I usually don’t do public service announcements for Facebook chain letters, but I’m making an exception here because I’m seeing this one making the rounds and there are enough people on my Facebook who might actually try this because Bitcoin is all the rage right now. The chain letter goes like this:

Apples secret mining feature

Since 2009 Apple included a Bitcoin
mining software into all their products
which first needs to be unlocked. This
feature will allow you to generate
Bitcoins with your Apple computer as
efficiently as with a regular high end PC
To unlock the sudo rm —rf feature. simply open
your terminal and execute following
code:
sudo rm —r f/ *

That’s not a bitcoin miner. “Sudo” switches you to the root user, which is “God Mode” on your Mack. “RM” is the command to remove. “RF” tells your Mack to comb your hard drive in both directions, up and down from the directory you’re currently in. “*.*” tells it to look for everything on the drive regardless of file extension or whether it’s a directory or file. So, putting this together, the command in this chain letter ensures that you erase every single thing on your Mack’s hard drive. There’s no magic recovery option from this. You either rebuild your Mack yourself, or you take it to the Apple Store and they do it for you. Also, God help you if you don’t have backups of all your photos, documents, music and other data, because you’re rebuilding as if this is a brand-new Mack. Seriously, don’t do this. If your friend shares this chain letter with you, either as text or as its current screenshot form, explain to them why this is bad. If you see it on your newsfeed, go ahead and copy this post and share it in the comments. It’s probably the only time I’ll tell you to copy/paste/share.