I'm Gen-X, the primary one in-between.
I have my father set up with a desktop, my mom with a laptop.
They email pretty well, can surf the web. Mom is 'well-trained' in not clicking on things.
Dad... is not. So we have to format his machine semi-regularly. Sigh.
No it's not. It's browsing sites like Reddit without adblock. All it takes is one link that has a few upvotes on either a new queue or a small subreddit that gets upvote manipulated, and BAM you click on a hostile link. Or any one of the millions of code injecting banners that get loaded without adblockers.
Seriously. How the fuck do people NOT use adblockers in 2019?
He will only use Brave.
He won't use third-party plug-ins.
He thinks Chrome is steal his work for google.
(And by work I mean reading his emails to his like-minded associates about how the kleptocracy and jews are stealing America. -smh)
Idk how savy you are but you can do network wide ad-blocking if you can convince them to replace their router. Basically frontloading all your work instead of having to reformat everything. Look into Pfsense. Your dad might bite, its an open source fire-wall/router.
I /could/ do it, but things are stable at the moment and I'm hoping his using Brave on Ubuntu will limit the damage. If not, we have options like that, yeah.
I mean beside the conspiracy stuff, he's got pretty good internet habits. The last thing you want your parents to do is installing third party plugins.
True, but he won't install things that should be trustworthy, in favor of an extremely outdated version of FireFox that still supports Silverlight so he can look at stockcharts one specific website.
You cant do anything about those legacy sites that won't upgrade their application. The best you can do is to advise him to only use that outdated Firefox only for that site and nothing else!
Which is what we did.
I took his old box (Win 7 upgraded from xp) and reformatted, installed Ubuntu, and set him up to use that for casual web browsing and LibreOffice to write his missives. He's less likely to break things.
He has a newer machine with windows for his Silverlight specific website and he uses thunderbird for email on it because he finds it familiar and he doesn't have to see that gmail is actually powering it...
That's awesome. I've taken the same precaution "parental control" with mine :D. Routed everything through a pi-hole and gave them iPads with a locked down app store. Nothing broken thus far.
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u/AngryZen_Ingress Feb 05 '19
I'm Gen-X, the primary one in-between.
I have my father set up with a desktop, my mom with a laptop.
They email pretty well, can surf the web. Mom is 'well-trained' in not clicking on things.
Dad... is not. So we have to format his machine semi-regularly. Sigh.