Old enough, however, to start a tribute thread with a little-bitchy nitpick regarding the use of 'at'.
Obviously he would become a beloved icon, with his persona combining all the things the average American loves:
- Militant pacifism
- Blackness
- Islam
- Poetry
- Poor sportsmanship
2 is excellent. I knew nothing about Ali until the Mann film, which impressed, but I don't know how accurate it is. Also know nothing of boxing. The only match I've seen is the one in the Iliad, which kind of spoils the modern sport. "They don't have iron plates in their gloves? Pussies."
My dad always liked him.
And that's pretty much all l I know.
Sugar Ray Robinson was probably a greater boxer, but he was the greatest heavyweight and the greatest cultural f you athlete.
He was sort of a neighbor growing up so I have lots of memories of him as an old man who seemed to something wrong with him but was absolutely the biggest presence at the elementary school fundraising fair/local street carnival etc etc. Then later I saw clips of him in his prime and it was just like "holy shit."
I guess I am old enough to remember the days, like 10-20 age thereabouts, but there was like a whole lot of shit goin on in the 60s and Ali was just a part of it. And I was a basketball and baseball fan. Remember Kareem so much better.
Watched some fights tonight on youtube. Patterson. Liston.
This wasn't Ali's toughest fight, but maybe his most fun and gives you a great sense as a non-boxing fan of just how fun he must have been to watch. Yes I will dance around you and then do the impossible.
I was too young to really follow him being stripped of his title, but watched him win it back. The Greatest.
He's dead.
Ali successfully defended his title six times, including a rematch with Liston. Then, in 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War, Ali was drafted to serve in the U.S. Army.
He'd said previously that the war did not comport with his faith, and that he had "no quarrel" with America's enemy, the Vietcong. He refused to serve.
"My conscience won't let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, some poor, hungry people in the mud, for big powerful America, and shoot them for what?" Ali said in an interview. "They never called me nigger. They never lynched me. They didn't put no dogs on me."
He was stripped of his boxing title, convicted of draft evasion and sentenced to five years in prison.
There's the amazing scene of him appearing out of nowhere tonsave a suicidal man. https://youtu.be/SV75aFzC1aQ
He brought out the best in Howard Cosell, and mastered the pre-game banter, thereby setting the stage for Sean Avery.
11 - I remember that as a little kid, first memory if him. His kids were in the same (public) school and the teachers were going on and on and on, and it made sense to first grade me because why wouldn't you be excited about someone's Dad.
The 20-minute video piece about him on the NY Times site is great.
I only remember him as an old man afflicted with Parkinson's, and the link in 8 (while certainly impressive) just emphasizes to me what a barbaric sport boxing is. Nevertheless, he was a great man by any measure, and will be missed.
The fight in 8 is nuts. Would not happen today.
Fair enough, but still, I find boxing hard to defend. I'm sure you recall my hometown glee when Holly Holm beat Ronda Rousey, and I remember Johnny Tapia and Danny Romero being really big deals when I was growing up in Albuquerque, so I'm not just instinctively opposed to it, but knowing what we know now about traumatic brain injuries, yeah, hard to defend. (Football too.)
I think we always knew boxing caused traumatic brain injuries. Maybe we didn't know it about football so much.
I also think we are more concerned about brain injuries nowadays, because they disqualify you from leading a normal life more than they used to. 100 years ago a guy could retire from boxing, be confused and slow-witted and still be qualified for any number of jobs such as hitting pieces of steel with a hammer or pulling really hard on a rope. Now, to work you need your brain to work.
I doubt that, actually. Hitting pieces of steel with a hammer is useless unless you're able to hit the right pieces with the right force. I suspect it's more true that champion boxers of the past were both as honored and as useless as modern ones. I admit I don't have any evidence for this, however.
Boxing is brutal. But CN is right that for the 20th century we've known it was brutal. And one of the great things about the sport is the lack of bullshit sanctimony around it. Soccer mom equivalents in 1950 weren't letting their kids box. And the pro boxers were always doing it for money, not for the glory of the college or high school coach or whatever. Also, there's some evidence (I don't know how good) that football and hockey are worse for concussion related injury than boxing -- boxers get hid harder but take many fewer total hits to the head. Regardless, no one has gone into boxing for their long term health since forever.
