Regardless of what some folks in the "User Friendly" movement would like to think, most tools require basic instruction in order to be safely used. We can't code away all individual responsibility.
In your analogy, it's like saying "people shouldn't be allowed to use cars unless they can verify the hydraulic pressure in the master brake cylinder"
Which is wrong: manufacturers should (and did) install brakes warning lights. And we need to come up with better warnings for users. Blaming them for these sorts of problems is unacceptable.
1) Did you click a link from an email? 2) Does the page it redirect you to ask for your login info?
You may have received a phishing email. Are either true?
1) You expected this email because you were notified about it from another source e.g. website, support staff. 2) If you login to the website not via the suspicious link, the linked web page does not ask for your login.
If you answered yes, you probably don't have a phishing email.
"You expected this email" is also not a hard test to pass in either academia or corporate settings, where users are generally besieged by unsolicted instructions to "Go here, do this, hurry up about it".
Here are some regular people's experiences of scams.
(http://www.moneywise.co.uk/scams-rip-offs/scams/scam-watch-t...)
#1 - Yes, some scams are reasonably sophisticated.
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2012/may/23/credit-card-user...)
Computers have taken over the world precisely because we have worked very hard to make them approachable by mere mortals. The only reason Google matters is that they figured out how to make the search engine much more user friendly. Apple is on top of the world because they made a more user-friendly music player, phone, and portable computer. And we HNers are all getting paid stupid amounts of money because the wide adoption of computing has created high demand.
Nobody is talking about coding away individual responsibility. They're talking about removing another bit of pointless friction from the system, so that the tools are more effective for the tool-users.
And I'll add that cars are heading in exactly the direction that you lampoon. If the car industry had thought like you, they'd still be back on hand-cranking to start the car, needing to maintain the battery's water level, and having to wear goggles. And soon Google will have solved the driving problem, mainly thanks to the way consumer adoption has driven down the costs of computing.
A taxi is what the end user is looking for when they want to go from location A to location B without specialist training.
