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Consumerist Catches Geek Squad Stealing Porn
mekane8 writes "Consumer-advocate blog Consumerist ran a sting operation to catch a Best Buy Geek Squad member searching for and stealing media files from a customer's computer. The article includes the story with screen captures and a video of the technician's actions. From that piece: 'Reached for comment, Geek Squad CEO Robert Stephens expressed desire to launch an internal investigation and said, "If this is true, it's an isolated incident and grounds for termination of the Agent involved." This is not just an isolated incident, according to reports from Geek Squad insiders alleging that Geek Squad techs are stealing porn, images, and music from customer's computers in California, Texas, New Jersey, Virginia and elsewhere. Our sources say that some Geek Squad locations have a common computer set up where everyone dumps their plunder to share with the other technicians.' A related story from a former Geek Squad employee details the decline of the Geek Squad and Best Buy ethics in general."
Are you kidding me? You expect these people, who are the low-paid,
bottom-of-the-IT-food-chain to have ethics? Why are they any different
from a parking lot attendant or car wash guy? Because they're techies?
Don't kid yourself.
Heck, at two companies I've worked for (both big-name, publicly traded),
they've caught (and fired) one or more sysadmins reading other people's
email.
Sadly, The Ethical IT Guy is on the verge of becoming a quaint holdover
from the previous century.
Encrypt it, or lose it.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
really?
It's hard for me to get worked up about this.
I doubt that these guys are obtaining and distributing files that couldn't be obtained for free using a good BitTorrent client (albeit also illegally). I mean, sure, most managerial types agree that you shouldn't do that stuff at work, but aside from the misuse of on-the-clock time, is it much different than a bunch of college roommates using a shared network directory for their downloads?
Stealing homemade sex videos and that sort of thing from customers' computers is another matter. That would be a pretty major invasion of privacy and should be grounds for substantial, per-case lawsuits. I suppose it would be hard for a corporate overseer to distinguish between "legit" and privately owned media in that situation.
Home videos? Private diaries? Love letters? Stay out, Geek. But "media" . . . as a customer, what have I lost, exactly? To be honest, I'd rather have a competent technician solve my configuration problems and help himself to my MP3 directory than have to waste time with ignorant first-level servicepeople in a tightly overseen, "theft-free" big-box environment.
Geek Squad ought to get a grip. Oops, maybe that's the source of their problem.
Hold on, my hypocrisy meter just went red.....
If this was any of you guys downloading stuff off Bittorrent all we'd here is "It's NOT STEALING WAAHH!!!"
However, now if the guys at GeekSquad do the exact same thing it's now 'stealing'....
So what you are saying is that if I get something from Bittorrent over my comparatively slow link that's not stealing, but being efficient about it (which these guys seem to be) is now 'stealing'. Check.
Oh, and don't even try that: 'But on Bittorrent it's OK since I have permission' bit with me, unless you yourself made the content (and for the love of God I hope it ain't Porn), your 'permission' is about as relevant as me giving you 'permission' to buy the Brooklyn Bridge.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Geek Squad/Best Buy employees are no different than walmart employees, and it doesn't require any more IT knowledge than a wallmart janitor would need to get the job. When I work at "the Buy" I remember the *procedure* for fixing a computer was reformat and reload. These aren't professionals and, while what happened was wrong, it shouldn't surprise anyone.
That must be how they always catch the child porn guys that are having their computer worked on. A technician always "just accidently discovers" it.
Goddamn, I want geeks to fix my computer, and any "technician" who DIDN'T do it must not be a geek to begin with.
Well, wouldn't you?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I quit working for the Geek Squad about 8 months ago, and have since quit the IT field altogether, but I can safely say this was not an isolated incident. It was a common occurrence, at multiple locations I had worked at, to copy customer files onto flash drives or even burn them onto CDs. We also did have a computer set up at the store's expense for the sole purpose of caching whole copies of customer hard drives for "archival" if they purchased a data backup. (It was helpful as sometimes the customers would destroy the DVDs we burned for them and we were able to give them another set, but it was also routinely plundered with searches for *.jpg and so forth.)
