Slashdot Mirror
When Users Attack
AdmiralKit writes "Ever wonder how much damage some users can inflict on their computers? This site documents the cream of the crop of parts that have been returned because they are "defective" or "broken." Pretty amazing what people can do to computers in the middle of the information age."
=[
They'll return their melted server tomorrow because it is 'broken'
Middle of the information age? You have got to be kidding me. The way I see it, we've barely progressed beyond the point of last night's erection.
this may be the Information Age, but we're all cavemen at heart. *sniffs keyboard*
The user who drilled holes in his laptop to improve cooling
The man who had a Pentium motherboard, and installed his new Pentium2 processor in the PCI port (with the help of a hacksaw)
My CD Rom drive, which started expelling smoke while installing Windows 95 (hardware with good taste)
The woman who brought in her computer wondering why it was crashing... she had had the thing for 3 years - without a CPU fan and heatsink attached
The incompetent computer shop who couldn't figure out how to fix my uncles computer (when its 9$ cooling fan had died)
Ever wonder how much damage some users can inflict on their computers?
:]
No, not really. After seeing some people submit their own sites to a Slashdot front page story, everything else pales in comparison.
ah yes but nothing beats the good ol' cup holder/platform
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
He'll need to add a snapshot of his smoldering webserver to his gallery.
I can't get the "Index of the pictures" page to load fully, but the pictures are loading slowly for me via the Google caches:
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Page 5
I'm not sure how many pages there are in total, but these ought to get you started.
Only 17 comments so far and the server's melted. I happenned to get a few picts myself, but that's about it.
We really need a slashdot cache! Come on commander taco, surely you can program that!
I got to see the first page before it got /.ed
All I can say is WOW....I mean I've fried components before, but nothing with this kind of visible damage.....well, except for the time I burned out my zip drive, scsi card, motherboard and floppy by accidently pluging my speaker transformer into my zip drive (they look identical and have identical connections, except as I noticed afterwards one is 12VAC and the other 2.5VDC).....left pretty burn marks all over my scsi card and motherboard. And then there was the time I was serviceing my old laptop (loose connection somewhere inside) and I forgot that when I moved workspaces I had slipped the battery back into its slot....ZZZTZTZ....smoke, and a fried out chip on the motherboard.
Luckly everything I've destroyed since then has not had such spectacular effects associated.
So....I guess I can see how this stuff happens.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Ever wonder how much damage some users can inflict on their computers?
No, because I know how much damage some users can inflict on websites.
I stole this Sig
Obligatory Google cache, though it seems to be largely a picture collection, so it's not too helpful.
According to the news on this page, the URL posted originally belonged to jonnyguru.com. But, unfortunately, the Wayback machine's archive for that site goes back to just after it was displaced, so it appears we're SOL until the server comes back to life.
Oh well...
Something to try: Put a copy of all those photos on a bogus web page with the title, "Here is what Microsoft software does to your computer."
Then show the page to your "favorite" manager.
Table-ized A.I.
My parents are the typical lot when it comes to machines. When we first got one, they felt that it was "their toy" and wouldn't let me have at it. Not that I was taking computer classes in Elementary School or anything. Even at 10 years old, I was more way more qualified.
/. bunch goes through that as well. And it doesn't stop when you leave home, either.
Since that time, my parents have learned to scream for me whenever something goes wrong. I'm sure alot of the rest of the
I remember that first PC. No hard drive, DOS on a 5.25", and another floppy with something called "Microsoft Desktop 2.0" Call it the prelude to windows. On to the mishaps. Dad thought he could take it apart and tinker as if it were some sort of Ford model. Genious that he is, he has it on and is looking in complete awe at some of the parts. Inside was a 1200bps modem. He had no clue what it was, even though I told him several times. Guess 10 year olds don't know much, do they. Anyway, while this thing was still running hot, Dad rips the modem out. Two chips on the card, toasted. Several other resisters, capacitors, etc. fried. The 8 bit slot it came out of, useless. From then on, my father couldn't, for the life of him, figure out why the machine would screw up every so often. Later I learned that he'd semi-fried the motherboard, and continual (ab)use wore it out.