And boxing isn't for the dumb. To fight like Ali in 8, you need to not only be in insane shape but to have masterful chess player. It's not just random slapfights.
Here's the first Ali-Liston fight in full. Listin was really really good, but Ali is just so goddamn wonderfully fast.
Punchdrunk was a phrase in 1918 and a medically described chronic condition in 1928. But maybe it was thought to be rarer, or actually was rarer; boxers and footballers were smaller back then so they didnt hit each other as hard.
Dear God, that Cleveland Williams fight that Tigre linked: I've never seen anything that brought home to me the combination of grace and brutality in heavyweight boxing so clearly. I remember watching the Foreman fight in the Congo live at school, but this, with the dancing shuffle, was something else. And then the blind, terrible courage of the loser here, walking into those monstrous punches.
And the bravery of Cleveland Williams is greater than you think. Before the fight, wikipedia tells me, Williams had been inactive the entire year of 1965 while recovering from a gunshot wound he suffered during a scuffle with police officer Dale Witten after a traffic stop. Williams was shot with a .357 Magnum in the abdomen, barely survived, and suffered permanent kidney damage, a loss of over ten feet (3m) of his small intestine, and nerve damage from the bullet, which affected his left leg above the knee and caused it to atrophy as a result.
There's a sense in which, if you're looking for a black hero of 20th century America, Williams should be right up there with Ali.
Yes for sure. 23 is a great point.
Obviously the known and clear brutality was why boxing became the first major sport in the US with successful black professional athletes. But a lot of those guys had to Deal with insane pressure and be beyond courageous. Eg Sugar Ray Robinson being drafted in WWII and then made to fight in front of audiences where they were keeping the black troops out.
So sad to wake up to this news. He was my childhood hero along with Neil and Buzz and probably the only sports one. Just damn.
So sad to wake up to this news. He was my childhood hero along with Neil and Buzz and probably the only sports one. Just damn.
My brother lived near Joe Frazier. You could always tell which estate was Frazier's because it was the one with the fire truck in the backyard.
The Muhammad Ali Museum in Louisville is surprisingly great. (Meaning: I had pretty low expectations, but I was surprised; it was great.) It may not be worth a trip all the way across the country just to visit that museum, but if any one you were already making a trip across the country to have a beer with me, you should totally stop by the Muhammad Ali Museum while you are here in town.
I remember him in his pomp. And I remember him being knocked down by Henry Cooper and only being able to continue because Angelo Dundee broke all sorts of rules. (He won in the net round.)
Yes, everybody knew about getting "punch drunk", but it was and is a gamble people take because. How do you delegitimise something with that kind of money behind it?
RIP.
a The Guardian has a nice article on his colorful quotes.
How many goddamn times do I have to intentionally type "a href=" before my phone will stop trying to autocorrect it? Machine leaning my ass.
Today on Facebook, my sister is all "oh, yeah, I met Mohammad Ali." I'd forgotten she used to be a boxing reporter in Detroit.
I suppose there's no need to plug for When We Were Kings, but just in case you haven't seen it, it's well worth checking out.
My vague impression is that boxing as a mainstream thing that people other than dedicated fans care about ended at some point in the 80s. Mike Tyson was sort of the last gasp.
I think I've said this before, but boxing remains quite mainstream for huge numbers of people, including in the United States -- this is, I guess, assuming one doesn't mean "white American" when one says "mainstream."
As a high schooler I listened to round-by-round summaries of Ali-Frazier I on the radio. Brutal and enthralling. Pay TV tickets at the local arena were something like $20 - a king's ransom. I sat near Ali waiting for a plane at O'Hare in the early 80s and he seemed almost completely out of it. He was traveling alone and United clerks watched out for him and got him on his flight. Everyone called him "Champ."
I feel like boxing in the US dipped in popularity for a while after Mike Tyson but then started coming back, kind of like American militarism after the end of the Cold War.
