Neither of those are used by general consumers on a regular basis. Those are used by people that are generally knowledgeable. I don't know why people can't wrap their head around this. .zip is used every day by people that aren't the best at understanding computer security. Massive difference.
The category of "tech literate enough to use zips but not enough to know not to blindly click links in emails and also aren't covered by their company's security policy" is a pretty niche group. Your grandpa isn't compressing zips and sending them around to family. Vast vast vaaaaast majority of people just use direct file uploads.
This is going to be a problem, but not for the average folk, but rather for IT teams with unstable rules and other software teams like Gmail who are likely to signal larger differences between attachments and just links.
> The category of "tech literate enough to use zips but not enough to know not to blindly click links in emails and also aren't covered by their company's security policy" is a pretty niche group.
As someone that has worked on a support desk in my youth, I can assure you that this is not true. I've seen 20-year-olds open bad attachments or fall for password reset phishing. A new one is a texting scam from your manager, etc asking you to do them a favor. Scammers are pretty good at what they do (even if it seems obvious to us), that's why the US is scammed out of billions a year. The new TLD is absolutely going to get people scammed. It might not be on a nightmarish level, but it's going to happen.
My co-founder will have trouble with this, as would several others.
Over the years, I have held enough varied and deep IT and development roles to warrant volunteer mentoring aimed at combating this kind of thing. My experience says the group of people hit by this is larger than many of us would expect.
My number one favorite approach is to share some stories and get others to do the same to get that convo up and running. Then set that baseline rule: if you were not expecting it, don't open it and or send it to me.
I get a few a month and from competent people.
Fact is we are often working hard with a lot on our minds. And then the slip happens. It is that momentary relaxing of discipline and hello!
no, but commonly used services like Google Drive often zip folder downloads automatically, so regular users have been conditioned to blindly accept .zip downloads. so even if grandpa himself doesn't know how to create a zip file, he might very well try to open a .zip link when he sees one.
