Slashdot Mirror

http://www.ev4.org/thermite/
3 hard drives we destroyed a few years ago...

Actually it is very easy to rip someone off using loopholes in paypal's system.

I can place an auction for an item which i claim to be in the US, and when you win it i can ship it from the US and make you submit payment to an email address via paypal, where the account is actually registered in australia (tho you obviously cant see this based purely on the email address).
Then i send you a brick or some other heavy junk from somewhere in the US...
You receive it, get real angry and file a paypal claim...

I can then try all the tricks in the book, i can say there's been an error and we shipped the wrong item, and if you cancel the claim we can proceed to send you the right one (if you cancel the claim you can never open it again)...
Before you file a claim i can delay you with talk of slow shipping and false promises that the item will be with you soon etc, you only have 45 days to file a claim, if i delay you that long there's nothing you can do.

If you do file a claim, and paypal finds in your favor they will ask you to send the item back to me using a shipping service with online tracking... This is where the "heavy junk" comes in, it will cost you a lot to send the heavy junk to Australia with tracking, especially since you need to use a fairly fast shipping method to avoid the paypal claim expiring... You are expected to pay for this yourself, and paypal wont refund what it cost you to send the item back.
And yes, despite the fact the item originally came from the US you will be forced to send it to australia because that's where the paypal account is registered.
Also if you already sent the item back (ie during the negotiation phase i promised to deal with it if you returned it) you wont be able to send it with tracking and will thus have the claim rejected by paypal.

And throughout this process, paypal will help the unscrupulous seller.

See http://www.ev4.org/wordpress/category/fastmemorymanscam/ for details of how someone scammed me and many others using this method, and google for fastmemoryman - my site is the first hit nowadays, a LOT of people have been screwed by him.

Yes, i have had many bad experiences with paypal and corrupt sellers taking advantage of the flaws in their system to rip off purchasers, take a look at:
http://www.ev4.org/wordpress/category/fastmemorymanscam/

Then there's their "subscription" service, where a company can automatically bill you on a recurring system, there seems to be absolutely no way to see which subscriptions are active or how to cancel them. A corrupt seller can lie to you about cancelling the subscription and you have no idea if they lied or not until paypal charges you, and when you dispute it they simply ignore you.

ebay also cancel your listing if you try to recover the cost of paypal charges in your listing, because the idea of an extra 5% or so to cover costs would encourage buyers to pay by other means.

Except that many of the worst sellers actively use and are supported by paypal...

See http://www.ev4.org/wordpress/category/fastmemorymanscam/

Basically if you buy an item from a seller, and it's wrong, defective, etc, paypal will give you a refund but only if you ship it to the seller's "registered" address, using a shipping service with online tracking. Because of this, sellers can register an address in a foreign country, sell low value goods, ship you garbage, and then it becomes uneconomical to send it back so the seller keeps your money.

Aside from the fact that that when selling something, i'd prefer *not* to use paypal, as i have to increase the cost of the item and shipping to cover paypal costs. I much prefer personal collection, i can demonstrate the item to prove it works, and i receive the full amount i sold the item for in cash.

See http://www.ev4.org/thermite/ for a few drive vs thermite experiments, the first pic was actually 3 drives when we started out, and the bright silver blob is where one of the drives completely liquified.

You can get various USB IDE/SATA controllers which will let you hook up an old drive easily, there are also SCSI controllers but they are far less common.

In the case of really old (ie very small) drives, i just create a compressed dd image of them incase i will need them in future, as unlikely as that might be it's quite easy to archive several late 90s hard drives onto a DVD these days.

Then i overwrite the drives using shred or dban (http://dban.sourceforge.net) and throw them out...

A bigger problem is dead or semi dead drives, as i'm unable to shred them... I usually opt for Thermite. Thermite is easy to make, and makes sure no data will ever be retrieved from drives.
This: http://www.ev4.org/thermite/IMG00020.jpg used to be 3 hard drives.
The aluminum cased drives completely melt very rapidly, to the point you can stir them with a stick... The steel cased drives take far more heat before they become molten but it's still more than doable. You might also want to strip off the circuit board before you set the drives on fire because the burning circuit boards can produce some pretty nasty smoke.