Pay-per-view may have helped to kill boxing. You can't casually watch big fights without either paying a king's ransom, or finding someone else who has.
Heavyweight boxing hasn't been super popular in the US for the past 10 years for a bunch of reasons, including that no one likes Ukranians. But other weight classes are maybe more popular than maybe ever and a big fight is still a big event here. A Triple-G/Canelo Alvarez fight, which will probably happen this year would easily be one of the biggest sports events in the US this year, both in excitement and money at stake.
no one likes Ukranians
Is this all the Trumpistas channeling Putin, or what? Seems a strange choice of ethnicity to hate on.
Just a dumb joke based on the fact that two of the great heavyweights of the past 10 years have been Ukranian, one of whom is apparently now the mayor of Kiev and a big time politician.
OK. I stopped following boxing because Tyson, and found I couldn't be bothered to start again.
Another thing worth noting in partial sort-of defense of boxing is that the athletes take home a much bigger percentage of the profits generated than in almost any other commercial sport. Yes boxing promoters are often disreputable sleazebags but they aren't hedge fund owners or independent billionaires owning teams in a league and the athletes aren't employees. A lot of the things that seem annoying about boxing as a sport (meaningless and confusing "title belts"/no guarantee that great fighters will actually fight each other/pay per view) stem from this fact. It's a sport that to an unusual extent works for the profits of its athletes (as opposed to the profits of the "league," aka wealthy owners and their employees).
re: 39
I think that's right. Years and years of heavyweights who just weren't much good, and who were boring to watch compared to the lighter divisions.
I have to admit I have moral qualms around boxing, and I can't really watch the old-fashioned slugfests. They just feel totally uncomfortable to me. And I've boxed.*
* or at least, I've and done a lot of boxing sparring (hundreds of rounds over about 9 years), so I have a fair sense of what being in a boxing ring feels like, and I've taken full power headshots. I've never fought a sanctioned amateur boxing match.
Ali was a massive figure in the UK, not just because of his fights but because of his media presence via the Parkinson show.
I think it might have been Parkinson himself, but certainly another British media figure/comedian, etc once said that no racist watching could be under illusions that they were superior to Ali. Not only was the he the heavyweight champion of the world, he was so obviously mentally quick, and eloquent.
I have moral qualms about boxing and feel guilty every time I lapse back into enjoying a good fight.
I do quite enjoy fictional boxing, though. Creed was right up my alley.
I've boxed too, if "a makeshift ring in the woods being egged on by your drunk friends for three rounds on more than one occasion" counts.
One of the biggest pillars of my town's community is the guy who runs a boxing gym. It feels quaintly old-timey New York* to me. (I probably mean a specific borough or neighbourhood, but I'm not well versed enough to know.)
There was a boxing gym in Long Island City, Queens when I lived there, left over from before the gentrification.
My neighborhood is enough of a ghetto so that the boxing gym is a real boxing gym and not a cardioboxing spot for yuppies. Of course I personally am way too intimidated to go in there, but maybe will in 10 years when it rebrands itself and turns into a place where wizened old Mexican men teach pathetic weak social media marketing consultants and tax lawyers to punch into a bag for their morning workout.
I am fairly ignorant about boxing but, in addition to When We Were Kings I would recommend two other documentaries -- Facing Ali and The Last Round: Chuvalo vs Ali. Both really good*, and by focusing on what it was like for opponents of Ali they give a sense of both the different types of people who become heavyweight boxers** and his significance to the sport -- having the opportunity to fight Ali was clearly a career-making fight for many of them.
* Facing Ali is better. It's beautifully filmed, and well edited. The Last Round has the pace and production values of a made-for-TV documentary, but Chuvalo is a great subject.
** Almost all of them poor, but there's quite a range of personalities. The interview with Leon Spinks is heartbreaking.
A Triple-G/Canelo Alvarez fight, which will probably happen this year
Hopefully, but for all of Alvarez's talk I think he wants no part of that Kazakh wrecking machine. Alvarez's schtick is to do a big weight cut and fight smaller guys. He's never fought a destroyer who's every bit as big as he is.
