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Undercover Cameras Catch PC Repair Scams, Privacy Violations
Barence writes "With help from readers of PC Pro, Sky News in the UK launched an undercover investigation into rogue PC repair shops. As a result, Sky's cameras caught technicians scouring through private photos, stealing passwords and over-charging for basic repairs. It was a simple enough job: 'To create the fault, we simply loosened one of the memory chips so Windows wouldn't load. To get things working again, one needs only push the chip back into the slot and reboot the machine. Any half-way competent engineers should fix it in minutes.' But these technicians had other ideas, stealing photos and documents, as well as login details for email and bank accounts."
I don't know a lot of halfway competent engineers who are PC Repair men.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Stupid geek squad!
apt-get install redhat please god - Me (take it easy, I love Debian)
No one should be surprised at this. People snoop and overcharge. If you want your privacy respected, don't give anyone else access to your computer. If you don't want to be overcharged, learn a thing or two about your PC so you can fix it yourself.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I'm not surprised, sad to say - people can be very unscrupulous - but how do you prevent this? Under *NIX, you can separate a lot of your data from the OS. But under Windows, with its registry, it's a little more difficult.
If I couldn't fix it myself, I'd at least put in a blank drive before I took it in to a repair center.
Truth, Justice. Or the American Way.
This is what happens when you skip over qualified technicians to hire high school students or college dropouts who are 'good with computers' to save a little money.
Perhaps these companies should be sued, each and every one of them, for privacy violations. Maybe when the risk of hiring unqualified technicians is too high, they'll actually start to hire people with certifications and/or degrees for a sane amount of money.
No, $7.25/hr isn't a sane amount of money for a computer technician in the US.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
FTA... "Yet he then begins browsing through our hard drive. A folder marked 'Private' is opened and he flicks through our researcher's holiday photographs, including intimate snaps of her wearing a bikini. He stares at picture after picture, stopping only to show them to colleagues. He then picks up the phone and calls our researcher. He tells her our motherboard is faulty and will need to be replaced. Usually it costs £130 but he'll do it for £100. We tell him we'll think about it and call him tomorrow." Wonder what the press left out of this one?!?!?!
stealing photos and documents, as well as login details for email and bank accounts
Address book lists, songs, movies, p0rn....
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
While the stuff all the reports are picking up on is certainly not good, the most shocking bit is near the end of the article:
Meanwhile, at Evnova Computers in Barbican the loose memory chip was also spotted and fixed. But the company also told us we needed a new motherboard. We declined the offer and collected our laptop. When we examined it, we discovered technicians had soldered the memory bus pins together to recreate the original fault. Evnova later claimed it believed we were from a rival repair company.
So they catch onto the fact that it's not a genuine customer and they think that a bit of criminal damage is the best thing to do?
...only in the chubby threads...
-- Ethanol-fueled. Captcha: conquered
Before you do anything, image the drive. Sorry if that means stealing their porn and personal documents. More sorry I have to cover my ass with every goddamned clueless windows user!
You mean to tell me the kind of shop that would charge $50 to install a stick of RAM might behave in a less than ethical manner? NO!
I know HP does it. I don't know of anyone else, but they tell you not to send the hard drive in with your computer for warranty items. I myself would want to stand there while the technician fixed it. I don't let contractors into my house when I'm not there and this is the exact same thing.
All tower cases should come with a diagnostic boot drive. The days of feeding IDE and SATA cables and screwing hard drives into place has to stop. The tech to make snap in hard drives has been there for a long time.
I keep a cheap HD with KNOPPIX Maxi ready. I would always swap it in, if I ever bothered to let a hardware tech touch my machine. I have in the past, but only because they can diagnose motherboard issues and I cannot.
Too bad there are companies like this out there, when i stopped working for a PC repair shop (espically when i stopped doing alot of repair work on the side), I had alot of my old customers ask me if they should keep taking their systems back to the same shop, or to another shop. The best advice i could give them for hardware related problems was to tell whoever was fixing the systems, that they wanted any original hardware returned to them.
Software, always been a problem... anything you store on your systems is fair game to whoever is fixing it. The best advice i was able to give to my old customers for their sensitive information was not to store it on the computer at all. Pick up a couple thumb drives and store any documents, passwords, etc... on those drives to keep it seperate.
