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Best Buy 'Geek Squad' Accused of Pirating Software
Alien54 writes "Texas software company Winternals Software LP has sued Best Buy Co. Inc. in federal court, alleging that the nation's largest consumer electronics retailer was using unlicensed versions of its diagnostic equipment. Best Buy's Geek Squad, is alleged to be using pirated versions of the software since talks on a commercial licensing agreement broke off. A restraining order has been granted."
A slightly related comment - I used to work at a PC repair shop next to Best Buy. We would get a constant stream of customers that would be sent from Best Buy to our store after *they* broke the machine! Sometimes they would even walk right out after getting a machine from the customer and bring it to us. I laughed out loud when I started to see these geek squad commercials. I can just imagine now the peeps at geek squad that use format and reload as their way tp fix any problem the computer has.
a friend of mine works at geek squad, and apparently they have some "geek squad only" forum that has tons of pirated software on it. i don't know it to be true for sure, but that's what he tells me.
$20 says there's a story about "Geek Squad" employees being suspected of installing spyware/keyloggers on customer computers within the next 6 months...
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
...for about two weeks. Most disorganized bunch of fu*k-ups I've ever seen.
Yes, the unlicensed software usage is true, and widespread.
The keylogger thing mentioned above happened once, and the tech was summarily fired. I'm pretty sure the customer got a completely new machine, too, because of it.
Our supervisor was a douche, complete and total jerk. When I confronted him about the issue of pirated hardware, he held sort of the 'BestBuy is like Wal*Mart' attitude, with the assumption that the corporation could just strong-arm the publisher into submission.
I guess he was wrong.
Informatus Technologicus
Having worked computer service in the past, my 2 cents..
Piracy was absolutely rampant behind the counter. The policy was: so long as the customer doesn't see it, it's all good. Some stuff was frowned on, like copying a customer's key to XP and the like, and we were strict on the MS licensing rules (w/customers) except for the boss's friends, who got whatever they wanted.
We used 3 different diagnostic programs, and the rumour was that we'd paid for one copy of one of them a long time ago. We were encouraged to warez (does anybody still say that?) new apps to make our job go smoother, and we must have had a dozen different pirated data recovery suites lying around. So this is not really surprising, if the enviroment at BB is anything like what I knew.
The biggest problem with the service side of things is that anyone who is any good at the job is qualified for much much better things. Servicing PC's is an entry level job that requires an enourmous working knowledge to do well. Any monkey can run a ram diagnostic and format/reinstall, but anything more complex, like virus/spyware removal, intermittant h/w failure, dealing with customers, even just data backup: These all require a skill set that pays better elsewhere. As a jumping off point for geeks, its a great education, but it don't pay what its worth. Hardly a shock that this leads to less-than-professional conduct...
I would work for Best Buy. Why, because I need a god damned job and I don't want to work fast food or shitty retail anymore. As a geek squad guy, I'd at least get to work with computers at work. And because my major is not in computer enginering or computer science, other companies don't want to hire me even if I do spend almost all my free time working with my computers. Otherwise best buy sucks, don't buy stuff from there, they have shitty deals.
This is entirely true. We were often told to "solve the problem however you can" by managers. Why? Because there pretty much =wasn't= a "geek squad" budget. It is treated as an extension of the PC/Home Office department and basically is used to placate customers who have had their machines screwed up at the service centers. We weren't technicians, we were negotiators. We HAD no budget. In fact, Store 323, North Avenue in Chicago uses pirated software for its diagnostics, on every machine that comes in. It is copied and distributed to the technicians, the other employees, their friends, ANYBODY. The passcode to get it to work, is, ironically "323". The "Geek Squad" agents have shitty jobs, utterly shitty. It wasn't "we're provding you with pirated software to do your job because we're cheap" it was "find your own pirated software to do your job because we're too cheap to buy any AND too lazy to even do the pirating"
Why am I not posting anonymous coward when Im giving them such obvious information as to who I am?
Because I'm not afraid of telling the truth.
Fuck you, best buy
Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little.
Hearsay my ass. I worked for Future Shop (owned by Best Buy) and all we had was pirated software! We didn't even have OS disks. And diagnostic equipment? HA! We had one diagnostic software app that didn't work. We asked a few times for stuff but we never got it. I remember sitting in our room with the other techs dreaming about this RAM testing machine we heard this other company down the street had. "Shit, wouldn't that be nice guys?" "Damn straight." But hey, we could install a cheap video card in 30 seconds flat!
There's more to that story.
People are simply willing to believe that "evil corporations that want only to suck the $$$ out of every bank account they can sink their fangs into are capable of any rumored misdeed because...well, because they're EVIL."
The fact is that, while there are corporate-types who do wrong, that's also true in the small-business world as well (I could tell you stories about a local chain of computer retail stores here in the Houston, Texas area that would make any such 'Best Buy' story pale in comparison).
And the further fact is, our burgeoning free enterprise system, including "evil corporate America," is what has made all this low-priced tech feasible in the first place--not to mention giving jobs to every one of the small-minded punks here and elsewhere who would rather depend on simple-minded stories they can get those puny brains around, than actually THINK with them.
