Skunks and Weasels
Aug. 17th, 2011 02:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogA fairly insomniac night last night, extended, if not caused, by a late night visit from Pepe LePew to the immediate vicinity of the nearest window. Ultimately, I got back to sleep, with a less than usual amount of crappily weird dreams.
Since then, the electronic versions of skunks have been keeping me, and various close ones, quite awake. First, I discovered that I had, in fact, not stopped the forced install of the Google Chrome broswer on this laptop yesterday, when a client used it in the office to work through an interactive post-bankruptcy "debtor education" course now required to finalize your case. The site tested my browser, told me I needed a Flash update, and next thing I knew, Chrome was downloading right along with it.
I resolved to kill it; not because I dislike it or have heard bad things, but more that I resent (a) the amount of control the Googly-Googly-Googly people already have over my life, but especially (b) that they slipped the install into another company's download without telling me. I consider that as bad as any malware you might encounter, in terms of design if not effect.
Before that, though, I did offer to try it out to see if it was having the problems with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
firynze's publishing website that some people were having with it (including me, when using Firefox). It loaded a bunch of run-unders pointing to a bunch of offsites, and next thing I knew, AVG had flagged a bunch of malware installs and shut down the whole browser. None of that in Chrome, although it appears she may be up against a blinking-like-a-beer-sign piece of hacking that turns itself on and off randomly to keep people from finding and killing it.
Finally, Emily ran into a forced download of Firefox 6, which was incompatible with the rest of her computer but which, then, wouldn't let her replace it with a clean download of version 4. Fortunately, she'd saved her setup file from when she installed THAT one a few months back, so we were able to put toothpaste.com back into the tube, as it were. (Me? I'm still on the latest security update to version 3; I still don't like the 3-to-4 changes they made in how it looks and works, so I'll keep slogging my stone knives and bearskins, thankuvermush.)
Since then, the electronic versions of skunks have been keeping me, and various close ones, quite awake. First, I discovered that I had, in fact, not stopped the forced install of the Google Chrome broswer on this laptop yesterday, when a client used it in the office to work through an interactive post-bankruptcy "debtor education" course now required to finalize your case. The site tested my browser, told me I needed a Flash update, and next thing I knew, Chrome was downloading right along with it.
I resolved to kill it; not because I dislike it or have heard bad things, but more that I resent (a) the amount of control the Googly-Googly-Googly people already have over my life, but especially (b) that they slipped the install into another company's download without telling me. I consider that as bad as any malware you might encounter, in terms of design if not effect.
Before that, though, I did offer to try it out to see if it was having the problems with
firynze's publishing website that some people were having with it (including me, when using Firefox). It loaded a bunch of run-unders pointing to a bunch of offsites, and next thing I knew, AVG had flagged a bunch of malware installs and shut down the whole browser. None of that in Chrome, although it appears she may be up against a blinking-like-a-beer-sign piece of hacking that turns itself on and off randomly to keep people from finding and killing it.Finally, Emily ran into a forced download of Firefox 6, which was incompatible with the rest of her computer but which, then, wouldn't let her replace it with a clean download of version 4. Fortunately, she'd saved her setup file from when she installed THAT one a few months back, so we were able to put toothpaste.com back into the tube, as it were. (Me? I'm still on the latest security update to version 3; I still don't like the 3-to-4 changes they made in how it looks and works, so I'll keep slogging my stone knives and bearskins, thankuvermush.)