Im sure there are more of us out there that have given the same advice.
As a computer technician myself (and no, I'm not just "good with computers"), people have asked me to back up anything and everything I can find, i.e. pictures, word documents, etc.
In order to do my job, I must sometimes look through the computer (i.e. Windows Search or just browsing through directories on the root of the drive). If I happen to run into nude pictures of the person I am fixing the computer for, then I treat them like any other picture and back them up.
Heck, next thing the media's going to say is that using simple password editors/removers to get into Windows accounts for repairs is wrong.
How do you steal passwords from a computer? Login details for Facebook and bank accounts, were they saved in a Notepad file or something? I don't understand this part.
When I used to repair computers, we almost always looked at the customer's porn cache. I never looked for financial data, no interest in it but if you had a stash of hot asian girl porn, it was getting pilfered.
I upgraded my system to 1GB of RAM which it recognized properly. But after using it for about 3 weeks, I got a "PCI.SYS is corrupt or missing" error on boot.
When I called my support folks, I was told that I would need to either replace the motherboard or reinstall Windows XP. These are folks I had told what I had done to the system including the RAM upgrade. In any case, I would have had to spend in excess of US$220!
What I did was to remove the "offending" RAM and everything was good as normal.
My question though is why would the system work for three weeks before throwing the PCI.SYS error?
I wouldn't leave bills in my car if I was going to a car mechanic, and I don't always trust them when they tell me something is wrong with my car without getting a second opinion. Why would it be any different in other similar industries?
It's not just the techs who are incompetent. The users who put personal information in something that they give to someone else put themselves at risk.
IMHO, introduction to PC anatomy and troubleshooting should be mandatory in the high school curriculum in today's day and age, and would go a long way to mitigating the problem.
They had to get the computer working to rummage through the private stuff, right?
(yeah, I know they could yank the drive and put it in another machine but run with it for a minute here...)
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
You should have STUCK IT IN HER POOPER!!
Keep that in mind next time you marry!
Wait... so what you are saying, is that there are dishonest people in the world who will steal or invade your privacy if they feel they won't get caught?
Thanks for this new and amazing "research".
If you aren't smart enough to do it yourself, you pay for it. Plain and simple. I don't bitch when I have to pay to get my car scanned when the check engine light comes on. It doesn't take much work there either, plug a device in, (maybe) turn the car on and read the error code from the device. The newer readout's will even pinpoint the problem now, not just tell some random diagnostic code that has to be looked up. Some of those places charge up to $100 just for the scan, particularly if you opt to not have any work done. Seems to me that's comparable to paying $50 if you're afraid of opening your case and installing memory on your system.
THANK YOU! Seriously I get so sick of people bitching and complaining about the "techs" at places like Geek Squad. You get what you pay for, when I worked there none of us were making over $10 an hour, and I being the new part time guy made I $7.50. Now this is no license to steal people's things, but it certainly explains why sub-par service is provided all around. If you are paying less than $15 an hour you are either getting somebody who is unqualified, or in the case of the guys I worked with simply didn't care.
1) Collect images of goatse, lemonparty, etc
2) Move to folder marked "Private"
3) Loosen memory chip
4) Bring computer to snoopy repair shop.
5) Laugh as crooked tech's scream "Augghh, my eyes!"
(there is no ???, but there also is no profit. Sorry)
I am a little confused about the first part of the story. It says: Yet the spy software later revealed something extraordinary. The webcam shows that almost immediately the technician discovers our loose memory chip and clicks it back into position [based on recorded boot and shut down times]." How did the webcam record how the technician opened the laptop and snapped the memory module back in place? I assume it was not the webcam but the log files that told the story?
thats what you get if you give children a console instead of a pc.
they do not learn how a computer works... and
they wind up sending a broken pc to a repair shop instead of fixing it them selves.
I don't like to do PC work for people that I work with. Just to keep things professional. So I sent some work to a friend of mine who was looking for some work. Initially he did a great job, and several people started spreading the word and got him a few more jobs. After a year or so, I started hearing complaints. Jobs not being done right or slowly, couldn't contact him, or couldn't get their machine back. One person at work ended up taking him to small claims court to get their computer back.