This wasn't something I ever did, mainly because I had my own pornography to look at and never came across anything even remotely interesting in any other way, but other "Agents" would do it on a routine basis.
Oh, FFS. It's not stealing, it's illegal filesharing.
I, for one, sympathize with the perps here. Who would begrudge the Best Buy Geeksquad drudges some cheap thrills? Besides, if they're busy sharing porn, that makes it less likely they're doing something awful to the innards of Auntie Mae's PC... I would hope.
My real feeling on this, though, are that it's all part of Best Buy's sales model. They can get a lot of customers to purchase an additional 120-gig hard drive if it comes preloaded with porn.
Also, did you notice they now sell tissues and lotion? It's all about synergistic product lines, folks.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I more or less agree with you... however, the one difference is the invasion of privacy aspect. Like you say, who knows if those video files are porn, home videos, secret business files, whatever.
The issue isn't GS guys stealing a customer's porn. It's the tech stealing the customer's HOME MADE porn.
Like pictures of the customer and his gf getting it on, for example.
That's quite a bit different.
I ran a computer repair shop (note that I said "ran" not "worked at"), and this practice of "stealing" porn, music and movies was practically company policy. In fact, that's pretty much all we did. Ninety percent of repairs went like this:
1) Backup customer data (read: customer's porn, music, movies and various documents. Occasionally saved games)
2) Copy over WinXP syspreped mini-image, wiping hard drive.
3) Fix partition table.
4) Run through XP mini-install.
5) Grab any straggler updates.
6) Copy back customer data.
7) Delete crap we don't care about from backup.
8) At the end of the day, copy porn, music and movies that don't suck to my laptop and clean the image/backup server.
(In case you didn't realize, 90% of repairs are people who got so much spyware and viruses that a wipe is just faster. Especially with the mini-image (which is just a copy of XP/2k, fully updated, with all the various media players and firefox, that's been syspreped and shrunk down to the minimum (with ntfsresize on Knoppix). On first boot, XP will auto resize the fs to the maximum if the fs is smaller than the partition.))
This was some time ago (read: long enough ago that the statute of limitations applies), but I see no reason that it doesn't still work like that. I mean, come on, it's faster than bittorrent.
If someone wants to copy my \music\mp3 directory, more power to them. But, as another person posted, if they go into my \documents\creative_writing I'd be a bit ticked. I'll admit that. Mostly because unlike the music directory, none of the stuff in there is for public consumption. Also, the mp3 directory is 100% reproducible from public networks. It's already out there. Them taking a copy of all my mp3s is just a way for them to save time and bandwidth. My personal files, on the other hand, aren't.
Of course, as a use case this isn't likely, because I wouldn't buy a computer from Best Buy, let alone entrust them with repairing my box. (And of course, I can fix my own damn computer, so...)
This isn't a matter of stealing or copyright or anything like that. It's an invasion of privacy. Best Buy is giving you a contract (both social and written) saying that they respect you private data, and that you can trust them. If their employees root around in stuff they shouldn't, that's a breach of privacy.
Plus, it's a chance to lay down a strawman beat on Best Buy, and who wants to pass up that opportunity?
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Insterestingly enough, a while back on that same blog, there was an article about how Geek Squad snooping around some customer's computer revealed he had child porn.
While computer repair regulations don't exist like, say, auto repair regulations do, at the time I wondered if it would become compulsory for a computer repair shop to search and disclose child porn and similar because won't someone please think of the children.
If you have a safety deposit box at a bank, you're entrusting them not to open it while you're away and look at all the sparklies. If you take your clothes to a cleaner, you entrust them not to wear it out on the town ala. Seinfeld. If you get your car fixed, you entrust them not to wade through those papers in your glove compartment and snicker at that condom from 1974. I think it's a reasonable expectation that you'll have files not related to your problem remain unexamined.
Were it my repair shop, the first thing I'd think of is "wow, we're so not busy right now my employee has the time to search for goodies on client computers?"
More Twoson than Cupertino
Look. Most comments aren't seeing the picture here. It's not the copying of some 3rd party pron that is the issue. It's the copying of private made at home pictures that are the concern.
