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IT Repair Installs Webcam Spying Software
Vapon writes "A lady noticed her computer was running slower after she had brought her computer in to be repaired. She took the computer to a second repair shop where they found that one of the problems was that her webcam would turn on whenever it detected her around and was taking photos and uploading it to a website. The repair technician that installed the software has done this to at least 10 women and has photos of at least one undressing."
...you've got nothing to fear.
Does this count as being a private dick?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I smell a lawsuit.
Unless of course they share the photographic proof.
Just undressing?
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
Why on earth would he go to all this trouble when there's any number of friendly Filipino women out there willing to do the same at a low-low cost?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Next up,
repaired tv's that can see you.
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Not that I would watch it, of course.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I need to see a naked girl to shit in a cup, eat vomit, or get double stuffed to get hard thes days.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Lesson. Whenever taking your machine into those places, write down the serial numbers. Unfortunately, if you buy a new machine, repairing it yourself is not an option if you want it done under warranty.
Extended warranties are rip-offs - no exceptions.
What the subject says.
FBI Agent: Why didn't we think of this?
DHS Agent: Because we already did.
Unless you own an iMac, mine is in the shop (AGAIN!) for yet another circuit board and possibly new video card.
So that was the best $169 I ever spent.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I'm done with people making excuses for why they do things like this. There comes a time when you just have to do what is necessary and remove the cruft from society.
This wasn't a case of doing something silly (writing on your drunk friends face with magic marker), or being mistaken (going down the wrong way on a one way street), this was a deliberate, conscious act undertaken with full knowledge of what would happen when this was done.
We can't keep wasting tax dollars on court cases for stupidity, which is exactly where this case will go. Just shoot him and be done with it.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I got an extended warranty on my the last monitor I bought, had it repaired three times and replaced once at no cost, sounds like an exception to me.
Agreed. Extended Applecare saved my butt twice in the past six years. I suppose whether or not the warantee is worthless would depend upon your vendor though.
Caveat Utilitor
I wonder if he made sure it was her personal computer. She could have been bringing her husband's computer in instead of her own. Now that would have been amusingly ironic.
No good deed goes unpunished. - Avon, Blake's 7
Once you jack off to Japanese girls puking in each other's mouths, you can't exactly go back to Playboy!
Unless you own an iMac, mine is in the shop (AGAIN!) for yet another circuit board and possibly new video card.
So that was the best $169 I ever spent.
I've got news for you - they wouldn't sell them if they were unprofitable. On a large scale, it's always a better deal for them than it is for you. But, for the individual, paying a couple hundred dollars might be better than the uncertainty.
But that doesn't stop me from pretty much always buying AppleCare. Though my Macs are also on the high end, and therefore more expensive to repair or replace. I'm not sure that would be true if I bought cheap Macs.
Will anyone dare to click on a link labeled "dick"?
I see it got modded off-topic, but it seems to me like a valid question. What the heck was this guy thinking? Or the recent story on The Register, where a 47 year old techie got jailed for a similar stunt, except he also tried to blackmail a 17 year old girl into underessing in front of the camera. (Which is how he got caught.)
I mean, seriously. What. The. Fuck.
Didn't these guys find enough photos of naked women on the internet? I mean, seriously, how did that train of thought go? "Man, if only I could see some photos of women at least partially undressed... Nah, surely nobody publishes something like that. I guess I'll just have to bug someone's web-cam." Or what?
Or was it just a psychopath's power game?
Since the story is about him, it doesn't seem to me offtopic at all. No, seriously, I want to know. What goes in the head of that kind of idiot? How do you recognize one?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Yes, well, Macs are special...
http://www.allen-poole.com/
...laptop watches you!
Apple's warranties are absolutely worth it. The three year extended warranty is dirt frickin cheap compared to any repair you might need down the line. Hard drive failed? Replaced. Keys fell of your keyboard? Replaced. Little rubber feet come off the bottom of the laptop? Here's a sheet of extras, just in case they come off again in three years.
Seriously, if you buy a Mac, buy the extended warranty.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
"The repair technician that installed the software has done this to at least 10 woman and has photos of at least one undressing."
I believe the correct word is womans, duh it's plural.
Srsly u guys. U guys, srsly.
Ars Technica had this first. They should get the credit. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080805-high-tech-peeping-tom-rigged-laptop-webcam-to-snap-nude-pics.html
I! Tego Arcana Dei.
the sheer cheek of it!
N.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
You just watch the laptop.
Isnt that the point of having a light on your camera? So that you can tell when it is taking pictures of you?
I have found that the cost of the extended warranty is roughly equal to the cost of any repairs that would have been needed over the same time. One exception was a Dell machine that kept eating power supplies. The cost of the 3 year warranty was about 3/4 what the cost of power supplies would have been. Of course, I had to deal with Dell support, so there was a non-monetary cost, too.
Where they are worth it to me is when a computer is being taken to college by the kids. I would rather be able to call Dell or Apple and say "Fix it" than have the kids trying to get it repaired. Its a peace of mind thing.
But, when Radio Shack wants an extra $10 to extend the warranty on a $30 item, yeah, that is a ripoff - no exception.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=35123165
I got an extended warranty on my the last monitor I bought, had it repaired three times and replaced once at no cost, sounds like an exception to me.