I found out later he was addicted to WOW and that was what was causing him to be a knob.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
Most of these technician services are quite dodgy. For every one that offers honest service at a fair price, there are a hundred like the above, or like Geek Squad.
Here are some choice bits:
Set up a wireless router with encryption (=WEP, probably) = $150
Securely add another device to the above (=type in pass.) = $90
OS Upgrade and Update (=install Win and run wind. update) = $90
Data transfer up to 9.4 GB (=burn two prol. cheapo DVD-R) = $60
Online console setup (=config router for 360 to get Live) = $150
It is ridiculous that this is the state of the market - unqualified techs charging enormous amounts of money for trivial tasks. I realize that there are some honest, upstanding people in these companies, but the mass of those who are not drown the out. It is sad really, as I know some very qualified people who run a very honest and fairly priced business doing support/repairs, but they are bypassed by uninformed users who run to Geek Squad because 'at these prices you must be doing something dodgy'.
Just an example of in this case images copied from a laptop that was taken for repair. For anyone living in Hong Kong or following Cantopop, just think "Edison Chen". You will know what I'm talking about, it has been all over the media for a long long time.
For the rest of us: this is a famous singer/actor/etc around here. He took his laptop for repair once, and a year or so ago photos of him having sex with female stars started to appear on the Internet. Copied off of his laptop by the repairman who started snooping around the data on the hard disk after the repairs were finished. This repairman has got a jail term for that, by the way. And it all ballooned in the biggest entertainment story of cantopop in 2008, and probably the biggest in cantopop history.
For links: just search for "edison chen" on google. The first top-100 or so are about this scandal.
Make friends with a computer geek, so you can ask him to fix your computer for you, for free, as a personal favor.
It also seems that if you have a computer geek in the family, such favors are obligatory by default, without any friendly reciprocation required.
I used to not mind (being the geek, that is). I got bitter about it after enough people were only friendly to me when they need something, and basically ignored me otherwise. Only once did an attractive woman who I had been trying to date string me along to get computer repair services for her parents. I dropped her like a hot i7 with silicone thermal paste.
This is why I do my own tech support. And tech support for everyone I know...
Encrypt everything and stop worrying. TrueCrypt is free.
Not to advocate the devil, but a few years ago, a local radio jockey was arrested when computer repair people found child porn on his laptop when he sent it in for work. I'm not sure if it was a blatant act of intrusion or if he was a complete idiot and left it out in the open, but it does show that sometimes it can do good. On that note, all people who meddle in the privacy of others deserve harsh punishment. Stealing passwords is in the realm of computer criminals, and shows what these people are: criminals. Don't trust the repair men... unless you already nuked the system.
Cheers, DH.
Here in Argentina. Sometimes the shops run out of spare parts. Then they take someone else almost functioning laptop and take the good parts out. They fix one computer and wait for the spare parts to arrive for repairing the lobotomized laptop. If they arrive, they will charge you for the old and new parts. If not, they would return your computer saying that they had not been able to repair it. So you get back your computer with far more problems than before.
I then make an image of the hard drive then wipe it saying "sorry i found a key logger and rootkit spyware on the laptop so I had to wipe it..." It's up to the customer to make sure they have a backup...
I can then browse the image at my leisure, on machine not connected to any network..
Then I offer to recover their data from the hard drive for £200 and come back in the morning...(I just take the copy form the image i made earlier) easy money! ^__^
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
Are there similar horror stories about car repair?
...are a bunch of assholes give us GOOD repairmen bad names.
I wonder how many times he got away with this, taking the extra cash for himself. I reported the scam to his boss, but the boss wasn't very excited about it. He was probably in on the scam, too. Heck, it was probably his idea. Most office customers wouldn't know 2G RAM from a RAID array. Just another example of the sort of automatic fraud from vendors that you have to constantly be aware of in China (and elsewhere).
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Yeah, but were they in /s/, or /d/?
Mod me "troll" if you want but there is nothing magical about computers. If someone feels it's not worth their time and effort to learn how computers work, that's their prerogative. But, when they make the choice to remain ignorant, they need to man up and accept that this is going to cost them. They will be at the complete mercy of people who made the effort to understand how these devices work.
