Monthly Archives: February 2012
are keyloggers ethical?
I recently helped a user track down a keylogger on his computer. While this case was certainly one of being ‘snooped’ on (the keylogger had been installed on his own machine by a third party), this got me to thinking: are keyloggers ever ethical?
While they can be used for nefarious purposes (spying on your partner or colleagues, for example), they can also help you track down a stolen laptop, aid companies in detecting illegal behaviour or corporate espionage by employees, and help parents protect their children from internet pests.
Feeling conflicted, I thought the best people to ask would be you! So what do you think? Click on one of the options below and hit ‘vote’ to take the poll, and/or leave your thoughts in the Comments!
how to remove a boot.efi file from Trash
Click on the Trash can on the Dock, hold down the ‘option’ key and click the ‘Empty’ button over there on the left side of the window. If this doesn’t do it, the file may be in the .Trash folder of your Time Machine (TM) or some other disk.
To find out if that’s so, follow this procedure:
1. Open Terminal.app, copy and paste the following command into the Terminal window
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE; killall Finder
Then press ‘Return’.
2. Open a Finder window. Navigate to the TM disk starting from its icon in the left hand column. You should see some greyed out folders called .Trash and .Trashes. Click on these and have a look for the boot.efi file that we’re hunting down.
To remove the boot.efi file from the hidden trash, try the following:
3. Go back to Terminal and copy and paste the following:
sudo rm -rf
Do NOT press ‘Return’. Instead, press the Spacebar once, then use your cursor to drag the boot.efi file from the hidden folder in Step 2 and drop it in the Terminal window. Now press ‘Return’. You will be asked for an administrator password and given a warning which you can ignore. Type in your password, but notice that your typing will be invisible, so type carefully.
Press ‘Return’.
4. If you typed your password incorrectly, repeat step 3. If you typed it correctly, hopefully, your Trash is empty. 🙂
5. The last thing is to hide all the hidden files again, so copy and paste this:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE; killall Finder
Then press ‘Return’.
You can close Terminal now.
Good luck!