Fear & Family I.T. Help | Protect The Ancients

Operating Systems & Open Source
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Hey there folks!

It’s probably safe to say that, for some of us, our families do not share the same enthusiasm for computers and all things “Information Technology”. Where… comparatively, their skills on a computer equal technologically to about the discovery of fire. Or the wheel on a good day.

And… the horror stories of, lets call it “misunderstanding”. Trying to print out a video from YouTube. Using the mouse upside down. Passwords that are the same combination as is on their luggage, you know, real sick shit.

My open question for this forum is; what have you done to protect your less technology informed family members from themselves? (Or something to that effect.)

Ideally I could just VNC, make profiles without administrator privileges, that whole shabang, but, that would shackle me honestly. I don’t want to be their I.T. guy, anymore than I already am. And Chromebooks are out of the question. Which as far as I can tell, has me with three options:

  1. Drop them off into the cult of Apple.
  2. Find a Linux Distro that they won’t blow up… 'cause they will find it.
  3. NTlite as much of the windows bloat out as I can without removing various protections.
  4. Put their bodies under the floor boards, hallucinate their hearts still beat, and confess among corvids through poetry.

It’s probably going to end up being 3, as I’m also trying to figure out a way to auto sort and back up whatever files they put on the computer, as there is no organization to speak of, but that’s a stretch goal at this point. I just need to find some configuration which I can make basically idiot resistant, and I’m not even sure that exists.

So in appreciation of more informed thoughts which are not my own, thank you.

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I’d say steer that towards Apple for certain things, but absolutely if you don’t want to mess with giving them tech support.

My dad’s PC runs linux because all he does is check news and email. So it was an easy transition. Obviously, know your use case and you should be fine.

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I did this to my parents many years ago giving them an old Core2Duo iMac, best move I ever made. The support requests are minimal. I’ve tried a lightweight Windows install as well as Linux, both of which have been disastrous.

Over the years, I’ve probably had a handful of support requests, including things like upgrading RAM when visiting.

I convinced them to upgrade from their Core2Duo iMac to a M1 iMac, quite the improvement for them and to this day, support is minimal.

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Educate them where you can… My big concern with the elders is scams and… scams, mostly.

Educate on:

  1. Don’t click random things in emails.
  2. don’t give financial information to anyone.
    2.1. Nobody needs your 2FA code except you.
  3. If someone calls you for money, call them back and verify. (ie, if me or someone in the family needs money for an emergency, hang up and call them back and double check you’re not being spoofed.)
  4. Don’t install random shit you see on a website.
  5. Being suspicious of the things you read online. Don’t trust everything you see on your computer.
  6. You can always call me to validate something if you’re feeling nervous about something (de-stigmatize not understanding)
  7. Nobody legit (in terms of old folks interacting with computers) takes payment in gift cards. Send your grandkids giftcards for christmas, not some rando that called you saying you owe some tax shit.
  8. Help them find and write down the fraud / help phone numbers for all their financial institutions and take up a stance of calling them back if they get any calls about strange activity.

In terms of hardware, Apple is nice and easy to use. Chromebooks also a good choice, though support long-term sucks, but they’re Linux-friendly (mostly). Encourage them to ask questions and try to make space for them to be able to be vulnerable and try to be understanding.

Just don’t let them use Windows…

Brownie points for setting up a time machine (if going Apple) thing for their backups or whatever. Maybe if you’re ambitious set up a self-hosted situation where you can restore their stuff remotely.

I dunno, I guess at the end of the day the best advice I have is: be as understanding and patient as you can. Try to see things from their perspective. Try your best to find relatable analogies to explain things. I remember as a teen and a young 20-someting, my patience and empathy weren’t there. It’s better now. Also working a Tech Support job as Tier 1 support really helped me realize my folks aren’t nearly as bad as some other people out there…

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Thanks all, looks like the Cult of Apple is the recommended path. And a special thanks to @shadowimmage for a list of education suggestions, though I’m way ahead on that one.