I got the same services on a Samsung CRT monitor without buying the extended warranty. They replaced it - free shipping and all - 30 months after I bought it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
She took the computer to a second repair shop where they found that one of the problems was that her webcam would turn on whenever it detected her around and was taking photo's and uploading it to a website.
Vapon and Taco, meet Bob.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
A webcamera is one of the things that I will never again attach to my computer. I rigged up a webcam to my computer once so while I chatted with some chicks they could see me. My sister used my computer while I was away for a week. Looks like she would just invite some random lusers to use the webcam.
Well a message popped up one afternoon and it was from some luser telling me I was cute. I ask him how he know he said my webcam was on. Then he ask me if I would get naked for him. And it was a guy.
Camera in box.. box back to store. Now when some chick wants a picture I just direct her to a website where I have a picture of J. Random. Hunk.
Works for me.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
Bow-chicka-bow-wow!
Seriously though... unless the woman has the system in her bedroom, what are they hoping to see?
If they did it on my system, they'd just get web-cams of me reading slashdot and playing WoW in my underwear...
Two key things I've seen mentioned
- The light on the camera, there is a REASON for this light, and it's to let you know it's ON. This is the same reason camera phones do it as well. To let you, and anyone you are taking photos of that you are pointing a camera at them.
- Repair. DIY. You can't do this with a laptop. Laptops are generally not user serviceable without at least having the system restore media and the nintendo screw driver (you know what I'm talking about.) The woman did the right thing and took it somewhere else. Hell, the alternate ending to this story would have been reporting the first tech, but installing his own spyware that didn't flip the light. Chances are the first tech had been doing this a long time, and this woman only noticed probably because she had dial-up and hence a "slow" computer.
I've tested the 'recording' aspect by taping over the LED on the camera... amazing thing is, nobody questioned why the LED was taped over. Second, this was an oldschool webcam that was an actual NTSC fixed focus camera, so it was "ON" all the time unless it was unplugged. However the LED, had it been visible would have at least drawn the attention to turn the camera away if you are not going to use it.
Back in the day of Win95, it was really easy to get all manner of spyware on dialup users, for simple fact that few had antivirus software that was updated (indeed a lot of malware was installed by pirated antivirus software) A local ISP had the same malware on their server, so put two and two together (owners of said ISP sold the ISP to someone else and then broke in later and stole the equipment so the new owners came to an empty building.)
Do you think Apple is losing money on the extended warranties?
(They could still be worth it; spending $250 now may well make a lot more sense than facing the possibility of spending $500 tomorrow; the point is that Apple sells them because they are profitable for Apple, so on the balance, they aren't profitable for Apple customers.)
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
To preface this: I am not a Windows (tm) user.
After all, the Tripwire program (Kim and Spafford) was created in 1992. That would have been in the Windows 3.1 era. Windows 98 doesn't include it (My wife uses that product), but it should be a standard part (or option) in later versions. I always presumed that it (or its underlying concept) is a standard part of "anti-malware" software. I do have an instance of Windows XP SP2 running, and it complains ON EACH BOOT of missing an approved anti-malware program. Mind you, since I don't run anti-malware, or a firewall, the XP instance is run in an isolated virtual container.
Of course she didn't trust the technician; why didn't she apply the obvious measures?
Don't the commercial anti-malware programs or Windows incorporate this protection?
Now, it would be difficult to defend against boot-sector attacks (I was reading an article on Microsoft Vista, and it's defense against this -- also ref. /. and its recent article on the subject), but that would take considerably more skill than the typical PC jockey has. Typical prevention of this would be (at least with the COMMERICIAL anti-malware programs), should be a boot and scan from CD-ROM. Something easily mentioned in the anti-malware instructions (Note that my Windows 98 CD doesn't boot; a boot floppy is required, making this defense difficult in THAT environment. But, like I said, I *know* Windows 98 doesn't offer this protection. Windows XP? Certainly should, but with the warning about not running anti-malware, maybe it defers this function to external software. Which is ok, after all Tripwire is external software for Unix as well).
I have a hard time actually believing that Windows could be such a security clusterfuck, that a vendor default installation could suffer from problems like this.
About the only thing I can say is: Class-action suit hammer time! This is SO basic -- it's like seatbelts.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
The guy was trying to get off on the THRILL of forbidden fruit. You know like peeping toms. The boobies you are not SUPPOSE to see. There are many people out there like it, and it surprises me it didn't happen sooner. Not that I am saying he was right, or that he shouldn't goto jail. He should, it's just not that hard to understand WHY he did it.
The thing that makes AppleCare a bit different is that Apple is essentially a monopoly supplier for the repairs, which makes their cost much lower than what they actually charge.
Look at what it costs to get a new screen installed. Do you think that it costs Apple anywhere near that much to do it? Definitely not. They're making a hefty margin.
What this means is that Apple actually can end up charging less for the warranty than for the individual repairs, on average, over the long term. I find this to be particularly true with their portables, where the cost of AppleCare isn't all that much but the cost of repairs is completely ridiculous.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
the Repair guy was just trying to see if she cracked the new level on Call of DUTY 19...geeesh...everyone always points the finger...
Joe Investor
Drop damage of any sort? Not replaced, you pay more for repair than you would out-of-warranty, and your warranty is cancelled without any compensation.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
The correct word is women . Women is the plural of woman, just as men is the plural of man.
From TFA: "Marisel Garcia is one of eight or nine women in the Gainesville, Florida who is a victim of a Webcam Spy Hacker voyeurism scandal, orchestrated by Craig Feigin."
