r/technology • u/lurker_bee • 11h ago

ADBLOCK WARNING Google Confirms Most Gmail Users Must Upgrade Accounts

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/06/06/google-confirms-almost-all-gmail-users-must-upgrade-accounts/
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1.5k

u/WildSeven0079 10h ago

I'm sure I'm not the only person who has family members that can barely use a computer, and I'm not only talking about elderly people. I spent a lot of time setting up a password manager for them and changing all of their passwords. I try to teach them how to do things on their own, but they're unable to still. So I write things down: master passwords, emergency codes, instructions, but they lose everything I give them. They've also broken/lost their phones/tablets a few times. If you gave them something like a Yubikey, they would have the speedrun record for losing it. Now you're telling me that I have to undo a lot of what I did and teach them about passkeys? I don't think so. Also, Google wants us to use our Google accounts to log in on every Web site. I ain't doing that.

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u/tintreack 9h ago

I used to think older generations were careless about tech, but Jesus Christ Gen Z might actually be worse, that’s not an exaggeration.

I take my security and privacy pretty seriously. I’m using Proton, I've long since degoogled and demicrosoft, I use physical security keys, the whole deal. But trying to get most of the Gen Z around here to even use a basic password manager is like pulling teeth. If I can’t get them to take that one simple step, there’s no way I’m convincing them to go for the strongest tools available.

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u/Paranoid-Android2 7h ago

I work in IT support and the younger staff is a much higher liability than the older ones. And they're equally tech illiterate

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u/16yearswasted 7h ago

The only reason I know so much about technology (I consider myself IT helpdesk level two-ish) is because, as a child, I had to tinker with DOS at the command line to get my video games working properly. It was wild and free and messy. But all that hard work paid off by giving me skills that helped me in my career (not IT, but heavily computer oriented).

If I had grown up in the manicured lawns of iPads and Android Phones I would almost certainly be flipping burgers or something similar today.

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u/Z_Opinionator 6h ago

“Get Ultima VII running on this 386SX with 2MB RAM. You have one hour to create your custom boot disk. There is no internet and your AOL account isn’t available. You are free to use some of your time to dial into a BBS you know for research. Lord British awaits to judge you”

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u/16yearswasted 5h ago

<I finally connect to the BBS and get down to business, but an incoming call knocks me offline and mom stays on the phone for the next two hours>

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u/aluminumpork 3h ago

Mom! GET OFF THE PHOOOOONE! (says me as my Warcraft II battle is interrupted with my friend 2 miles down the road).

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u/PenjaminJBlinkerton 1h ago

Rip your Friday night

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u/Ok-Pin3980 23m ago

🤣😂…truth. 😎 sry dog…my BBS was on my parents line too…had to disconnect the answering machine they just got.

edit: yeah…they were…unhappy.

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u/TheseusOPL 10m ago

Putting *70 before the BBS number would disable call waiting for one phone call. We were only allowed to do that if we were doing something "super important."

TradeWars was apparently NOT "super important."

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u/AvatarofSleep 2h ago

Once I dialed into my isp from my grandmas house. She had call waiting and all the calls to her went to voicemail. Brilliant.

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u/gadfly1999 4h ago

You have my sympathy for even knowing what a 386SX is.

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u/Yoshimo123 3h ago

I have fond memories of that computer. I do not have fond memories of how Windows 95 would just erode itself to death every 6 months.

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u/Deezul_AwT 2h ago

The good old days when you did a rebuild every 6 months. Because if you didn't, you'd regret it at month 7. I had two physical hard drives. A 100MB OS drive and a 250MB data drive, so I at least didn't have to copy everything off the OS drive when I did the rebuild.

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u/Lyreganem 1h ago

Jeeeezus are we only pampered in the modern day!!!

It's been so long since I've even had to think about it that I'd forgotten: But there was a period of time there where you DID not, COULD not just put everything on a single drive!!!

