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In moments of distraction I've had a couple of near-misses where I nearly clicked on malware.

But when I'm trying to explain to my dad how to know what to trust and what not to trust I realise it's completely hopeless. You can fake almost everything that a non-techie would know to check.

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Ever think to link to a file (e.g. excel spreadsheet) for a forum, like you can for an image with imgur?

other than Dropbox public url's the services that exiist have so many images with the word "Download" in the resulting link, all of which look exactly like a UX element, that you have to click about half of them or play Sherlock Holmes to uncover the real download link. It's like a scratch-off lottery.

You could get a hosting account (e.g. NearlyFreeSpeech or S3) and hotlink to them. I guess people don't often intentionally click ads when downloading files, unlike viewing images, so setting up a free file host isn't profitable.

Or install AdBlock guiltfree because the website is obviously hostile beyond forgiveness.

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