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Comment by franga2000 | Hacker News Reader

franga2000

My no. 1 thing is to always install and ad blocker in their browser. uBlock does a pretty good job of getting rid of all the fake download buttons and pop-ups.

And tell them explicitly that if their computer tells them they have a virus, they must not try to do anything about it and call you immediately. 99% of the time it's a fake pop-up and they don't want to look stupid so they follow its "friendly instructions" to "get rid of it" and end up making a mess.

Other than that, take away their admin privileges, set up 2AM auto-updates (or manual, if you're there often) and tell them to only store personal files in one specific directory, which is synced to something with CoW or daily backups (and then also sync the desktop just in case).

As for e-mail, I set up my grandparents with one e-mail for people they know and a gmail for everything else (like website registrations). That way, the personal address never* gets any spam.

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That is until websites started detecting adblockers and refusing access to their site.

My mom called me because her tablet was broken, it turned out the news website had a giant overlay with some heartbreaking story that they relied on ad sales and due to her evil actions, they now had to lay of people. I whitelisted the site and it worked for a day or two, then my mom called me again that her tablet was still broken. This time that same news website had an overly aggressive full-page overlay ad that she couldn't figure out how to close. A third time she called me her browser kept crashing because the news site was attempting to load multiple MB of JS and video ads.

For my parents it's ads, not scams that cause the most problems.

uBlock Origin[1] is a good idea. Not only does it get rid of potentially harmful ads, it also blocks malware/badware websites. I'd recommend enabling all filter lists under "Malware Domains."

Edit: HTTPS everywhere[2] could also help prevent attackers from redirecting you to their fake "You have a virus!" website.

[1]Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa... Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...

[2]https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

what is CoW?

Here, I found this by searching for "cow file sync":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy-on-write

>Copy-on-write (CoW or COW), sometimes referred to as implicit sharing[1] or shadowing,[2] is a resource-management technique used in computer programming to efficiently implement a "duplicate" or "copy" operation on modifiable resources.[3] If a resource is duplicated but not modified, it is not necessary to create a new resource; the resource can be shared between the copy and the original. Modifications must still create a copy, hence the technique: the copy operation is deferred to the first write. By sharing resources in this way, it is possible to significantly reduce the resource consumption of unmodified copies, while adding a small overhead to resource-modifying operations.

Copy in write i guess

Copy on Write, presumably to save them from crypto-locking ransomware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryptoLocker

Its the backups that save you from crypto malware.

True, but I have yet to find a reason to prefer full (or even incremental) backups over CoW. Full backups are just too big and slow, and good reliable open-source and cross-platform incremental backup software is hard to find.

I've found using Syncthing for Client-->NAS-->Off-site with BtrFS snapshots on both servers to be just perfect (of course, YMMV).

> good reliable open-source and cross-platform incremental backup software is hard to find

I've been using rsnapshot for at least a decade, and it's available wherever perl and hard links are available (which isn't windows, at least pre-WSL).

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