Then came the 486. This was the first one with anything that resembled Windows on it, that being 3.1. Well, mom wanted to see what she could do with Windows (and again, new machine, I wasn't allowed to play). What she did was got into the settings area, played with numbers, changed addresses, and basically sent Windows to hell. Then she discovered that F1 gave her setup options. Thinking that would solve the problem, she proceeded to lock herself out of the BIOS (by forgetting her password in a matter of moments). This was at the advent of Prodigy and AOL, so I found my way around after learning that BIOS passwords could be cracked hardway, and fixed the problem.
Since then, I'm the PC fixit guy. But with all the advances we have, I'm still trying to get them to move forward. I can't wait to see what they do to Cable lines and modems, network hubs, and next-gen stuff. No matter how inept our fellow peons in the workforce get, the people we know at home always seem ever the slightest bit worse...
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
That's probably because AMD processors are preferred by 12 of 10 idiot overclocker kids.
Where are the pics of some creamed keyboards?
Yik! Don't bring up porn accidents, please. I just finished dinner. May make for some interesting 911 (emergancy) calls, however.
"You put your what in the what? Don't reboot! Help is on the way, young man."
Table-ized A.I.
My personal favourite was a new member of the staff complaining that she was tring to access some old 5.25" disks, but the disk drive was making a horrible sound when she would put them in. It took me 5 minutes to figure out that she was putting it in a CD-ROM drive, not a 5.25" disk drive
That was 22 years ago. He bought a Commodore PET (the big one, with 32 megs), floppy disk drives and printer.
Two weeks later, he comes back with a box, and asked us if we would buy back the printer from him. In the box was the printer.
Totally disassembled.
Down to actual TTL chips, resistors, diodes and transistors. Heck, he even took apart the printhead and separated the tiny coils and the actual needles!!!
We laughed for days about this, and since he was a classmate of mine, I got teased pretty well with that afterwards...
I used to be the Windows system administrator at a small (300-person) company. Before we got mail filters installed on our server, we would just get nailed with viruses. We were on about our third round of Melissa at that point, and each time, I would send out a company-wide email telling people not to click on attachments.
;)
Well, I knew most of the people in the company quite well, including the sales guys. One of the sales guys happened to be a pretty close friend of mine, and the thought he really knew a lot of computers. In fact, he was so cocky about the belief that he would never get a virus that he didn't usually read my emails.
In this particular case, I happened to be sitting a few feet away from him when he was going through his email. He came upon my email and asked me if he could delete it. I said, "Sure, as long as you don't click on attachments." Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him delete the email and click on the next email in his box. Then I watched him double-click on the attachment and immediately get nailed by the virus.
I sprung into action. "What are you doing? That's the virus!" I yelled. I disconnected his Ethernet cord so he wouldn't spread it, and spent the next 20 minutes cleaning the damn thing off his computer.
This company was full of people who really thought they knew their stuff when it came to computers. I watched one of the Linux gurus there sheepishly admit that he didn't know that removing an NT box from a domain removed his ability to log in with his domain account. (Since the IT staff was the only group with the local administrator password, he actually had to log a helpdesk ticket saying that he couldn't log in to his NT box.) I watched our VP of sales call our network admin away from an off-site meeting because "ALL OF MY EMAIL HAS DISAPPEARED! OH MY GOD! YOU DELETED IT!" (In actuality, he had scrolled all the way to the right in the pane that showed his mailboxes, so he couldn't see any of his mailboxes. One very pissed network administrator had to explain to him that there was a scrollbar at the bottom of the screen that he needed to scroll back to the left.)
It happens all the time, but before you spout off that those users are stupid, I must remind you that we all have those things we know nothing about. Do you know the correct usage for its vs. it's? (Hint: Only use it's in place of it is -- no other time.) Can you fix your car every time something goes wrong, or do you take it into a mechanic? Do you know how to ballroom dance?
The moral of the story: We're all stupid sometimes. Learn to laugh about it. Heck, that's the only way you're ever going to get through a single day as a sysadmin.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
Reminds me of my friends computer, the case has a nice dent in it (on the top) from when he hit it a few times with a bat. I also hit my computer alot (back in the IBM PS/2 days, and if you had one of these computers you'd understand why I would beat the crap out of it) I dented the case with my fist, very painfull but it relieved alot of stress.
I also have a keyboard missing alot of keys from when I smaked my computer with it. After I started learning alot more about computers I stopped attacking mine. Well it crashes alot less and when it does crash I can actually read the error message and understand it (and fix it). Whenever people call me for help with computers, I always say "Well did you kick it? Good! Now doesn't that feel good?" or "Ok now go to your window, open it. Now stand near the computer, bend your knees slightly and keep your back straight, now lift the computer and carry it to the window. Drop."
