Help!!!!

[altis]

Originally Posted by greencreaper

There are awful lot of users who couldn't give a rats arse so long as their PC works. You see it on here and at other places I post - they come screaming for help because their PC doesn't start or they can't do x or the Net is slow due to all the traffic they're generating. Once it's fixed they'll go back to ignoring their responsibilties. These users should undergo a "re-education" program, preferably involving an assortment of sharp and blunt objects.

Then there are the users who sail along in ignorance til they come down to Earth with a bump due to a virus infection and then they start taking an interest in system maintenance and security.

Then there are the users for whom it's all a mystery, despite their best efforts to understand. These are the people I most like helping - they've tried and failed and need the support of the people with the ability to understand. They probably have things enabled by default (e.g. XP firewall) and their PC came with a copy of a virus scanner, but beyond that...

But IMHO they shouldn't need to. It's okay for us who have been at it a while and understand the pitfalls but it's way too much for a novice PC user to grasp straight away. Advertising targets them saying their new PC is internet enabled or that they can get so much benefit from, always-on, broadband. Yet, after they have coughed up all that money and try out their new purchase they find out the real truth - what they are being sold is crap and requires a lot of time and learning to make it worthwhile. It's not their fault.

Originally Posted by Theodoric

Well, that's something new I've learnt and I'm duly grateful in being prepared in case it happens to me. However, it does raise an interesting point. We are forever being told that we should treat with extreme suspicion any message, however apparently trustworthy the source, asking us to put something onto our computer. So what do we do in practice when a message like this appears? I suppose that phoning a known ntl number and asking for confirmation would be the best course of action.

One final point; these walled gardens. Is there anywhere on the ntl site that provides us with information on them?

Indeed. That's exactly what I thought when I read the first post. Perhaps it would be a good idea to put up some screenshots of the legitimate walled garden together with a real NTL phone number to ring. But perhaps NTL would be worried this might frighten off potential new customers.

[Plonking]

Hmm it seems like the best option would be to try and educate people more about their pcs, which is a very difficult thing to do!

I'm not saying people are stupid, some just won't be interested in learning about the ins and outs of their pc.

One thing I have noticed from the talk elsewhere about the new windows service pack is that it seems that windows is making things easier for people to be safe(ish), without understanding what they are doing. Whilst this is the easy way to go, it is not the best way.

By encouraging people not to learn about their pc and how it works, it leaves people open to future, more advanced, forms of attack. (and lets not even begin talking about what microsoft does in the background, lol!) It also means that any advertiser can sell them any pile of crud software designed to *fix* something-or-otehr and they will just go out and buy it without understanding what it does!

Personally, I feel education would be the best way, although it will probably never happen and be virtually impossible to bring about