Heck, I can tear down an engine and rebuild it if I want but I choose to pay other people to do that kind of work for me. The fact that I understand how engines work gives me the ability to screen mechanics and find one who won't rip me off. One who will just do the work that needs to be done and charge for the true value of that work.
I honestly can't comprehend people who don't take the time to learn how things work. These days, most white collar jobs require extensive use of computers. People rely on these devices to feed their families and put a roof over their heads yet they make no effort to understand how they work. It's ... I have no words. I just don't understand how people can be content to live in a fog of ignorance.
I was an honest repair technician back in the 80's. Most times the repairs were the Mac OS, a dirty keyboard switch or the user tried yanking the 3.5 with pliers. The company was sold and the new owner told me that when a system came in, I should always replace something. I did not comply and when I was up for a raise he gave me 10 cents more per hour. I told him to keep his fucking raise and a few days later I was fired. At the unemployment office I fought it, they quized him and I was able to collect because my record was spotless. Thank you carma.
..is perfect in every way with eight 2.93 GHz cores
You, good sir (or is it bad troll), are wrong. Your Mac Pro doesn't have two eight core Xeons, it has two four core Xeons with HyperThreading enabled. If you're going to troll get your facts right.
BSD is for people who love Unix, Linux is for people who hate Microsoft.
" Any half-way competent engineers should fix it in minutes.' But these technicians had other ideas, stealing photos and documents, as well as login details for email and bank accounts."
Figures...I keep hearing these "technicians" "technologists" and "engineers" refer to themselves by these fancy titles. Most of them don't even know that these titles in some countries, carry responsibilities, and licensing requirements.
"Engineers" "technicians" and "technologists" in Canada anyway, need to be licensed to call themselves such. Anyone going through the rigorous schooling and licensing procedure would probably not bother doing such petty crimes, risking losing their license, or getting reported.
But then again, joe sixpack who can reseat a RAM chip, and program in visual basic is an engineer...and so is the guy from the local geek squad..
To get things working again, one needs only push the chip back into the slot and reboot the machine. Any half-way competent engineers should fix it in minutes.'
This isn't as bad as some of these "exposes" they run on PC repair shops, but I would dispute it should take minutes to fix. For a start, you need to open the case first, which you're probably not going to do until you've tried to see if you can solve the problem without opening the case (maybe it's a BIOS or OS problem). It's not like checking the ram is seated properly is the first thing you'd check and it's not like the BIOS will come up with a "RAMs not seated properly" message.
I remember another similar set up a while back where they'd plugged the IDE cable in backwards. Again, if somebody brings in a computer that has stopped working, the first thing you think of is not going to be that the IDE cable has magically turned itself backwards again.
Having said all that, let me make it clear that these people (the PC repair people) are still scumbags. I had a computer from BestBuy that was still under warranty that had damage to the power supply and motherboard (you could see the burn marks on the connectors). BestBuy's Geek Squad tried to tell me that I had a virus and need to buy their anti-virus.
I've been thinking about this for a while. There are quite a few stores that offer a free computer checkup. They don't fix it they just scan and recommend that you purchase their software.
What if my computer was a heavily encrypted Free BSD system that was skinned to look like windows perhaps using some bizarre file system.
I was talking to a friend of mine who, like myself, does local PC contract work. He charges a bit more than me and in discussing that one day he started talking about the various reasons he felt his costs were fair. Partly it is a regional difference as well as he has been doing it longer. But the big thing that I felt, knowing his clients as he often will consult with me on things, was trust.
Given that I'm sure that there are others in his area that could do his work for a lower fee his clients are very loyal. Rather thou the trust that they have in him is worth the extra money.
I even used a car analogy. Saying that he was like a trusted mechanic. Since most people don't know much about computers when something is wrong with them, like a car for someone who is not a mechanic, as the repairman you can lie with near impunity as to what is wrong. Or just describe the problem as it really is in such overwhelming technical detail that it sounds much worse than it really is.
I don't think any of us who have been around are very surprised that this goes on. From the moment PCs when mainstream I've seen sleazy repair shop after sleazy repair shop doing the same kinds of things. And it makes it all the easier for me to retain customers given that by doing honest work I build up a trust with them.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
There are cases, however, where you have to poke around a bit to get a job done right.
