mgorny-nyan (he) :autism:🙀🚂🐧 on Nostr: Yesterday, my mom asked to help her with her computer. Of course, the computer uses ...
Yesterday, my mom asked to help her with her computer. Of course, the computer uses this extremely user-unfriendly system called #Windows. She tells me that she's getting a "virus" notification.
I take a look at the screen — indeed, the whole right-hand side of the screen is spammed by suspicious "antivirus" scam. The kind of "modern" blue rectangles, in the style of the operating system that wants to make your PC look like a smartphone, displaying on top of other windows, no clear way of closing them. When you click them, they open a shady website — and get even more of these windows.
My first thought: it's some malware. Mom says she didn't run anything from the #Internet. I open the task manager and try to find something suspicious… well, *everything* is suspicious there, no surprise. I'm playing with the windows, trying to provoke the app into some visible CPU activity spike or any other hint — nada.
Then it suddenly came to me — maybe these are notifications. Indeed, I click the notification icon on the taskbar, and they disappear. So I enter the notification settings, and figure out that these notifications are coming from Chrome (don't ask).
The conclusion is clear: modern enshittified Internet bombs the user with garbage, making them to accept everything blindly, to get through an avalanche of cookie banners, PII banners, ads… eventually they also gave shady websites the access to send notifications that resemble antivirus software — and the operating system helps with the scam.
#enshittification
I take a look at the screen — indeed, the whole right-hand side of the screen is spammed by suspicious "antivirus" scam. The kind of "modern" blue rectangles, in the style of the operating system that wants to make your PC look like a smartphone, displaying on top of other windows, no clear way of closing them. When you click them, they open a shady website — and get even more of these windows.
My first thought: it's some malware. Mom says she didn't run anything from the #Internet. I open the task manager and try to find something suspicious… well, *everything* is suspicious there, no surprise. I'm playing with the windows, trying to provoke the app into some visible CPU activity spike or any other hint — nada.
Then it suddenly came to me — maybe these are notifications. Indeed, I click the notification icon on the taskbar, and they disappear. So I enter the notification settings, and figure out that these notifications are coming from Chrome (don't ask).
The conclusion is clear: modern enshittified Internet bombs the user with garbage, making them to accept everything blindly, to get through an avalanche of cookie banners, PII banners, ads… eventually they also gave shady websites the access to send notifications that resemble antivirus software — and the operating system helps with the scam.
#enshittification