Over a decade ago when I used to work at CompUSA the tech department did the same thing. If someone brought in their system to be worked on, the tech goes through it and sees what the problem is. Along he way if the person has a collection of porn, music or videos that we found interesting for whatever reason we would always copy them over to our jazz drives or external hard drives.
Oh and if they had child porn - we'd call the police.
Ave Molech Setting
fill your hard drive with goatse
Geek squad is on about the same level as the kid down the street. We have ALL done that, some family friend, or neighbor, or whatever needs their computer fixed, so we fix it for them. How many of you have honestly worked on a neighbors computer without at least taking a look into ~\My Music\? It goes with the territory and people know it. You cannot honestly tell me that your average consumer takes their computer into the geek squad to have it fixed and expects that they are getting top level support. If you had a bunch of home made pr0n, or private pictures, videos, files, etc on your computer, don't hand it over to some mouth breathing idiot behind a geek squad counter.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
when you take something from someone and deprive them of it.
If someone makes copies of files they find on my PC, they are invading my privacy and that is bad. They are not stealing from me. I still have all my pictures.
If I have found that someone has invaded my privacy in this way, I will be unhappy but I should not accuse them of theft!
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
I really dislike going into a Best Buy. I always get this dirty kind of feeling from 80% of the people who work their. They give the impression of being just scumbag salesmen that can't hide the fact they're scumbag salesmen. Geeksquad guys stealing porn is hardly surprising.
A few months ago I was looking at TVs, and the sales guy was this young kid who just oozed sleeze. (If you've ever met a bad sales guy you know what I mean). He was trying to push a certain TV. I went over to Circuit City a few blocks away to see if they had any better prices. I actually wound up buying the same model this BB salesguy was trying to sell me, but the CC guy didn't try to push too hard. He of course tried to upsell my on an HDTV, but he at least had the instincts to back off a little.
Recently I was at Best Buy because they had nice quality speakers really cheap. I checked the website price, and went to the store. The price at the store was higher than the website price, so I asked the sales guy. He went to a terminal, went to the INTERNAL website (the dodge I already knew about from a few lawsuits against BB for this deceptive practice), and proclaimed I was incorrect. Of course I complained and eventually got the website price.. but it left me feeling even more uneasy about how Best Buy isn't the most honest, or trustworthy retailer.
Oh, and don't forget about the racketeering lawsuit filed against Best Buy. Not so great a track record.
AccountKiller
Heck, at two companies I've worked for (both big-name, publicly traded),
they've caught (and fired) one or more sysadmins reading other people's
email.
Typically the guys charged with, "get rid of this SPAM in my InBox!". Yep, I've seen it first-hand, when they don't like the anti-spam guy they go after him for 'reading other people's e-mail'.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
No. In fact, I haven't seen a single post saying that (note: I'm browsing at +2, so I may have missed some). Moreover, I've seen several posts (like this one) reiterating that it isn't stealing.
So, frankly, I think your hypocrisy meter needs recalibration. Or are you calling it hypocrisy because Consumerist calls it stealing, while Slashdot (often, perhaps even generally) doesn't? 'Cause that strikes me as a sort of weird definition of hypocrisy. I mean, I wouldn't normally call my boss hypocritical for not giving me a raise when my wife thinks I deserve one.
For the record: copyright infringement isn't stealing, though it may be unethical. Copying people's porn stashes off their hard drives isn't stealing, though it may be unethical (due primarily to the - naive - presumption of privacy that consumers likely have).
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
When I worked for a huge non-chain computer store in Massachusetts, technicians would SCOUR every single computer which came in for service looking for porn. I think they had 100 gigs collected from dozens of customer's computers, back in the day when 100 gigs was a lot... Every other computer store / computer service place does the same thing. Why? BECAUSE THEY ARE GUYS. THEY HAVE TESTICLES. OF COURSE they're going to hunt for porn.
To be honest, I'm surprised that this is a surprise to anyone. I think the average tech opinion on this is that if you have things you don't want others to see on your computer, you damn well better not mess it up to the point where you have to take it in for repair, or be smart enough to fix it yourself. (And yes, the majority of repairs are only necessary because people click the "OMG PRAWN!" banner ads and then wonder why they have popups and spyware on their system...)
