I’m often annoyed by nanny tech. Every new version of macOS adds new hoops to jump through just to get work done. Android keeps making it harder and harder to install apps from outside the Play Store. Windows has been a shitshow for like 20 years now. iOS was dead on arrival.
And for all the effort put into protecting users from themselves, this is how easy it is to deliver malware to users. Here we have users who:
- Click on ads. This is already an incredibly stupid (even if normalized) thing to do.
- Paste code from those ads directly into Terminal.
I suppose there are two ways to look at this. One way is to think that yes, users do need to be protected from themselves. I mean, look at how dumb they are!
The other way to look at it is, what are we gaining from all these “security” measures that make all kinds of legitimate use harder? The whole world is paying the price of these attempts to protect people from themselves, even though that proves to be impossible time and time again. What is the cost:benefit here really? How much are we going to sacrifice in this futile attempt to idiot-proof technology? There is no limit to the idiocy of the general population.
I wonder if it’s not only futile, but actively counter-productive. Perhaps all the hand-holding and guard-railing serves to enable the general lack of awareness and understanding that’s required for a user to fall for such obvious tricks.
I don’t want more technical “solutions”. I want social and legal solutions. Start by holding ad delivery networks accountable for the ads they deliver. If they can’t afford to adequately vet their “partners”, then they need to change their business model.
- Paste code from those ads directly into Terminal.
How is this different from following random instructions posted online claiming to tell you how to block things like telemetry? People have been trained to type things they don’t understand into the terminal.
The truly incompetent will do whatever they’re told and won’t think for even a second, but there are a lot of people in the middle. The hoops do help those people that are just on the edge of technical competence stop to think for a second.
Well, you shouldn’t paste commands you don’t understand into Terminal full stop. That’s always been true.
But it is different, anyway. You’ll occasionally see the incredibly-stupid “curl … | bash” pattern in the docs of some developer tools (lookin’ at you, Claude Code), but that’s a different target audience. And it’s still a red flag.