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I spent the weekend at my mother's house watching CNN with my grandparents. I also read some of the print news they have around. Anyway, I realized how very different (and generally less panicky) the news experience is specifically in print media -- online and TV are both consistently frantic. And reading news mostly online I think leads me to get distracted and scatterbrained. So I decided to throw some money down on print subscriptions. I'll probably rotate a few out after a year but right now I've got The Week and Jacobin. Any other recommendations for good print news? I want to have a pretty broad range editorial standpoints to draw from.
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51 - I sort of agree but what else is Alvarez gonna do? He's not quite big enough (financially) to hang around forever and not fight. And GGG has looked better but against substantially weaker opposition.
So I decided to throw some money down on print subscriptions. I'll probably rotate a few out after a year but right now I've got The Week and Jacobin
I mistakenly received a print copy of The Week in the mail -- intended for a neighbor -- and found it to be much like the "Speed Reads" section of the online version of The Week. Headline news.
Jacobin I can't say.
For calming print, I'd go for the New York Review of Books. Available online, but I find long-form journalism difficult to digest when reading online.
And this will attract a bunch of haters, but I still really enjoy the print version of Harper's.
53: Yeah, I suspect money is what's going to force it in the end. Those ppv numbers for the Khan fight weren't that impressive. The road to being anything resembling the new Mayweather goes through Golovkin.
Ali's passing is making me wonder what MLK and Malcolm X would have been like as old men. People often say that MLK was too radical to become the kind of secular saint he's become if he hadn't been killed, but Ali makes me wonder if that's true. Might it be the opposite, and Malcolm X would have grown into a respected elder statesman?
Everybody from Omaha eventually becomes respected. It's in the water.
45 "he was so obviously mentally quick, and eloquent." Interesting view on the validity of IQ tests across cultural divides; the Army tested him and said his IQ was 78....
The result kept him out of the army in 1964. I suspect a dive.
"How can I make racism work for me?"
Since this is now the Omaha thread, I'm going to note that today, while watching kiddie soccer, I realized that one of the other families at my school was related to me by marriage. This isn't a new situation. The marriage in question happened in 1978 (in Omaha) or so and both families have been at the school for years. I'm just not very observant.
Also, this is now the second person at a very small school who knows somebody I knew in Nebraska.
boxers and footballers were smaller back then so they didnt hit each other as hard.
Size is definitely an issue with hockey, which, according to recent research, is much more dangerous than you might think. Back in the day when my grandfather played hockey (and he played in the junior, or local, league with "King" [Francis Michael] Clancy), you didn't have to be a really big guy to be a really good player: you had to be fast on skates, and highly skilled with a stick. Maurice "Rocket" Richard, one of hockey's all-time greats, was 5 foot 10 -- an almost disqualifying height, nowadays. Nowadays, in North American hockey, you have these really big players going at it in a relatively small rink.
Re: 10. I hadn't seen that quote about Ali's refusal to fight in the Vietnam War. That's impressive.
Just a dumb joke based on the fact that two of the great heavyweights of the past 10 years have been Ukranian, one of whom is apparently now the mayor of Kiev and a big time politician.
And the other of whom is married to Hayden Pannettiere. Have we learned nothing on these threads these past few days?
I was a big fan of Ali when I was a kid -- as much for his talk as for his fighting. Now I' m struck by the great courage it took for him to take a stand against the war, and the painful contrast it makes with the cowardice or terrible judgment of his decision to side with Elijah Mohammed over his friend Malcolm X.
I was a big fan of Ali when I was a kid -- as much for his talk as for his fighting.
This clip, which made the rounds last year, is fabulous.
58: I remember seeing his IQ in a Newsweek article on The Bell Curve back in the '90s, and thinking 'if that doesn't discredit IQ tests I don't see what could.'
these really big players going at it in a relatively small rink
And at unbelievable speeds. It really doesn't translate well at all to TV. The first time I went to a Hurricanes game, I was floored.
