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

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Are you kidding? In this region, I swear having a felony rap sheet is a requirement for election to office. The constituents figure you're not tough enough otherwise.

I hear you as a techie, but as someone who's seen way too many people struggle with what I consider basic computer maintenance, it just seems like a poorly designed system that doesn't take those basic steps for you.

[georgmi.livejournal.com]

My basic feeling is, if you're not allowed to vote, people should not be allowed to vote for you. :)

Yeah, the system should do more. But the fact that it doesn't shouldn't result in a machine that's fsillied by default after six weeks. People can learn to have somebody change their oil every few thousand miles; they ought to be able to learn to turn on a firewall and install McAfee.

Oddly, Microsoft has had a hard time including their own antivirus solution with Windows because of complaints of anticompetitive behavior from Symantec and the like. Not that MS' solution is any great shakes, still, it is an unforeseen (I hope it was unforeseen) consequence of the antitrust situation that MS is prohibited, or feels it is prohibited, from providing the necessary solution.