Reading week and a fresh reinstall on my laptop.
So Google Chrome’s apparent securities holes were well… apparent.
Yesterday, an accidental ad click led to a Google Chrome exploit that installed Antivirus Live, a rogue spyware (I’d even go as far as to say virus) onto my computer. After attempting to quarantine it myself in safemode, I failed (being unable to completely kill it before it propagated itself the next start up). Luckily, my Thinkpad T400 comes with a built in factory reset button (useful if I ever decide to sell this extremely awesome machine). After using the included software to retrieve some files (namely about 300 MBs of photos recently updated. Being somewhat paranoid, all my files are backed up in 4 places. Using Dropbox, there’s a copy of all my notes and assignments and other important files on my netbook, the dropbox server, and the laptop. The 4th place is an external harddrive that I keep files on as well. ).
What have I learned? Well a few things.
- Being paranoid has its benefits. I didn’t have any hesitation giving up (saving myself hours of headache) and resetting my system to its factory functionality. In whole, the entire recovery process has taken 4 hours (and a lot of that was making sure I got the 300MBs of photos onto an external without corruption)
- Dropbox again proves itself to be amazing. All my magic decks, assignments, notes, and important information just simply stayed safe. Installed dropbox on the fresh install and boom, it starts to put those files back on here.
- Google Chrome’s amazing speed has its consequences. It really does have some security issues.
- Firefox again claims itself as my default browser. It also helped that because I had backed up my google chrome bookmarks on firefox, I could just sync those back in.
- I’m not running any of my customized desktop interface applications (rainlendar included). This makes me sad, but I just don’t have to time and energy to reconfigure everything to my own need. Maybe I should have backed up these files too (but given that I edited my desktop over a period of 3 months, I really lost about 2 months of customization).
Anyway, a few funny last notes. Yale’s Freshman Holiday Dinner was overhyped, yet enjoyable. It’s definitely an interesting thing to see a 20 foot long piece of bread and lobsters thrown into the crowd. The ice sculpture thing was awesome as well.
Well that’s all folks. I have an econ final next monday and then I head back to LA the following Tuesday
-Sebastian
EDIT: Edited for a reason. heh.