Not a victim of having her privacy invaded, not merely being spied upon.. but a full-fledged Webcam Spy Hacker Voyeurism Scandal. A WSHVS. Dear god, WHAT HAVE WE COME TO? I think I'll found a WSHVS victim anonymous.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Given that a majority of men have watched or are watching porn, and the numbers are steadily rising for women too, I'm not so sure. Chances are half the guys at the office, the taxi driver if you use one at any point, at least one of the clerks at the supermaket you visit, maybe even one of the doctors who've treated you, etc, are into porn. If porn taught that, you'd notice it.
Plus, I don't know... I thought porn was about _sex_. I don't get the mentality that it's all some kind of (preferrably male) plot and power game. There _are_ people of both sexes who enjoy sex, as just that. Not as some form of power game or currency, but as just, you know, two people having an intimate moment and some fun too.
So, really, I don't get it when I hear it that porn is somehow teaching males to exert power over women. (Read your quote too, if you don't know what I'm talking about.) Or that anything that happens in there is only for the male's pleasure. Apparently regardless of whether it's one on one, two guys on one gal, two gals on one guy, or just two lesbians and no guy involved, it surely is only a depiction of something where just the guy gets any pleasure there. Apparently even if what's portrayed is one guy going down on his SO, it's still only for the guy's pleasure. And apparently demeaning, abusive or otherwise unwanted and unwelcome for the woman, if it involves sex in any way.
Women are occasionally known to have orgasms too, you know?
Plus, it's a depiction of an act which isn't just natural, but millions of married people are doing it right as you read this. And that's not even counting the unmarried ones. Is it really that much worse and harmful than a depiction of someone being beaten up, shot, stabbed, burned alive, or the other stapples of TV and movies? I mean, if people take what they saw in movies into the real world, wouldn't it make more sense to worry about those who watch war movies?
But, anyway, anyone who thinks that any kind of sex is inherently demeaning or submissive for the woman, well, at least do us guys a favour and don't marry :P
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
OCZ Barebone Gaming Notebook
Directron's Notebook Barebone Systems
Granted, the barebones kit is most of the laptop and you can usually buy a Dell with the same configuration for cheaper, but there are a few options out there for "building" a laptop now.
Thats one of the reasons I will never buy another apple product ever. They cheat you out of a real warranty (90 day warranty on a $500 ipod?!?!) and there rationelle is "oh you should have baught the extended waranty". Um NO THANKS apple... how about you provide regular standards of support? such as 3 years on a HARD DRIVE based mp3 player. At least 1 god damn year.. jeez..
whats next apple, forcing me to pay for "service packs" to your OS?
when your product is so crap that you NEED to buy an extended warranty because it WILL fail, you know that there is something very wrong there
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
I take it you've never heard of soylent green? ;)
He who has no
The right way would be to store the files in a hidden directory, wait until a late hour (like 1am), use a mouse-listener to make sure nobody had used the computer for an hour or so, THEN upload the files. Sheesh...
In Soviet Russia, webcam watches you!
Seriously, if a tech tried this on me I think I would get the last laugh. Unless 40 year old overweight men that infrequently shave and are rarely sober are the guy's thing, he's likely to tear his eyes out after looking through my cam back to me.
--
$tar -xvf
Keys fell from your keyboard but you are still seriously recommending that people buy from Apple ? Are you joking ?
I've bought an IBM PS/2 keyboard back in 1994, it had never lost any key and still works like if it was still brand new.
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
Thats one of the reasons I will never buy another apple product ever. They cheat you out of a real warranty (90 day warranty on a $500 ipod?!?!) and there rationelle is "oh you should have baught the extended waranty". Um NO THANKS apple... how about you provide regular standards of support? such as 3 years on a HARD DRIVE based mp3 player. At least 1 god damn year.. jeez..
whats next apple, forcing me to pay for "service packs" to your OS?
when your product is so crap that you NEED to buy an extended warranty because it WILL fail, you know that there is something very wrong there
You do realize that the iPod warranties are one year...and have been for quite some time. Phone support is limited to 90 days, but actual warranty is 1 year. This was the case when I bought my first iPod back in 2003.
Quote from the Apple website:
Your iPod comes with single-incident telephone support for the first 90 days and a one-year limited warranty. Purchase the AppleCare Protection Plan for iPod to extend your service and support to two years from your iPod purchase date.
Just to be fair, the whole "monopoly provider of parts" is true for pretty much any portable product from any company, and really for any consumer product as well. The only place where it isn't true is for things like motherboards on desktop machines where the form factor is standardized and you can substitute off-the-shelf parts. I remember trying to do a repair on a Sony mini-DV camcorder. The power switch was flaky. It still is, though not as badly. Anyway, they wanted IIRC $250 for a small piece of plastic with a power switch and a pushbutton on it. I told them "No thanks. I can buy a new JVC mini-DV camcorder for that," and I did just that. Well, I think it was actually $300, but.... :-)
It's basically like car parts. If you can find a third-party part manufacturer that you can get the parts from and/or a company that strips down dead cars for parts, you can get the part for a minimal expense. If you can only buy the factory part, you end up spending... IIRC $15 apiece for a bolt with a rubber sleeve from Ford. Pure comedy.
