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Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do (www.vox.com)
submitted 2 years ago by [M, B] to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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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[–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

Running modified executables you find on torrent sites seems worse

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    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.
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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Who is torrenting stuff on their PHONE?!

    (Unless using it to control their PC remotely)

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    it was mostly a joke and an exaggeration, but it still baffles me how much more they use their phone for things that objectively one can do much easier in a pc or laptop. Like things that require you to have 5-10 tabs open and constantly jump between them to compare things or fill a form with 20 fields etc

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