I used Yahoo to search for something and was sent immediately to the following [redacted] site. I believe my Mac was invaded and don’t know what to do!

First, relax. Your Mac wasn’t invaded, infected, compromised, co-opted, or conquered. If you’d clicked through a few of those dire pop-up warnings you might have been as amused as I was to see a phony Windows Security Alert appear on a Macintosh. What you’ve encountered is termed “scareware”—a scam that attempts to frighten those confronted with these pages into downloading a hunk of software that will allegedly deal with the problem.

The chain of events goes like this: A perfectly legitimate URL is hijacked by the scammers and you’re redirected to the scareware page. That page is designed in such a way that several dialog boxes pop-up, warning you that your computer is infected. Click Cancel and you’ll just get more warnings and an interface that makes it appear like your computer is being scanned. If you fall for the trick and click the buttons necessary to download the offered antivirus software, you’ll pay for a product that is likely a hunk of malware (and I hate to think what happens to your credit card information). This malware is bad for Windows PCs but has no effect on Macs.

Typical scareware warning:

Regrettably, these pages are sometimes difficult to dismiss because the constant pop-up warnings prevent you from leaving. Clicking OK may get rid of the pop-ups so that you can close the window or tab (and no, doing so won’t automatically download the software to your Mac), but I faced a situation with my wife’s Mac (who was just concerned as you were) where I had to force-quit Safari to get away from the scareware page.

You can take some comfort in knowing that the search engine folks do their best to weed out this junk and that those who promote it have been—and will continue to be—prosecuted for engaging in such malicious and scammy activities.

Even hiding the Dock doesn’t seem to help, at least not all the time—when a Dock icon bounces with my Dock hidden at the bottom of the screen, it pops up just enough to be visible (and annoying). While some programs, such as iChat, nicely give you control over the dock bouncing, others provide no control at all.

If you dislike those bouncing icons, I have a fix. Unfortunately, it’s an all-or-nothing proposition; you can’t control bouncing on a per-application basis. But if you really dislike those bouncing icons, here’s how to ground them forever. Open Terminal, in Applications -> Utilities, and enter these two commands (don’t type the $; that’s just the command prompt):

$ defaults write com.apple.dock no-bouncing -bool TRUE
$ killall Dock

(If at some point you decide you’d rather have your bounce-happy Dock back, repeat the above commands, but change TRUE to FALSE at the end of the first command.)

The first command sets a hidden preference to stop all Dock icon bouncing, and the second command kills the Dock, which then restarts automatically. After it restarts, you’ll never again be bothered by a bouncing application icon. This does mean, however, that it’s now up to you to keep an eye on your running programs so that you know when one of them wants your attention.

The inspiration for many SSB offerings was the Firefox offshoot Webrunner, and the descendant of that project has now earned a 1.0 beta designation and its own website: Prism, from Mozilla Labs, gives you a power tool for creating your own SSBs at will, either via a Firefox extension or by launching the Prism config app and typing in the target URL.

Aside from having a dockable icon for each website you convert, you can also set your SSBs to launch at login, or assign mailto: links to open your web email client (similarly achievable for Gmail with the Gmail Notifier tool). If you have to keep separate sets of credentials for work & personal accounts for web services, no need to log in and out repeatedly — just set up a Prism SSB for one of the accounts, and the passwords & cookies will stay as they need to be. In my brief testing this morning, several sites worked just as expected; the only sticking point is that the Choosy extension gets confused about whether or not Firefox is running when an SSB is open.

Safari 4 developer seeds had offered a “Save as Web Application” feature for creating SSBs, which has been stripped from the File menu in the current public beta but still looks to be part of the final release; meanwhile, you can still make WebKit-centric SSBs with the excellent and free Fluid.

The average computer owner/user has never suffered a hard drive failure and often doesn’t realize it’s even possible. Sadly, disaster strikes when you least often expect it and often offers little to no warning for preparation.

So what should you do when you lose your data and recovery services just aren’t in the budget? First of all, DON’T MAKE REPEATED EFFORTS of booting or access attempts on your own or under the direction of a non-specialized recovery company. Each and every time the attempt is made the situation can be made worse or irreversible.

The best advice is to remove the hard drive from the system (if you’re unsure of how to do this have a professional do it). Place the hard drive in an antistatic bag. Label it with a date of the crash and a description of the contents you had stored on the drive that may be most important. If you have a safe or safety deposit box you may store it there. Otherwise, a shelf in your home office or similar out-of-the-way type place is fine. Bottom line is that a hard drive can survive years without further deterioration as long as it is in an even-temperature environment. No high-level humidity or extreme cool temperature conditions. Your hard drive can outlast this economic recession, whether it’s 5 years or 50 years. (shutter)