• filcuk@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        9 hours ago

        It’s fine for the type of user windows is targeting by default.
        Most people don’t give a shit if it’s xls, xlsx, xlsm, or xlsb, so long as they can open it in Excel and punch in numbers, and there are mechanisms to prevent these people from getting infected easily.

        • snowsuit2654@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          7 hours ago

          Yeah it’s honestly way more likely for someone to change the file type and break the file while renaming it, than it is for malware to get past Defender.

  • wanderwisley@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    22 hours ago

    I still remember bricking my mom’s gateway computer while downloading eps of love hina, blade 2 soundtrack and next door Nikki videos off of limewire…sorry mom.

  • frezik@midwest.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    edit-2
    1 day ago

    I repartitioned the hard drive to install Linux.

    Unbeknownst to me, my brother had stored the photos he took of our grandparents 50th wedding anniversary on that drive. There was no backup.

  • Sixty@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 day ago

    I never fell for mp3.exe, but I did install Real Player and use the built in browser once.

    I learned how to remove a Trojan virus that copy pastes itself into a few directories before mom got home from work at 9 years old.

    People wonder why I know so much about computers, a large part was fucking up the expensive family PC repeatedly.

    • rumba@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      20 hours ago

      That’s how we all learned it back then. Shear necessity.

      Most boomers were too far into old age to learn it effectively. X and Z were raised in it. Now the tech has changed dramatically and you don’t need anywhere near the skill anymore, there’s a lot of younger generation that have no clue again. They can run the shit out of an iPad though.

      • Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        21 hours ago

        How times have changed. I used to have print outs in my filing cabinet with virus removal guides from all the various times I contracted digitally transmitted diseases online.

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    edit-2
    1 day ago

    Pfft. I wasn’t the one who ended up getting viruses or bullshit breaking the computer. That was my mom and all her goddamn toolbars. Open the browser after mom was on and now the website is about 2 pixels at the bottom of the screen under a wall of garbage.

  • Tetsuo@jlai.lu
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 day ago

    When I was a kid I visited my grandparents and since there was still only Internet Explorer on their terrible computer I decided to install Firefox.

    Unfortunately the computer power supply died right after I did.

    Therefore my Firefox installation was determined to be the root cause of the computer being ruined.

    So yeah, Firefox apparently kills power supplies in some folklore.

    • muusemuuse@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      1 day ago

      My mother is like this but worse. Some sort of tech in the house doesn’t behave as she expects? It’s obviously caused by that time I used it 3 months ago. It doesn’t matter that it worked just fine between then and now, everything is my fault.

      I can’t wait until she’s finally dead.

    • allidoislietomyself@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      1 day ago

      When I came home for summer break after my freshman year of college I had to use my mom’s car to get around. Well my mom is the absolute worst person when it comes to auto maintenance. The 3rd day I was home and driving her car her engine blew a piston rod because the piston ceased in the cylinder. Turns out my mom never changed the oil. Like never ever. But because it happened while I was driving it was all my fault. I “must have been racing or doing something that caused the problem”. 25 years later she still thinks it was something I did.

  • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 day ago

    I never really got into file sharing early on, I somehow jumped onto torrents instead and soon after migrated to Linux distro hopping for a while.

    All the while I kept fixing PCs for family and friends.

    Almost all of them were worn down, infected and affected by the 12 year old in the house who tried to download anything and everything they could find. Their only limiting factor was hard drive space, otherwise they would have downloaded the internet if given the chance.

    I remember starting up a Windows PC I volunteered to fix, waiting half an hour for it to finish its start up routine, go into it’s start up programs and discover a list of 200 weird items that came on at every start up … delete or remove all of them … restart, wait again and now there were 100 items at start up … research how to remove things, rinse repeat for about two days and finally gain back normal control of everything. Then move, back up or just delete a bunch of junk to take back hard drive space.

    Hand it back to the owner who put it back in their home office and their 12 year old would start downloading things again.

    It would take me days to fix it and the kid would take hours to ruin it all.

    Then the parents would blame shitty software or hardware and go out and buy a new faster system.

    The only side benefit to all this was that I ended up collecting a bunch of old systems, laptops and tablets that I fixed or used as Linux test systems and learned a lot from.

  • 9point6@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    edit-2
    1 day ago

    My favourite was when people would then use limewire to pirate limewire pro and double up on the malware