Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with lockdown

iPhone app syncing woes

MysticMCJ — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 18:46:43 -0800

I just sold out and got an iPhone 3gs. After some amount of pain and a few virtual images and iTunes installs, I finally got all of my contacts synced over, and I have discovered that I can't sync from multiple PVs like I used to. Not a problem- except for apps. The problem I have is that I installed all of my apps OTA, and the first time I synced after that, it was to my work PC. Most of my media is on my home PC, so I would like to make that "master" for syncing. But when I check "sync apps" it warns me that all apps on my iPhone will be replaced with those on my iTunes library- which is blank. I know that I have all of my apps and data backed up on my work PC- how can I switch this to my home PC? My big fear is losing all of my app data. Both are running winXP.

Why did Gmail lock me down in sector 4?

flabdablet — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 03:51:08 -0800

Yesterday morning, when I tried to collect my Gmail messages, Thunderbird told me the server had reponded "Lockdown in Sector 4!". I couldn't get into Gmail (POP3 or webmail interface) all yesterday and all today; it's come good tonight. Has this happened to anybody else? If so, have you ever found out why? Trying to log in to gmail.google.com took me to a page that told me my account had been locked down for "up to 24 hours" due to "unusual usage", including a reporting address to use if I didn't think I'd done anything to violate the TOS. AFAIK I hadn't, so I fired off several queries (took me a while to remember that I'd set the reply-to: on all my mail accounts to my Gmail address). So far, all that's got me is unhelpful autoresponses reiterating the web page text (irritatingly signed "Sincerely, the Gmail team"). Short of prostrating myself three times daily in the direction of Mountain View I have no clue what, if anything, I should do or stop doing to avoid this happening again.

I have just about got over the annoyance of being locked out of my main mailbox for two days, and I'm now mostly curious. Is this just the Gmail team subjecting randomly chosen guinea pigs to tests of a new security feature, or is there something I'm doing "wrong"?

My normal method of getting to Gmail is via Thunderbird and the AVG 7.0 Free e-mail scanner proxy, with Thunderbird's default 10-minute POP3 polling cycle. I don't send mail through their smtp server - I use my ISP's. Right before this happened, a friend had just sent me a draft of her PhD thesis to review (a 14MB attachment); this is the biggest mail I've ever been sent, and I have not yet downloaded it.

Is there anybody here with inside knowledge?

How to lock down the family computer?

tomorama — Sat, 03 Jan 2004 19:37:55 -0800

My family is computer illiterate, and since I moved out they've been giving the family desktop hell. Every time I come home from a holiday or weekend, ads, spyware and malware have taken it hostage. [more inside] The homepage is usually reset to a 3rd party spyware search engine/url redirection service, various toolbars are installed and the bookmarks are riddled with gambling and pornography sites. It's a horror to look at the names of all the processes running in the background. There are even executables that pop up advertising banners and things in the taskbar and on the desktop. Usually whenever I find things like this, I run all the anti-virus software, clean out the system using Ad-Aware and put things back together bit by bit.

This is a combination of my parents unwittingly clicking on advertisements, and my brothers installing various versions of KaZaA and clicking on malicious links in AIM profiles.

First things first, I tried to educate everybody about how to use the Internet and what to watch out for. I even stuck a word document in the middle of the desktop with a list of things NOT to do. Well, the education approach was all for naught - you try hammering netiquette into the heads of your nearly-60-year-old parents and two teenage brothers who are only interested in downloaded the latest mp3s.

When this didn't work, I removed KaZaA and hid Internet Explorer, replacing them with KaZaA Lite and Mozilla Firebird (with all the popup blocking and whatnot turned on).

This helped things a little, but it seems my family is better at finding their way to the ads and spyware than the spyware is at finding its way to my family. So, I need some help. How can I like down my family's computer so that they can't mess around with things they shouldn't be, while being abled to access all the services and sites that they use the system for? It's a fairly new Dell with Windows XP.