Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2012 October 28

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October 28

Wikipedia side pop-up?

Yesterday, whilst I was looking at this page I got a rectangular shaped pop-up with icons running down the side. When I hovered over a trash can icon, "nominate this article for deletion" appeared. When I hovered over another icon, "send appreciation to author" appeared. I closed the box but am now concerned that my computer may be infected with some type of malicious software. Or is this a new feature wikipedia is implementing? My computer is a power pc mac mini running mac osx version 10.4.11. Any thoughts? JayJ47 (talk) 02:07, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

My guess is that somebody was trying something out in what he thought was the sandbox, but was actually doing it live, and, after he discovered his mistake, he quickly reverted it. StuRat (talk) 02:13, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

So should I be concerned? So far its only happened once. I visited the same page on a different computer and it didn't show up. JayJ47 (talk) 02:23, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

It wouldn't concern me. StuRat (talk) 02:30, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

The most plausible idea I can think of is that somebody was experimenting with Javascript somewhere. Do you have any Javascript things enabled for your account? Looie496 (talk) 03:48, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

No, not that I'm aware of. Thank you both for your responses. JayJ47 (talk) 04:25, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

From a search, I found Wikipedia:Page Curation/Help#What is Mark for Deletion and how does it work?. Checking out that and Wikipedia:Page Curation, it seems clear you saw the Curation Toolbar. You can check the pictures or visit a page in Special:NewPagesFeed to see the toolbar to check against what you saw. (Ronald Woutering should have the toolbar for a while.) I can't say why you saw it. It probably shouldn't have shown up on that page since I'm pretty sure it must have been patrolled given the age and activity. It may be someone made a mistake and made the Curation Toolbar show up when it shouldn't have, it may be something simply went wrong on the software and it showed up when it shouldn't have. Either way, it's unlikely to be a concern. Nil Einne (talk) 10:07, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes that's what I saw! Such a relief to know it wasn't anything bad. Thanks for your help! JayJ47 (talk) 11:34, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Glad we could help. BTW one final possibility us that the toolbar appearing was neither a random bug nor someone temporarily breaking something but a trial as the foundation does occassionally run trials on a subset of users to test stuff. (I think this is unlikely here since the Curation toolbar appears to be new yet I think a fair amount of thought has already gone in to when it appears.) Nil Einne (talk) 07:14, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

wikipedia has finally achieved a degree of complexity which has led to it becoming self-aware and is beginning to test its abilities. Soon it will attempt to cause a global Internet flame war to destroy mankind in a preemptive strike.Gzuckier (talk) 02:26, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Core Temp malware

I downloaded and installed a software called Core Temp (a program that monitors CPU temperature) last night, only to delete it minutes later when I saw that my home page and default search engine had been changed to some search engine called snap.do without my permission. It even deleted my browser add-ons/extensions. I had to block the site by editing my file hosts in order for my browser to finally stop defaulting to that awful site. Then I ran a virus scan, and it detected some adware in the system. Well, after presumably getting rid of them, I restarted the computer. Then I as try to run a virus scan once more as a precaution, it tells my that my antivirus is expired, even though I registered it to protect for a full year about a month ago (I'm using avast!). So I uninstalled it to reinstall. I had no problems with it until I performed the mandatory reboot. Now when I log into my user account, the taskbar remains frozen and I can't open any programs. I had to restart in Safe Mode just so I could be able to type this. I just think all these problems have been triggered by the Core Temp software, which I believed to be safe based on the reviews I read before proceeding to download it, and I got it from its official site (http://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/). Has anyone else who used the software faced similar problems? 70.55.109.152 (talk) 23:00, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

If it truly originated with these particular actions, it probably has more to do with the InstallIQ system that tries to install random adware onto your computer than the actual Core Temp application. There's a lot of chatter about it here and there. ¦ Reisio (talk) 01:11, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

I've finally been able to fix the problem with Startup Repair (I suspect some system files were damaged), but my antivirus is mysteriously gone now. I downloaded Microsoft Security Essentials in its place, even though I vastly prefer the efficacy of avast!. But it's been acting so weird today that I'm afraid to reinstall it and encounter the same problems all over again. 70.55.109.152 (talk) 02:36, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Unfortunately the only way to be sure your system is uncompromised is to have been monitoring it from the start. ¦ Reisio (talk) 13:22, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

And, as Ken Thompson pointed out in his famous speech to the ACM, Reflections on Trusting Trust, if you really need to be sure your system is uncompromised, you need to have complete and omniscient control over every engineering detail in the entire chain of events leading up to the system's present state. Not only is this impractical, it's probably impossible even in theory - which is the point of Thompson's speech; he concludes by waxing philosophical about the morality and ethics of trust, which, despite their own complexities, are apparently easier to manage than their technical counterparts. Nimur (talk) 16:50, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm not as worried about Microsoft or Samsung installing something to track me and collect my personal info as I'm worried about third part software that I didn't approve of doing the same. Besides, I just want to be sure that I have no viruses wreaking havoc on my computer. However, the antivirus I normally trust to take care of this practically nearly rendered my PC unusable yesterday, and I need to know what caused this. 70.55.109.152 (talk) 21:00, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

You mean didn't keep your PC from being rendered unusable? The best you can do (short of a clean install) is to run your entire hard disk through a couple anti-virus and anti-badware scans, start it up again and see anything is still off. ¦ Reisio (talk) 15:02, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Any suggestions for decent antivirus/badware scans? 70.55.109.152 (talk) 02:21, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

Spybot – Search & Destroy is a good software to do this. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 10:12, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

A lot of people are saying the latest version of Spybot is bloated and ineffective. Having downloaded it to see for myself, I have to say that they're kinda right. 70.55.109.152 (talk) 02:19, 1 November 2012 (UTC)