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Online Revenge
Many people have submitted this story of a broken laptop purchased on e-bay. The buyer gives a little lesson on why you should always clean your hard drive before you sell a computer.
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Everyone is having a nice laugh right now, but it won't seem so funny if this guy commits suicide. Then we'll be reading about how the 'buyer' is on trial.
I always use sector encryption on my hard drives and wipe using PGP wipe when selling. Why not use the new Seagate drives with built in crypto now? Vista has sector crypto now? Why not use NTFS encrypted folders for your stuff but that doesnt cover caches and various temp files used by applications. This is something applications need to do, allow us to manage any possible cache and storage instaed of the currently splattered and hidden about files today. How about a standard on how Applications manage this kind of like a personal privacy standard?
Fantastic. I thought the register considered itself a somewhat legitimate news entity, but now they've posted a link to a defamatory website of unverified accuracy in an article. Many, many points down the toilet in my book.
The buyer gives a little lesson on why you should always clean your hard drive before you sell a computer.
And if you read the full story, you'll see that the seller gives a little lesson on how the law views vigilantism on the internets. Hint: Police are involved.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Extortion is basically what it boils down to; "Amir, if you want to refund my money you know where to contact me, and this page will disappear forever."
The rest of the crap in the story is unverifiable from the information provided. It is just here-say.
I doubt it's about the money. Scamming/cheating/robbing people REALLY pisses them off, even when the amount of goods involved is trivial.
I won't blame anyone for exposing a scumball after the scumball tried to screw him.
And why are the police getting involved, anyway?
The Israeli Army uses the only fool proof method I know for erasing data off magentic hardrives and is made up of 2 steps:
A. run the Harddrive through a Powerfull Degauser (a rapidly changing electro-Magnet)
B. Shred the Hard drive into pieces less then one square milimeter in size.
However this system may be hard to come by for most of us, and tends to harm the hard drive.
Writing a set of zeros on a sensative file is much better than deleting it but not necessarly
enough, because:
a. your OS may decide to move your file to another location on the disk.
b. Even after writing once or twice over the data, It still may be recoverable, especially
if you use constant zeros(or ones).
Writing random data several times is a better method, but is most be done over the entire
hard drive and in sevral passes over the entire hard drive,
since modern harddrives have a cache mecahnism(as well as one in the OS), so If
some one writes over the first sector of a hard drive 20 times, chances are the hard drive
actually got something physiclly written to it only once.
several tools for securly deleting data available on the net, I would not trust
my good reputation on any tool which securly deletes specific files but only on
those which wipe your disk clean,
these too may not protect you 100% becasue modern hard drive have a feature to correct(re-Map) bad-sectors automaticly, With this feature if the hard drive fails
to access a certain sector sevral times it will stop using it and send and use
a diffrent secotr instead(reserved in advance for this purpose and not normally accessable).
The damaged secotr may still contain private data after hard drive is wiped clean.
In short if you want to be truely safe use the Degause and shred Method.
Don't be paranoid
Me.
Because, like you, they don't know the whole story unless they get involved.
Except for the fact that some of the pictures are of people other than the owner. While the owner might be in for some karma, how about other people who are having their pictures posted on the 'revenge' site?
1:) All the people here talking about deleting contents of your harddrive get the point wrong. This guy sold his laptop because it broke and he was too stupid to consider mounting the HD in an other PC and moving the contents before selling it. The HD was still fully functioning, and it took the buyer no effort to get the contents of it, which he was eager to do as he was screwed by buying a broken laptop which status was mentioned as "refurbished".
2:) The buyer is an unreasonable dick, because he could have known that this was not a serious seller. The buyer posts screenshots of the e-bay auction, that make this clear here and here. Just read the text the seller wrote, and you know that this is a no-go. Still, the buyer goes on ranting that the seller described himself as a businessman, yeah, idiot, did he really believe that?
Nasty people will try to screw you when selling material over the internet (and not only there), and stupid people will get screwed at obvious scams. Any interference by law representatives or even the media is just a waste of time in this case.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
At first glance, you think "serves him right" of course, I'm no exception.
But where I live, there are things you can do if someone fraudulently sells you non-working stuff as working.
This is vigilante justice, plain and simple. I don't think the proportionalities match here.