I'd never before seen the clip linked in 67. I love it.
a makeshift ring in the woods being egged on by your drunk friends for three rounds on more than one occasion
The plot of Fight Club 2 sounds like crap. Sequels are never as good as the original.
69- On occasion someone films our pickup games. Even knowing how slow we are, it's shocking how slow we look on film.
We lived in Cherry Hill, NJ, from 1970-72, as did Ali. I was a toddler at the time and found out later because my brother and sister had tried to sell directions to his house and they had used the inside of the box lid for one of our board games for their sign.
http://www.courierpostonline.com/story/news/local/south-jersey/2016/06/04/cherry-hill-played-big-role-muhammad-alis-life/85366084/
I know someone who swears he saw Ali once eat three large steaks in one sitting.
It's the A1 sauce that does the real damage.
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For Tigre and any other car buffs, I just left the scene where patrol caught a guy in a stolen Porsche 918 with the Weissach package. For the uninitiated, that's Porsche's super car with a 2.5 second 0-60. It's one of the fastest production cars on the planet.
Shockingly bad security at a certain car facility here in town means that a local homeless man drove that car around for several hours and by a minor miracle stopped and surrendered when the patrol guys lit him up.
|>
Work e-mail this morning with subject line "Who's the greatest now?"
About sales targets.
78: WORTH IT.
Actually, I have no idea what the criminal implications of that would be. Assume the guy has only minor stuff on his record--no violent crimes, just petty theft and the low level shit common to homeless--and that he wasn't caught doing anything insanely dangerous with the car. That's a quarter million dollar car (or similar); does that mean the guy is fucked relative to joyriding in a Camry? Like, could this be a 10 year conviction?
It's hard for me not to think in terms of no harm, no foul, but that's surely not right. It's not like the driver was a college swimmer.
I would absolutely be more likely to sympathize with a defendant in a case where they went joyriding in that car as opposed to a camry if I were on the jury. Partially just because the level of joy would have to be higher, but also because I suspect that someone who has a car worth a quarter of a million dollars is a lot harder to inconvenience in a way that would genuinely interfere with their ability to make a living or have long term consequences for them.
Like, could this be a 10 year conviction?
A roof over his head? Maybe intentional?
"The Cop and the Anthem" would have been so much better if were written after cars were common.
918's are base price about 900K, this one was listed at 1.6 mil. Doesn't actually affect the charge though. A theft that's a gun or a vehicle is a second degree felony regardless of value. Second degree felonies are in theory 1-15 in prison but that is so not going to happen. I'll be lucky to keep him in jail for six months.
Maybe intentional?
Don't think so. He's only 21 and I think he's got some mental illness coming on. A few months in jail (at most) and he'll be back out not getting the help he needs.
85: Pretty sure. Young and cleaner than most but he literally had nothing but two trash bags with dirty laundry with him in the car. And when the BOLO for the car hit the radio one of the bike guys said he'd seen the car recently down near the shelter.
I've often wondered why more people in bad situations don't do something like that. It's like the grab-two-beers-inflate-the-emergency-slide exit for people without a job.
918's are base price about 900K, this one was listed at 1.6 mil.
I've really fallen behind on supercar pricing.
I had a feeling I was lowballing, but Porsche has traditionally had the "less expensive" supercars relative to Lambo or Ferrari. I guess top end McLarens start well above $1M, so it's still kind of true.
88: It's still true, the 918 is a freak outlier in the Porsche lineup. Basically their answer to the Mclaren P1.
If the guy was homeless and without reasonably likely prospects for improvement, stealing a million dollar car is probably the rational choice from a utility maximization point of view.
If I put some math on a few slides, I wonder if they'd let me give a talk at the shelter?
89: OK, makes sense. Wish I could drive one. I guess my first mistake was buying a house.
Your mistake was to acquire things that produce positive utility in sufficient quantities that you'd experience a net loss even if you stole a million dollar car.
You're assuming he wouldn't get away with it. Clearly that car could outrun any cop cars out there, after all. And outrunning them would be a pretty big utility boost.
The streets of Pittsburgh are not at all conducive to getting away by driving.
