It wasn't a pretty picture when Rick Sandy plugged in the digital photo frame his wife had given him for Christmas.
When he started downloading pictures to the device, his computer froze. He restarted it, and his Norton anti-virus software went blank. Then, the files that controlled his computer disappeared. And Sandy - an information technology expert himself - was shut out of his own machine.
Turns out, says San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer Deborah Gage, an increasing number of devices ranging from hard drives to flash drives and MP3 players have been discovered spreading malware.
It also turns out the words "download" and "upload" have slipped their moorings, might as well get used to it. When I read it I think downloading from the Internet, but these days it seems to just mean copy locally, as from a computer to a connected flash drive - or picture frame. It is, of course, a difficult distinction to nail down, since an Internet download is a copy too, by another name. But still.
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