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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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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?
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.
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
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.
Uhm.. what?
They just reported it as it is, someone claims to have been cheated out of a working laptop, now he has posted stuff from it on the net and gets himself looked into by the police... Oh and theres a website for you to look at.
Why is that not proper reporting? They don't even take sides - which is highly unusual for The Reg.
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 presumption for that, is this seller is 'honourable','respectable', and didn't sell a dead laptop with inflated specs. The images on this system clearly show otherwise and there is legal redress if he feels that he has been wronged... the truth can hurt.
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.
It's not verified (making it questionable as news at best, but since it's of a personal rather than public nature, I wouldn't even grant it that much ground to stand on), it is very highly damaging to the guy's reputation (not just as an online seller, but more importantly as a person), and it's potentially dangerous (950,000+ hits and he's getting threats...some sicko among all those visitors just might be crazy enough to do something based on the rumor). The one site linked to obviously has taken a side. If there were any hard facts presented, writing the article at least would make sense, but not providing an avenue into the alleged perpetrator's personal life by linking to a vigilante website.
I hate digging into the big bag of cliche counter-arguments, but here's a case where this one definitely fits: How would you like it if someone displayed your entire personal life (simple or shocking as it may be) in a deliberately disparaging fashion? Or perhaps (we don't actually know in this case), they make a bunch of crap up about you. I knew a guy who's personal and professional reputation was destroyed by a false allegation that was spread freely before any proper investigation was made. The case against him was tossed out in court, but his personal business (bike shop) never recovered and he had to close down and leave town. Assuming that he was innocent, as we have every bit as much reason to believe as the judge did, is this in any way just? Did those who spread the rumor contribute in any way to the betterment of society or did they harm it?
Two things about this post:
The Register contains lots of biased articles. While it does contain decent articles, its usually better to get them from the source, such as securityfocus. This, to me, doesnt make it a news source, it makes it a blog with news in it. (However i have to say i am an avid fan of the BOFH)
secondally, The police are now investigating. I suspect this is due to the content of the comments, some of which seem to bring out some very nasty sentiments - a lot of which were unrelated to the issue, rather than the content of the blog, itself, however.
While i think the owner should have kept more control over it, perhaps restricting posting, i dont think they have done anything wrong. They decided that a public humilliation was a good way of going about this.
If you believe the blog, and i have reason not to, the owner of the blog tried to sort this out amicably. Anyone who has been through EBAY's dispute procedure will tell you its a pile of cr*p, certainly in the uk. Other than cancelling accounts, there is very little they can do other than to refer the seller to the police. I dont know if this happened in this case.
However, its true to say some of the UK tabloid press, have a lot to answer for, and the BBC should make an apology for misreporting and post it publically on their website.
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
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]-