BTW, for your laptop repair parts, there are companies that strip the things down and sell them for parts. That will usually net you a much lower price than trying to find a part from the manufacturer. If you don't have an extended warranty, shopping around can really save you some bucks. This, of course, assumes that the failure was a fluke and not due to any frequent cause of failures. As always, with "working pull" parts, YMMV.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Count me lucky then--20+ years of Apple products and not one cent on extended warranty garbage. I do have a dead 17" monitor that lived for about 8 years and an old Performa that had a motherboard death (replaced for free beyond its warranty period). Oooh, I forgot, about a billion dead hard drives. Man those things suck.
> I smell a lawsuit.
You want to know who I'd like to sue? The idiot who designed the webcam. They all have a light that is supposed to let you know when it is on. But of course it is just software in the windows driver and can be disabled by any idiot with a hex editor. THAT is the crime here.
You should be able to trust that light. That mofo should be hard wired to go on whenever the CCD is charged or when data is actually being sent. And it should have a delay (a simple capacitor would do) to make sure it stays lit for at least 1.0 seconds anytime it is triggered to stop single frame caps being hard to spot.
The light's specific purpose is to notify the user and it is obviously DEFECTIVE. A mandatory recall or two would drive the point home to the hardware makers about putting vital safety functions into the driver.
Democrat delenda est
"Profitable for apple" could mean that they aren't making a profit on the warranty and repairs themselves, but they cover the costs easily in the profit of the pc and the customer is so happy they buy more apple stuff later.
"Not losing your customers to the competition" can have a value too. It's a bit too indirect for most modern companies unfortunately, they seem to instead prefer to give all sorts of incentives to new customers and allow their existing customers to be drawn away by their competitors' new customer incentives. "We'll treat you like crap when you try to claim on the warranty, to make sure you never buy from us again!"
lie, they will claim water damage and not repair just for living in humid climates that trip the sensor. Waste of money.
Keys fell from your keyboard but you are still seriously recommending that people buy from Apple ? Are you joking ?
Let's see... as a former IT guy, I've worked on thousands of computers over the last 20 years. A few dozen have had a key or two break/snap off (typically a well-worn one like a space bar, command key, letter "s", etc.). Probably five or six of those were Apple systems; the rest were mostly a mix of Dell, Sony, and Toshiba. Seems perfectly reasonable that it would happen now and then, even to the best of hardware.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
True.
I did not say it was NOT profitable for Apple. I merely said it was worth it for the customer. Clearly it's worth it for Apple too.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Apple's warranties are absolutely worth it. The three year extended warranty is dirt frickin cheap compared to any repair you might need down the line. Hard drive failed? Replaced. Keys fell of your keyboard? Replaced. Little rubber feet come off the bottom of the laptop? Here's a sheet of extras, just in case they come off again in three years.
Seriously, if you buy a Mac, buy the extended warranty.
Unlike PCs where commodity desktop parts make repair/replacement very easy & cheap. Get the cheapest warranty (one year).
Warranties on laptops are worth it since there are so many custom components. The deciding factor for my company to go with Dell for laptops was that Dell offers 3-year next-business day warranty replacement including accidental dropping for a very reasonable price.
http://www.facebook.com/s.php?k=100000080&id=760575156 Hah!
He should have presented these womans (sorry, couldn't resist) with a lengthy terms of service agreement. The spycam language buried on the third page or so would have completely exonerated him.
A case like this is what is needed to highlight the absurdities of EULAs.
You just contradicted your point in the same post.
It doesn't have to be that there's a losing side and a winning side, just because one side makes a profit and the other doesn't.
There's always economies of scale. It might cost you $10 to buy a set of those rubber thingys under your laptop, but it might cost Apple $6 to buy them in bulk and ship them to you. Even if you didn't get your money's worth of the service with other broken parts and support calls, and it ends up effectively costing you $8 (out of $250 say) for those rubber thingys, they're still making money, and you're still saving money.
It works the same way for every company, not just Apple.
But granted, extended warranties tend to be a massive ripoff, and they tend to be how companies like Best Buy and Circuit City made most of their money. Devices usually fail within the warranty period, or they tend to fail around the life expectency of the device. Very few devices fail in between.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
I had a Samsung CRT which I didn't get the extended and one day it wouldn't power on. I sent it back to them and rather then repairing it they sent me a refurb with a huge gouge in the anti-glare coating and several other visual defects. When I called to complain seeing the one I sent them had no scratches in the anti-glare coating they basically told me to go fuck myself in so many words. I guess I wouldn't have minded about the refurb so much if the viewing area didn't have several highly distracting and visually distorting scratches especially when my original didn't have that issue. I decided to get the extended on my new monitor which replaced that one and the extended plan on my current monitor gets me a brand new monitor with no visual defects where as Samsung just gives me some piece of shit then tells me to go fuck myself.
I personally have had good experiences with extended coverage plans on car stereo equipment, TVs and monitors but that is me and I can't speak for everyone.
How do you not know that your webcam is on. Both of the ones i have (one intergrated into my laptop and a usb 2 external one) both have lights that come on when they get accessed.
It could mean that they are doing it for customer relations reasons, but I would be dumbstruck if they were doing it for any reason other than profit (based largely on the assumption that it would be better to simply spend the make-up money on improving quality).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Local paper article about this. Includes a picture!
Apple also sells computers because they are profitable for the company. It's not true that only one side of a business transaction 'profits'. Both parties can have differing viewpoints of success. So the Apple warranty could be 'worth it'.
