alt Hacker News>Ad blocking has become a safety issue. My parents are at an age where they fall for things. If a malicious ad pops up and offers to install McAfee, some other form of crapware, or outright scamware, they'll click that ad and install the thing.
I've been using the internet since the 80s. This has always been the case. Even before graphical browsers.
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transcriptase • today at 12:45 AM
Nonsense. Before the advent of those first “you’re the 1000th visitor” banners or relatively harmless “worms” spready by literal .exe files sent by email in the early 2000s… most of the internet could be trusted by default.
And at that point the blast radius was so hilariously small, some rando compromising your computer was a nuisance versus a threat to your financial wellbeing.
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Bitcoin changed everything. It used to be if you hacked somebody's PC you got.... a hacked PC. Big whoop.
Bitcoin provided both a financial use for stolen compute and a bankless online international payment system for ransoms.
That's what turned the script kiddies into professionals. Malice and lulz were replaced with dollars and cents.