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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 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.
Probably saved passwords in Firefox or whatever equivalent they were using. If you are not using a master password, one can just hit 'show passwords' to get em all.
Since most people don't like typing their passwords in each time, if someone has used a particular browser for a long time, it can be a goldmine of access info and details.
Firefox:
Tools->Options->Security->Saved Passwords->Show Passwords
This is only a trivial example.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Not quite from the article, but from an article linked to by it at the bottom of the story:
"...Inside one of the documents copied to the memory stick was a text file containing passwords for Facebook, Hotmail, eBay and a NatWest bank account.
Once the technician had discovered this information, he opened a web browser on the laptop and attempted to log into the back account for around five minutes.
The only reason he was unsuccessful was because the details were fake....."
If it's a RAM problem, and there's no way to tell in this case without further testing, it can manifest itself in all kinds of unusual ways. Random errors like this can happen. Instant reboots can happen, blue screens, general failures to boot, corrupted data, etc.
Easy enough to take the chip out and test it in a known-good computer using memtest, though.
Motherboard RAM-handling issues can sometimes pop up as well, especially if that particular RAM is the straw that broke the camel's back and overloads your power supply. If the port or controller is damaged, it can look similar to wonky RAM.
Of course, we all know that Windows is perfectly stable, too.
Either of those options they gave could possibly be correct. There's no way to tell without troubleshooting, though.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
But the article mentions a sample bias. They asked readers what the worst PC Repair shops were before they investigated.
[blockquote]Oh and you're not a very good repairer if you're just guessing at parts. If you can't tell the difference between a broken power supply, motherboard, or ram then you don't know what you're doing[/blockquote]
I don't know, there are funky things that can happen.
For instance, I had a machine that would randomly reboot, windows error messaging pointed to a chipset failure. So, I swapped ram, but the machine kept rebooting, so I swapped processor. This didn't fix the issue so i tried a new motherboard, the pc still kept rebooting. I decided to go ahead and pull the mobo from the chasis and run it on a cardboard box before replacing any more parts. I turned the mobo on with a screw driver. The computer never rebooted and ran flawlessly. I put it back in the case and it began rebooting again. I disconnected the power switch wire. It didn't exhibit this problem. I found out after all that work, it was a faulty power switch!
Sometimes you just can't tell by the symptoms what the problem is, and even following reasonable troubleshooting steps you sometimes just waste time.
I have to completely disagree here with computers being more complex than cars for repairs. Realistically there are a handful of components on a computer that you ever need to deal with. In a weeks course you could teach someone with any sort of aptitude towards eletronics how to fix 99.9% of issues, because in the end its find out what's not working as you think it should, open a box and snap in the new part. Compare that to a car where you may need to diagonose things such as cylinder compression, belt timing, rebuild transmissions, and scores of other things. We're not talking Jiffy Lube stuff, but actual repairs and tuning. There's no comparison when it comes to the amount of knowledge aquired.
Don't compare computer design and manufacturing with repairing.
Because those $100K jobs are few and far between and usually go to people with connections. Don't believe those salary surveys. Those that have great paying jobs are easy to find. Those that have given up on engineering because they can't get a job or have low paying jobs are generally not as easy to find and therefore excluded from the surveys. Result: Surveys don't represent reality.
How do I know this? I have a master's degree in chemical engineering plus my state EIT (Engineer In Training) cert, but have been working in the computer field since 1997. I got laid off and couldn't get another engineering job. I spent 3 years trying. I've since quit the engineering profession. I have made more as a computer tech than I did as an engineer. I've got a neighbor who has a BS in chemical engineering, and his experience mirrors mine. He does not want his kids going into engineering. Even when I was working as an engineer, my coworkers would often gather and read the salary surveys and laugh at them.
Plenty of old cars shared a reservoir for the brake and power steering fluids.
Ahh the crux of the matter :) (aside from the WGA jibe)
The point is that a tech had to allocate desk time (at least where I work, we charge for desk time, not the techs time, since the tech will be back and fourth between about 4 computers constantly) to fixing this, not to mention finding a deliberately sabotaged component (and sabotaged in a way that is NOT A COMMON FAULT) then testing to see if windows was harmed by the faulty part (usually if a machine runs for a while with memory errors it will corrupt at least a handful of windows files if you are lucky, the registry if your not).
How this diagnosis would go at my pc shop...
1, try booting
2, try booting linux live CD
3, open case, find loose ram
4, try booting windows again
5, boot from a windows CD and do at least 3 chkdsk (at least get 2 clean scans)
6, run prime95 on it overnight to make sure its all happy
6.5 if at any time a prime95 pass fails or windows doesn't boot, load windows CD and do windows repair for XP or SFC for Vista, if it still fails, load linux CD and dupe data to NAS in preparation for reinstall (we do this regardless of if the customer asks us to, the amount of times we get asked after a "wipe-reinstall" if their email is still there...)
7, charge customer $99AU for the fault.
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