I use Windows... like a two dollar wh.. why don't I just go ahead and not finish that sentence.
Disclaimer: I worked at Best Buy as a PC tech from 1996 to 1998, seasonally (this was well before Geek Squad days). I was 16 when I started. I saw a lot of crazy stuff, both from customers and from our management (most of the managers were let go at one point, supposedly because they had been DEALING COCAINE...but that's just hearsay.)
I am always surprised when I see stuff like this -- shock and astonishment that retail PC techs aren't complete pros. That's not to say that there weren't some good techs there -- there were. But there were also bad techs, because the management at a story like Best Buy knows about retail sales and (hopefully) customer service. They cannot tell the difference between a good tech and someone who can just talk like a good tech, but they do know that, if we were really great techs, we wouldn't have been working at Best Buy. Other posters have mentioned bad behavior as a natural result "bottom of the food chain" and "low-paid" employeees.
We weren't the bottom of the food chain. The sales floor guys were - especially in the computer department. They wanted our jobs. I routinely had guys in their mid-twenties give me shit because I was 16 and had a better job. I wasn't making more than they were since I was seasonal, but that was okay with me. I was making decent money for being 16 in 1996 (about $8 an hour, I think) and the job was as tied to merit as it could have been. If I fixed computers well and quickly, I got a good review and customers left happy. Since a lot of our customers expected to have a miserable experience dealing with us, it was actually a pretty good feeling to make somebody's day and fix in an hour what they thought they'd have to come back for in a week.
I only worked summers and over Christmas, so every time I came back, I had to "prove myself" again as the other full-time techs had invariably either been fired or else moved on to better gigs. For every full-time guy there who knew a lot and showed me a trick or two, there was a guy there three times my age who didn't know anything other than how to reinstall windows, and who resented the smartass 16-year-old who made him look bad. Most of these guys lasted only a couple months, but every now and then you'd get somebody who could weasel their way into the job and manage not to be a bad employee even if they were a bad tech. The fact is that a lot of the "repair" jobs we got back then were really basic. An un-scientific analysis of what I remember the job was like saw maybe one or two machines over an 8 hour shift that actually needed hardware work we were capable of; the rest were OS issues, software problems, driver problems, or else they were hardware issues that we had to send out to our service center. The bad techs just sent more stuff out to service, which wasn't really encouraged since we got a happier customer and probably a better profit margin for our store if we fixed it in-house rather than sending it to a regional service center.
At the end of the day, though, we had a lot of autonomy. The second summer I was there was the best one -- they'd fired all but one of the other techs and (for whatever reason) had a hard time replacing them, so it was just me and this one laid-back dude fixing just about everything, and since we were both pretty good, we got the same amount of work done with half the manpower. The managers rarely enforced the "regional" policies as to how we were supposed to do things (if there even were any) so long as our numbers were good.
Best Buy as a company has about as much oversight of their techs as Honda or VW have of their dealership techs. They're hired locally and monitored locally (if at all). They can try to set some standards for who to hire (realy easy things like A-Plus certification) but it doesn't change the fact that it's a low-ish level job unless you're a masochist and you want to use it as a stepping stone to management.
So I'm not surprised by any of this, but I don't really hold Best Buy responsible unless they knew about it and did
Is it unethical to protect a customer's data?
Maybe they were just backing up important files prior to software install?
It could happen... and apparently did.
*Still* negative function...
I (occasionally) do support / repair / recovery for individuals. Never do I look into media like this, let alone copy it. It's not really that hard - just follow the golden rule. If I wouldn't want someone poking around my files, I do the same for them. Come on, people!
Cheers
It's not entrapment. Entrapment would be forcing them or coercing them to commit the crime, often with another illegal act. Prostitution sting operations, for example, are often very close to (or over the line of) entrapment, as the police plant streetwalkers (an illegal act) in order to catch another illegal act.
There is nothing like that here -- it's a computer with stuff on it, and their job is not to grab that stuff, it's to fix the computer. End of story.
How about a folder called "Music"? Can they steal from that because it's labeled as such?
