I download the bitcoin .exe, and it came clean, with the right signatures, but who knows how they are distributing the stuff. I have a Ubuntu computer. If they're at least a bit smart they will use their download redirects to serve the spyware only to Windows computers or something, so that could be why I got a clean binary. Bitcoin devs investigated, at my request. They removed the sf-editor1 user from the project owners and checked the binaries to see if sigs matched, and they did. But like I said, they could be filtering who they serve the "spyware" to.
I refuse to buy any laptop with less than 16GB of RAM.
Spent almost 1 year searching for a laptop to buy. Had to buy a 14" ASUS-RoG G46VW[0] and replace the screen for a 1920x1080 one.
Oh, believe me they only last a few days at most. I don't use an infinite IP blocklist. It has like 100 IP's or so. When one goes in, one must come out. And lets just say there are enough badly behaved bots around that it doesn't take much time for 100 IP's to rotate.
While you have a very valid point, in my use case I just ignore it. I don't see why anyone would want to block anyone else from accessing a small independent label website. Or the personal blog of a friend of mine. Or the portfolio site of another friend who is a designer. (edit)Or what real harm could come from it if it happened.
If my users want to go where I ask them not to go when they have no reason at all to go there, their problem. There are no links anywhere to those dirs, except for the robots.txt. Also, the blocks lift after a couple days. Honestly, nobody ever complained, and I'm sure it stops/hampers some attacks dead on.
I like to put a Disallow rule to a randomly named directory with an index.php file that blocks any IP that accesses it.
Then, for a bit of added fun, I put another Disallow rule to a directory named "spamtrap" which does an .htaccess redirection to the block script on the randomly named directory.
There's always something to read. I don't know what else to tell you. I also don't think it's unreasonable to ask someone to learn how to handle a shovel before starting the digging.
I would dare to say those incidents you describe happen because people click mindlessly instead of reading. Clicking around is not clicking mindlesly. You can read what the stuff says. And you, in last case, read the instructions manual. Or maybe that should be the first thing to do and us humans have always been doing things the wrong way.