It's an ageist way of saying that this exploit is less critical for people who take proactive counter-measures, and more affects less technically inclined or security-minded people.
And that is an example of how political correctness is an arms race.
Is it so hard to be nice?
What isn’t nice is then to say that that is an ageist thing to say. Even though it is a perfectly valid thing to point out real people who are affected by certain online threats.
Which it is.
If the point is that it's unhelpful to make irrelevant assumptions about parents and grandparents, then this is in complete agreement with the parent's point and is not a critique of it.
This is not a clever gotcha.
The original comment was about grandparents and parents neither of which you need to have a certain age to be one. Assuming that it IS about age is in turn actually ageist because you are signaling that people should be parents at a certain point in their life.
To be clear, I don’t think your intentions are wrong: you are just trying to right a perceived wrong. I am just asking you to grant others a more favourable interpretation of their intentions as well. I do this by pointing out that your well intended call out of ageism is in turn also interpretable as something unwoke.
Hence arms race. There is always someone who can be more politically correct.
My parents are NOT AT ALL technically savvy. My mother's web browser has a ton of bullshit addons all over it, or at least it did last time I looked at her computer in 2014-ish. I can't imagine she's gotten much better about this stuff. But we can't talk about this pattern because it could hurt the identity of older HN readers who are technically savvy, it's offensive.
Ageism is bad when it's preventing people from getting work or engaging in society in a meaningful way. I simply do not care if it's used to make casual remarks with the specific intent of getting people to relate to an idea, e.g. people who don't know any better about privacy are actually people you know, most likely your parents or grandparents or some of their friends. And taking part in shutting down that conversation because of "ageism" is, IMO, worse than the ageism itself.
How do you think you get the sort of ageism that prevents older people from getting the job?
I think you get it from a multitude of reasons, including allowing interviewers to come up with bad faith assessments on culture fit and other un-quantifiable employment parameters that amount to nothing more than, "I liked or disliked the candidate." I'd even extend that logic to a larger cause, allowing coworkers (i.e. same level individual contributors) to interview candidates, as I don't think coworkers necessarily have the proper skills or incentives to neutrally evaluate future coworkers, especially not beyond, "I like this person because I can relate to them because we look the same, have the same interests, etc." This isn't strictly ageism either, it can affect people by class or race or other things that set them apart.
I'd rather say: it's wrong.
HN readers' parents are likely far more technically inclined than an average person.
(The commenter did not invoke their own parents, which might be a slightly more reasonable position)
Making a claim that HN's parents must be technically incompetent adds nothing to the thread, is likely to cause momentary confusion, and only contributes to the "bad" ageism that you are concerned about.