It's pretty easy to go online and understand what the "FTPPassive" key is (and why it's enabled by default). The firewall settings thing is a UI bug, if that. Those other toggles don't take effect when blocking all incoming connections is active. As such, it doesn't matter what the value for the other toggles is, so it resets them to the default (true). Perhaps a sharp point if you toggle firewall often, but not an outright security issue. My laptop has that systemuiserver preference setting there as well.

I think this person is a bit paranoid and reading a bit too much into things judging from their timeline.

Pasv is just a work around for nat'd connections.

God bless Apple retail employees who have to deal with this stuff because I could not, I would hand in my neon t-shirt on day 3.

Rambling paranoid incoherent article. This person is either not technical at all or is having delusions.

The only screenshot of an actual error is about "dsldevice.domain_not_set.invalid" which is apparently some crappy ATT fiber router thing when Internet is not up.

There is no "background ftp" going on. Passive ftp is a way to do the FTP protocol and it makes sense to be on by default.

Sparky,

this sounds like you've been running on very little rest for a while, and that's rough regardless of what's on the damn Mac.

If there's someone you trust offline, it might be worth talking to them about how you're holding up, separate from the technical questions.