Regardless, Dekortage=fanboy lol
2 women, that's not so bad.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Purely for forensic purposes, of course.
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE
Sauce?
Back in the day, if you had some knowledge about PCs and Windows, you could fix most flaws.
Nowadays it's different.
Firstly, the hardware is a lot worse. If you want a working firewire proaudio card, be prepared to try at least four or five motherboards and PCI firewire cards before you find a working combination.
A computer shop might be able to do this, but it's very unlikely you will have the parts to experiment with. The standard of computer parts has got so slow that many seriously flawed items are sold alongside working ones.
There is no way one person working alone will have access to all the spare parts they need.
Same with any peripherals. I see it all the time on forums - "You bought an X mother board to go with Y graphics card? IDIOT! Everyone knows that combination could never work!"
Second copy protection.
If I want to reinstall someones computer, I need access to their email account to do all the challenge and response stuff. People don't like this.
Third - Windows.
Copy protection, general flakiness, unexplained errors... When you could buy and install a copy of Win2K at least you had a chance of it working.
Now you need to research every bit of hardware and software to make sure it will work together. Even with totally legitimate installs, I've still had windows refuse to authorise.
I've totally given up fixing peoples Windows PCs. It's no fun anymore, just a painful grind that may NEVER be successfull because the basic hardware is so shit it never could have worked anyway.
At least with Linux you have some chance of getting it going, well at least there is nothing actively preventing you from getting it going, and it's more obvious if the flaw is in the hardware or the driver/OS.
Or you could just buy a computer that doesn't fall apart in 3 years.
That's funny. We had a batch of Dell notebooks and every one of us had keys falling off.
Oh...and replaced.
BTW: Apple charges $30 for every single repair. "Shipping and handling"
And how badly you abuse your hardware :)
The woman said she used her laptop as many other young people do: carrying it with her from room to room in her home as she used it to download music ...
Incoming RIAA suit!
I've got a couple of uses for something like that.
No sig today...
In order to restrict the speech of others you must expend effort on each and every person in the world.
Therefore you only get the restriction on free speech that everyone things should be restricted.
Now, for a counterpoint, please tell me how you get from "God" to "Free Speech". In less than seven moves.
Unless you own an iMac, mine is in the shop (AGAIN!) for yet another circuit board and possibly new video card. So that was the best $169 I ever spent.
I'm not surprised your Mac keeps breaking down if you only spent $169 on it!
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
The warrenties better be cheap when you pay twice the price for slower hardware.
You should probably ask bob to look over your journal entries before you ask him to look at other posts belonging to other people.
Fixing the grammar in your stories won't fix your non-sensical ramblings of your crappy life, but it would at least qualify you to make stupid grammar nazi comments.
No two ways about it, there are two sides to every story.
An entirely fair point. I didn't necessarily mean to single out Apple with this, it's just that Apple is the only company I've bought an extended warranty from because of this issue.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Why would a man do this? Easy. Girl next door attraction.
I found out a girl in my apartment complex was a stripper when she came up to me in the club.
Of course I just had to get a lap dance. In fact, she talked me into it (as if it was hard (eat pun)) by saying, "Come on, everybody wants to get a lapdance from the girl next door." And I'll be damned if she wasn't right.
A few years a go a dude in Spain wrote a virus to do this same thing. Pretty creepy if you ask me. http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2125724/peeping-tom-webcam-worm-created-virus-writers
If even one of these things is even remotely significantly likely to happen, then Apple hardware is too shoddy to be worth buying anyway. Hard drive failure within such a short time? Seriously? The real cost of hard drive failure isn't the hardware in any case, it's the fuss. Keys falling off? What the fuck? I'm typing this post on one of the cheepest brandless keyboards imaginable and even though I've dropped it hard on several occasions only the casing is slightly chipped. Keys falling off... for crying out loud. Rubber pads that you can buy for 1.90 at a hoppy shop? I'm not even going there. Sure, buy that warranty. Go ahead, it's your money.
(Hm. The euro sign doesn't show up in the preview. I hope it will when I post; if it doesn't: Slashdot, fix it please.)
He spent $169 on the warranty, obviously.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Don't worry, it's just a new feature for Google Maps. Not only do they trespass private property to snap pictures of your home, they also take pictures of the interior. You shouldn't be worried unless you have something to hide... commie.
Are you serious? AppleCare for my wife's laptop $350.00... I said no way. She's had it for two years and the hard drive just died, but I replaced it AND tripled her RAM while I was at it for a total of $44 by just ordering the parts myself from newegg. Apple wanted $350 for the repair. I even mounted the old drive in linux and was able to recover some of her data which I probably warned her about 50 times that she should be backing up!!
Extended warranties are a racket and a rip-off. The manufacturers LOVE them though because they are almost pure profit, most people who buy them never have a single incident and the ones that do almost never have anything which comes close to what they paid for the extra coverage.
The only reason people seem to think AppleCare is worth it is because Apple charges such insane amounts for simple repairs which people could do themselves for a fraction of that price.
The three year extended warranty is dirt frickin cheap compared to any repair you might need down the line.
That's because Apple has a monopoly on their parts, so they're overpriced to begin with. If you buy a good computer, you shouldn't need all of those repairs, making the extended warranty a rip off.
