"RoseGarden" - - - - - - - from - nscave

A photo printing machine is a computer

Here’s one we don’t think of very often if at all. Many of us use photo kiosh machines at your local favourite store or shopping mall to print photographs. You know the deal, you take your camera card with you and pop it into the machine, make your selections and your pictures are printed in an hour or less while you shop.

Then you go home, put the card back into your computer to recheck the pictures you had done and if you are lucky your computer virus program warns you have a virus or worm. If you are not lucky, or don’t have a good virus program, you computer has a new found friend that will do all sorts of unkind things.

Experts say the chances of this happening is 1 in 10,000 or very remote. But if you do a search on Google you will find it happens to enough people that one should be aware of the problem.

The photo machine is a computer, just like your PC at home. If someone brings in an infected card and puts it in the machine, the malware gets copied to the machine, and then to your card when you use it later. (And to anyone else’s card inserted in the machine.) And if you don’t have proper safe guards, on to your computer and so on.

Some photo machines have systems to prevent this, many do not.

Something to think about the next time you head off to the quickest way known to get good quality prints.

Things you should/could do:

1. You don’t have to stop using these machines, after all the convenience is nice. Just be sure when you go back home after using these machines, or for that matter having had the card inserted in any other computer, be sure to do a virus check on it first thing. Or, if you only loaded the pictures on the card temporarily for printing, put it back in your camera and format it for future use. This will erase all contents permanently, so make sure you have previously saved the originals.
2. Another suggestion is to use the internet to transfer the pictures online from your computer to the photo printing site and pick them up when you get there. Most places have this service as well as the machines available.

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This recently happened to a friend, and being aware of this can prevent a lot of shock and awe.

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This work by NSCAVE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License