Living ethically is a lot easier when you have enough ethics to avoid doing bad things for reasons better than "I might get caught."
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I would be much more worried about my MP3 folder now. With iTunes' DRM-free codec, you are linked to those files. So if some Geek adding memory snags a couple gigs of your music and throws it up on a P2P, it's going to be your name on them.
How much would it suck to get sued for thousands by the RIAA because some highschool/college punk snagged a copy of your iTunes folder? They have files with your digital signature sitting on a P2P server, and they only have to show that given a preponderance of the evidence you are likely guilty.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Small issue (and I don't know if you're trying to be funny or not because of your sarcasm sig): Unless they were to know otherwise, the pictures and iTunes music was not 'stolen'. That is a very bad and overly false assumption to make.
And, believe it or not, there are those on the 'net that pay for their pr0n, so that isn't a safe place to assume 'stolen' either.
AccountKiller
Hold on, my hypocrisy meter just went red.....
If this was any of you guys downloading stuff off Bittorrent all we'd here is "It's NOT STEALING WAAHH!!!"
However, now if the guys at GeekSquad do the exact same thing it's now 'stealing'....
No, dude false alarm, didn't you notice your "reasoning abilities" meter is so low? At that low levels, the other meters go in totally random measures and can't be trusted at all. Trust me, I'm a geek.
The issue at hand is stealing potentially private information of one's harddrive, without permission. Bittorent is about someone willfully uploading a file to share it with others, and then a group of people sharing bandwidth to get this file.
The difference is sort of like:
a) looking up a gang bang event in your neighborhood and dropping by to join the party
b) someone on the street hitting you with a slab of wood in the back and raping you
See?
I worked for Geek Squad prior to it being called Geek Squad and after the name change. The story is absolutely true as fellow technicians did exactly what was expressed in this story. There was a central machine that all the vids,images went into but that was not the sole purpose of the machine. All tech benches have a central machine that we used to store our tools and to conduct virus scans. I worked in a college town so the pictures of sorority girls were pretty graphic. I was there to get a paycheck, others took the time to invade people's privacy. I don't believe I recall them specifically searching. But when customers would request spyware removal or data backups, you see filenames flash across the screen. Some techs choose to look further when they'd see filenames like "sorority party, drunken flashing" or something like that. BestBuy has a policy of retaining data backups for up to a month when someone requests one. We'd burn them to dvds or cds and keep a copy just in case the copy we burned for them was unreadable in their drive at home. For example if we used DVD+R and their drive only supported DVD-R if we didn't have a copy on hand then all of their data would be lost and we'd be in trouble. Well those backups were on our central machine so techs would look through them and find this porn. Get the picture?
Bush's Law: As an online discussion concerning ethical behavior grows longer, the probability of a mention of George W. Bush approaches one.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
TFA says they took their entrapment box to "about a dozen" geek squads, and finally found one to do this, and then cry WOLF! I thought the Consumerist was a decent blog until this crap sensationalist story, which has now been picked up by freakin' slashdot (of course) who added the headline "Consumerist Catches Geek Squad Stealing Porn".
1. When running an entrapment scheme, a 1:12 ratio is hardly damning of the whole organization
2. Who cares? Was the entrapment author deprived of his pr0n? No, someone just got a copy.
3. If you have super secret pr0n or whatever on your computer, DON'T TAKE IT TO BEST BUY. Hire someone to come to your house so you can discuss your concerns and sit next to them while they do their thing.
Give me a break. Ethics?! How about journalistic ethics?
Shame on the Consumerist and shame on Slashdot.
So your girlfriend found out that those naked pictures and movies you took are out on the internet and she is so very mad at you.
Simple, tell her the geeksquad STOLE them off your computer.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
My car has some niceties I have added on myself. While I certainly do not take my car to just any mechanic, there are some (rare) exceptions when it cannot go to my usual mechanic (i.e. warranty work I had done in the past). An example of once such feature is a very loud stereo system. I actually take the electronic toll pass, change, and especially the amplifiers, and sub woofers out of the car before taking it in because I know the volume would otherwise be maxed out when I get it back from the shop. I simply do not trust just anyone outside of myself and my close friends to have those items within their reach. Furthermore, I am also careful, as with anybody else, to only hand them the keys they need to operate the vehicle, and do not provide them with my house keys or keys to anything other than the car.
