this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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Most people aren't all that clear on the distinction of things being "on" a phone. When they switch to their next phone and their photos immediately sync onto it from whatever cloud stuff they use, they may have the illusion that the new phone is where their photos "are" now and not consider the continuing existence of the data on the old one.
Basic technical literacy should be everyone's responsibility and would be in a perfect world, but any IT person will tell you that it can never be assumed of anyone. However on the bright side, stories like this blowing up in the mainstream news will knock a little awareness into more end-user skulls every now and then. Send it to all the non-techies you know and care about!
After being in IT for a decade it never ceases to amaze me how incompetent people are when it comes to tech.
At my first gig in NYC I worked at a smaller financial firm (about 100 people) and every mid-level and above employee was given a work phone. One time I got a ticket that said "my smartphone is being really slow, can someone please take a look?". I went up there and it was a guy in his 40s (I was like 30), suit and tie, I think he was a Junior VP or something like that. He gave me his Galaxy S5 and I looked at the RAM usage and it was all taken up by Chrome. I opened up Chrome and he had 99+ tabs open, I told him that was the reason and he said "Oh.. I thought those automatically closed when I exited (he meant switched apps, not killing the process)...", I told him they didn't and started swiping them away, after the first few it was about 90 tabs of (teen) porn π€£. I had to stand there in front of him, straight faced for a good few minutes cleaning up his porn. Afterwards I said "it should be better now, just remember to close your tabs when you're finished with them." and left. Once I got in the elevator I nearly pissed myself laughing so hard.
That's awesome. Reminds me of having to tell an SVP that yes, per his demand, I did take his request to keep sharing music online illegally at work. He didnt seem to accept that the legal letters the form received meant he needed to change anything.
What could have been an 'oh shit, my bad' and noone has to know - turned into the entire leadership weighed in to direct me to delete the files and tools and be very clear he was putting his employment at risk.
The poor man's ego. He seemed to think the IT guy didn't have the ability to speak to him like that. Even insisted I tell him in front of two of his staff as a power play
Omg thatβs golden
Yeah, that was about a decade ago and it's still fresh in my memory, probably one of the most difficult times to maintain my composure. I could tell he wanted to die inside the moment I told him the tabs didn't disappear.
I've seen too many guys, even those in "respectable" positions like executives or club captains, just leave their porn tabs open before asking me for some help with their phones.
When I asked them to open up their browser they would straight up open it up to a previously opened porn tab and start to panic. And somehow, the porn site that opened is always XNXX, lol. Pornhubs' banned here and I guess XNXX just become popular instead.
It's quite ridiculous how brazen they are about it
I'm not gonna lie I do this too. Not leaving porn tabs open, but not closing apps/tabs. Android should automatically clean these up afaik.
NOOOOOOOOOO! DO NOT. EVEN. SUGGEST. THAT.
I've got hundreds of tabs opened, if Android cleaned them automatically it'd be like burning my own Library of Alexandria.
Use bookmarks my dude
Like if I didn't have any mess in my bookmarks as well...
Apart from that, a tab open means a task to do. I can bookmark an interesting tab only if I've "been there" already, e.g. if I've already read an article cover to cover.
I better hope you saved the links. Just asking for a friend.
Bro it's 2023. Do you and your friend really not know how to find porn on the internet?
Sad but true.
As one of those IT people (who was taught on punched cards), I'd had some hope that by the 21st century only GenX and Boomers would have this issue.
That young adults don't know this stuff is very frustrating.
Most people cant explain how a toaster works - it may as well be magic to them.
There is actually a theory floating around, that people growing up in the 80ies-2000 were the most tech literate, because they had to tinker to get thinks to work. Want to play a game on DOS 6.2 and it did not work? Edit some system files for more memory. Today the technisch hidden behind false physics and got really well.
My son is nine. I got him a Kano (the old one with a raspberry pie as base) and he has to learn why we need to connect a display to the processing unit and connect peripherals to do things. His friends own a tablet, a smartphone and a gaming console. You cannot see behind the tech in those, if you donβt want to destroy them and explore hobbit works (on a basic level).
Kano. Never heard if it...of too the webs I go!
Thanks!
It is a great project, but unfortunately I guess it is not running very well. They did the setup with raspberry pies first with additional modules like a screen, an LED matrix and other things you could program. The software experience is pretty awesome. The whole manual is telling your kid a story and describing everything in just the right language for a kid. You plug it and the story goes on at terminal level when your kid is promted to write their name. After this it boots into a really well made desktop with a adventure game to get to know the computer, a bunch of programming tools and a browser.
Schland detektiert
It's genuinely crazy. I've had to remove viruses from my friends (16 or 17 at the time) and just didn't understand. Why are you allowing things to make admin changes? Or just having to explain the difference to people what a "zip drive" is and a USB drive. As things get more "convenient" tech literacy definitely goes down.
I worked in my university's computer lab and one time I had a girl complain that the computer wasn't allowing her to do something (like download or save a file, this was over a decade ago) and she was frustrated. I asked her to show me what the issue was. She did what she was trying to do, a pop-up appeared and without reading it she clicked "no" and then proceeded to bitch about it not working. I did it again and the pop-up was asking for permission but she kept denying it, and then complaining that it didn't work π€¦ββοΈ
Though I do see that these two have the opposite problems. One clicks yes without understanding, the other clicks no without understanding.
Though I will say I wish the admin access requests had more information about what the app wants to do with that admin access. And that programs that request admin access for things they don't really need it for were generally treated with disdain.
It's not that she didn't understand what it was asking, she straight up didn't even read it, as soon as it came up she clicked "no" in a split second. I watched her do it like three times.
Yeah, that was a part of my assumption, that her misunderstanding was about whether she should read it rather than about what the words themselves said. Those who do at least read have a better chance at understanding, though messages aren't always easy to understand.
In a way, the two have the same issue: they think that these message dialogs are things that get in the way of doing what they want to do. They just act on that in opposite ways so the yes guy allows everything to happen (including bad stuff he doesn't actually want) and your friend disallows anything from happening, including what she does want.
They are both trying to run before they have learned to walk properly.
We started with Boomers etc who never used tech so had no idea what to do. Then a couple generations of people having to learn tech to use it. Now we are at the point where itβs so easy to use that people can use without ever having to learn about it.
My toaster now gets regular updates and needs constant internet access
My oven asked me to allow cookies πͺπͺπͺ
On the plus side it's going to keep you employed, a bit like COBOL programmers today.
Back when I was in college (mid to late 2000s) I worked in the campus computer lab. People frequently asked "how do I print stuff?" because they had to pay for it ($25 was included, it was to stop people from printing out a few hundred page books for free), they just had to swipe their ID at a touchscreen terminal, select the print jobs and hit "print".
This girl came over asking this question and I repeated the above, then she said "No... how do I print from the computer?". I was dumbfounded because this was a very large statue university that didn't accept just anyone. It was Microsoft Word (when they switched from the menu bar to that stupid start menu style button in the upper left hand corner) and she had zero clue how to use it. I was thinking "damn girl, how did you make it through high school and get accepted here?!". She was apparently your typical hot blonde airhead.
Please don't be sexist
Oh shut up. Lemmy is quickly turning into Reddit where people get butthurt and cry foul over the dumbest things.