Yeah, I bet you can find several examples of b*stard GeekSquad managers with no integrity--in a chain as big as Best Buy, there're bound to be some of them. But you WON'T hear any stories about the ones that just do their jobs and try to please the customer.
"Man Bites Dog," you know.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
I can testify to that large collection. Not a day went by in the three months I did support for one of the big oems, that I didn't talk to at least three people who were told by Best Buy to call us for their recovery discs. When we told the customer that all of our machines shipped with these discs, they'd start on about how Best Buy tacked on a $20 "optimization" onto their new pc...
From what I could gather, this "optimization" consisted solely of installing several incompatible versions of security software, cd burning software, and crap like weatherbug. Oh, and snagging the recovery cd's. My first day on the phones, I thought it was coincidence, until I mentioned it to a more senior tech.
"Oh, yeah, they take 'em. It's their policy or somethin'"
It still took a couple weeks before I believed it, but soon my script was,
"Do you have the CD's that came with your PC?"
"No, it didn't come with any..."
"So you got it at Best Buy then?"
"OMG, How'd you know?"
And since the item was now an "open box" refunds went right out (unless you were willing to make a big enough scene, I heard a few going on over the phone that made me cringe).
Long rant short, after talking with several people I worked with, my experiance was not unique. Basically, BB was trying it's damndest to make sure the customer came back for an expensive service call. Whether or not this is still common practice, I don't know as it's been a few years. I also stopped shopping there for anything about the time I had 20 different associates tell me how much they loved not working on commision in one visit.
Shift happens. Fire it up.
I've worked with and on computers for nearly thirty years and I'm frequently surprised by the amount of piracy in workplaces. Oh, I'm not talking about out-right piracy like bittorrented copies of cracked Photoshop, but lots of little things.
For instance, I've worked in commercial printers that literally had thousands of typefaces. Let's say you have a job you need printed on a printing press. You collect all the images, layout files, typefaces, etc., and you send that to the printer. The printer is supposed to delete those fonts when the job is complete. They don't, of course, so you have millions of pirated typefaces out there.
Another example: images that are only supposed to be used once, logos "retouched" and used in other publications, templates you're supposed to pay for obtained from non-traditional (i.e. free) sources, trials that miraculously seem to go on forever, etc.
Stuff like this happens in all kinds of offices all over the planet. There are so many companies out there who, if they took a real and honest accounting of the software and tools and plug-ins they have, would find that if they did actually purchase everything they own, they'd likely not have half of it. And if they did, they would have spent themselves into bankruptcy. But they rationalize that it's all necessary, it's something they need to do in order to do business. Indeed, many companies couldn't perform some of their services without the stuff they obtained.
I dunno. I think that, one day, someone really large with lots and lots of locations and chances to pirate stuff is going to get slammed with a huge fine and it's going to open a very large can of worms. If Best Buy really did use Winternals products illegally, it would not surprise me in the slightest, and it would be very, very typical of most companies, large and small.
P.S. And, yes, I can't claim my hands are completely clean.
P.P.S. Don't copy that floppy.
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
Best Buy's Geek Squad, is alleged to be using pirated versions of the software since talks on a commercial licensing agreement broke off.
To me, pirating (in the software/music sense) means: to copy without the legal right to do so.
If you install a bunch of software under license and then the licensing falls apart, making that software no longer licensed, you don't retroactively go back in time and "pirate" the software. You're simply using now unlicensed software - not copying it.
It's kind of like having sex with someone, dumping them, finding they still stalk you and then claiming they're a rapist. No, they had consensual sex with you. The fact that, since then, they've taken to doing something else that's illegal does not retroactively make them a rapist for having had sex when it was consensual.
Of course, screaming "rape!" in the press gets you a lot more headlines, helps you get more awareness of your product in the marketplace, and helps you strengthen your position in future negotiations with someone who really wants you to shut up, far more than saying, "They keep hanging around outside my window."
However, the security sucks. It is too easy to change things that shouldn't be changed. It is too easy to hide and bury things where they don't belong.
Is there any reason for a user-level app to not get a 'chrooted' version of the registry that only allows write access under a certain tree node?
I mean, assuming Microsoft cared about security.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I worked at a Geeksquad in Awatukee, Arizona for all of 2 weeks. It was a terrible experience. The management approached me and informed me when I was making estimates for customers they needed to be NO LESS than $200. They didn't care what I had to do to make the estimate this large, they said just do it.
.ISO image of tools, burned it to a CD and informed us this is what corporate wanted us to be using. In fairness we decided to take a look and see what kind of tools were on the CD. I remember about 30 different partitioning tools on there and memtest86, thats about it!
There were only 3-4 people working behind the counter in the store who knew what they were doing. The rest of the employees never would have been hired by a real computer repair shop.
One of the more experienced techs brought in some diagnostic software he personally purchased and we would use this to diagnose computers as they came in. When we approached management to buy enough licenses for the software so we could legally use it they barred us from using it at all. Instead, the management downloaded an
We presented a case to management begging them to buy us licenses for the other software as thats what we needed to do our jobs efficiently. They let us know if we couldn't figure out how to use the CD they provided we obviously didn't know how to do our jobs.
Screw Geek Squad, Screw Best Buy. They are Evil.