The moral of the story isn't, "if you buy a Mac, buy the extended warranty," it's don't buy a Mac!
Yes, I am totally aware that I will be modded into oblivion for this. But somebody has to say it, and I have karma to burn.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
The best solution is to just not buy a Mac.
The picture only shows the guy.
No kidding. My MacBook Pro has had its top plate replaced (that repair alone would have been the same price as the extended warranty was) after a screw came loose and scratched it. (They fixed the screw, too.) I've had part of a power brick, an Apple Wireless Mouse, and a battery replaced under this extended warranty.
captcha: amoral -- don't look at me, I didn't break this stuff on purpose :-)
Free web cams to the first 100 (female) customers of my new discount PC repair shop.
The ultimate source for milf pictures.
that's what twitter wants you to believe. In fact, Anonymous Coward is yet another one of his sockpuppets.
It's a very elaborate troll.
That's not necessarily true.
The actual cost of the warranty repairs could end up breaking-even for Apple. In which case, they'd be making profit from pooling together everyones warranty money and earning 3-10% annually on it. Especially during the first couple years when things are likely not failing.
If they did this and earned an average of, say, 7% annually, and they compound the interest, they'd make about $40 per warranty over the first 3 years.
And I think it's safe to say that as an Apple customer, if you didn't plunk down $170 on that warranty, chances are you're not going to invest that money in your IRA instead.
I'm not trying to be a "know it all" about this, and I have no idea if Apple is actually doing this. But this is how insurance companies work, and all a warranty is, is an insurance policy. So it makes sense to me.
pics or it didn't happen ;)
I used to work for an Apple Authorized Service Provider, and we probably marked up prices at least as much as Apple did - every part we bought from Apple got marked up a fair amount, and that's on top of the $60/hour, 1-hour minimum labor charge. Never mind that, at the peak, I was only getting $11/hour. On the other hand, Apple also has (had?) a flat-rate repair service. For roughly $350, they'd replace anything and everything on a laptop, excluding accidental damage/abuse (which could drive the price up to around $1100, if the screen was involved, or much less for less expensive parts). So that actually acted like a cap on the price of repairs - if we could repair it cheaper ourselves for the individual parts and labor (despite our markups), we would; else we'd send it in to Apple.
The prices certainly weren't reasonable for RAM, hard drives, and the like - but we sold third party upgrades instead of the "official" Apple service parts when the computer was past the warranty and needed repair. But for the parts prices from Apple, a lot of repairs weren't too unreasonable (though yes, some were horrendous).
I think where they are able to come ahead is by charging prices roughly equivalent to replacement costs, but then they get the old parts back, which they may be able to fix and reuse.
jalet said IBM PS/2 keyboard. Problems with these keyboards are not reasonable, 14 years of continuous use notwithstanding.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
Hell yes, on any Macbook Pros with an Nvidea GPU.
Good i hope they throw him in jail for at least 5 years. Theses guys are nothing but cowards,there way too much sexual harressment on the internet already. I would like to see some of theses women start sueing theses cowareds as well.
Jack of all trades,master of none
O.K. Then riddle me this: why do _women_ watch porn, if it's strictly about men having power over them? Depending on what study you want to believe, even a _lot_ of women. One study claimed that 87% (yes, eighty-seven percent) of women aged 25 to 39 watch porn. I find that a bit _too_ high to believe, but there you go. Another claim, and from an ACLU activist woman no less, claimed that 40% of porn rentals in the USA are women, for a total of some 160 million videos per year. An erotica magazine claimed the same 40% women among its subscribers. So, you know, us men barely score 50% higher than women in porn rentals (60% rentals by men, vs 40% by women.) Go figure.
So, you know, why _do_ so many women watch it then? Some even pay for it (e.g., rentals.) Go figure. You'd think that something that blatantly and obviously about power over women, wouldn't turn so many women on. Are so many of you gals secretly masochistic, or what? Or maybe it's not that clear cut at all that having sex is some kind of humiliation and torture?
No offense, but I'd like to see some statistics about that "most popular" claim. Just how much of you find on the internet, doesn't say much about how many people watch that, let alone make it their primary motive there. Catering to niches can be sometimes disproportionately more represented.
Point in case: gay porn. Pretty much _everywhere_ you turn, you find gay porn thumbnails, although only 10% of the population are gay. A lot of us males actually lose erection at the sight of that, and, at least in the USA, I get the idea that a large segment of the population is outright homophobe. But judging by availability on the net, you'd think the majority of the people get off on male homosexuality. Sometimes extrapolating from an unrepresentative sample gets you that kind of thing.
At any rate, even so, the vast majority of porn _I_ found doesn't involve any pain or humiliation. Maybe because I'm not looking for that kind of thing. There _is_ plenty of it on the net, but not a majority by any reckoning, and, again, there's actually more gay porn than that. See the previous paragraph.
Just repeating it doesn't make it true. There's more than one kind of porn, you know? Much as I hate to rain on your self-righteous parrade (ok, ok, I don't), but not all porn is about punishing anyone in any way.
That may be so, but prostitution doesn't necessarily involve violence either. Pretty much everyone who goes to a brothel here (yes, they're legal), goes there for a fuck. You _can't_ get abusive to the gals there, any more than you could on a woman on the street, because the cops then want to get in the act. And they're as unionized as anything else here.
