What stupidly easy tech solution do people gloss over all of the time?

Frozyre@kbin.melroy.org to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 191 points –

For me it's the paranoia surrounding webcams. People outright refuse to own one and I understand, until they go on and on about how they're being spied. Here's the secret - unplug the damn thing when you think you won't use it or haven't used it in a while.

They, whoever it is, can't really spy on you on something that's already off and unplugged!

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People who complain about ads on YouTube. I tell them about ads blockers and they always go "Huh, you sure it works? Sounds good, I might try that" and then proceed to forget about it and complain about ads in a few months time...

I'm pretty positive by this point that people love to bitch about ads for the sake of bitching about ads. They bring this onto themselves.

Same goes for them going onto sites without ad blockers. Then when you tell them, it's either "OHHH THANKS!" or "Uhhhh, I cAn't" for no reason.

Or people, like my mom, who are were relatively educated about technology and don't want to learn new technologies/tools under the pretense of security (even if the software is foss, like again most adblockers.

Edit: Whenever I use a browser without an adblocker, I remember how shitty the web is without them.

My mom built computers in the '90s and '00s, she taught me how to use the command prompt to play my dos games. now she can barely use one. I don't know what the hell happened.

Well, my mom is a computer engieneer, who had me reflash a phone from work and install libreoffice on her windows laptop (to be fair none of her coworkers could reflash the phone and the second one was probably just lazyness).

I think this happens because people believe that ad blockers are "too good to be true". That was what I first thought when first getting an ad blocker, that there was going to be some kind of "catch" like slowing down websites, making them less functional or being malicious. But it turns out they actually improve performance, rarely affect functionality and are even recommended by the FBI because they protect against malicious advertising.

I just install it for them or tell them to use Brave (don't down vote me, these people aren't going out of their way to use firefox and download all the needed extensions)

I hate the ad blocker argument for youtube. How am i supposed to do that on my tv or my phone?

  • invidious
  • piped
  • some TVs have 3rd party specialized versions of the official webapp

The first two have web pages and phone apps. You can find the phone apps on F-droid.

Fun fact: did you know that the youtube app on your TV is just a no-effort web browser with a URL fixed to a web page, which you could even use on your PC?

Can I do any of these on FireTV?

I expect that all smart TVs have a web browser, so the first two should always work. Be aware though that while piped is more usable (imho), it currently does not work anywhere, because it did not yet implement a fix for google's blocking that invidious did a week or so ago.

If FireTVs are android TVs, you should be able to install the android apps too, in a way or another.

I literally just use normal Firefox with normal ublock origin on my phone

There is no catchall solution that's simple, take what you can get