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Recently, someone in my family was not able to get into their home PC with their password, and called for assistance. This means having to drive down to the machine to see what they are doing, and log in with the appropriate account that can reset that password. Work commitments preclude driving there right away to see what is happening, and I am trying to locate a remote access solution. If they were logged into the machine, I could use some sort of remote assistance tool, but that is not an option in this case. There is the possibility of setting up SSH or OpenVPN to access the machine via the Internet, but I am not certain leaving those tools running all the time is the smartest idea in this day and age.
What recommendations do the Soylent community have for securely managing a machine over the Internet when someone is not logged into it?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Sunday April 30 2017, @08:31PM (1 child)
It depends on who you flock with. In my work I run into lots of people not in technological field and the older they are, the more mystifying the tech is. By the same token, I've hired plenty of millennials to do receptionist type work and I'm always disappointed at their computer skills. Yes they can use Facebook fine, but I really feel like I shouldn't have to explain that cmd-c is "copy" and cmd-p is "paste" -- this isn't esoteric knowledge.
Secondly, you're a programmer and know other programmers. The way most people see technology is as a magic black box and if it doesn't work like they expect, they won't even make a methodical attempt to understand it. Certainly as a programmer, you've looked at the way a program fails to understand how to fix it, probably even tried to make it fail. When you experience glitches in a program you didn't write, you can methodically attack the program to see exactly what makes it fail to come up with a work-around. You get that there is a logical interaction between what you do and how the program was written. Most people don't -- it is simply magic to them which works until it doesn't, and once something is outside the rote learning they used to get to whatever skills they have, they quit.
So anyway, you may be a geezer (and I'm right behind you), but your technical skill level is not the norm, your understanding that tech is not black magic is not the norm, and your faith that people will care enough to learn it is not the norm.
(Score: 2) by gidds on Tuesday May 02 2017, @12:53PM
Exactly! As you say: people treat technology as magic; they don't want to understand it, they just want to remember the specific sequence of actions to achieve a particular goal, and treat everything else as ‘Here Be Dragons’.
And I think it's less about details than about the whole mindset. For example, I had a family member who simply couldn't get his head round softkeys.
This wasn't on a computer, nor even a smartphone, but back on what we'd now call a ‘feature phone’ (i.e. a dumb mobile) — and a simple one at that. It had just one softkey (a button below the screen that could do different things, with its current meaning shown on screen next to it). He wasn't a stupid guy, but he just couldn't grasp the idea that you needed to look at the screen to see what the button did. He expected to remember a sequence of keypresses to do what he wanted, and it frustrated him no end that pressing the same keys in the same order could have different results.
Actually, I think that mindset is much wider. People ask me “How do I do X?”, and (because I'm often not familiar with the device or software in question) I have to say, “I don't know. But let's take a look…” And I can often do it, not because I know what buttons to press, but because I look at the screen and try to see what it's telling me.
It seems that many people just don't look. Perhaps especially older people; perhaps because when they grew up, controls were hard-wired, and devices didn't have any state other than the control settings, so you never needed to look.
How do we avoid getting like that? How do we keep up with technology?
That's tricky. I think one thing is to try to set aside preconceived ideas. Perhaps that's why young folk pick this stuff up quicker: they're not trying to fit everything into their existing understanding, because they don't have any existing understanding. They just accept what they see for what it is.
And another is to play. Children are also very good at this, but adults tend to look down on it. Which is a shame, because exploratory play is how we learn about new things! Obviously, with technology you have to be a little bit careful to avoid doing real damage, but having a good old play and poke around is a vital way of getting to grips with something new.
In the Olden Days™, of course, this was easier: you could look through all the menus (or press all the buttons) to get a good picture of what was possible. As software moves away from such old-fashioned UIs and is controlled more by gestures and swipes, that gets harder to see. I think we're laying down a real problem with software discoverability.
But I think it's just as important simply to keep your eyes open.
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