Gotta ask, what variant of Linux? Stock Ubuntu? Mint? … Arch? : P

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My stepdads desktop is Fedora. Everything he does is in a browser so I just loaded Linux and set up Brave browser and he has been running it for the last 3 years that way.

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Wendell did a video on this a while back, basically he suggests to partition the drive for both OS and data separately, so you can easily nuke the OS. Also put them on their own restricted username and leave the Admin access for yourself

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I put OpenSUSE LEAP because I was running with Tumbleweed at the time.

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Also do have some personal health checks done for your folks, just in case. While some of this behavior can be quirks, old age does not rob you of your faculties hard and fast.

Well unless they they were kind of people who would try to print video in their youth, or were always way too simple minded to fall for scams.

And the old age slowdown is just that, slowdown. It should never make you incapable of doing most tasks.
Senile dementia is unfortunate misnomer, its not caused by by age, nor inevitable and if present, its cause is almost always destruction of neural structures by disease of massive trauma. And those is not normal part of aging process.

Why am I saying this?

Encountered something similar with my mom just now. And falsely thought it was just aging and stress.

She was getting progressiveness worse with handling passwords, accounts (work and personal) over few years, and lately even basic 2FA bank auth was getting impossible to do without assistance. And was always pissy about it :slight_smile:

Hand on instruction did not work, keepass did not work and in the end nothing did.

Fast forward few months, toss in paranoia. Fast forward a month? Involuntary hospitalization, since now hallucinations and aggression are now involved.

It was well concealed alzheimers, now in rapidly progressing outward phase. She will not be returning home.
I am now trying (and failing so far) to arrange care home for people for special need with full round the clock care, that’s how bad it is now (<2 months after hospitalization).

So unless they are generally simple folk that would never grasp basic technology processes like 2FA, or very old like 90+, they should not need this kind of old-proofing.

If they do, solution is probably not technical – restriction of legal access and guardianship if possible. They are danger to themselves and not entirely capable of acting in their best interests.

Look into account co-signing and stuff like that. Or that you will be handling their account from now on if possible.

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What I did for my elders was a bit niche. My dad is retired and plays quite a lot of steam games, so i cant just toss him to Apple land. He is however, extremely excitable about technologies, so when i mentioned pihole he wanted one.

He’s now running pihole, moved all his smarthome stuff to home assistant, and has a unifi UDR for solid firewall and VLAN segregation. His windows10 is as debloated as i can make it, updates are disabled, the only browser on anything in the house is firefox (yes i know iPhone just runs it on top of safari, fuck Apple), with the standard suite of anti-telemetry and malware addons.

They have Apple for all their mobile and tablet devices, and I’ve walked them through disabling as much of the built in crap as possible. Having as few apps installed as possible, and using the browser for tasks to reduce permissions granted to apps. They know to read the data practices section in the app store for something, and to my joy my mom told me shes been going and turning off all the cookies for every website she visits, rather than just clicking through prompts.

They have Mullvad for VPN, and nothing in the cloud. They consume media from my Jellyfin server and have no subscriptions besides the VPN.

My dad got a hand me down synology from me(with UPS), along with a walkthrough on how to tell it what folders to backup, and those hyper also backup to my NAS via VPN. He also has a piece of paper on what to do if the power goes out, since mounting encrypted drives isn’t super clear sometimes.

They don’t answer the phone to unknown #s anymore, “if its important they will leave a message”, and assume all texts are scams at this point. Now if i could just get my mom to stop watching the news. Doomscrolling isn’t just for kids anymore

I am incredibly proud of their willingness to forego convenience in the name of safety and privacy, and to trust me to help them do so.

Obviously this will not be the case for everyone, as your parents are different than mine. But the easiest and most effective thing is just to have open and honest dialogue about their needs and your concerns. Being a parent is hard, being a parent to your parent can be just as hard.

