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June 21, 2006
Procrastinatr and the Power of Social Hacks
If you follow Mac news/reviews at all, you’ve probably heard or will hear about the Procrastinatr fiasco. The brief recap is that Brian Sutorious, a college kid, posted a hot new “app” called Procrastinatr, that promised to help Mac users organize their lives better. Somehow it got picked up at TUAW, that’s the above link (Procrastinatr.com is dead now), and a whole bunch of well-meaning Mac users, probably productivity geeks, downloaded it. The only problem was, Procrastinatr was a trojan. When you ran it, it used AppleScript to move all your iCal events back a week. And Procrastinatr didn’t prompt for an Admin password because iCal files, like most user-created files, are in ~/.
Good joke? Bad joke. But a wonderful cautionary tale; a whole bunch of Mac users willingly installed and ran Procrastinatr (I confess, I visited the site and considered downloading it); now everyone is reminded that the net is basically Deadwood.
Is the Mac a secure computing platform? I guess it is resistant to true viruses. But security means being an active, thinking net user. “Files Are Not For Sharing” is a joke, but “Look both ways before you double-click” is not.
Posted by Rob Courtney at June 21, 2006 05:39 PM
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