> Those of us who lived through Windows ME, where logging on IRC basically gave you a 25% chance of having your computer hijacked by some random script kiddie, think it's laughable to say that security is anywhere near as bad as it used to be. Night and day.

Those were people just messing around. Annoying and harmful to your local machine certainly, but the harm that was caused was localized.

Security vulnerabilities are now industrialized, with large-scale public attacks and widespread silent compromises used to gather and sell your information for profit. The situation is still bad, it's just bad in a different way.