The Internet has been around for fifteen years, and PayPal has been around for more than ten. I don't think either of them qualify as "new" anymore. Most people get scammed not because the technologies are new, but because they have been using those technologies irresponsibly, i.e. without educating themselves about their dangers first. They simply want to reap the benefits, and end up losing their money.

> The Internet has been around for fifteen years

WWW has been around for 20 years. But it's only recently that people have always on cable modems and active content.

> without educating themselves about their dangers first.

HN is full of stories of well funded, international businesses, with considerable sums of cash at risk, who do stupid insecure things. If they can't get it right why should Joe Sixpack be expected to do any better?

Email inboxes are full of hoaxes about supposed dangers - most of them are garbage.

I'm interested to see what kind of help there is for people who want to learn how to protect themselves on the Internet.

(http://www.usa.gov/Citizen/Topics/Internet-Fraud.shtml)

That site has comprehensive information. It's lousy. Look how much stuff people have to wade through.

>>I'm interested to see what kind of help there is for people who want to learn how to protect themselves on the Internet.

What kind of help is there for people who want to learn to protect themselves in real life? Does the fact that there is no comprehensive resource somehow remove one's burden to learn anyway?

You're extremely grumpy. Blaming the victim is not some brave, heroic concept.

People can imagine what it looks like to be in physical danger, and instinct can help them avoid the situations to some degree. It's hard to imagine what it's like being in an unsafe situation on the internet.

>>Blaming the victim is not some brave, heroic concept.

Blaming the victim is bad only if you believe that blame is a zero sum game. Unfortunately, it is not. If you walk down a dark alleyway in New York at night alone and get mugged, the mugger is guilty of mugging you, but you're also guilty of being a silly goose. You don't gain immunity to blame simply because you were the victim.

To expand on that (since I find in this topic it is necessary to be explicit), since blame is not zero-sum assigning an amount of blame to the victim should in no way be seen to reduce the blame or fault the perpetrator receives.

In other words, since blame is not zero-sum, placing some blame on the victim is not a defense of the perpetrator.

Why shouldn't you be able to walk down a dark alley in NYC at night? It's not your fault if something happens. With that attitude, we are just tolerating crime and accepting it. If more people walk around at night, the crimes will gain more exposure, be more aggressively stopped, and things will get safer.

The individual has every right to walk down a dark alley, and the group very well may be safer if more people walk down dark alleys, but if the individual is optimizing their behavior for self-preservation (and I think that is how individuals are most likely to act, at least in the 'West') then avoiding the alley is likely the best action

You're expanding on my point exactly. The Internet does not have such an obvious dark alley. You can copy HTML/CSS, have anchors with a different href than shown, and a lot of sly things. I hate using anologies when talking to hackers, so I didn't use the alleyway example even though I was thinking it.

>>You're expanding on my point exactly. The Internet does not have such an obvious dark alley.

Not literally, no. But most Internet scams can actually be avoided using common sense, which dictates that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

> The Internet does not have such an obvious dark alley.

http://p3n1zp1llz.48djkhcd.com.shadyurl.info/freemoneyz.exe

;)

Edit: Forgot about this site, but perhaps it could be used as a training tool for family members you feel are not quite as savy as they should be: http://www.shadyurl.com/

Make a page that just says "Grandma, don't click links like that!", convert it to a "shady" url with shadyurl.com, then email it to your grandmother.

A nice idea!

But [urls are disguised so easily](http://horribleurl.example.com). The A element has split the real URL from the text description since forever.

Good point. Training family members to look at the status bar first is probably pretty hard, and probably not even effective. At the very least you would have to train them to recognize and avoid url shortening services...

Yea, and if you wear provocative cloths, you're asking to get raped right?

Victim blaming is wrong, period. If you get mugged, you're not guilty of anything. Stop making excuses for people behaving shitty.

How 'bout if you just moved to New York from backcountry Idaho?

I would say that a criminal is equally guilty if they commit a crime in a dark alley NYC or if they commit a crime in backcountry Idaho.

If I replace my bicycle u-lock with a nice hefty rope and start lashing my bike to whatever object seems solid at the time (this is a concept that actually appeals to me), then I should receive some blame when my bike gets inevitably stolen. However the bicycle thief is no more nor less a thief.

No you shouldn't receive any blame. The person doing something illegal should receive the blame.

You are making your life less convenient for yourself by letting your bike get stolen but you're not doing anything wrong.

I was talking about the guy who got mugged. What if he had never lived in the city.

What I was trying to say is that your hypothetical does a good job of showing why blame is not zero sum. Obviously in either case the criminal receives the same blame, but I think it is fairly clear that the victim who took drastic measures to reduce risk is less to blame than the one who did not.

The important thing to remember is that the blame of the victim, while present, has no relation to the blame of the criminal and should never be relevant in, for example, a criminal trial for the criminal. I really feel like I can't emphasis that enough.

I don't think we are talking about the same thing.

Perhaps not. I am just trying to expand upon what enraged_camel mentioned about blame not being zero sum.

In real life I have my parents to keep a watch on me for most of the early part of my life. This takes years of intense involvement, with a lot of teaching about risk and safety.

I have Public Information Films on a variety of subjects:

Tables are dangerous (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icbYf_aR91o)

A collection of terrifying ads (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0xmSV6aq0g)

There are a variety of crime prevention and community safety websites. There are radio and tv programmes with advice about avoiding scams. There are magazine articles (even a well respected consumer law advice magazine "Which?") about scams and consumer law.

All of this is built up over many years and modified when needed.

How are people expected to learn how to keep themselves safe on the WWW? What search terms are they expected to use? (This is when I need Matt Cutts or some other Googler to give us useful stats about the words people use to find information about scams)

How would you know that responsibility is needed without proper education about the dangers?