So basically again you're projecting your own androphobe ideas there, and have to see humiliation and abuse because that's what you already decided to see. In practice it's a bunch of women who do that of their own free will, same as any other job, and are decently paid for it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Or you could just buy a computer that doesn't fall apart in 3 years.
You mean an apple][ ?
I bought a webcam from Staples, found the quality poor, and returned it. I could have sworn I did a factory reset, but six months later I started received emailed videos from some families rec room. :S (At the time, I was out of the country, and thought someone had stolen my home security video system, and was a bit freaked out...) But it turns out someone bought the refurb camera I returned, which still had my email notification in it.
So unintentionally, I was being email bombed by videos from someone else's house. I contacted the ISP of the originating videos repeatedly (Eastlink), which repeatedly ignored me. It took me going to the CTV and getting the story on national news to embarrass Eastlink into immediately contacting the people and resolving the problem. (Staples contacted me upon seeing the story, was incredibly apologetic, claimed they were putting new refurb policies in place, and said they could have tracked down the buyer for me. I didn't realized they could have done this; it would have been an easier route than the media...)
Contacting the media really worked to get the attention of the ISP. They did make me sound like a bit of pervert (sheeesh, it was a mistake, I wanted the videos stopped from the start!), but at least it had the desired result...
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Let me guess, he saw it on a porno sight where people claim to video girls without their knowledge then decided that it must be OK. Therefore, he can do the same thing. Monkey see monkey do. Did he miss a disclaimer or something on the porno sight.
Because Dell, Sony and Toshiba computers have a command key.
Someone that lame is obviously a Slashdotter. So where are the pics?
The rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are not an exhaustive list of all rights. The courts can and do find additional ones from time to time, and that is legitimate.
The constitution empowers congress to regulate interstate commerce, so without the 1st amendment, they could legally, for example, pass a law that newspapers sold across state lines are required to go through a government censor. The 1st amendment supersedes the interstate commerce clause, though, so congress doesn't really have the right to pass such a law.
We need that shit. There's nothing redundant about it.
Note that the above post applies to pretty much any reputable vendor. Apple is not special.
Likewise. Well, no, I think I extended the warranty on my automobile for pretty much the same reason. Most other stuff is getting cheaper and better with such rapidity that the cost of the extended warranty plus interest is enough to buy you a new one by the time the product fails. :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Interesting, I rejected the extended warranty for my car for similar reasons. I figured that the neighborhood garage would be able to fix any problem I had for far less money than the extended warranty would cost.
It might depend on what kind of car you have, though. I just have a boring mid-range GM. Maybe if you have something fancier it starts to pay off better.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
This is what I absolutely HATE about warranties and, in particular, extended warranties that you pay extra for...they imply that you now have rights to service that you otherwise arent't entitled to...which is complete bullshit.
In Australia, and I'm sure the US too, consumer protection laws will generally provide a level of protection well beyond the conditions stated in the warranty or extended warranty for hardware.
The "warranty" acts as a mechanism for making a customer think they have less rights than they actually do under the law.
This isn't necessarily true. You're acting like Apple is just some random 3rd party company offering insurance. But they're not. They are the OEM, and as such, have access to parts at cost, skilled and experienced labor, schematics, and an otherwise huge knowledge base for the product.
In other words: you may be getting parts under warranty that would retail for more than the warranty, yet Apple may still be turning a profit, either because their unit costs are low, or perhaps because they spend $5 to replace a capacitor and refurbish your busted motherboard, which they give to someone else who paid $200 for a warranty...
I saw this first hand with cheap-junk (MAG-brand) monitors at Best Buy. The things wouldn't last a year, and even when I took it to my local TV repair shop and paid a $20 testing fee, they couldn't figure it out with a basic check, and couldn't get specs from the manufacturer. So the second time around I got a $50 3-year warranty on the monitor. Brought in the monitor twice, they shipped it to their service facility, (where they no doubt have the specs and equipment) checked it out, and fixed the lose solder joints, burnt out components, etc. Cost to them? Perhaps $20? Meanwhile, I would have had to spend $300+ to buy new ones. And for the record, yes, I did wise-up, and went with another brand, at another store, which has gone for many years without needing warranty service.
Side-note: I was considering Viewsonic, due to their 3-year warranty, but it turned out that didn't include any of the reasonably-priced ones you'd find in stores, which seems an awfully big red flag... I hear HP in particularly is very good about providing service documentation for all their monitors. But I digress.
I find the same thing with hard drive manufacturers. When you cross-ship a HDD, the "deposit" fee put on your credit card is less than it would cost you to buy a similar (refurb) drive anywhere else. They may not be making nearly as much profit as a retail sale, but it's presumably still more than it cost them to repair, so still a net profit, versus a consumer tossing it in the trash, and a big savings for the customer who would otherwise have to buy a new, retail drive. Everyone is happy.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Pics or it didn't happen!!
*ducks*
Seriously, if you buy a Mac, buy the extended warranty.
Why? Cause you'll need it?
Keys fall off keyboards? Hard drives fail?
I've used the same keyboard I've had for the last 9 years. If a hard drive fails, there's usually some indication there's a problem before it fails, back it up, scrub clean (dod wipe or other magic rewrite) - use spinrite to enforce the scrub onto the tracks, send into vendor for warranty replacement. Yes, there are hard drives with 5 year warranties - that's where you should spend your money - not on an overpriced Mac.