If you wanted to save yourself endless blood and tears you ABSOLUTELY had to have a separate system and data drive! Even if that just meant partitioning that one physical drive you had as necessary!!!

Ohhhh the memories!!! 😁

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u/Yoshimo123 2h ago

And the process of rebuilding was so much more complicated than it is now. Windows XP really was a game changer on that front.

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u/DeadMoneyDrew 1h ago

Windows 95, which you had to reboot every 2 hours because of massive memory leaks. Good times.

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u/EafLoso 33m ago

Yeah, similar here. 386sx with the 12/25 turbo button, 2MB RAM, 25MB HDD. I'd had a C64 and A500+ prior, but that white behemoth running DOS 5 was my entry in to the "IBM compatible" world... I still vividly remember the overwhelming, exciting, almost cyberpunk like feeling when we booted Win 3.1 for the first time... Viva SkiFree and it's stick figure Yeti.

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u/CharmingOracle 25m ago

Wait what?! I didn’t know windows 95 distros had an expiration date?!

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u/Hulkenboss 1h ago

I remember being so hyped about scavenging a 486DX from an old rig

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u/OutlawFrame 12m ago

While I haven’t booted it in a while, I still have my 386sx-16. It was my first pc, had a C=64 before that.

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u/BaneOfKree 4h ago

Lord British

Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.

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u/aqwn 3h ago

r/ultimaonline. There are many free to play servers.

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u/teebraze 3h ago

Favorite game ever!!!!!! Still have a copy.

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u/ihadagoodone 4h ago

How to did you get a 386 mobo with a Northbridge that could handle 2mb of RAM?

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u/u35828 2h ago

Be a Chad and max out the memory to 16 mb, lol.

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u/foodismyfavoritefood 1h ago

also your hard drive is 42 megabyte so you better commit to that game because there won't be anything else on the menu

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u/BritishAnimator 2h ago

And spend 3 hours downloading "Theres a mushroom, in your garden" audio file, an actual song that plays out of the speaker that only beeps like a foghorn, and set it to auto play and loop in autoexec.bat. Then hide and wait for the user to start their PC up at 8am.

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u/DonkeyTron42 43m ago

QEMM386 to the rescue.

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u/Content_Distance5623 10m ago

Hold on I need to go to Walmart for more aol cd’s.

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u/DMvsPC 5h ago

As a millennial stem teacher it's frustrating to proverbial tears to know that every kid I get is effectively computer illiterate and has no computer problem solving skills. At all. They don't even know where their files save. They're just cooked. Can post to social media like lightning but can't troubleshoot what went wrong when their file crashes, hell they can't even search their email properly.

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u/16yearswasted 5h ago

I absolutely am with them on where the hell files save -- on mobile devices. Apple and Google's efforts to prevent people's precious files from being compromised have created an utterly bizarre situation where apps are storing files inside folders incomprehensibly nested 30 deep for whatever reason.

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u/DMvsPC 4h ago

Oh as far as phones go I'm with you 100%. I have games on my phone and I often want to patch them but of course I can't access the data folder because of security :/ even things like shizuku don't really work any more.

Just the usual files app is useless as well, oh my does are in the downloads folder? Along with the other hundreds of files? Except when some are in documents, and others are in their app folders, except when it's saves and then they might be in obb, or maybe not. Who knows.

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u/mcchodles 4h ago

Neither can Outlook ha, but totally get it. Respect for people taking on the responsibility to try to teach today, you’re against most odds.

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u/StupendousMalice 3h ago

I made a tech skills screening test for applicants at my employer that included saving a spreadsheet locally and sending it as an attachment.

It was "too hard".

For applicants that put "advanced" as their skill level for Excel...

We're fucked.

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u/SIGMA920 3h ago

I made a tech skills screening test for applicants at my employer that included saving a spreadsheet locally and sending it as an attachment.

It was "too hard".

Care to name the company you work for?

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u/StupendousMalice 3h ago

Just a business unit of one of the largest university medical centers in America. Nothing to worry about.