I've had quite a number of (private) customers bring me machines with dead drives with important files after the bigger shops couldn't fix them. Sometimes the old "stick it in a ziplock in the freezer" trick works with stuck bearings etc.
In a lot of cases, getting the drive up and running was step 1. Step 2 was dealing with various issues of data corruption etc etc. In a lot of cases a disk with issues is a lot easier to restore when you connect it via a USB adaptor (when a drive goes down on a regular bus the machine gets pissy, but USB just disappears and reappears), but you still end up with possibly munged files etc. The last step, therefore, is usually to comb around a bit and check to make sure you actually got legit files back, and not a bunch of garbled or zero-padded crap. One tries to restrict such things to inane seeming files, but you do run across some interesting filenames on some occasions.
One thing I've learned after restoring several different peoples' drives. Word documents seem to be less likely to come back than ODF. Porn (mpeg format) is probably the most resilient to corruption though. It's both a bit sad and amusing having to hand back a drive and telling the owner: "about 50% of your documents were corrupt and unrecoverable, but your porn collection is in good shape." Luckily, most people are more interested in family pictures, etc, and JPEG's aren't too bad with surviving minor filesystem or corruption issues.
Back in the days when all computers were mainframes, a company's computer stopped working, so they hired a consultant to fix it. The consultant walked in, took out a small hammer and tapped the computer, which started working. He billed the company $1000.
The CEO was outraged, and demanded that a detailed bill be sent. The bill came back:
Tapping computer with small hammer - $1
Knowing where to tap - $999
Free Martian Whores!
It is something Costco has discovered: They have less shrinkage (theft) than normal. Why? They pay their employees well and have good benefits. Thus while it doesn't mean nobody ever steals from them, it means it happens less than at similar stores. The reason is threefold:
1) People like and care about their job more because it pays well, and thus don't want to do things that might mess it up. So even if they are somewhat morally dubious, they may elect not to risk their job.
2) Their employees have more money and thus less incentive to steal. When you are flat broke, theft can seem like a good option. When you can afford what you want, it isn't as attractive.
3) They have more goodwill towards their employer. They feel like their employer cares about them so they care about their employer. Most people have a much easier time screwing someone over if they don't know them or dislike them.
It really DOES seem to work. Also, it tends to reduce turnover. With minimum wage, you have an extremely high turnover rate. People come and go all the time. As you increase pay, you increase the amount of time people will stay with you. The reason this matters to an employer is that it costs money to train new employees. Even on menial jobs, you don't walk in and have 100% efficiency on day one. This applies even if you've done similar work before. Every setup is different, it takes time to train up people.
Again something Costco has discovered. The interesting thing is that the two factors (lower theft and turnover) seem to add up for them and largely offset the higher costs for employees. Yes, they pay out more, but it reduces other costs and thus doesn't end up hitting the bottom line as much as you might first expect.
What kills me is that in the article they state they picked the worst shops w/ bad reputations. Well duh there gonna be bad, how is this even news? You don't see to many food critics review places they know are awful? Better, would you read an article about how prision imates tend to commit crimes?
This is the reason why you need to learn some basic knowledge and educate yourself so you can either do the repair yourself or know how to identify when you are being owned. Not only does this type of underhanded business practice happened in Tech but it has been going on for years in the automotive sector. I have had my car dealership try to talk me into letting them change my air filter until I saw what they were going to charge me for it (over $60); considering I can go buy a replacement air filter for around $20 and spent 5-10 min changing it out myself.
That may sound a lot, but how much does your average lawyer charge you to state the obvious? or to read something and slightly change the wording so it's less full of jargon?
At least the geek squad guy has to actually move from his chair to rip you off.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
it's wonderful that you can tear down an engine and fix a computer. Hurrah.
Are you also an expert plasterer, electrician, plumber, heating engineer, chef, tv repairman, Telecoms expert, architect, building surveyor, Doctor, paramedic, psychiatrist, physiotherapist, salesperson, accountant and lawyer?
Because if not, and you have not trained to a professional standard in every one of those disciplines, at some point in your life, you will be at the mercy of one of those experts and totally dependent on their advice and expertise.
