Stupid is as stupid does

     The title is one of my favorite sayings from the Forrest Gump movie. I should have taken his mama's advice. This could also be titled "You Tube made me do it" but I like to think I'm a responsible adult and can admit my own mistakes.

    So there I was learning all I could about the Raspberry Pi and drooling over the simple electronics projects I could do when I came across a You Tube video. This You Tube video contained images from a sweet RetroPie gaming setup that the poster put together as a 16Gb starter version. RetroPie is a vintage game console emulator OS so you can play all of the video games from the early Atari up to the PlayStation 1 I think. It has over 3000 games in the disk image and I wanted it, for my husband and son of course.

     The poster of the video had a link for the torrent download but I didn't have a down loader on my laptop. I downloaded the first one that came up on a search. What a mistake!



     I made this mistake even though I've warned my kids about downloading stuff. I've got a Windows XP desktop set aside to use for this purpose with an old version of a torrent client that is never updated and I don't care if it's buggy, it doesn't have malware and it works great.

     I downloaded uTorrent. It claimed to be small, 2Mb, and you didn't have to install it just run the script. I did not blindly click through the install process, I didn't want the other crap that came with it, but it still downloaded more than just what I wanted. How could it hide anything in 2Mb? Well, it did. It changed the default search on my Firefox browser to be Yahoo, yuck! It added some sort of Lavasoft website safety scanner, ironically funny. I'm never trusting Lavasoft again if they stoop to these sort of tactics.

     I suspect it did one more thing. I may not have noticed but I had Acrobat Reader going and several PDFs open at the time of installing the little monster. My screen kept flashing after I reopened Firefox and found the changes. Then I went back to my PDFs and it was saying that I had a viewing assist program running and would I like to optimize the PDF to use with the viewer. I think it was capturing what I was doing on my computer and sending the screenshots somewhere for data mining.  Data mining is an awful repulsive practice. It amazes me how far these people will go just to get a hold of what you are doing on the internet. They are really bottom feeders.

     I spent a whole day trying to undo what I unintentionally did. I had to do a lot of searching online. Nobody seems to know about the screen capture thing. I uninstalled uTorrent and the Lavasoft thing. I had to find out how to block uTorrent from getting through my Firewall because it was still allowed after the uninstall. And then I found someone that said you had to flush your DNS (which I know nothing about but did anyways). This stopped the flashing and it seems anything that was done to my computer.

     I haven't restarted my computer so I don't know if the changes are permanent or if there's still some installer hiding somewhere. I wasted a whole day learning a lesson the hard way and not learning more about the RPi. Stupid.

     At least I have my RetroPie disk image but I'm now scared it may also be crap or infected or something. I don't know how much I trust it with how much trouble I got into using a small 2Mb piece of junk. If the RPi is ruined at least it doesn't cost much but can I infect my home network with something? I hope not. I'd better turn off the on-board wi-fi before running it the 1st time. You live and learn, sometimes the hard way.