.

Lets call it what it is, a cancer, one that literally enables countless bad actors and purely for a search engine's own profit. In theory theres a time and place for ads, but maliciously inline and disguised as the actual results people want arent it.

[rchaud]

It's already happened to an elderly family member who was trying to troubleshoot a printer problem. The top results were 1-800 hotlines run by scammers looking to get remote access to their machine to "fix" the issue. Google has hordes of these companies padding their pockets and won't lift a finger to remove them.

[squigz]

As my parents get older, I worry more about this.

Are there any good, easy-to-understand resources for spotting and avoiding phishing scams and such things for non-tech audiences?

[yifanl]

The only real difference that matters between a fake site and a real site is that the information on it is genuine, the form doesn't really factor into it. Which makes this a very tricky problem: You can't tell if the data is genuine before you have the genuine data.

[array_key_first]

Domain names is how you do this reliably. This is why everyone should use a password manager. It makes phishing much, much harder to do.

[yifanl]

There are no best practices for domain names, there's nothing that can differentiate between NPM and a fraudster from hosting "npmjs.help".

It also doesn't help when you have to visit a new domain for the first time, which tends to be the case when looking up novel information.

[array_key_first]

If you're trying to do something for the first time with a big company, you usually know the domain name. Like Google is google.com. Or for something like your bank, it'll be printed on your credit card.

[rchaud]

My parents were highly computer literate and taught me how to use them growing up. These days they can barely even send emails and spend 30-60 minutes looking for files that are either on their desktop, download folder or in Recent Documents menu in Word/Excel. At some point in the aging process computer skills are one of those things that seem to go.

[array_key_first]

I don't think they go at all, I think software development is just bad all around. Almost all software is really, really bad and we just put up with it or are used to it.

Most software does not value consistency or UX maintenance AT ALL.

What I mean is, a lot of those older programs arguably had much better user interfaces in terms of usability. More contrast, more text instead of glyphs, and often still simpler.

UI is like fashion, it changes because change is good. Not because those particular changes are good.

Compare Windows 11 and 7, or XP, or even in a lot of ways 95. What's the prettier experience? 11, I guess. But which one doesn't make me scream at the computer? Not 11.

But it's not just Microsoft, Apple does it too. We throw away literal YEARS of user understanding and memory for nothing. Users get tired over time. They can't keep up, nobody can, and it gets frustrating when things just get worse and worse over time.

[smcin]

Searching for official manufacturer manuals/user guides for appliances is also another goldmine for third-parties.

[nottorp]

But they deserve it when the manufacturer has one of those enterprisey sites where you need to go through 10 searches to maybe reach your manual, when the 3rd party site just shows it directly.

[smcin]

Not really, and the third-party sites almost never show the PDF directly without first trying to harvest your email or phone number or subscribe you to spam, sometimes they try to steer you towards unaffiliated 800 numbers tricking you that those are associated with the manufacturer, sometimes they bundle the download of manufacturer's PDF with malware, browser cleaner app installers etc.

Sometimes the third-party sites are helpful and benign, sometimes they are merely spammers trying to upsell you, occasionally they are malicious.

Agreed, the manufacturer site behavior is also annoying.

[tokioyoyo]

Most web-usage is happening on mobile, and ad-blockers are less common there. So, younger generation is pretty much living through the ads constantly.

[vunderba]

Yup. For reference, on Android your best bet is to install Firefox + uBlock Origin. On iOS, I believe Kagi's Orion has built-in content blockers but you can also install uBlock Origin [1].

[1] https://help.kagi.com/orion/browser-extensions/ublock-origin...

[stack_framer]

Brave is excellent on Android. I watch YouTube all the time with literally zero ads ever.

[anticrymactic]

You can use ReVanced on Android to block the ads in the YouTube app

[a96]

Brave is a series scam company.

[int_19h]

On iOS, Safari has some basic ad blocking capabilities, and beyond that there's AdGuard.

As far as alternative browsers go, Vivaldi also has an integrated ad blocker.

[TheJoeMan]

What's odd is that the search engines, youtube, etc. get to claim the impartiality towards content applies to "impartiality" towards ads. I am younger, and I still almost got scammed trying to find a phone number to call a travel booking site. I called the number shown on Google, and they wanted to "verify my account" and triggered an email verification code. Only at the last minute did I realize it was an account takeover attempt. But that isn't Google perpetuating a crime?

[aniforprez]

Happened to my father who got routed through ads on his phone while booking flight tickets to some seedy website. He regretted it but thankfully got refunds initiated successfully because of issues with the flights themselves and a lot of back-and-forth. He resolved to only do critical monetary operations on his laptop where I've installed any and every possible adblocker.

The web is so hostile to the inform and the old. It takes one moment of weakness and there's someone ready and waiting with a scam.

[Toorkit]

My bank replaced it's banktown.com url with b-twn.com, I thought I was on a phishing site, but it's legitimate.

[onionisafruit]

Not just the older generation. I can’t get my adult children to care about ad blockers.

[charlieyu1]

It already happened to my friend, and they’re not so old. Some people typed WhatsApp to their search bar and was brought to a phishing site instead.

Oh wait it happened to me as well. Fortunately it was phishing a recruitment site and all they got is my CV.