That goes for everyone of us, and it's not unreasonable to expect that people who provide such services do so honestly and ethically.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
For the purposes of a PC repairman, computers are far simpler than cars. You might have to adjust the valve springs on a car's engine or find out why the VVT isn't working, but if a CPU was causing a PC to crash randomly you'd just swap the whole thing out, and changing a CPU is FAR easier than changing an engine. Unless you want to get down to using a soldering iron and multimeter, repairing computers could never be anywhere near as difficult as repairing cars.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You too should get it right. All Mac Pro come with HypeMachine, not HyperThreading.
They should put hidden fees in their bills.
Want me to work on your machine?
$5 hidden expense for handling of machine.
$2 for for processing the hidden fee.
$5 for storage of the machine per day.
$7 for weekend storage.
$1.50 for phone notification
$2 for email notification
%19 charge for Optional US required regulatory regulators usage tax
Would you like us to plant a tree in your name (IE throw a seed out the window while im driving to the bank) $25
$10 Data usage fee
While not excusing the criminal behavior, I love it when people create a problem that just doesn't ever happen in the real world then point to the techs for being dumb. What I mean is, I've seen memory modules go bad, but I've NEVER seen memory modules work themselves out of a slot. They click in there and stay. I've seen monitor power cords work themselves out, memory chips go bad, but never a memory module. Another repair tech expose took an old PATA ribbon cable and cut some wires. That wasn't a real test either. PATA cables are not a wear item. If they do go bad, it is a result of recent handling and is detected immediately. While you know the problem, the techs have the opposite problem - their experience works against them. So when simulating an error, please make it plausible.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Specialization of labor is what has allowed our society to progress as it has.
This is something that has always annoyed me about many geek types is that they seem to think it perfectly reasonable for everyone to be required to be a computer expert. They'll proclaim that everyone should know how to fix their hardware, be comfortable with a command line, know enough programming to fix a bad makefile and buggy C++ code and so on. However these are the same people that usually can't cook a meal. For some reason they believe that THEIR skillset is something the whole world should have, even though they have little skill outside of it.
I don't know about the area that they investigated, but most PC repair techs (NOT engineers, if there is such a thing) are lucky to get paid $10-$12/hr in many areas, at least in the US. Given that the market is flooded by that people like that kid who did a website for his uncle and thinks that he's a PC master given that he's the one who figured out how to download mp3s without his parents finding out... If PC repair shops actually paid for real engineers, rather than techs - I'd be surprised to see this kind of thing, but given the fast food attitude in the PC repair world, it's really not surprising.
Graduate students and most professors are no smarter than undergrads.
They're just older.
The CBC did a documentary called "Getting Gouged by Geeks" of precisely the same thing, with almost precisely the same fault - Instead of loosening the chip, the module itself was blown in such a way that the computer didn't power on. Unfortunately, CBC had high standards - even one guy who had figured it out, and honestly fixed it, was considered to be "gouging" because he only had a larger module than what needed replacing - Let's not even mention that they expected him to do a house call for free and give them a memory module for the going price online. There were plenty of examples of others who weren't so legit, though.
You can see it here. Interestingly, Slashdot ran a story on it.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
Stealing passwords, rooting through 'interesting' pictures aside, I take issue with these 'exposes' on bad techs. Whether its PC techs, automotive techs, or whatever. We (I was a PC repair tech for a few years) do not expect sabotage.
A memory module does not become loose. There is no reason to expect that is the problem - at least not initially. And even if the loose module is found right away, only an overworked tech with a don't care attitude would let it leave the bench without running some kind of diagnostics (at least memtest for a while) to ensure the module wasn't further damaged by being partially inserted.
And running diagnostics costs - even if I'm not doing anything. Having a PC on the bench ties up a place where I can be working on someone else's problem. If I can't work on someone's PC because your's is running a diagnostic or install or some other long running process, then guess whose paying the bill? YOU.
As for snooping through files, that's not professional, but even professionals are human. You're sitting there waiting for an error or problem. Maybe you are stumped. You need a mental break, something catches your attention on the computer. It happens.
Stealing data, even copying music, pic's etc. Now that is bad and should be exposed and the places shut down.
I'm in my right mind and I have the answer to everything!