Saying you've never gotten angry at a comptuer would just be a flat out lie, I bet there's millions of people who have typed up a term paper in 6 hours right before it's due, go to print, computer freezes and you realized you haven't saved the file since you opened it. Or you could be momemnts away from capturing the flag in your favorite CTF style game when suddenly the game closes for some stupid reason (IM received, accidentally hit windows 95 key, game crashes.) Most of the problems are user related but the computer makes a good outlet for your anger.
Then there's the stupidity errors,
"I was banging my mouse against the desk because the button got stuck and now it doesn't work anymore, why not?"
"My cd-rom drive doesn't work!" (open it up to find an upside down CD)
"My computer turns on for 5 minutes and then it crashes and won't turn on", spent 2 hours looking for a problem with the PSU or something like that then hear "Oh yeah the fan doesn't spin." looked at the fan, was covered in dust and wouldn't even spin if I pushed it with my finger
"I think my motherboard's bad" "why?" "Well the computer keeps freezing, oh here it goes again, don't try the power button just yank the cord from the wall and plug it back in"
"Our printer doesn't work!", opened it up, the ink cartrige was leaking everywhere since someone tried to clear up the nozzle with a pen
Those are all problems I had to fix for people I know.
Probably the worst thing I ever did was fry three athlons. One was a XP 2100+, the next was a t-bird 1.4 ghz, and the last was one of two MP 2000+'s. Two motherboards fried too all because I installed a heatsink with no thermal compound.) Although I turned the XP 2100+ into a nifty 1.73 GHz keychain. The MP 2000+ was replaced free, but the other two I have to pay for myself (although I still haven't gotten a new motherboard so I've been stuck with my 600MHz PIII for a while)
I was running some normal telephone cable for a friend of mine behind a desk. Modem, answering machine, and two telephones, all from one jack. I was running the cable and trying to get all of the power cords set up, as well. I was running out of hands, so I held one or two cables with my mouth. I was under the desk, so it was hard to work with.
I was getting things set-up when I plugged in one telephone cable to another piece of equipment. Sure enough, the telephone cable that was in my mouth just became live.
I cannot describe to people that have not felt their tongue being fried what it feels like. Not a good sensation at all.
It also caused me to hit my head on the bottom of the desk.
All in all, not a great install at all.
This may or may not be related to what the site says, but it is not responding (even at 1am EST), so I thought I would add my own little story.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Unprofessional, quick diagnosis: Solder points on the back of the motherboard touched the metal casing (or something else metallic that they weren't supposed to touch).
One time while building a system I failed to fully secure the motherboard against the metal chasis. Somewhere, somehow the back of the motherboard was touching the chasis. When I fired it up, this exact same thing you described happened. Fortunately, it still worked after I put it all together properly.
When I was on the tail end of my college years I kept up my habit for comps by buying and reselling them fairly quickly.
I had just picked up a p-90 for a very good price and had a buyer for my dx266. Check these specs.
16 megs of ram
2 meg video
windows 3.1
CD-rom
15 inch monitor
Colorado 250 Tape Backup(still hearing it whining on these late lonely nights)
and a 540 meg Connor drive(worst comp in history).
Well I had a buyer for 1600 bucks, I had paid 2400 for the thing, buyer was getting a fair deal. 2 years warranty...
I had opened the box for whatever reason and it was running on the kitchen table at my place.
I go out the night, get a little ripped with some friends. Come home, crash, and up bright and early cause I had to deliver the box.
So I do not notice that the case is back on. Probably in some hangover funk it swept by me.
I deliver the box. And a week later my customer calls and tells me there is this horrible funk coming out her new computer.
I go over and crack the box, and there is some rotten scum in the bottom of the case. Slightly boozie smelling. I clean it out, tell her I do not know what it easse, but looks like a rodent got in... she buys it.
I go home and my roomate says that he had come home drunk and was about to finish doom and he got motion sickness from the game but instead of running to the bathroom, he yacked in the case. He freaked, mopped mostof it out, and put the cover back on.
Heheheh.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Let me tear down any hope you might have left: it doesn't stop even when you marry and give them grandchildren. It only stops 10 or so years after that when, if you raised your children correctly, you can pass the gramma/grampa computer support contract to your son/daughter. Believe me, I speak from experience.
