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Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do::The generation that grew up with the internet isn’t invulnerable to becoming the victim of online hackers and scammers.
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Kids these days cant tell which download button is the real one
That’s why you a need a package manager
A package manager for piracy?
Yes, it’s called torrenting software. If you are just downloading regular things using a “download” button, that’s amateur piracy.
Why not sail the usenet ocean?
I rather be free pirate than a paid pirate
Running modified executables you find on torrent sites seems worse
Software is software. You’re downloading shady software off the Internet anyway, but there’s one key difference:
- Torrent sites (such as The Pirate Bay) usually have systems of trusted uploaders. These are marked with a green/purple skull next to the file in search results.
- A torrent with a large number of seeders (think: hundreds or thousands) is less likely to contain a virus because nobody honest would seed a malware torrent and it’d cost a lot to fake that many seeders across the world.
- Torrenting software verifies the integrity of downloaded data. It uses a cryptographic hash function for this so it’s impossible for a seeder to send you a tampered file (that is different from the file you intended to download). When you use a torrent file or magnet link, it contains the hash of the file so if what you receive does not match the hash then the torrenting software will discard it.
These are marked with a green/purple skull next to the file in search results.
do you think gen-z is able to somehow hover over the icons to see the tooltip and understand what these skulls are for when they’re using their phone for everything?
I mostly agree with you, except that The Pirate Bay is mostly regarded as risky for software. https://rentry.co/megathread-all-purpose under “untrustworthy websites”.
This assumes a bad actor doesn’t flood the torrent with their own peers. It would be trivial to set up a couple hundred peers to distribute malware.
Not sure if it was ever confirmed, but some years back it was speculated that the MPAA or associated groups were putting out bad torrents full of broken files to stop people from pirating movies.
A “couple hundred peers” is a lot easier said than done. That being said, it does happen and you are correct that having a lot of seeders doesn’t guarantee a safe download.
All of the three conditions I mentioned are neither sufficient nor necessary for a safe download, but there is a strong correlation. Unless the torrent is official (e.g. official Linux distro torrents), there is always some chance of a bad download. The chance can be low but is never zero.
Doesn’t surprise me, really. With all the stories you hear about the younger part of GenZ not being familiar with things like files and directories because everything is just saved in this enormous bucket of things called “the cloud”. I’m sure some of the things I’ve read are ragebait, but from my own experience, the increased usability of mobile operating systems has really influenced their ability to work with “traditional” stuff, which is nothing more than logical. But yeah.
I imagine it has more to do with phones being the most common and main way GenZ becomes familiar with tech, with which you mostly just open an app and it knows which files and where they are, presenting them in a way that skips the whole file/directory experience for 95% of use cases
It’s definitely that, yeah. I just wonder how it’ll go once (if?) they have to use a computer at work later.
Bad article that makes it difficult to find the study they’re citing.
However. It would not surprise me if true. I’m sorry but so many of you GenZ are the most gullible people I’ve even seen.
Maybe we millenials are good at not being scammed because we grew up during the infancy of the internet. Our mistakes were not punished as severely. There was no widespread PayPal, cashapp, venmo or stuff like that. At worst we’d lose items in WoW that wouldnt matter in 6 months anyway because the new expanaion would come. These days a kid will lose his knife in CSGO somehow valued at $600.
Still makes me sad to see that MLM scams are thriving within all generations. Just heartbreaking.
For all the older folk pointing fingers: “But because Gen Z relies on technology more often, on more devices, and in more aspects of their lives, there might just be more opportunities for them to encounter a bogus email or unreliable shop”
Compared to older generations, younger generations have reported higher rates of victimization in phishing, identity theft, romance scams, and cyberbullying.
Why include cyber bullying?
Yah, that really seems out of place with the rest of the list. How does one “fall for” cyberbullying? Where’s the scam?
Why include cyber bullying?
I believe they mean something like being victim in a case of someone extorting them by threatening to leak photos/videos?
That’s still not mixable with scams.
I think some of these just overlap. For example there can be a scammer pretending to be someone who is not. Then the victim may share content that wouldn’t share otherwise. Then the scammer extortions the victim by threatening to leak content in the victim’s social circle.
Yeah no shit I’m surprised even 8% of boomers are online, they’re using the only perfect antivirus - abstinence
That and a lot of stuff is no longer email scams. They have moved on to platforms like Discord that would be rare for a boomer to use. Even viruses are hardly an issue for them because everything is mostly done on mobile now. I know zero boomers who would say I am going to install this random .apk for a cool app that was suggested to me… instead it would just be “the app you recommend doesn’t exist, it’s not in the Play/Apple store”
It’s this weird Era where you almost need a little more technological literacy to be scammed, but not enough to actually recognize a scam.
Ah yes, its time to release TaylorSwiftAlbum.exe and FamousKpopBand.bat
Holy shit this needs additional jpeg
Excellent thanks x
If this story is even true, I suspect it’s because partly because fake sites are very convincing and easy to make - social media is out control for scam ads too, especially instagram anecdotally (I stopped somebody getting scammed).
