[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.