Google has a few of the pictures here.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
My fiancee calls me for help getting a new HD to work. Go through everything- even oddball BIOS settings that in no way should help, just on the off chance they will. Everything that should have helped was tried and failed.
Turns out, she had plugged the hard drive into the floppy connector because the hard drive cables wouldn't fit. Whenever I run across that, I go get a new hard drive cable that has a keying method that works with my mobo and drive. But thats me. Surprisingly, no damage to the hard drive. Not even bent pins. And she showed me later the cable she used, it was indeed a floppy cable, and wasn't just poor phone skills leading me to believe it was.
Then there were all the calls and visits to get the system stable. Finally I go to the temperature monitor in the BIOS. It reads 110 degrees CELSIUS. Yes, you could have boiled water according to that monitor. MY foolish self didn't believe it, so I powered it down and touched the heat sink. Pain was immense. I recommend that you trust the hardware monitor in the BIOS, if you have reason not to trust it, get a handheld thermometer to place against the heat sink, DON'T use your finger. Looking more closely, I discover that at some point she has disconnected the CPU fan.
The system is now running quite well. But was annoying getting it to that point.
Back in the stone age, a friend of mine was a supplier of BBC computers. Now, these came either complete or in component form. Both were mail order. He received a letter from a customer who had bought the kit and was having problems getting the computer to work. Nothing happened, not a sausage, no lights, no beeps, so my friend paid the postage to have the computer sent back to him. Upon opening the case he could easily see what the problem was. All of the components had been fitted with precision, with care, with glue.
You call me a pedant? I prefer the term "correct"
Is there something you want to tell us about the interesting angles of Mars and Jupiter? Are the lights on your DSL modem blinking messages to you in Morse code again?
Personally, I think we're still very close to the beginning in the scheme of things.
To you or more, the OS might be important, but most people don't care, and why should they? Everytime i get in someones car, i don't look to see what type is, if all i am getting is a lift to the beach!
You are a hard, hard man!
"Thanks to Melmac over at TheTechBoard.com, the Mishaps section of jonnyGURU.com are(sic) being hosted on a faster server with moer(sic) space!"
karma capped
220v -- 'nuff said
get em a new mac
if they manage to break that, I will give them a cookie.
I'm quite serious, if there is such a thing as idoit proof, I think these beasts qualify.
(that us until they rm -rf / accidently or something...)
I live in a giant bucket.
One month, the plan for their full page color advertisement in Byte magazine fell through. I'm not sure what they'd originally planned to advertise, but they ended up advertising the EPROM programmer instead. It wasn't unusual for EPROM programmers to be advertised in Byte. But it was somewhat unusual for there to be a full page color ad for one.
The ad was very successful. We started getting a lot of orders. And as far as I know, most customers were happy with them. But we did get a few customers who called us saying things like "I installed it, now what do I do with it?" You'd think that people wouldn't buy a $250 accessory for their computer without some idea of what they planned to do with it.
Anyhow, one of these customers was really irate and demanded that we refund his money. Company policy at the time was to only allow exchanges of defective products. So he said it was defective and sent it back. When it arrived, we discovered bullet holes through the box. Looked to be the result of a 9mm, though I could be wrong.
I'm at a local computer store and the kid before me is there with his mom seeing if he can get his processor "fixed". The owner of the store opens the case to see the 486dx266 chip laying mangled on top of the socket. All of the pins are bent, the chip is cracked and blackened, and there's still a nice little burnt smell even from a couple of feet away.
The shop owner asks the kid what happened. The boy confesses that he and a friend were monkeying about on the computer and the friend decided they should overclock the processor. Surely overclocking must be achieved by putting the processor on in a different direction. The friend puts the processor on backwards. Doesn't work. They try and try to "overclock" the machine and eventually *POP* the processor dies. The kid states that he got mad took the processor out of the machine threw it on the floor and gave it a gentle coaxing by jumping up and down on it. After that they attempted to fix the pins and put it back it the right way. No luck though just more ZZZZT ZZZZT ZZZZT from the processor.
This kid must have been 13 or 14 years old standing there with his mom. His mom just had this little smile like "You poor stupid kid, you'll be living with me until your 36" kinda smile both frustrated and amused.
