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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

Just tell her not to enable developer mode. This is FUD: Apple would clearly have the right to determine the side-loading process as they see fit, and they can put in all sorts of protections to prevent novice users from accessing it easily. Think parental mode type protections. Apple is the master of UX; surely they can figure out a way to keep things secure for users who need it to be?

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>Just tell her not to enable developer mode

She doesn’t know what that is. She won’t remember what I said 5 minutes after I leave. She will blindly follow the instructions of any official-looking website or any scam caller that instructs her to disable these protections in order to “watch a video” (actually sideload an executable).

> Apple is the master of UX; surely they can figure out a way to keep things secure for users who need it to be?

She got around all of the modern permissions and signing protections on macOS and installed a malicious phony video player that nuked her device and stole her banking credentials. It doesn’t matter what you tell her: she WILL get tricked unless it’s impossible to be tricked.

That's both unfortunate, and sort of amazing. So she's not technically literate to know if she's being scammed, yet obviously competent enough to follow directions to get hacked.

That's most people who are given reasonably-written instructions that seem to be written by trustworthy people.

> She will blindly follow the instructions of any official-looking website or any scam caller

You probably shouldn't let her use the internet unsupervised, if this is true.

You’re talking about 80% of people who are on the internet.

If not more.

My guess is that the actual numbers are much lower, like orders of magnitude lower. The U.S. may be dominated by Apple devices, but the rest of the world runs on Windows and Android. 80% of the world population isn't being scammed out of their savings nor are their phones infested with keyloggers and other malware.

And if cases are that bad their loved ones would probably install parental controls or an MDM to protect them against themselves.

> Just tell her not to enable developer mode.

If we're just telling people to do things then why not just tell app developers to publish through the App Store.

Most developers will continue to do that even after iOS allows third party app stores, just as most Android apps publish through the Play Store (even if better alternatives such as F-Droid exist).

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