Solved Trying to help an elderly friend.......

kelper said:

@bobkn

But you did say it. Here's direct quote.

"I have no idea how to prepare a Linux system that's as user-proof as a Wow Computer (as advertised in Parade magazine). Generally not recommended, because it's overpriced.

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As is usual in English, "overpriced" referred to the noun nearest it, which was the Wow Computer. I suppose that it could have been slightly clearer with a second, explicit mention of the Wow Computer.

Aside from that, I suppose that there may someone who doesn't know that Linux is free, and (I believe) usually open source.

I don't have a down on Linux, although I haven't tried it. (I used Solaris, the Sun Microsystems version of Unix, but that was 30 years ago.) I think that Linux advocacy in this forum is misplaced, though.

bobkn said:

As is usual in English, "overpriced" referred to the noun nearest it,

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Not when that is in a separate sentence! But you are American, all is forgiven.

kelper said:

Any email that starts 'I am the Attorney General' or 'I am the winner of the lottery' is a scam. Normal people sign off at the end, not the beginning.

In my email client, when I hover over the sender's name in the inbox, it expands to show the real sender (I know this can be spoofed)

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How often do people say to the police after being conned "he was such a nice man".

The art of a good scam is to look real. If you get a post saying "I want to use yiur account for a couple of days and you will get paid x000 pounds", you know it is bs.

But if you get one allegedly from a normal organisation e.g. post office, electric company it can be hard to tell if it is real or not sometimes. They do not ask for large sums of money and do not ring obvious alarm bells. These are the dangerous ones.

kelper said:

Not when that is in a separate sentence! But you are American, all is forgiven.

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The "separate sentence" wasn't a full sentence. No subject.

My expectation that the implied subject was clear may have been lost on some. Or some are just playing with me, from motives I can't guess.

Plus, condescension, even if justified or half-joking, is very unwelcome.

cereberus said:

How often do people say to the police after being conned "he was such a nice man".

The art of a good scam is to look real. If you get a post saying "I want to use yiur account for a couple of days and you will get paid x000 pounds", you know it is bs.

But if you get one allegedly from a normal organisation e.g. post office, electric company it can be hard to tell if it is real or not sometimes. They do not ask for large sums of money and do not ring obvious alarm bells. These are the dangerous ones.

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Some seniors aren't online at all, but still subject to attacks via the telephone.

I know of a couple of elders (one was my father) who fell for the infamous "grandma" scam. Fortunately, the scammer requested that the funds be wired from CVS. I don't know whether CVS trains their people, but in both cases, the seniors were informed that it was a scam, and lost no money.

Even the US mail can be an attack vector. I got a letter from someone offering to buy my house. It wasn't for sale, but I called the local phone number on the mail out of pure curiosity. I managed to hang up before the transfer to an expensive international line was completed. I presume that the scammers wouldn't have made much as their cut, but I guess that thievery exists at every scale.

I am also assuming that the OP's reference to "senior proof" not necessarily refers to scam traps but to the general use of a computer, judging by the reference to ....

rdburke said:

Not at all. They know just enough about a computer to really screw it up. As most of us know, you can't just choose delete when you want something to uninstall!

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To protect a user against this type of (irresponsible) action would require a greater knowledge/experience of system setup (irrespective of the OS type). Unfortunately the OP is not going to find a one line solution answer in this forum, hence my response that the onus should be back on the user to gain a greater knowledge about computer use and not be the OP's responsibility for constant maintenance.