Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
not just lawsuit.. It is criminal offense that the technician will go to jail.
Once you jack off to Japanese girls puking in each other's mouths, you can't exactly go back to Playboy!
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/
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.........
Speaking as someone who actually RTFA...
It's illegal to secretly record people, especially in their own homes (reasonable expectation of privacy). If you install a little camera in your neighbor's ceiling, you can bet you'll end up in jail. This is the same.
On top of that, there is the computer hacking, not performing the correct service (after all, by "fixing" the computer he made it slower)
And while there is no "right to privacy" explicitly state in American law, the Supreme court essentially created it in rulings during the later half of the 20th century (I want to say this was Roe v. Wade, but it may have been before).
Even if there is no criminal case (which, as I stated above, I'd be quite sure there is) she could always go civil. After all bugging someone else's computer and posting pictures of them undressing on the internet without their knowledge is definitely something you could get a civil judgment for. If that isn't intentional infliction of emotional distress, I'd be pretty surprised.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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.
Hmm it seems I landed in a pub. Have you ever driven beyond the speed limit? I suggest you be shot as well.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Right to privacy, as a conjectured right, dates back to the 1890s. The Supreme Court decision "Griswold v. Connecticut" (1965) established the idea that a "right to privacy" did exist. But (and this is true for Roe vs. Wade as well) the privacy spoken of there (however you feel about the rulings) has to do with the right of a citizen to have privacy from the government. The only laws which may have been violated may have been anti-stalking laws (enacted in the early 1990's) and (to cite California's) this does not seem to fit, "alarms, annoys, torments, or terrorizes the person, and that serves no legitimate purpose" as "two or more acts occurring over a period of time, however short, evidencing a continuity of purpose." As to civil suit, well, they have to prove damages. As far as I can tell, that could be solely dependent on what happened with the images. Those who had their computers trespassed upon would be lucky to get even a small amount of compensation.
http://www.allen-poole.com/
A little offtopic but I don't understand why people say there is no explicit "right to privacy" in American law. I wonder if this was a talking point invented for some political reason at one point that filtered out into the mass consciousness somehow.
Anyway, Amendment 4: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The word "privacy" is not used but this is a right to privacy in a large sense, isn't it? That the government can't search you, can't search your house, can't go through your papers, without a warrant?
This particular case is more of a civil action since the government didn't do it, but I find it a little unreasonable to say there is "no" right to privacy or that the Supreme Court "created" all our privacy rights, when there is clearly at least some privacy explicitly written in the Constitution.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
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
The constitution doesn't grant anything. It enjoins the government from taking certain actions.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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
Perhaps what I say next will end this 'privacy' argument once and for all, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
First you are combining two separate ideas, the common argument that the word 'privacy' is not in the constitution is true. HOWEVER, you say that privacy is never explicitly stated in any law, this is wrong. There are certainly many privacy laws that various states have that use the word privacy. Such as privacy laws to protect your medical records, financial records, some court records, etc.
Yes it is true that privacy is never explicitly stated as a right. But there is a reason for this. Privacy was not part of the venacular in 1700's colonies. Most writings during that time do not contain the word 'privacy'.
However, idea of privacy is certainly prevalent. Wouldn't you consider the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" very similar to the idea of privacy?
And I also must add, the Bill of Rights is only a list of some rights that we have, not the ONLY ones we have. Plus the ninth ammendment also states we have rights to things not specifically numerated in the constitution.
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.
Absolutely backwards. The Constitution grants powers to the government. Anything that's not in there, they can't do.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
This is true. The founders believed that we have inalienable rights, which means that they are granted by God, not the government. The government is not allowed to try to take them away.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
The Fourth Amendment provides for security in persons, papers, effects and so forth from the government. Even if you construe it to be a privacy provision, it's not binding on Joe Sleazeball's Krazy Komputer Krepair Kshop.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
Speaking as someone who actually RTFA...
Pfft.. party pooper! Way to end the discussion of slashdot lawyers with your "facts"!!
not performing the correct service (after all, by "fixing" the computer he made it slower)
I always figured it would be a federal offense to install Norton software.
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.
For those that don't believe in God, the same rights can be dervived through logic.
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.
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.
You may have said that as a joke, but Comcast is one step ahead of you. http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/managing-infosec/comcast-wants-to-put-a-video-camera-in-your-television-set-top-box-23242
Give the guy a break. Slashdotters have a hard enough time with the concept of "woman". Now you expect him to get the plural right?
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
We can't keep wasting tax dollars on court cases for stupidity, which is exactly where this case will go.
You should move to North Korea or China if that's the sort of country you want to live in. I prefer to live where you are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, and where the punishment fits the crime.
I'm sick of you assholes trying to turn my country into MORE of a police state. Shoot yourself for treason and save the government the trouble.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
> 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
Looks like Joe's is a KDE shop... where would I go for Gnome support?
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
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
> 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 who don't believe in either, there is His Noodly Appendage.
Yeah, a while back, when video recording equipment first got small and cheap enough for people to purchase, scum started using it to spy on women. This was back in the 80s and 90s, and it turned out while there were laws against recording conversations, which could be legally used to nail some of them, if they recorded just video (Which all of them immediately started doing.), there was actually no law against it.
But that was back in the 80s and 90s, and there were enough well-publicized cases of this happening that they changed the law.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Freemasonry traditionally requires belief in a deity. In fact, its religious syncretism (a member of any religion can join as long as they see their god as the same Great Architect of the Universe) is one of the reasons that the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches have been very critical of it. However, a few of the founding fathers were Deists, so they certainly believed in an invisible guy in the sky who granted rights as part of the natural order he created, but they simply didn't think he intervened.
Supreme Court decision "Griswold v. Connecticut"
I'm having trouble remembering ... which Vacation movie was that one again?
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Local paper article about this. Includes a picture!
Who the hell modded this insightful?
Amendment I: The government CAN NOT restrict religion or speech
Amendment II: The government CAN NOT restrict citizens from keeping arms
Amendment III: The government CAN NOT quarter soldiers in your house
Amendment IV: The government CAN NOT search and seize your affects without a warrent
etc.
Supreme Court decision "Griswold v. Connecticut"
I'm having trouble remembering ... which Vacation movie was that one again?
I think it was "The National Lampoons Right to Marital Privacy Regarding Illegal Restriction on the Use of Contraceptives in Connecticut Vacation"
You didn't see that one? ;)
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
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.
Amendments are still part of the constitution, so you can't just magically exclude them. Also, the 'main body' has limits listed in them as well:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.articlei.html#section9
"The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it."
"No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed."
And so on. Please stop acting like an expert on things that you are completely wrong on.
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.
> For those that don't believe in God, the same rights can be dervived through logic.
Which is unnecessary, as they were postulates.
"We hold the these truths to be self-evident:"