Always test new RAM before relying on it, even when you're using ECC memory. It doesn't take long, it's free, and saves you a lot of time later. Memtest86 is an excellent free tool for testing memory. Just burn it onto a CD, boot up with it, and let it run for a new minutes.
including directly with one of the companies mentioned (i work dealer support for a large OEM) and most of them are plebians, with no knowledge and very little love or enjoyment of their jobs. what's crazy is that if you *want* them to do this (i.e. data rescue), i've seen PC world quote GBP600 for a simple slaving of the drive to another machine.
please restate bitrate in libraries of congress per hour.
Heck, I made mahogany row and I'd be perfectly happy running my own little PC repair business. Sure it's less money but it's also way less stress. Still looking longingly at the A+ class at our local community college but they don't offer anything for data recovery. I've built PC's for years, but there have to be better diagnostic techniques than the one I use. Replacing components until I find the bad one.
Do you guys know if there any good boot camp type training programs for data recovery? That would be interesting, too.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I initially started in the IT field working for myself doing computer and minor networking work for individuals and small businesses. I was always surprised at how well I was received as I was pretty young and, admittedly, not as knowledgeable as I am now. Turns out that these people were thrilled with my service because they had either had an awful experience with an IT company before or had heard of someone who had. I think that a lot of customers who weren't necessarily knowledgeable about computers were still perceptive enough to know that they weren't being ripped off (and, when with certain previous IT companies, were being ripped off).
Fast forward a bit and I've held a number of different positions in the IT industry. I got out of PC repair because I really don't enjoy directly charging customers for service, even if it was fair, dependable service). I have found in my travels that a lot of folks started out in a similar manner as myself. This leads me to my eventual point (my apologies, kind of rambling here!), which is that it's tough to make much as a PC repairman unless you own/mnage the company. And, if you do own/manage the company you're probably not actually repairing computers. Thus, your PC is more than likely being repaired by someone who's either entry-level or incompetent. While salary and experience level don't excuse the privacy/morality violations they do help explain the incompetence they ran into in TFA.
Most PC's brought into a shop are infected with something, this one intentionally, and it would have been grinding the disk from the continuous video writes. I'm surprised no one looked for and found their spyware. Reseat ram + grinding == bad chip and it's swapping? Just another virus ridden windows pc? I wouldn't have suspected intentionally installed spyware, but I would have checked for the malicious type and I'd like to think I'da found their spyware and informed them of it.
..is perfect in every way with eight 2.93 GHz cores
Your Mac Pro doesn't have two eight core Xeons, it has two four core Xeons with HyperThreading enabled.
I know he's a troll, but he didn't say he had two eight-core Xeons, he said he had eight cores. Which matches up with what you say about him having two four-core Xeons.
2 x 4 = 8.
SIG FAULT: Post index out of bounds.
Google has been the best mechanic I've ever had. :)
This is why everyone, including desktop users, need to truecrypt all your data.
Don't truecrypt the OS partition, just your data.
dumb ass this was in the UK not at a Best Buy
[URL="http://www.thepittsburghchannel.com/technology/19462493/detail.html"]Stupid Geek Squad Indeed![/URL]
People snoop, they overcharge. If you want your privacy respected, don't give anyone else access to your car. Otherwise, don't be surprised if the mechanics bug your vehicle and listen in whenever they please.
There's something wrong with this picture, but I don't think it's a bad analogy.
and I hate guys who screw customers. I charge a flat $30/hr, and it's free if the problem isn't fixed (in 6 years, that's never happened). I don't do any advertising, except by word of mouth. I have no dissatisfied customers.
Phone time is free (for now; if it's abused I'll change that) and I'll do anything.
These tech guys are dishonest. They give us all a bad name.
That being said, so does the news corp. If Windows isn't starting, it'll take me at least an hour (probably more) to figure out that it's screwed ram, particularly because most of these problems are software issues. Hardware rarely fails; a non-booting windows is usually disk corruption or a virus. So I'd yank the drive and chkdsk it first, which usually fixes it, then try booting a recovery CD (or flash) and check the ram when that failed.
When people delibrately screw up the computer (heard a story about a backwards IDE cable...) you can't be expected to find it instantly. You can fix everybody else's problems faster if you go for the common stuff faster. But when the news says "dishonest!!" people believe it for the same reason they call us in the first place - they don't know any better!
