There’s an Apple Bitcoin Prank That’s Hilarious and Devastating

General piece of advice: don’t go around typing stuff into your computer’s terminal window based on some pictures you found randomly floating on the internet. You’re not very likely to unlock a hidden bitcoin miner in your Mac, and far more likely to brick the thing instead.

There’s apparently a rumor going around that Apple’s actually been hiding bitcoin miner in its PCs ever since the crypotcurrency’s launch circa 2009, and that the trick to unlocking it is just one little line of code. The pitch goes a little something like this:

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If you have any idea what “sudo rm -rf/*” means, you’re probably already snickering. If not, well, it reformats your whole machine.

Trying to con folks into deleting everything they have is a prank as as old as computers, but it seems this recent (topical!) iteration bubbled up from the depths of 4chan’s /b/. And while it seems too ludicrous to believe that folks are falling for this, the Daily Dot has scooped up evidence that suggests a few have, or at least went out of their way to fake it.

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Considering there was also a “secret backwards compatibility” hoax that had folks bricking their brand new Xbox Ones, it seems like it’s been a hard few weeks for uninformed tech owners. Fortunately there’s a fix: just take a hammer to the screen, bring your computer back to the Apple store, tell them you got the “bitcoin defect” and they’ll give you a new one! Don’t believe me? Good. [The Daily Dot]