The seller should be forced to refund the money or provide a working laptop and the buyer should face charges for whatever crimes he committed by posting this stuff.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
http://amirtofangsazan.blogspot.com/
Note the allegedly scammed buyer has enabled Google ads on the web page he supposedly set up solely to extract revenge. Decide for yourself whether this impugns his credibility as a purported victim.
Assuming the story is true, the seller deserved a slap on the wrist. The buyer deserves jail time.
It's people like you who are the reason the world is so fucked up. The seller deserved a slap on the wrist... what's with that?
Assuming the story is true, he knowingly ripped someone off and refused to make good with it. That is not slap on the wrist-worthy. Public shame is too good for him. Also, his rampant stupidity should make him a prime candidate for a darwin award but it is unlikely he will ever win one.
Stupid, shonky people are rewarded for screwing the hard working public and when hard working public tries to get a little of their own back then they get in trouble. Fuck that. I spent all of yesterday fighting a court battle because stupid shonky corporation was sending me bills for service that I never requested or used. When the bills went unpaid they sued me! Of course, I lost a day's income and the court only made them pay court costs - no compensation for my time! Screw that.
I say publicly shame the shammers!
I drink to make other people interesting!
The buyer seems to be in the right in this case and it seems the seller is getting what he deserves. But I would be hesitant to applaud the buyer too much and encourage copycats... For example, quite a few stolen laptops show up on eBay. I'd hate to see someone doubly victimized, both by getting their laptop stolen and by a pissed off buyer plastering their personal information and photos all over the internet.
While Amir might be deserving of some kind of punishment, the buyer who posted the pictures is a complete asshole.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
We don't even know that the pictures really came from the laptop. It seems reasonably likely that the laptop was broken if the feedback on ebay is any guide. But, the buyer is obviously pretty dim. He bought a laptop from someone with 1 feedback. It seems reasonable to me that someone that stupid (being more an animal than a human) would be capable of lying about finding those pics on the laptop.
Or maybe it's all true. There's no way to tell from this tabloid crap.
Cow Cube
...you're not the sort of muppet who, when his laptop "breaks", thinks "I know, I'll sell it to someone on Ebay and pretend it was still working".
Not everyone is clued up enough to take the HDD out and wipe it in another PC, either and I think we've had demonstrated that the person in question isn't the brightest tool in the box...
Agreed. The worse thing about 'vigilante justice' is of course that people are going to believe him, even if he's making some or all of it up. Judge, jury, and executioner are separate people for a reason.
No excusing the seller, but the buyer is an idiot for making a purchase of this size from a non-reputable user.
Yes they did. However property is not copyright. The person who took the photos still retains the copyright and could probably sue him for copyright infringement.
Think about it - the laptop probably came with Windows on the hard drive too - would it be legal for the buyer to put Windows on a website for people to download too?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Where is the proof the laptop was indeed sent in already faulty condition?
The fact that the laptop was delivered below the specs listed suggests a general dishonesty that would also lead the seller to sell a broken laptop. Also, I suspect that if he expected the laptop to be actually usable, he would as a potential barrister have the presence of mind and foresight to wipe the contents first.
I am British, and being British I appreciate not only irony but also 'just desserts'. A man who deliberately set out to defraud someone has reaped his reward!
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
I think you are confusing legality with morality. Legal ... of course. Moral ... Maybe/maybe-not
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
Yep. That results in some truly wonderful miscarriages of justice. We've had a couple like that over here. You treat the home invasion and the subsequent thumping of the home invader with a baseball bat as separate crimes. Result? Home invader gets a slap on the wrist, home owner gets charged with greivous bodily harm with a deadly weapon. Or the trespasser who tripped on the garden host and sued the owner of the yard they were trespassing in.
If someone commits a crime, the law should not protect them from the repercussions of that crime. If we take the article at face value, the guy in this story intentionally sold a non-functional laptop. Because the laptop was non-functional, he erroneously assumed that his porn collection was inaccessible. If he had been selling a fully-functional laptop, he wouldn't have made that assumption, and he wouldn't have had a trouble. The direct cause of his current predicament is his own attempt to defraud another person.