I would absolutely be more likely to sympathize with a defendant in a case where they went joyriding in that car as opposed to a camry if I were on the jury. Partially just because the level of joy would have to be higher...
Just how many mouse orgasms are we talking about here?
If sufficiently unsecured, I'd that a million dollar sports car could constitute an attractive nuisance.
The things is that no matter how much of a committed joyriding fun-loving homeless guy you are it's gonna be pretty hard to find any 918 Weissachs around to joyride, even in Beverly Hills. I mean I actually like Boxters but you don't want to be the joyriding fun-loving homeless guy who goes to jail for taking out a Boxter. This guy, OTOH, goes straight to real American hero status.
I think you could make argument that you'd get the same or nearly the same utility from any car with a list price or over $500,000.
I've really fallen behind on supercar
Because the rich are getting richer, the things they buy are becoming more expensive. That's why they are convinced that inflation is happening.
I think you could make argument that you'd get the same or nearly the same utility from any car with a list price or over $500,000.
Oh, Moby. So poor. So naive.
98 gets it. There's less than a 1000 of those 918's in the world and fewer than that with the Weissach package. I'd never even seen one in the wild before yesterday.
I need to head in to work and see if they did an inventory. The vic was thinking there were some watches and other Porsche merch missing and there was nothing like that on the guy when he was caught so we might have a bunch of hobos sporting Porsche memorabilia down at the shelter.
Just be sure to tell them to say they found the watches on the street or something.
What does a $1.6 million car have that a $900K car is missing? Real ivory on the windshield wiper knob? Maybe a solid gold ashtray instead of gold plating?
What does a $1.6 million car have that a $900K car is missing?
The answer apparently isn't LoJack.
Maybe a solid gold ashtray instead of gold plating?
No, you've got that backwards. The solid gold slows down the cheap version.
Alright, since we're off-topic here:
I had an extremely alarming e-scam incident last night: this morning when I woke up my computer (home desktop, Mac), there was a payment page from Amazon open. I hadn't been on my machine since the previous afternoon, and haven't visited Amazon since March.
After some clicking around, I determined that someone somehow opened a tab at 2 am, went to Amazon, attempted to purchase a $400 gift card, was rejected (because I guess this is a known phishing scam?), then proceeded to purchase 10,000 "Amazon Coins", which are some sort of game currency, for $89, successfully charging my debit card.
Amazon has made this right, but how the fuck is this even possible? Needless to say, I practice safe computing (careful about downloading, etc). Did someone hack into my physical network, or is this purely within my machine? And why didn't it do a better job of covering its tracks?
Just to eliminate all possible other explanations... did you ask your kids about it?
Three possibilities:
1. Your wifi password is "1234" or something.
2. There's a guy in your attic you don't know about.
3. Unusually smart cats.
I never leave myself logged into Amazon even on my home machine because of the number of times I've clicked on a link from here and opened an Amazon page for dinosaur porn basic computer security skills.
Your wifi password is "1234" or something.
Very unsecure. "Password" is much safer.
111.3 is a possibility except that I would describe it as unusually careless cats.
Ruling out physical access is a good idea. After that--huh. There was apparently a proof of concept of a way to remotely root a mac last year, but I wouldn't assume it was that; seems like a pretty high-powered thing to use for such low return, and I hope Apple would've patched it by now (but I haven't found proof).
It's weird/interesting that they used userland access. Is there anything weird in the login info? One place to look is the Unix command "last" (without quotes) that you can run in Terminal, although that doesn't seem to be complete as I'd like it to be. I'd also look at the file /var/log/accountpolicy.log and see if there was anything strange happening overnight--did it generate a record of "you" logging in? Did they get it on the first try?
112: Being a Hugo voter this year, I don't even have to click; they send it to me for free.
Sadly, not yet. Short Story--he's been outputting one of these a week for the last year and a half.
The nomination process is maybe a bit overly democratic?
110: We had to wait all day to confront Iris, but she was pretty convincing about her innocence. She expressed enough ignorance about how Amazon works that I believe her. Kai would never be up at 2 am, would almost certainly not do something like this, and is almost certainly incapable. Also, if he got up at 2 am for illicit computing, he would watch a YouTube video about the universe.
