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Safe Computing For the Elderly?
wingspan asks: "My 80-year old mother is insisting on using this new fangled thing called the Internet for banking and brokerage. I researched ways for her to perform those activities safely. The typical suggestions, from organizations such as BITS [pdf], include installing anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-spam, anti-adware, browser toolbar, and a personal firewall. The suggestions also include not clicking on links, verifying security certificates (If it has a cert, it must be a good site!), making sure the address begins with 'https://' regularly updating the security software and patching all other software, and regularly changing passwords. Personally, I think the technical suggestions are too Windows-centric, too costly, and leave too much of an attack surface. The non-technical suggestions are simply too much to ask of the elderly. What do you think? Is it possible for an elderly person to safely perform Internet banking and brokerage? If so, what system should they have, how should it be configured and maintained, and how much of the security should depend with the elderly user?"
"As you get older you lose your mental faculties. That's not patronizing - it's what happens."
Sometimes true, however I once had opportunity over several weeks to play a Monk in his late eighties at chess, a game at which I have some talent. I've never been so completelly destroyed in chess so many times in a row, his abilities were fearsome.
Yet he seemed absent minded, it was all very puzzling.
Chess skill is largely a basis of pattern recognition and experience, prodigies aside. One can be brilliant at chess by sheer dint of having played thousands and thousands of games and be mediocre at everything else in life. Adrian de Groot famously [in the chess world, at least] found that Grandmasters are far better than amateurs at memorizing real gameplay positions on a board, but are just as poor as amateurs with nonsense positions [three white bishops all on black squares, kings adjacent, general random piece placement]. This has led heavily to the adoption of the 'pattern recognition' mode of thought.
Your monk, then, may have just been very, very, experienced, in spite of his old age, and thus fearsome. Hell, look at Viktor Kortchnoi.
That said, though, I absolutely believe there are some very, very, sharp elderly men and women out there. As well as some very, very, strong ones, to dispel another myth. The key is using what you have -- intelligence, strength -- and never giving it a chance to slip into senility.
Perhaps life really is full of possibilities.