For Thanksgiving, give your parents a treat: upgrade their browser

It's about "moving the cheese". Most people are creaturea of habit, when you move their cheese it forces them to change their habits and instills panic due to fear of the unknown. More so if the person affected isn't tech savvy. They are afraid they won't be able to do what they did before, they are afraid they'll make some new mistake that will have disastrous consequences, they are afraid of being embarrassed with making some novice blunder that will cause everyone to laugh at them, etc.

For these folks changing their browser, even a little bit would be like you or I walking into the bathroom and finding the toilet paper replaced with 3 seashells. You can get past that moment of panic with some coaching but some people don't like to be helped so there may or may not be anything you can do.

My philosophy: if you're getting tasked with being the family IT department, lay down some rules: they use what you suggest or they don't get support.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Moved_My_Cheese

It is "unsafe" for the would-be helper to help people who aren't asking/paying for help and who don't understand the difference between a easily changed default setting and installed spyware.

With such people, you never know when they will simultaneously accuse you of "breaking" their computer and remove your access to said computer so that whatever you've done that they believe "breaks" the computer indeed becomes "permanent" and is something they can be permanently pissed at you for.

After, you know, asking.

I stalled the laptop purchasing decision for my mom and grandmother and ended up letting other family members get my grandmother a laptop (Windows), and I let my mom get talked into buying a Mac by some friends and family members and abdicated all tech support responsibility by arguing that I only knew how to use Windows.

It worked; all blame is shifted away from me (as it should be) to the electric contraptions and other people who talked them into getting the laptops in question.

I think I increased my life span by twelve years and freed up a couple of hundred hours a month by that.

I am basically the Machiavelli of tech support.

I hope nobody minds but I'd like to share what happened to me recently:

My father called me a few months ago to ask if I could go on our bank's online banking site and tell him if I noticed anything unusual. At the time, HSBC's online banking had the following flow: Enter your user ID as the first step, enter your DOB as the second, and finally enter three specified digits from your 6-figure security PIN.

It all seemed OK to me, nothing out of the ordinary, but he was telling me that when he was prompted to enter his security PIN, the site asked for the full number. This was a big no-no.

"So I thought I'd better call you before I do that, because it doesn't sound right and you know about this stuff."

I went to their house the next weekend to check it out. He fired up the ol' IE7, went to the HSBC page, completed the first step of logging in, and there it was, clear as day. A mysterious third box prompting the user to enter their full PIN.

I don't know exactly what put that input box there, and successive Googling has yielded nothing specific. I assumed the damn thing had picked up some nasty spyware, or some other malicious code with the potential to cost a lot of people an awful lot of money. I installed Chrome, deleted the "Internet" icon from the desktop, imported old bookmarks and the like, and let him have a go on his new browser.

I really think we, as the more technically-minded people in our families, have an obligation to do this for the people we care about, in a way that extends far beyond those clever CSS animations or native video support. I'm lucky enough that my folks know to keep their eyes open to anything fishy online, but I had no idea he was still using IE7. The idea of him (or indeed anyone) inadvertently giving their complete bank details to some cyber-criminals out of completely innocent ignorance terrifies me.