111.1: Our wifi password is absurdly convoluted, and not modifiable. It is written on a chalkboard in the kitchen, but we're discounting physical B&E.
It's not B&E is the guy has been there since before you moved it.
115: are you talking about logging into the machine or into Amazon? The machine was left on and logged in (since nobody has physical access to my office), and the Amazon login was autofilled (although it appears from the Safari history that the page was accessed, then logged into as a subsequent step, which I don't think would normally be necessary? Which maybe indicates that it was automated, not somebody capable of "seeing" my screen).
Improperly implemented democracy (or, at least, an implementations that relied upon a norm that has since disappeared) intersecting the usual sexism/racism issues that are common in fandoms where white males have outsized voices. I'm sure if you google "Sad Puppies" and "Rabid Puppies" you'll hear more about it than you'd ever want to. Amazingly, we haven't really discussed it much here.
120: Have you been getting OS updates?
121 is a sound point.
I thought our mouse problem was on the downswing, but perhaps not.
The first thing I would suspect would be a rogue browser plugin. See if you have any of those. If you do, turn them off.
124: Just installed on Friday, in fact. I haven't seen anything suggesting it's a problem, and it's been out for about a week.
126: Yeah, that sounds likely. That he was logged in--and especially if the browser was still active, which is easy to do on a Mac even without a window open--means it could be done without any of the real scary overwrote-your-BIOS stuff. I forgot that Safari even had extensions, but it does. Seems the simplest way to get it to execute foreign code.
126: Just checked, I don't see anything suspicious other than iPhotoPhotocast, but I don't know what that is, so it's off.
127: Heh, no. I literally can't think of a computing task simple enough for her to accomplish it unguided. There are very few she could do guided.
OK, 129 convinces me to switch all of them off except for Google Earth, Java, and Silverlight.
Is Rhapsody even still a thing? I have a plug-in for that.
Do you know what version of Java you're running? There have been a lot of vulnerabilities through it, including via the applet interface. I hate to say it as a Java dev, but if you don't need it for something specific I'd disable it, too.
One thing that happens sometimes is that a perfectly decent plugin, with a widespread install base, gets sold to someone evil, who then takes advantage of the plugin's update process to install bad shit. So, even the plugins you trust, you shouldn't trust.
At least this one was just trying to steal your money on Amazon. The stuff that really scare me are the exploits that encrypt your hard drive and refuses to unencrypt it until you send them bitcoin.
There are browser hacks you can get infested with that only take going to a properly sketchy site to be downloaded. On the other hand I don't know anything about Safari, so I don't know if it is vulnerable. Is there anything "interesting" in the browser history, dinosaur porn aside?
(Sort of expanding on 129, here.)
Agree with 132. You should definitely disable Java if you aren't a Java developer. If you can't get by without Java plugins, make sure you are updated.
It's not dinosaur porn, it's Hugo nominated science fiction.
Yeah, Java is frickin' dangerous. Don't run that.
106: The Weissach cuts some weight, uses magnesium wheels, etc. I don't know that any of those went for MSRP. Those limited run super cars often go quick and for a premium.
109: Someone send up the Tweety signal!
Also check your carbon monoxide detector. CO poisoning can cause really weird behavior.
How the fuck does a $900K car not already have magnesium wheels?
How much are used ekranoplans again?
I think I had Java off for awhile but then needed it for something. But no harm in turning it off until I need it again (or find out that I always need it for something or other).
Thanks, everybody.
Wow. I read last night that he was in the hospital.
Stop dying, people younger than me. That shit is unsettling.
Wait till you're my age. Everybody dropping like flies.
Teamviewer has apparently been compromised, so if you run that it could be the vector.
If it uninstall TeamViewer, I won't die as long as I'm younger than Apo?
But once I die, you'll start catching up quickly.
I should clarify that Team Viewer insist they haven't been compromised, but rather that their users are being attacked as a result of the recent LinkedIn/Tumblr password leaks.
LinkIn sent me an email about that. I suppose I should do something.