If you build your own computer, each component has it's own warranty, and you usually end up spending less than the price of the Mac, but get much better quality components than Apple uses.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
TANDY Model 100 4ever ! Spy on that...
music lover since 1969
I could honestly see the hero of "Ghost" using this trick...
if you buy a mac, expect everything to be propriatory, including the repairs, reason #1 to not buy a mac.
I bought a Toyota Rav4. The warranty was cheap enough that it paled in comparison with the number of repairs my previous vehicle needed in that range of mileage. Part of that was probably my choice of vehicles, though. Apparently vans and minivans are designed to last about 30,000 miles. Well, the Ford dealer here said I should think about buying a new vehicle at 80,000 miles or at least having the engine rebuilt. Translation: we're too clueless to ifind and repair a simple coolant leak. Took them five days to find the split metal tube inside the intake manifold. I'll walk before I ever let that dealer touch any vehicle I own again, but that's a long story.
Basically, I had a horrible experience with a Ford Windstar in which a design defect in the engine caused me to spend an entire day tearing down the intake manifold and replacing all the seals, replacing one valve cover, flushing out the EGR hose, and cleaning pounds of oily gunk from the inside of the intake manifold.... I've also split a metal high pressure water line just below the intake manifold, had clogged vacuum lines just above 30,000 miles (which, BTW, was actually the first symptom of the design defect that I fixed at 60k which the ultra-sleazy Ford dealer KNEW ABOUT at the time and neither bothered to fix nor inform me about. Had I taken it to a competent Ford dealer, I'm told Ford actually would have eaten the parts cost that close to the end of the warranty period because the design flaw was well known and well documented at the time....
There have also been dozens of other problems with the vehicle (flaky rear air conditioner switch causes the rear air to randomly come on when it is switched off, left turn signal becomes a right signal instead of resetting when you turn the wheel, key switch randomly turns interior lights on, low grinding sound when I turn the wheels at low speed caused by some rubber hood rubbing under there), each of which the dealer seems to want $1500 just to look at, most of which I simply lived with because the vehicle was out of warranty before it started falling apart. It has paint peeling on the door. I've had the transmission rebuilt, the starter plate replaced (they noticed it was pretty much shattered when they dropped the transmission), and experienced... two or maybe three blowouts, and I'm still not up to 100,000 miles.
Before that, I drove a Chevy van whose fuel line clogged up once, which had constant problems with water in the fuel (at least once a year) due to an improperly designed fuel filler, that had some sort of ignition module failure, and whose paint fell off in sheets. Oh, and the rear air conditioner freon line ruptured. Was there anything else? I can't remember. Seems like it had some weird electrical quirks, but it has been too long for me to remember what they were.
Given how breathtakingly unlucky I've been with new or barely-used vehicles falling apart in the past, getting an extended warranty on the Rav4 seemed like a good idea. :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
you'd think someone would give tips on how to avoid this? or at least help with telling others what software packages actually DO this to avoid.
link to the photos?
IMO the biggest reason for buying extended warranties is that they have access to the right parts quickly and easilly.
Certain parts on laptops (e.g. keyboards, screen cables) are manufacturer specific and have a tendancy of failing long before the expensive stuff dies. For a warranty repair this is no problem, they will almost certainly have the right part in stock. For a non warranty repair you will have to trawl the likes of ebay and when you do find a replacement it is likely to be secondhand.
Motherboards in desktops are a similar issue, if you replace the motherboard in a big brand OEM machine with a generic board then the OEM copy of windows will deactivate. You may be able to provide MS to phone activate it but it is likely to be a pain at best.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I've bought an IBM PS/2 [wikipedia.org] keyboard back in 1994, it had never lost any key and still works like if it was still brand new.
That may be but laptop keyboards have to be much thinner than desktop keyboards to keep the overall size of the machine down. This unfortunately makes them flimsier.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Uh, anyone who's read the news lately has discovered that the 4th amendment doesn't apply to the US government anymore.
Ouch! Well, I can't blame you there.
As for me, my mileage is much lower (under 40,000) but so far no repairs needed. I'm keeping my fingers crossed....
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Apple's warranty is well worth it. I mean you pay like 1-200 bucks for a warranty. Ok say your surfin Slashdot and your computer dies...you take it into the apple store and they say oh your logic board is bad that will be 700 dollars please...but wait whats this we have here? you bought the Apple Care plan ok we'll fix it free. WELL WORTH IT!
~I bet you were looking down here for an awesome siggy like everyone else..sorry to disappoint~
Nothing to see here, move along.
Seriously, I'm surprised it took this long for something like this to come to light.
I'm sure the folks at the Geek Squad are glad this wasn't one of their employees for a change.
*whoosh!*
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
A year after I graduated a girl I went to HS with was featured in Playboy as a college issue (from UF).
Also I am an audio engineer and worked for Good Charlotte at one of their concerts last week and got to meet Paris Hilton. First porn star I've ever met!
Libertas in infinitum
The existence of God is not a point needed to be argued in order to understand that all humans have inalienable rights.
Our rights are inherent in our humanity because humans desire to be free. It's called "natural law". So if you believe we evolved from nature, then you still realize that humans, like animals, have an inherent desire to be free from artificial restraint. If you believe in God, then you realize that being made in His image means that we desire to be free from artificial restraint.
God vs Nature is another argument entirely, but the existence of our natural and inalienable rights does not hinge on it.
Libertas in infinitum