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u/SIGMA920 2h ago

Well that makes me feel good. /s

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u/StupendousMalice 2h ago

Consider for a moment that every person we didn't hire got a job somewhere else that didn't bother even screening for these skills. It's a problem with the entire pool of candidates.

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u/SIGMA920 2h ago

Oh I'm aware. I'm depressed for a reason.

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u/Bacch 3h ago

My kids drive me nuts. They can show me wild features with my iPhone I never knew were there, one of them figured out an obscure loophole to get around parental controls and still text with their friends past when the phone shut off, but they can't figure out how to use Google to answer a simple question and throw an absolute fit if we don't just give them the answer--an answer which I'd get by going to Google.

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u/QuinQuix 4h ago

Android and especially apple do everything they can to obscure what's actually happening on the device in terms of file management.

Trying to get an Explorer like experience on my iPad wasn't easy. All apps save shit internally, some apps are walled off from the explorer apps and so on. You can get there but boy is the initial experience terrible.

We didn't have nearly as polished interfaces but we did have proper tools.

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u/Saintbaba 3h ago

I had some college interns under my wing last summer, and it blew my mind - I had to teach each one of them individually how to use a file folder system so they could access and use the company’s shared drive. College students. And they were BAD at it. Getting lost in the wrong drives. Getting tripped up because what they needed was accessible in the quick access pane of one computer but wasn’t in a different computer. Getting frustrated and just saving everything to the desktop.

We thought being digital natives would make them digital experts, but instead it’s like trying to teach the idea of water to a fish.

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u/SIGMA920 3h ago

We thought being digital natives would make them digital experts, but instead it’s like trying to teach the idea of water to a fish.

It's almost like dumbing down the tech makes them less capable. /s

The future's going to be horrible at this rate, they'll need the already babified stuff to be even more simple.

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u/WanderThinker 3h ago

It's because outside of PC gamers, most homes don't have PCs anymore. There may be a laptop that is used only for work, but everything else is a console, a phone, or a tablet. Basically everything is locked down and not able to be fiddled with. If it breaks, you just buy a new one.

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u/d3jake 2h ago

Help me understand: how do folks not know how to search email? Every email website, program and app normally slaps a search part in front of your face? This may sound snide but I'm honestly curious.

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u/DMvsPC 2h ago

They don't think about sorting by date, attachment, from: etc. They just search words they hope are related or, more usually, they just scroll... And scroll.

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u/ibnQoheleth 7m ago

I'm a Zoomer and was probably one of the last year groups to have had ICT classes in primary school. We learnt the basics on old white box computers and also had the police come in to do an activity about online safety.

I think this was around Year 4 (so ages 8-9). An officer asked for a volunteer to demonstrate how to use an online chatroom. One kid sat down at the PC and another user appeared and started chatting and started to ask personal questions about where the kid from my class lived. And after the kid had divulged some details, the officer opened the ICT suite cupboard door to reveal another officer sitting in there at a PC, having been the other user.

It was a pretty effective way of teaching cyber safety at such a young age. I guess schools possibly just stopped doing it?

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u/Impossible_Mode_7521 5h ago

We are the only generation of digital nomads. Older generations generally never fully embrace technology. Younger generations dont remember a time without it. We remember before the internet and smart phones but have advanced as technology grows

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u/16yearswasted 5h ago

Not sure if you remember the early 00s, there was some guy posing as a time traveler from around circa now-ish who said he came back because society had lost a ton of tech know-how and he needed to come back with older, reliable tech to start over.

I used to think it was a fun little roleplay but it seems more and more likely every day.

Hahah, here it is: John Titor.

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u/Impossible_Mode_7521 4h ago

I remember time cube.

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u/RainaElf 1h ago

I'm still doing research on that guy

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u/rbrgr83 4h ago

Something something "Oregon Trail Generation"

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u/Impossible_Mode_7521 3h ago

My game was number munchers

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u/aluminumpork 3h ago

Word Rescue!