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The problem I am having with my Mom (who is almost 85 years old) is that she only wants to use her iPad tablet. The problem is that her tablet is so old that the iPad won’t receive any more updates. My sister bought her a brand-new Android table but refused to use it. I have sat down with her to try and show her how to use the Samsung tablet, but she will only use her IPAD. Can you imagine all the flack trying to teach her Linux or even getting my Mom to use Linux?

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What does she do on the iPad that she cannot do on the Samsung? If it’s just the interface, then see if you can find a custom UI that is similar to her wants.

I’ve found that certain people don’t have the desire to learn, and while I vehemently disagree with this stance I have come to terms with it.

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For my parents, stability is the most important, IT is like electricity for them, switch stuff on, it needs to work. They live in rural area so cell phone reception is poor. instand messaging, IP-SIP (the old landline has been disabled), Internet access is the most important.

So I got them a newish router (Fritzbox, I know some people hate AVM, for me they are a competent brand compared to most trash tier manufacturer of consumer network hardware). The router also supports DECT and old analogue phones for IP telephony, so I only had to connect the old ISDN telephone system and all the wired phones in the house work like before.

My mom got a new PC because the previous PC(s) were showing their age and were made for the most part out of my older machines - I made a hot spare in case should the first PC die, but some of its components were also failing.
For the new PC I reused a Wortman Pentium 4 Server / Workstation case (its basically a standard ATX case but was awesome minimalistic for its time in 2003 and had 120mm fan mounts for in and outtake when most cases were still using 80mm). As mainboard I got a new old stock B450 board one customer newer picked up (or paid). Its very spacious because it was designed to house double socket Xeon systems in its high end config.

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I installed all of my unused “old” Wifi5 Unifi APs which are now meshed together and provide coverage of the whole house and use a written off NUC with Debian as controller and jump host should I need to check connection / update status of the various devices. I decided to enable autoupdate for router and unifi devices. Its a dead-simple network but it has been smooth sailing since 2+ years.

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I guess your above statement fits my mom to a tee. The problem for my mom with Android tablets is that they only have two physical buttons. My mom once told me I knew how to use my iPad, but I can’t figure out how to use this @#@#@ Android tablet. I have shown her how to navigate on the Samsung tablet several times, but she just can’t give up her iPad. I guess I better save for a brand-new iPad for my mom’s Christmas gift.

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I must admit, for the most non-technical affine persons I have to deal with, I recommend mobile devices from Apple. Most of UI since IOS7 behaves the same (there are few exceptions like the stupid “camera island” or older devices with a home button) Consistency is a godsend if you have to explain anybody over phone how to enter or change something in a UI.

Regarding privacy, in the end you are always beding a monster if you go mobile and use cloud services.
Android for me is a way bigger pain to support - the manufacturer idiocracy, the device flaws, you can have a $50 trash tier experience which barly works to a high end phone which is way over engineered for its intended use.
With Apple I get a mobile device within a certain standard and if its not 5+ years old it still gets updates. - Same for the ipad, if you replace the old one you most likley save yourself several headaches - and if she still insists on one with a home button, get a Gen9 ipad as replacement (the latest one still with a home button). Most of Apples old-new stock previous gen can be had for much cheaper than the current models and still perform fine.

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I put several onto Macs running Debian XFCE.
They love the hardware aesthetic and XFCE is configed to resemble MacOS.

-Bitwarden for password management with a yubikey
-ublock on firefox
-ufw with range bans

I find all kinds of crazy exe’s and dmg’s in the downloads folders.
Bad actors are increasingly pushing Apple oriented malware.

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My mother’s iPad is a reconditioned original. You can’t update it anymore, and you can’t get security updates. My mother has had her iPad for over eight years. Because she is so non-technical, I have to turn on her Ruku-enabled TV so she can watch her shows. I don’t mind doing things for her. I just worry about what she is going to do if I ever get my own house.

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Yeah the old original iPad is a tough one, because you are most likley on iOS 5 the most and the UI since 7 will be way different compared what she is used to.

What is the use case here? Webbrowsing?

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Web browsing, getting her email, Facebook, and ordering things from Amazon.