People need to take the same types of precautions with computers. If possible, back up your files elsewhere (i.e. optical media, portable hard drive) or consider using a network storage device (many home network storage devices are available now with RAID, and are not terribly high in price). Just as you would with a car, take out any money and private/personal belongings and put it elsewhere for while it is in the shop. Also, use different passwords for your logins than you use for your email accounts and the-like, as this is synonymous to only providing them with the key/keys they need.
Currently being sued by Sysinternals and probably by GRC (Spinrite) also. ...Look into Nerds On Site for an outstanding group of on-site techs geared more towards SME (and ethics).
They who can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. B.Fkln
What are you talking about?
The cops have women dress up like prostitutes dress and hang out in areas where prostitutes hang out.
What's "illegal" about that?
It's entrapment when the fake prostitute offers sex for money BEFORE the guy does. Because the guy MAY NOT have offered money for sex on his own.
However, now if the guys at GeekSquad do the exact same thing it's now 'stealing'.... No. It's not the "exact same thing," nor is it "stealing." It's a violation of privacy. It's not stealing because there's no loss of material. It's a loss of privacy. That's it. Theft is dependent on scarcity, and this is isn't an issue because an exact copy is made. Material was in fact created, not misappropriated. Give up on trying troll on the idea that somehow the standards that apply to a scarcity based world exist in a post-scacity environment. They don't, and they never did, because it's impossible to lose anything.
Oh and not to put too fine a point on the whole central problem the main premise of your post, but no one called this "stealing" jackass! Oh, and don't even try that: 'But on Bittorrent it's OK since I have permission' bit with me, unless you yourself made the content (and for the love of God I hope it ain't Porn), your 'permission' is about as relevant as me giving you 'permission' to buy the Brooklyn Bridge. No. It's every bit as relevant here, because it's not theft, and it never was. This is all about an expectation of privacy. In P2P I decide whether and what I want to share off my drive. This is them rumaging through my stuff and taking whatever I want. In the real world this would be putting a stack of stuff on the the curb with a sign that reads "free or best offer" and people coming up and rumaging through that, versus coming home and finding some guy digging through your bedroom closet.
No one gives a shit if someone makes a copy of your porn collection (unless perhaps it's your private homemade porn) or your mp3 collection. What's really the problem is if it was something of more value, like your bank account information, or your passwords or something like that. Porn and mp3s are publically available, my personal information isn't.
Again, your Brooklyn Bridge argument is of no consequence, because you're trying to apply the rules of scarcity economy to a post-scarcity one. They don't apply. There's only one Brooklyn Bridge. If you wanted to make your analogy appropriate, and you didn't, it would have been "[You] giving [me] permission to copy the Brooklyn Bridge." Oh snap! That completly changes everything, because now there's two Brooklyn Bridges! Well that's inconvient, so let's just ignore that shall we?
When I worked as a technician at Fry's, I regularly observed *supervisors* grabbing "interesting" material off a customer's machine. Honestly I don't see what the big deal is. It's small time copyright violation, big deal. I personally didn't do it since I rarely saw anything worth taking, but I never felt grossly offended when other guys did.
I did get a laugh the one time I removed a Barbie game CD from a machine that had more voluntarily installed porn dialers and pictures on it than I could count. The amount of porn pop ups alone on start up had to have been enough to make daddy tell the little girl "Don't start the computer without Daddy around, ok?"
Why do people not undertand the distinction? It is really easy: If you steal, then the stolen object is not with the original owner anymore! Too hard to understand? I think not.
So, with that said, this is invasion of privacy, espionage, copytight infringement and unauthorized use of data processing equipment. Might even get a higher sentence than ordinary theft.
I might add that anyone concerned about his/her privacy shoould use drive encryption anyways, or remove the drive before giving the computer in foreign hands.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
And is giving away $200 dollar blow jobs for $20.
