of us: you work in an office but spend a lot of time away from your desk. When you leave your desk, you likely leave your Mac on so you can skip the tedium of a restart. Your Mac is just sitting there, alone, defenseless against the hordes who might want to steal all your hard work and take credit for it! Even if you have honest coworkers who help orphans fill out college applications, there will still be at least one joker who will mess with your computer just for kicks. You don’t want that.
Quick Hack: Mac Pranks This hack is telling you how to secure your Mac, but it isn’t really helping your coworker secure their Mac. So it might occur to you that it would be fun to be the jerk who plays pranks while you remain unprankable (computer-wise, that is—your car can still get filled with packing peanuts). There are a ton of good Mac pranks, but one of the better ones is a simple prank called iPanic. It simulates a kernel panic by displaying the kernel panic screen and telling folks to restart (you quit iPanic with the predictable Command-Q). You can get your victim to start a fake kernel panic with whatever nefarious scheme you want to use: set it as a startup item, change its name and icon to some app they use all the time ( Hack #18 ), etc. Great fun for everyone (well, at least for you), but be prepared to confess quickly because it does get very frustrating for the person who needs to use the Mac. (It’s also not considered cool to install iPanic on your home computer to convince your significant other that your Mac is beyond hope and that it’s time to buy a new one. )
The simplest solution is to set a screensaver/wake-from-sleep password. Just open System Preferences, open the Security & Privacy preference pane, authenticate by clicking the lock icon, and then, on the preference pane’s General tab, tick the box labeled “Require password [some time interval] after sleep or screen saver begins” (Figure 7-18).
CHAPTER 7: LOCK DOWN THAT MAC
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