If you've ever tried to reclaim money through a small claims court, you know how farcical it is. You can get all the judgements made in your favour, but you still have to pay out for anything you want done. Send out the sherif to repossess goods? Pay up. Need a locksmith to get into the place where the goods are kept? You need to foot the bill. And there are no guarantees that when you do all that you'll find anything able to be sold, especially if your complaint is against a company. You'll have shelled out $300 and all you'll have to show for it is an unenforcable judgement.
On the issue of vigilante justice: yes, it's bad. But people generally only take the law into their own hands when the authorities aren't holding on to it tightly enough. A recent story on the news over here was that of the manager of a hotel, whose rooms had been broken into over 60 times in the last year. On a number of occasions, he filmed the thieves as they robbed him, and handed in the tape to police. There have been no arrests in connection to any of the robberies. When it comes to a choice between vigilante justice and no justice, you don't have to be a genius to guess what people will decide to go for.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
There is the possibility (remote, yes, I know) that the seller did ship a working laptop which just broke on transit... OR the buyer has a grudge against the seller and the laptop works fine, he's just getting revenge for something else (but it's highly unlikely). See, this is why we have laws in place to deal with things instead of vigilante justice, because when people take matters into their own hands, they can never truly know the whole story or if they are acting properly instead of just out of emotion.
Meh.
Maybe I need to do some soul searching but I think what the buyer did was outstanding. Yet, at least at my moderation setting, comments are running 5 to 1 against the buyer.
Maybe it's because my home has been broken into 5 times by neighborhood kids. Or, that a box of checks was stolen and someone wrote $2000+ against my checking account. Or, that I've had my CC number stolen and everything from kitchen appliances and plane tickets were charged to my account. Maybe it's just because I'm sick and tired of the scum inhabiting this planet. But I think what the buyer did is great and we need more of it.
The light has been shown on this Amir guy for what he is. Public humiliation is a sensible, non-violent form of deterrent and socially acceptable. The police publish the names of "Johns" arrested for solicitation for all to see. Even the Bible supports public humiliation as a deterrent. The Bible says on judgment day all will be known and nothing hidden and exposed for all to see. Our (USA) and (English) early judicial systems used public square stocks and humiliation as a formal sentence.
The buyer has done his due diligence. All the documentation is there. The seller took 2 months to ship and only after repeated requests. The seller also agreed to refund the money once called on the fact the laptop was junk but then reneged. The seller was given multiple opportunities to correct the problem. He just wasn't interested because he knew he was scamming the guy.
I saw one post "If the guy kills himself, what a loss". A loss of what? The world would loose a scamming criminal who doesn't think twice about stealing other people's money? That's a loss I can bear.
Maybe, just maybe, this Amir guy will learn a valuable lesson from his fellow brothers that so far his religion has failed to teach him. Maybe Amir will pull his life together, get some morals and become a valuable member of our society. Maybe, just maybe he's been given a second chance to come clean and make it right.
JMHO
-[d]-
No. Copyright doesn't work like that.
Suppose I write a book and sell a copy to you. Even if I express no copyright or licensing restrictions, you do not have the right to distribute that text. (You have first sale rights to loan, sell or give the book, but not to distribute copies of the entire text.) The same applies to photos. If you acquire photos for which I hold the copyright, you have no legal right to distribute those photos absent some explicit agreement with me.
The copyright holder retains distribution rights unless there is an explicit agreement otherwise. (The fact that software comes with the inevitable shrinkwrap terms and DVDs come with reminders that all rights have been reserved probably explains why folks think copyrights have to be expressly claimed. But it isn't so in any Berne convention signatory, like the US and UK.)
Phiwum's law: anyone that names an obvious law after himself and then puts it in his own sig is just pathetic.
Uhh... is this the same British mentality that allows their government to track their every destination on the roads, and store that data for years?
Is this the same British mentality that is allowing the EU to dictate that ISP's retain all traffic info on all of their users for a minimum of 5 years?
Is this the same British mentality that recently got an innocent man shot because they thought he might be a terrorist, because he was wearing a trench coat?
Is this the same British mentality that is allowing their government to develop ID cards that have all your fingerprint and facial recognition data on it for analysis by all of these closed circuit cameras you guys are putting up on every street corner?
Huh... I must have missed something.
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