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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."
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.
Because people like him get off on their victims being unknowing and unwilling. I pray that I catch somebody installing a hidden cam in my house, as I have a bullet with their name on it.
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.
Depends on the state and its laws.
A few years ago...in L.A. we had a guy that was sneaking video cameras into peoples' homes, and video taping them doing pretty much everything.
Turns out, they could not prosecute him since there was no law on the books against it. He got off scott free, but, they did pass a law down here making it a crime.
I dunno what the exact wording of the law was, but, if it specifically mentioned video taping equipment...the computer trick might be legal?
Anyway...it depends on the states laws as to if this will be illegal or not. Unless the Feds try to get in on it...if they try to argue that the signal over the internet might cross state lines or something....hmm.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
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.
Poorly worded, but not absolutely backwards. In the context of personal rights, the constitution doesn't grant anything, it simply makes statements about things that the government cannot do (just read the bill of rights if that still sounds stupid, it says stuff like 'the right of blah shall not be infringed' not stuff like 'the government can give money to religious groups but only in the context of community blah').
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
"It's illegal to secretly record people, especially in their own homes (reasonable expectation of privacy)."
This falls apart with leasor/ee agreements and what fraction of a population owns the property of another.
"No laws on the books," is what i've heard repeated through the years-- citing technology as the specific without enforcement
Would were! Should is! Could be! And live a hundred times three.
"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!"
> The reason is that the Roe v Wade decision rested on the idea that
> we have a right to privacy and anti-abortion laws violate it.
Except that almost every serious scholar now admits the Supreme Court was simply finding a justification for a decision they had already made. Roe is horrible Constitutional law and nobody uses it as an anchor for an argument anymore since it is only a matter of time before a future court revisits it, the outcome of which revisit is totally unknown.
Note that I'm not trying to open up an abortion thread here, even well respected pro abortion scholars admit the weakness of the reasoning in Roe. When it falls abortion itself will simply get tossed into the political arena where it should have been decided thirty years ago and nothing much will change.
Democrat delenda est
For those that don't believe in God, the same rights can be dervived through logic.
I'm going to need a derivation before I believe that. If we set up a set of goals (happy populace, efficient society, etc.) then we can derive a set of rights that we should have in order to achieve those goals. But a set of unalienable rights that all humans do have derived through logic? That seems a little tough.
We can infer a lot of rights that the founders believed that their God bestowed on Americans based on documentation that they left behind. We can define rights that we believe that we deserve and should defend (or possibly fight to acquire or take back). But I defy you to illustrate how simple logic can spell out a set of rights that all humans do have without invoking some kind of divine standard. And, assuming that these rights are not divinely inspired, did these rights also belong to all societies in the past? What about foreign societies? Or can you logically derive what set of unalienable rights that modern Americans have that would not apply to Europeans/Chinese/cavemen?
I'm all for logic over superstition any day. But the idea that the rights that the founders believed that their God bestowed on Americans could be exactly replicated through simple logic while supporting the notion of why they are unalienable as opposed to why they should be unalienable just seems nonsensical.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
As you correctly noted, the word "privacy" does not appear anywhere in the Constitution. What you are talking about is what is sometimes called a "reasonable expectation of privacy," and is largely non-controversial (at least it's not controversial that it exists; the extent to which it exists sometimes is). It means that the government can't do certain things without sufficient cause.
The controversial "right to privacy" (which I'll tell you up front I'm not a fan of) is something the Court found in the "penumbras" of the fourth, ninth and fourteenth amendments in Griswold v. Connecticut. And it has nothing to do with the government searching your home. It has to do with whether, and to what extent, the Supreme Court can import into the Constitution, via the 14th Amendment due process clause, certain rights that existed in English and American common law (including a vague, ill-defined "right to privacy") in order to overturn state and federal statutes. The current jurisprudence has basically devolved into "if you can convince 5 judges that the law is not fair, it violates the common law right to privacy, and is therefore unconstitutional." This has led to very inconsistent, unprincipled jurisprudence that depends more on the judges' personal whims than what the Constitution actually says.
The way it should be is the Court should leave states alone to make laws---even stupid ones---regardless of whether they personally agree with them. For example, the law in Griswold was a law passed by the Roman Catholic majority nearly 100 years earlier that forbade use of contraceptives. In his dissent, Justice Potter Steward (correctly) called it an "uncommonly silly" law, but (correctly) concluded that it was nevertheless constitutional. Justice Hugo Black, my favorite judge of all time, in his dissent commented, "I like my privacy as well as the next one, but I am nevertheless compelled to admit that government has a right to invade it unless prohibited by some specific constitutional provision. For these reasons I cannot agree with the Court's judgment and the reasons it gives for holding this Connecticut law unconstitutional."
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
This is way, way off topic, but logic is basically valueless without premises. The point of logic is to establish a framework of reasoning, which you then apply to a set of known true premises (or at least, assumed true premises). The original poster's argument, that logic alone can prove the existence of rights, is a non sequitur (in fact, it's a non sequitur that describes another non sequitur, since both the statement and the principle it's pushing do not follow). Logic alone doesn't do anything. It's like a computer without electricity.
I've just reviewed my vest pocket copy of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and I do not see any qualification of the Fourth Amendment to limit its scope solely to intrusions by government.
Maybe I'm just blind?
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