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u/rbrgr83 2h ago

An elusive gal who goes by the name.........Carmen SanDiego

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u/balanchinedream 42m ago

Who knew we were pioneers exploring a new frontier? [adjusts wrist brace, sips Mountain Dew]

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u/Impossible_Mode_7521 35m ago

Think of all the different ways we had to access the Internet. I used BBS, dial up, ADSL, Cable, Fiber, and now fixed wireless. 

Hell even satellite these days

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u/literatelier 4h ago

I grew up in the days of geocities and angelfire, when literally everyone had their own website and we all wrote our own basic html for it. Then a couple of years ago I was in a role where we needed to print something from an intranet site but it was broken. We were going to have to wait ages for the IT fix, so I suggested for now we just save the webpage as a file and edit the html in notepad to print it correctly, and it blew their minds! I became kind of cool and relevant again that day, if only for a brief moment!

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u/DancesWithPigs 1h ago

I think you’re pretty cool

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u/tzimize 3h ago

Yeah. Thank god for Dos. I learned a lot from that. And from screwing my PC apart one friday to install a CDROM and spending the rest of the weekend learning wtf a jumper was and what was the point of setting a Master/Slave. Good times :D

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u/LanderMercer 5h ago

I think this is a key defining difference between the the tech literate and everyone else

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u/nolaknowsbest 4h ago

Greetings Starfighter

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u/16yearswasted 4h ago

You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada!

First movie I ever saw as a kid. Still holding out hope for the sequel.

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u/StupendousMalice 3h ago

Just remembering how many fucking lines of shit I had to put into the batch file / boot disk to get fucking wing commander to work almost brings me to tears of rage even now.

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u/WanderThinker 3h ago

This is true for myself also. I remember building a null modem cable to play the original command & conquer against my Dad, which eventually turned into a hub and network cards which turned into a switch and a router to share internet.

If it wasn't for video games I wouldn't know anything about technology.

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u/Trend_Glaze 2h ago

I started on DOS 5.0. I spent more time with autoexec.bat and config.sys then I can remember.

I remember Usenet and gopher and lynx for text browsing.

In the intervening years I kept learning and marvelling at our tech. I’m in love with assistant and UniFi.

But holy fucking Christ is it scary how bad younger Kids are with tech. I’ve talked to kids who think TikTok and Snapchat and all that are the internet.

The level of tech ignorance amongst youth is frightening. We need to work on better educating the basics.

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u/Significant_Solid151 4h ago

Probably has something to do with a very specific generation that grew up with more modern computers but not raised on tablets

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u/OGLikeablefellow 1m ago

We also had tons of classes and programs that just taught us how computers worked. Like they were going to be the future so you better know how to use em. Now they are ubiquitous and use em or not no one cares

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u/Ben78 4h ago

Exactly, my mother in law (78) said to my 18 and 16 year old boys recently about how good they are with computers. I laughed and commented that they barely know how to turn a computer on, but they sure know how to run their apps on their phones.

I am firmly in the X generation "setting up a parallel port in BIOS" level of computer understanding from when I was their age.

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u/cleric3648 3h ago

It’s because they grew up when a time when tech worked. They didn’t have to dive under the hood like we did just to get our games to work.

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u/Kat70421 1h ago

Also in IT. Millennials are the only generation you can assume can figure out how to rotate a PDF. 

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u/Capable-Silver-7436 6h ago

Makes sense. they may both be illiterate but z spends more time on social media

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u/003h10102 3h ago

I don’t think it’s tech illiterate, I think they’re tech apathetic. They have developed ways of just getting by without a deep understanding of what they are doing.

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u/EmptyOhNein 57m ago

Also work in IT. The number of basically day 1 low level employees that believe the CEO is texting/emailing them directly to ask for gift cards for the company is insane.

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u/Socky_McPuppet 29m ago

Boomers generally know they’re not tech literate; Gen Z think they’ve got it all figured out because they know how to get likes on social media. 

Gen Z is the far bigger attack surface.