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Man Finds Divorce Papers, Tax Docs On "New" Laptop
An anonymous reader writes "25-year-old Hidayat Sudirman found that his new laptop came loaded with more than just the usual software, it also contained 10GB of someone else's documents. From the article: "A buyer on the lookout for a new laptop got more than he bargained for at his local computer fair when the 'new' device came loaded with over 10GB of personal documents — including divorce papers and tax returns."
I think I saw an article a while back that IBM was going to add even more bloatware and start including "starter docs" to take the guess work out of creating day-to-day files and records. That's not personal data, those are "templates".
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1 - The seller got his hand on a bunch of identical, lightly-used machines and decided to resell 'em as "new". Creep.
---or
2 - The seller imaged a bunch of boxes from a used machine (with the end in view of not having to register/activate multiple copies of Windows) - i.e., the seller is pushing a pirated version of Windows with his new machines. Creep.
I just got a "new" Boxee Box from Amazon that had some one's name in the accounts. To bad he didn't subscribe to Netflix. How come big business can sell used things as new?
If I return something. It should never be able to be sold as new again!
* Carthago Delenda Est *
The divorce papers spelt his own name. That futuristic laptop, top-spec and top-notch in every possible detail, was actually a gift from the future. And after reading through some pages of the divorce settlement, he called his fiancée and cancelled the marriage.
As if by magic, the laptop was now empty. He would not be able to show the nifty features of Office 2018 to his office mates.
I worked in the IT department for a company, and we ordered a couple of laptops for evaluation from CDW. One of the laptops was defective (the lid closure switch didn't work). So I sent it back and got a replacement. A week later, we ordered a dozen laptops. In that shipment was the defective one I had sent back, still in the same box I shipped back in (I had torn the box trying to get the box open). Needless to say, a nasty phone call was made to our sales rep and he overnighted a replacement and they never asked for the defective unit back. I kept the defective unit as my desktop.
This was bought at a computer fair give me a break. Retailers selling returned stuff as new, not a surprise, definitely illegal. Manufacturers pulling it, extremely illegal. I had a friend that bought a "new" external hard drive only to find that it was loaded with someone else's photos, tax returns, etc. We believe that was the manufacturer buying refurb drives to install in the external case. Does that constitute a "new" product?
I do this - what you do is take your data, and make a copy of it. The second copy is your key. Then you XOR the plain text and the key together, just like a one-time-pad encryption method. This leaves you with a giant file that's all 0s. You can then compress down to almost nothing and save it to disk. The last step is to store your key somewhere. If someone gets that compressed, encrypted file, I can guarantee that as long as you keep your key safe, they won't be able to decrypt it.