Anyone have experience of doing work to bail family and friends out in a meaningful way? What did you do?
- make sure that auto-update is on. Recent OSs are pretty good about this. GNU/Linux / MacOS are also pretty good about updating 3rd party apps (since they come through the package manage / app store), Windows needs a little help (there was Secunia PSI which is now deprecated)
- run the user as a "restricted user" (ie. not superuser / admin). Again, this is mostly given with recent OSs. This also mostly blocks them from accidentally installing software (I generally set up machines with all needed software - like browsers, office suites, media codecs, etc and tell them that they don't need anything else and if something/somebody tells them they need to install something else, they should treat it with extreme suspicion and call me first)
- the big one: ad blocking. I usually combine hosts file based, DNS based and browser plugin based blocking (like uBlock Origin). Seems like lots of scams / malware are going through advertisement and since starting to blocking advertisement over a decade ago, the problems my family / friends are seeing with their devices went down dramatically.