RE: https://infosec.exchange/@bontchev/117314994533181052
Ah, I forgot you are a Windows user, where installers are a differently interesting risk,given that it’s old-school “click link, download file, run MSI or EXE.”
Being zoomed in on Windows does tend to narrow your viewpoint and your experience a lot, given that other OSes are available, and used by a majority of server-style systems and a significant minority of laptop users. (I’m ignoring iOS and Android, which are Mach/BSD and Linux at their core respectively, because of their strongly regulated installation ecosystems.)
There are certainly mainstream products - by any reasonable definition of mainstream - that officially document curlbash copy-and-paste operations for installation. My own system has Rust and Julia installed in just that way, though I downloaded the script first, for what that’s worth, examined it briefly, and then ran it later instead of piping the download filelessly into a command prompt.
I guess it’s sad that age hasn’t mellowed you into being respectful (or gentle) enough not to call people “idiots” because they don’t know Windows like you do. People aren’t stupid just because their knowledge and experience are different from yours.
Sometimes, bad learning comes from bad students. But surprisingly often it’s as much or more the result of bad, or unsympathetic, or unthoughtful, or hypocritical teachers.
As others have said before, with humour but also in seriousness…. Vesselin, you need to get out more.
Quoting
@pducklin@infosec.exchange I said that, contrary to your claim, mainstream products use installers and not the curl | bash idiocy. You have yet to prove me wrong.
Knowing basic stuff about the computer, like what the Run dialog or the Terminal do, is basic computer literacy; it doesn't make one a "technical expert".
I use Claude as a productivity boost. Not because I couldn't write the same code but because doing so would take me years instead of a couple of months. And I still verify carefully what it has generated. I know the language quite well, thank you, or I wouldn't program in that language with or without Claud's help.
My position is unchanged - the only ones who fall for ClickFix are computer-illiterate idiots. If you want to place blame elsewhere, place it on the other kind of idiots who keep coming up with more and more convoluted forms of CAPTCHAs, so that the average user becomes completely confused about what is legitimate and what is not.
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