Family Support with a Side of Awkward

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Continuing the discussion from Things you wish you could say (everywhere):

So for those who read the original comment, I’ve resolved this issue.

The Problem: $Mother-in-law reports that her iPad has been haxxored! She clicks on links and gets a popup saying it’s been hacked and the battery is being drained. Also, it won’t charge!

The Twist: The content being viewed in Safari when the issue occured was of an adult nature.

Yup, pr0n.

Resolution: Charging cable had failed. Replaced with one I had in my game night bag as a spare. We’ll call it a gift, especially if it avoids discussing the other stuff.

I also provided $Wife with a suggestion to educate user as to how to close tabs in Safari. We’re desperately hoping that some or all of the tabs that made us go :unamused:, :blush:, :open_mouth:, :scream:, or a few reactions we don’t have emoticons for.

I wisely closed tabs before connecting to wifi (Which $M-i-L refers to unironically as “weefee”) but here’s some of the tab contents burned into memory:

[spoiler]* Several for her bank.

  • A few for her job’s scheduling system.
  • Several for sites resembling Youtube, but with colors instead of “you”
  • Several for something titled “18 and Abused” which were apparently cached as we did catch an eyeful (thankfully tame).
  • Some URLs with categories for various adult sites. Huh, so she apparently is itnerested in supporting men of color. Large men of color.
  • More pr0n sites I’ve blocked from memory.[/spoiler]

$Wife and I laughed over most of this… The abuse stuff is a little weird, and I admit we’re both a little grossed out, but we’re trying to deal with the necessary and totally normal, “Yes, parents have sex” reaction.

I also pointed out that while I’m not an expert Pr0n surfer myself (and that’s a boy scout badge they could sell out of in 24 hours…) some of the tabs could be the result of pop-up type behavior combined with not knowing how to close tabs (which causes slowness).

But Wait, There’s More!: Cleaned up, confirmed charging, updated apps, etc. All is well. $Wife decided to put our dog on the iPad’s wallpaper as a joke instead of $M-i-L’s dog. This meant opening up the camera app, taking a couple pics, and then going into the settings app. Select wallpaper, select camera roll…

So, it’s apparently relatively easy for people not used to iPads to figure out either the screenshot button or the ability to save images from web sites to the camera roll. See previous spoiler-marked list and use your imagination, folks.

TL;DR: Old people are bad with technology. Old people are horny. This iPad is no longer safe for use by the younger nieces and nephews. Also no longer safe for the older nieces and nephews. Also, considering asking $Wife to bring home some rubber gloves before further work is done.

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My godson got his laptop infected with something, so I got to clean it off. He tells me, “I have a lot of pictures on there. Can you back them up?”

I check, and sure enough there are about 40-50 GB of pictures. I did not back them up.

Moral of the story: Don’t ask your godmother to back up your pr0n pics…

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Maybe I’m showing my age here, but I remember the era where a floppy full of pr0n was a big deal, and something you’d keep in your most safest, most private location. Especially since you spent minutes per image to download from a BBS.

[Old]Kids these days[/Old]

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I remember seeing people in college bring stacks or boxes of 3.5" disks to the computer lab to offload the stuff from their UNIX accounts. Workflow:

  1. Dial in from dorm room
  2. Browse Usegroups
  3. Flag/download en masse into home directory
  4. uudecode
  5. Take floppies to computer lab (10Base2, baby!)
  6. FTP from UNIX account to local floppy.

Those who enjoyed living dangerously would “compress” (it’s JPEGs, so…) everything into one zipfile and span them across the disks. Of course, if one disk goes bad, you’ve lost the whole batch.

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I remember doing something similar for Mac shareware in college in the late 90s where I’d download on PC, manually split the encoded files to span multiple floppies, then reassemble in BBEdit (a text editor) before de-binhexing the file.

Really painful process.

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Holy crap… That brings back memories.

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Reminds me of the one time I found pr0nz on a lady client’s computer. Reported it to my manager (who was female).

Turned out her brother downloaded some naughty stuff…

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Printing a picture of Farah Faucet topless on a dot matrix printer off my c64, my dad came home before it got to the good part, I remember pulling the power cord so hard it knocked a chair down.

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Right. “Her brother”.