Still doesn't excuse the douchebag who tried to skim the bank info, though. The only reason I look through data is to see if it needs to be backed up - most people don't know where everything is stored.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
If you take that recording, and show it around, you have violated the privacy of the recorded people.
If you then go out to show everyone the "privacy violations, you *recorded*, you haven't understood anything.
Only in the UK, where cameras already start to be seen as something "normal", can someone have such a huge discrepancy in logic.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Fixing cars also requires a suitable place to work and a few $100 of specialized tools just to get started. Lots of luck finding a place to work on your car in the dead of winter in Minnesota (or other northern area) when you live in an apartment. Things needed to swap out a CPU: 1. Desk, table, or floor area. 2. Screwdriver (maybe). 3. New CPU. 4. Arctic Silver. 5. 15 minutes. Things needed to swap out an engine: 1. Garage or parking area. Heated garage if it's winter. 2. Screwdrivers, wrenches, sockets, ratchets, air compressor, impact wrench, engine hoist, etc. 3. New engine. 4. Replacement fluids and filters. 5. A couple days?
Wouldn't 'tuning a car' equate to fixing some bugs or improving performance of any random software or the operating system on the PC? When you limit the PC repair to hardware issues the solution tends to be 'replace hardware'. If you otoh are a real PC repair man you need to know how to reverse engineer and patch some legacy software made by companies who gone under.
And on same token, the software I need fixing happens to use some obscure custom hardware. You need to be able to fix that too.
UK, US, what's the difference? They're both populated by overweight lazy assholes who speak English.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Co-workers used to always bring in their home computers for me to fix (for free), because as the database and web guy, I "knew" computers.
So I always did searches for *.jpg on their machines. It's interesting to see the pr0n preferences of your co-workers. Some of the people you would least suspect have some of the most extensive and unusual pr0n collections.
Plus I managed to snag some good co-worker, girlfriend & wife porn as well. It's astounding how clueless people are about the visibility of "secret" files on their computers.
Actually, my guess would be that they did a bad soldering job and screwed up the motherboard, then tried to lie about it when they got caught...
Unlike the US system it is not the worst in the developed world.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
Why would someone give personal photos and documents to a PC repair technician along with their computer? What technician would even accept a pile of papers and photos from someone who's bringing in a computer to get fixed?
That's a new one on me. I do know old datsuns (I have one now) use hydraulic clutches though, and that reservoir uses brake fluid, but it isn't attached to the brake master cylinder at all, totally separate.
When I replaced my PC this last time I decided to migrate my Internet Explorer and Firefox profiles so I'd not loose my bookmarks.
I was amazed how simple it was to do. In IE I did file/export and exported Favorites and cookies. Then on the new computer all my stored passwords worked. That is very scary. Any time I leave my PC unlocked and walk away, any stored password could be stolen. Firefox was even easier. Copy the profile directory from one C: to another.
That also means any administrator on my network can also steal this information. The thing to learn from this is to never store passwords or account info in Firefox/Internet Explorer.
Actually I did it. I couldn't resist teasing 4chan with my new manicure.
Signed,
Your Right Hand
Some places only want techs that can upsell extended warranty and other carp and cut the hours of the people who don't rip people off.
Just look at how bad places like staples are http://consumerist.com/5048382/why-i-quit-staples-easy-tech, http://consumerist.com/362708/staples-tries-to-charge-senior-citizen-390-for-basic-computer-repair
That is what you get when you rank people by how they sell and have boss who have little to no idea about how tech works.
At small non chin place that I am at this person ones came in and there laptop did not work and it was fixed by just resetting the ram and he only had to pay $10.
"Because those $100K jobs are few and far between and usually go to people with connections. Don't believe those salary surveys."
Don't be ridiculous. If you are competent and have 10 years in the field, the only reason you don't earn 100K is because you either live in the sticks, or just aren't very competent, or both.
I'd say about 90% of the computer (software) problems can be fixed by searching on google. And about 90% of the hardware problems can be easily fixed if you take the time to put together your own PC and learn what the hardware does and how it should operate. It's EASY - I built my own PC at age 14 by myself not really knowing anything about hardware. Just RTFM!!!