It took everything I had to keep from falling down on the floor with laughter.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
I worked in the early 90's for a VAR in western MA... man, that was an experience, even aside from the customers. But there were a few memorable repair calls we had.
We came in one night from a repair call and dinner to find the following message on the answering machine:
"Um.... hi... this is Jane Doe. My Commodore 64 started smoking earlier, and I shot it with a fire estinguisher. Um... do you think it's safe to turn it back on?"
Another call we got was:
"Hi... I was wondering if I could buy a Q, L, and C key from you... my parrot ate those keys off the keyboard."
While sort of not a supid mistake by users, I did see one specatular mess made by a power supply that flamed out. As we did the autopsy, we realized that the thing had gone up because the airflow was blocked because of some buildup. We realized, when we visited their site, what this was. THey were in a small auto-insurance office packed with five or six chain smokers. I couldn't stand it in the office more than a minute or so. I suspect that the PSU had gotten a fair amount of ash from a nearby ashtray in addition to just general gunk from the smoke.
Ok, its not much, but it still amazed me.
.
At my old job, we had a lot of interns (wich the boss saw as free labour), one particular intern once had his computer screen go blank on him. So he called me up to help. I go there and knowing the computer, and the guy, I figure he had kicked off the power cable again. But I could still hear its fan humming... I turn the case around slowly, all the cables are still pluged in, so I proceed to push 'em back in (the case was at the cable's limit...big stupid table, not my idea, anyways...).
The guy (same intern who admitedly didn't know much about computers) reaches across me and YANKS THE POWER CABLE OUT.
Long story short it turns out the monitor was defective and would shut itself down when it got hot, but I came very close to punching that intern in the face
ARGH!
You can't take the sky from me...
You mean like this guy?
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
Rather, mean and cruel, and inexcusable on the part of a teacher, whose job description probably does not include "attempt to damage children's psyches through public humiliation". The person who asked about the parents suing the school was right on, in my opinion. Ordinarily I loathe over-zealous litigiousness, but in such a case it would be well warranted.
Dear site owner,
We will be providing a link to your site in about 30 minutes, after which it will recieve hundreds of thousands of hits. If you're not equipped to handle that, you may wish to consider having your site mirrored. OSDN is a leading provider of low-cost quick-turnaround web hosting services.
Sincerely,
C. Taco
May we never see th
Too many files to mirror somewhere... at least not one that would not suffer from another /. effect.
:(
/. before. We know the effects. We try to avoid it if possible. :p
The site was hosted at webmasters.com in Tampa. After the traffic crashed the server twice, Webmasters sent a nasty email stating that they were permanently closing the account.
Of course, this is getting fought. But consider TTB, at least for the time being, a dead link.
For the record, no one at TTB submitted the link. We've been
> You are correct. However, the original poster spoke as if it was a recent occurance, not 10 years ago. my bad.
I agree. He did. I defend myself here with this equation:which I find to be true in the overwhelming majority of cases.
> Just the thought of it brings me horrid memories of my 1x cdr (and taking over an hour to burn a cd).
You had a burner? Well, you were lucky. I just had a box. No, just a box. My little brother would sit in it, and hold up a chalkboard with the sums, and...
Virg
"The mishaps page was hosted on http://www.thetechboard.com (aka "TTB").
The site was linked from the front page of http://www.slashdot.org.
Typically when a site gets linked by slashdot, also known as "slashdotted", it tends to encounter large bursts of traffic.
Due to the gross incompentence of the hosting service http://www.webmasters.com, the server crashed twice under the pressue of being "slashdotted".
The complaints of the other clients that were using the same server and therefore also experienced outage prompted Webmasters to threaten to permanently close the TTB acount.
Of course, the account has always otherwise been in good standing, but the folks at Webmasters don't even have the mental capacity to limit bandwidth for a particular site so it does not bring down the entire server, so why would they take TTB's otherwise "good behaviour" into consideration?
Please forward any hate mail to: security@webmasters.com (this is from whom the mail about the account cancellation came from).
Thank you.
Jon "jonny" Gerow (pronounced muck like "Guru", hence the handle)
"
I have also removed an unknown number of 5.25" floppy disks and CDs from between the drives, as users mistake gap for drive. And I can't even remember the number of "which one is the ANY KEY?" calls I used to get in the DOS days.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
I run a web hosting company. Send me a zip of the site (brian@tobinhosting.com) and I'll mirror the stuff.
:)
Temporarily, of course.