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Comment by Brajeshwar | Hacker News Reader

I do this and have been teaching my family too. Recently, my daughter got her Roblox merchandise emptied after she clicked a link from Discord. I looked and rough math put at close to $1000 worth of Robux (when converted if I have to buy the Robux). This happened after she figured out to turn off all ad-blockers, NextDNS, from the client side. Now, I have migrated the VPN-ish-DNS at the Profile Config level and have told here that the blockers in the browsers are for her safety. She cried the whole day, until I agreed and bought her few Robux to go on.

Phone calls and text messages are the ones I have no control whatsoever, so I try to avoid them at all cost, not just for security but they are irritating most of the times. I stopped voice few years back - https://no.phone.wtf

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I worry technology is so easy today's kids are less tech-savvy than their parents, which is a terrifying concept to me.

Really. This worries me as well

We are seeing young people that can't work around Word/Excel (sure, or their cloud equivalent) to do basic tasks like creating a table or basic formatting

When I was in high school we traded files amongst ourselves using burned CDs and flash drives. My nieces and nephews don't understand what a file format is.

Thank goodness Microsoft hides file extensions by default. We wouldn't want these children learning!

Major /s

Today's technology isn't easier: it's just more restricted. The things you can do are pre-programmed and individually specified, rather than emergent from the design of the system, which means there's much less common logic to it.

I think the parent is conflating easiness with lack of complexity. Lack of complexity does make doing things less confusing if you have less options to choose from

I don't worry much. I'd prefer if they knew more, but somehow kids were always able to learn the sciences or engineering. Just because they don't learn on their own, it doesn't mean they'll never know it.

I think it's about the same amount of kids are tech savvy now as when I was a kid. Which is also scary, of course, but I don't think it's really less. It's just that non savvy kids are still immersed in tech; when I was growing up, kids could get through k-12 only touching a computer twice a year, if that's what worked for them/their families.

Did she need to do anything after clicking the link in Discord or was the exploit completely automated?

My kids have just started to get in to Roblox, not bought anything yet but I expect it'll happen soon enough.

From her story, she clicked a link that starts with `wrww-roblox.com` and seems nothing happened. She went about her day, slept, and found out that her account was empty when she wakes up.

The person might have been following her around for a while and some of her rare merchandizes had started attracting unwanted attention. She says she had been playing with the person for a while, and she missed the link that was NOT Roblox.

Why did she want the ad blockers off?

Probably because some things do not work with them.

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