The site http://www.ev4.org/thermite/ contains a few more pictures of thermite'd drives and a small mobile phone video...

You can get various USB IDE/SATA controllers which will let you hook up an old drive easily, there are also SCSI controllers but they are far less common.

In the case of really old (ie very small) drives, i just create a compressed dd image of them incase i will need them in future, as unlikely as that might be it's quite easy to archive several late 90s hard drives onto a DVD these days.

Then i overwrite the drives using shred or dban (http://dban.sourceforge.net) and throw them out...

A bigger problem is dead or semi dead drives, as i'm unable to shred them... I usually opt for Thermite. Thermite is easy to make, and makes sure no data will ever be retrieved from drives.
This: http://www.ev4.org/thermite/IMG00020.jpg used to be 3 hard drives.
The aluminum cased drives completely melt very rapidly, to the point you can stir them with a stick... The steel cased drives take far more heat before they become molten but it's still more than doable. You might also want to strip off the circuit board before you set the drives on fire because the burning circuit boards can produce some pretty nasty smoke.

The site http://www.ev4.org/thermite/ contains a few more pictures of thermite'd drives and a small mobile phone video...

For what it's worth, i can't place such a huge block of numbers to slashdoc (lameness filter will block it) but 2^8388608 is very large indeed, the result is posted at:
http://www.ev4.org/2-powerof-8388608.txt

And is certainly much higher than 524TB!

What is this sequel you speak of? Can i watch it on my doovde player?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjH9cEoEup8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmyU7T1Rc1s

http://www.ev4.org/wordpress/2007/10/18/sql-is-not-pronounced-sequel-where-the-hell-did-those-vowells-come-from/

You think that's bad, try signing up at:
http://www.keziefoods.co.uk/registration

Make sure you leave the "subscribe to newsletters" checkbox empty, and keep an eye on it as you click submit.
Really damn cheeky, they use javascript to re-check the button as you submit the page!
I wrote about this a while back (march 2007):
http://www.ev4.org/wordpress/2007/03/03/keziefoodscouk-are-cheeky-bastards/
http://www.ev4.org/wordpress/2007/07/04/keziefoods-are-cheeky-bastards-followup/

I mailed them about it several times...
The first time when i first noticed it, and got completely ignored.
The second time i mailed was after i received the newsletter that i explicitly did not want, this time the only response i got was accidental (one of their staff hit reply instead of forward!) and never got any actual intentional response from them.

You think that's bad, try signing up at:
http://www.keziefoods.co.uk/registration

Make sure you leave the "subscribe to newsletters" checkbox empty, and keep an eye on it as you click submit.
Really damn cheeky, they use javascript to re-check the button as you submit the page!
I wrote about this a while back (march 2007):
http://www.ev4.org/wordpress/2007/03/03/keziefoodscouk-are-cheeky-bastards/
http://www.ev4.org/wordpress/2007/07/04/keziefoods-are-cheeky-bastards-followup/

I mailed them about it several times...
The first time when i first noticed it, and got completely ignored.
The second time i mailed was after i received the newsletter that i explicitly did not want, this time the only response i got was accidental (one of their staff hit reply instead of forward!) and never got any actual intentional response from them.

Out of curiosity i just tried again:
I went to add remove windows components, and found that windows media player, outlook express, internet explorer and windows messenger were already unchecked.
So i went to look in the program files directory, and guess what...
ALL of these programs were still installed, and sitting right there in program files.
Look at this screenshot - http://www.ev4.org/stuff/shit.png

If you know a better way to remove it, do tell, although it's bad enough that the default installer lies to you anyway.

I saw an interesting case where someone had an image hotlinked...
He replaced it with:
http://www.ev4.org/hotlink.jpeg