That... that was kind of a nice reminder.

[kickaha]

Last night our downstairs neighbor knocked on our door, and asked if I could help her set up her printer. HP/Windows machine. Luckily, 'set up' meant "I can't remember how to connect it", so it took <60sec to do the physical cabling and basic setup. (Well, that doesn't include the removal of the old printer cruft that was left floating around...)

Except.

She booted her computer, which is connected directly to her cable modem. As soon as it came up, a taskbar monitor popped up an alert "Attack or intrusion detected. Block/Allow?" along with a vector name I recognized. Then another one. And another. And another. Web pages started popping up. Another. Then I noticed the alert was just cycling through vector names, one after another, sometimes a couple seconds between them, sometimes flipping by so fast the refresh on the CRT wasn't keeping up and they just flickered in and out.

This was just from booting.

I asked her if she wanted me to turn on her firewall, and they stopped once I did.

But HOLY SHIT. I <3 my Macs.

Comments

Re: The only problems ...

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Shared iTunes library?

Kernel panics are usually a hardware problem... RAM can come loose and cause that.

Hold down the power button for several seconds to force an immediate emergency shutdown. :)

Some shared.

[byrdie.livejournal.com]

I'll see if I can figure out how to reverse that -- it's not necessary anymore.

I eventually figured out how to shut the thing off without yanking the battery, but it took a while.