The great thing about that argument is that the defense lawyer gets to ask the lady cop what the fair market value of her blow jobs is. If he's good he'll find out how much her last boyfriend (or girlfriend, we are talking about dickless tracys) spent on her before getting head.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Back in 1990, when I was doing this type of computer repair, every single tech at every single company made copies of software for themselves off customer computers.
Of course, there weren't mp3s and such, but there was a lot of porn pictures and games. I'd say a solid 10% of machines had a "warez" directory where they'd keep their archive once internet connectivity became more common around 93 or so (common, in the sense of customers with broken machines bringing them in with some form of connectivity to the internet).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What he found after breaking in does not justify him breaking in! I agree that he should have reported those abuse images to the authorities, but in general, ex post facto justifications are almost never good:
"so I did kill the guy, but he turned out to be a child molester" -- Should you be going around killing people in the hopes you eventually catch one?
"so I raped that girl, but she liked me in the end" -- should you be going around... you get the point I think.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Or mebbee Freak Squad?
Yo... The photo processor at Thrifty and Walgreens been lookin' at your stray pookie shots for some tyme now, my brother.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
If you have an dirty pictures or movies that aren't encrypted, shame on you. You could die tomorrow--after the will gets sorted out, do you want your mom|sister|kids|whoever finding your smut? Everyone may suspect that I watch porn, but I certainly don't have to let them browse through my collection of underage llama porn for verification. Private stuff should be private. Make an effort, people.
I used to work at Best Buy (in store), and though I had some idea of how unscrupulous some of the people I worked with could be, I didn't imagine it was so terrible. Anyway, it used to be that we would get service plans for our computers nearly for free- so I purchased one for my new laptop when I worked there. A year later, I had since quit and then took the laptop in for service. I knew that the people in store had low morals, but I wasn't quite sure how the people at the service center stacked up, so I installed some monitoring software that would log everything that happened on my computer. Please note that the only things wrong with my computer were HARDWARE issues- a loose headphone jack, and a broken monitor. Absolutely nothing that would require data manipulation in the least on the computer itself. A few days later, I get a call from the Best Buy tech center asking me for the password to my windows account. He had apparently already reset the BIOS password and now wanted to access windows itself. I told him no, he didn't need to do that to fix it, and he replied that if I wouldn't give him the password, he'd have to ship the computer back to me without any repairs done. Begrudgingly, I told him the password to an account I had set up specifically for the purpose of the Best Buy technicians in case this had occurred. He hangs up, a few weeks go by, and I finally get my laptop back. What I found was that, over the course of TWO HOURS, this technician systematically went through almost every file on my entire hard drive, and what's more- he actually BURNED TO CDS, from my own CD burner, data and games I had on my hard drive. He even backed up a game folder onto multiple cds that required a full system install (half-life 2, in this case). This was not only a clear case of poor workmanship (why the hell should I wait 4 weeks for a repair if it's just this guy dicking around on my hard drive), but also of a total invasion of privacy. Moreover, my audio jack was not fixed. I called the Best Buy support company and over an hour or so, I managed to finaggle a conversation with the manager in charge of the division that "fixed" my computer. I asked him if he knew what was going on, and he replied in a very nonchalant manner that "these guys only access things that are necessary to fix your computer". I told him I had proof of otherwise, and moreover that they were going through all my personal files (the scant few I had left on my hard drive before sending it in, anyway). He didn't so much deny this as he did *literally* tell me that I was "wasting his time". I told him I was thinking of suing, though admittedly I wasn't sure for what; I didn't know if the invasion of privacy, breach of contract, or failure to repair were "suable" offenses. He actually LAUGHED, told me that since I had "signed the contract", there was nothing I could do, and that he didn't care what evidence I had. Yeah, it sucked. So I did wind up going to a lawyer, who advised me that the amount of time and effort that would have to go into fighting a contract's specific wording (did it say "might be accessed", or "would be accessed") would not be worth whatever payout might actually occur (if any at all). He also implied that it might be harder for someone in my position as a prior employee to assert claims against the company's behavior, which I had never previously objected to while working there. In truth, I had actually quit because of the shady practices going on in my local store, and had mentioned it on my 2-week notice, but alas, such is life. I would really like to kick one of these guys in the balls.