“And, so it was that at the critical moment in Kmart, things could have gone either way — safe and predictable with pop music or towards something darker, mysterious and dangerous.”
Saturdays are my turn on Doves & Serpents. Enjoy and let me know what you think.
Set my Macintosh free! (Net Nanny manual uninstall instructions)
This is a story of how to uninstall Net Nanny from your Mac in the case where you can no longer access Net Nanny’s admin control panel. IE. if you can still remove Net Nanny the official way, please do. Otherwise, this post may help.
A few years ago I installed Net Nanny on the family iMac following a brief episode of words like “nekid wimmin” showing-up in Safari’s search history. This turned-out to be an over-reaction. With time I slowly disabled various blocking features, eventually turning everything off. Instead, we practice the more libertarian approach of keeping the iMac in a public room and talking openly with our kids about why they should police themselves.
Tonight I decided to just be done with it altogether. So I deleted the application in the standard Mac fashion — I dragged it from the applications folder and dropped it in the trash. To be extra thorough, I scanned my library folders for any file created by Net Nanny and deleted these as well. Mmmm, that’s better.
Some time later I launched Safari and surprise, all content was blocked. I messed around with the network connection a bit and all was fine. What the hell? Then I fired-up my MacBook to google “uninstall Net Nanny from Mac” and found no specific instructions for the Mac but several sites referring to the need to remove/edit registry keys when manually removing from a Windows/PC. Hah, I thought, there must be a file I missed (actually, the first thing I did was restore the files I’d deleted back to the original locations with the hope that I could launch Net Nanny and use the admin pane to uninstall — but no good. Net Nanny refused to launch). Finally, I found the file I’d missed.
Here are the steps for manually uninstalling Net Nanny from OS X:
Pre-req: you’ll need to enter your admin password for each of the following actions (else those wiley kids would be able to do this as well :) Also, I don’t recall precisely if there were Net Nanny files in each of the following locations but these are the locations I always search when manually deleting any application. In the case of Net Nanny, any relevant file contains “Net Nanny” in the file or folder name.
Warning: you’ll be messing-around in the heart of your Mac’s operating system so do not delete any files or folders that do not clearly contain “Net Nanny” in the name. Else you may break your operating system and you’ll only have yourself to blame.
- Delete /Applications/Net Nanny.app
- Delete any Net Nanny folder or file from /Library/Application Support/
- Delete any Net Nanny folder or file from /Library/LaunchAgents and /Library/LaunchDaemons/
- Delete any Net Nanny folder or file from /Library/PreferencePanes and /Library/Preferences
- Delete any Net Nanny folder or file from /Library/StartupItems
- Delete the Net Nanny .kext in /System/Library/Extensions/ —this is the one I missed, the one that was breaking my access to the internet. It’s a “kernel extension” which modifies your system at a fundamental level. Apple hates these, btw.
- Delete any Net Nanny folder or file from [your user folder]/Library/Application Support/
- Delete any Net Nanny folder or file from [your user folder]/Library/Launch Agents/
- Delete any Net Nanny folder or file from [your user folder]/Library/PreferencePanes/
- Delete any Net Nanny folder or file from [your user folder]/Library/Preferences/
- Finally, reboot your Mac
That’s it. You’ve made the world just a little less big brotherly. Congrats! And you may notice that your system is running faster now. Who knew?
Years ago, I attended a rally protesting government cuts in funding for education and the arts. One of the speakers suggested that we boomers may be the first generation to teach the next generation less than we know. That often willful ignorance may turn out to be our final, fatal mistake, the greatest American tragedy of all. (h/t Holly Welker)
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away
We better stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down"
“If 4chan’s anonymity is good for anything, it turns out, it’s good for lulz. Consider, Poole explains, how the fixed identities in other online communities can stifle creativity: where usernames are required (whether real or pseudonymous), a new user who posts a few failed attempts at humor will soon find other users associating that name with failure. ‘Even if you’re posting gold by day eight,’ says Poole, ‘they’ll be like, ‘Oh, this guy sucks.” Names, in other words, make failure costly, thus discouraging even the attempt to succeed. By the same token, namelessness makes failure cheap — nearly costless, reputation-wise, in a setting like 4chan, where the Anonymous who posted a lame joke five minutes ago might well be the same Anonymous who’s mocking it hilariously right now. And as the social-media theorist Clay Shirky has suggested in another context (explaining how the plummeting costs of networked collaboration encourage, say, a thousand open-source software projects to launch for every one that gets anywhere), the closer a community gets to ‘failure for free,’ the better its chances of generating success.”
Sounds like a Communist plot to me.
(Via kottke.org.)
Holly Welker via HuffPo: “The corner of the internet concerned with Mormon issues has been aflutter recently over a new ad campaign created by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, featuring profiles of church members, showcasing their achievements, their individuality, their likability. [However, …] demonstrating to the world that individual Mormons are interesting, thoughtful, likable people won’t compensate for the corporate church’s [correlation-induced, “stultifying” reality].”
