Ahh limewire the virus sharing program
Kazaa and emule where more legit 😅. Still happened sometimes.
Its hard to imagine a shared family PC at this point in time
Ir’s possible. Dad is a gamer and kids aren’t old enough for PCs, but maybe old enough for tablets.
rick_astley_never_gonna_give_you_up.mp3.exe
No need to be suspicious, it’s just a self extracting zip file. Convenient and downloads faster!
It flashed a command prompt, that’s how you know it worked!
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.
E machines for me. Xp sp1 lol. 512mb ram.
Lol I remember eMachines. Integrated graphics on a desktop tower and the thing sounded like a leafblower under load. Also I believe it wouldn’t support a dedicated GPU either.
Gateway bruh…hahah
Limewire is the new beans on Lemmy or something? This is the 7th Limewire post in 2 days…
May be a bot network testing posting and sentiment manipulation.
My experiment is working to plan
Lemmy is in danger of growing stale. We’re taking it to strange new places.
Mate, you’ve only been here for 14 days.
👂Limes 🍋🟩? Lima beans 🫘? 👀
Seriously what the fuck is happening?!
Also if you miss that shit hit nicotine+ and get after it.
BearShare was always the superior option
But not necessarily safer
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.
My favourite was when people would then use limewire to pirate limewire pro and double up on the malware
linkinpark_paparoach_korn.exe
That was truly a banger, really infectious!
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.
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.
And that’s what the fire in firefox means
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.
Deleting system32 fixed my issues.
For linux/mac users it’s writing “rm -rf / “ into the terminal
It’s how you delete the French language pack.
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.
There are two types of people who do back ups:
- the paranoid
- the experienced
It’s only paranoia if it’s unwarranted.
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.
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.
I feel like that’s the case for a lot of our generation
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.
