[FRIAM] bizarre Fire Fox behavior?

[Nick Thompson]

Roger, 

 

Thanks.  I wonder …. .  The problem does not happen in I.E., but it has stopped happening in FF, now as well.  The problem did seem to survive two clean opens of FF, but more recently has stopped.  To be clear, what was happening  was multiple explorer windows being opened, but it was something in FF that seemed to be opening them.  It never happened when FF was closed.  This is entirely separate from the problem of firefox opening several processes and grabbing a 

Gig of memory just for fun, which seems to be perhaps irremediable.  Perhaps it’s time give up on Firefox.  

 

Anyway, all is calm at the moment.  I assume you are out in the gulf of Maine somewhere, where you should be, in a lovely chilly fog.  Here in the MIB, when are on our sixth day over 90.

 

Take care, 

 

N

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Thursday, July 05, 2018 10:02 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] bizarre Fire Fox behavior?

 

There's some kind of exploit running around that tries to freeze your browser by repeated file saves while posting a "You have been PWNED! Call 1-800-xxx-yyyy for help!" message, then they talk you out of your credit card number, and so on, and so forth.  Affects several browsers, there were earlier fixes but they're broken at the moment.  It sounds like your computer is too old for the exploit to work correctly.

 

The immediate cure is to delete the window/tab that is running the exploit, if you can identify it.  When you start firefox is it loading a collection of saved tabs?

 

-- rec --

 

On Tue, Jul 3, 2018 at 11:53 PM Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net> > wrote:

After a time, when Firefox has been running, Windows Explorer begins spawning new windows explorer processes (as indicated by the Windows Task Manager) at a frantic rate, roughly two per second.  They are all a little over 2k but not exactly the same.    When I close Firefox it does not stop, but if I don’t open Firefox, it does not start.  It does not happen with Windows Internet Explorer.  Those are the only two browsers I have.  

 

Has anybody experienced anything like this?  Eventually it uses up enormous amounts of memory on the machine and I suppose will ultimately crash it.  

 

N

 

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20180705/a1244781/attachment.html>