Helpful advice is taken as "Yeah, whatever. I'll do that when I get around to it." The only way to get that Sprawl Ganger to take the electronic world seriously, when he hasn't grown up around anything but physical threats, is to scare the piss out of him in a safe environment. He wants to constantly be on the look-out for payback, you let him know in no uncertain terms that you put a nice little back door into all that security you set up for him. He wants to push it, tell him you could make his cyber-arm choke him to death. This isn't an ice cream social, people. These are all borderline sociopaths you're playing. People from hard lives, making a living out of being an expendable resource. It's not D&D, no one is out to make themselves into big heroes. They're in it for the nuyen, or because there isn't anywhere for them to go but up.
So, no, being nice about it isn't always going to work. And when it doesn't, your character gets dead because the meat character could have sat down with you for ten minutes, while you made some simple adjustments to his cybereye's security protocols. Instead of cleaning his gun menacingly for the fifteenth time that day. Now, OUT OF CHARACTER, you're sitting around a table with people that hopefully have been playing for years in many different games. And they should know that if your character gets geeked by the team, you're only going to make something even MORE annoying. Hehehehe. My personal threat for the rest of the group is to make Cat-in-the-bag Man from Attitudes. But, back on target, skinlinks.
The rules are vague, but it's not like the makers of Shadowrun can INVENT a type of technology that will not only do this in game, but be able to completely satisfy all the electronic techs they have playing it. If they could do that, they wouldn't be making games, they'd be making millions on patents. So, you have to have some suspension of belief for the game to work. Skinlinks provide a way to set up your equipment so it's harder to hack from anything longer than touch distance. And getting a street sam to stand still long enough for you to hack his equipment is pretty damned hard.