You're extremely grumpy. Blaming the victim is not some brave, heroic concept.
People can imagine what it looks like to be in physical danger, and instinct can help them avoid the situations to some degree. It's hard to imagine what it's like being in an unsafe situation on the internet.
>>Blaming the victim is not some brave, heroic concept.
Blaming the victim is bad only if you believe that blame is a zero sum game. Unfortunately, it is not. If you walk down a dark alleyway in New York at night alone and get mugged, the mugger is guilty of mugging you, but you're also guilty of being a silly goose. You don't gain immunity to blame simply because you were the victim.
To expand on that (since I find in this topic it is necessary to be explicit), since blame is not zero-sum assigning an amount of blame to the victim should in no way be seen to reduce the blame or fault the perpetrator receives.
In other words, since blame is not zero-sum, placing some blame on the victim is not a defense of the perpetrator.
Why shouldn't you be able to walk down a dark alley in NYC at night? It's not your fault if something happens. With that attitude, we are just tolerating crime and accepting it. If more people walk around at night, the crimes will gain more exposure, be more aggressively stopped, and things will get safer.
The individual has every right to walk down a dark alley, and the group very well may be safer if more people walk down dark alleys, but if the individual is optimizing their behavior for self-preservation (and I think that is how individuals are most likely to act, at least in the 'West') then avoiding the alley is likely the best action
You're expanding on my point exactly. The Internet does not have such an obvious dark alley. You can copy HTML/CSS, have anchors with a different href than shown, and a lot of sly things. I hate using anologies when talking to hackers, so I didn't use the alleyway example even though I was thinking it.
>>You're expanding on my point exactly. The Internet does not have such an obvious dark alley.
Not literally, no. But most Internet scams can actually be avoided using common sense, which dictates that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Edit: Forgot about this site, but perhaps it could be used as a training tool for family members you feel are not quite as savy as they should be: http://www.shadyurl.com/
Make a page that just says "Grandma, don't click links like that!", convert it to a "shady" url with shadyurl.com, then email it to your grandmother.
Good point. Training family members to look at the status bar first is probably pretty hard, and probably not even effective. At the very least you would have to train them to recognize and avoid url shortening services...
I would say that a criminal is equally guilty if they commit a crime in a dark alley NYC or if they commit a crime in backcountry Idaho.
If I replace my bicycle u-lock with a nice hefty rope and start lashing my bike to whatever object seems solid at the time (this is a concept that actually appeals to me), then I should receive some blame when my bike gets inevitably stolen. However the bicycle thief is no more nor less a thief.
What I was trying to say is that your hypothetical does a good job of showing why blame is not zero sum. Obviously in either case the criminal receives the same blame, but I think it is fairly clear that the victim who took drastic measures to reduce risk is less to blame than the one who did not.
The important thing to remember is that the blame of the victim, while present, has no relation to the blame of the criminal and should never be relevant in, for example, a criminal trial for the criminal. I really feel like I can't emphasis that enough.
People can imagine what it looks like to be in physical danger, and instinct can help them avoid the situations to some degree. It's hard to imagine what it's like being in an unsafe situation on the internet.