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We put a lot of trust in big companies, so when they let us down it can have serious consequences.
I recently went shopping for a new computer. I wanted a low-end laptop for light work, and the HP Stream seemed like a good deal. That deal was made even sweeter when Best Buy offered to sell me a returned one for almost 20 percent off. The salesman assured me that it was in like-new condition and that they would honor all warranties. Sold.
I always get a little thrill opening a new gadget. The computer looked like it had never been touched and all the paperwork was still in sealed bags. There was even a slip of paper in the box with the ID of the tech who cleaned and certified the unit.
So it surprised me when I booted up and saw someone else's name and Hotmail address at the login prompt. So much for like-new!
As I stared at the full name and e-mail address of the previous owner—let's call him David—I wondered. Could I get into this computer another way? It was mine after all. And how much more could I learn about him? How bad of a mistake had the store made?
Any similar stories out there Soylentils care to share?
Original Submission
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday June 13 2015, @08:58PM
Sometime in the early-mid 2000's I was working for a company who had been awarded a contract to do warranty repair for Best Buy. This was back during the XP era when the vast majority of home users were unaware of the "hidden" Administrator account with no password by default which could grant access to anywhere in the system. I never downloaded anything from anybody's computer but I liked to search for something like "*.jpg" and see what popped up, and I would actively poke around a user's files when I got bored. In one customer's computer I found a bunch of camwhore pics in a folder adjacent to the documentation of her custody battle with a saved note that said something like, "Yeah, he's trying to say I'm a slut. Can you believe that?" Fortunately I never saw anything I had to report and anyway, what I did was nothing compared to what some of the Geek Squad and other guys did.
This was shortly after Best Buy had bought the Geek Squad. The idea was to have us handle the stuff that the Geek Squad couldn't -- which scarily enough were often things like OS reinstalls and malware removal. The more frightening part was how we repaired the hardware, though. We literally had a big garbage bin full of laptops which we used to spare parts for repairs. Need a new keyboard, aw, this one's not exact but close enough. Need a new bezel or clamshell, eh, this one's a slightly different color but close enough. There were huge secondary piles of used and yanked CPUs and RAM sticks of dubious quality from which to pick. Strip out a screw thread? Screw won't stay in? It will after some super-glue.
Of course I am more mature now and don't fix PCs for a living, so if I were in a situation where I bought a laptop which had user information I would simply wipe the drive and get on with life without trying to poke and prod. And what would I find in there anyway, insignificant minutiae about the life of somebody I don't give a fuck about? A shitty music collection full of whiny effeminate crypto-Christian bullshit like Bruno Mars or Kings of Leon? Naked pictures, as if I don't know what naked people look like? or the possibility that I would be put between a rock and a hard place for discovering something I would be compelled to report and have to deal with a shitload of police paperwork after forfeiting my new laptop?
Nah, not worth it. My life ain't that pathetic.
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Saturday June 13 2015, @09:58PM
I've got what's perhaps a different situation. The local computer repair shop I once worked at had ancient, ancient hard disks left over. One of them, a small IDE drive of around 20MB, I took home. I later plugged it into a test box here, and almost immediately my AV identified and removed a boot sector virus. It looks like it was running MS-DOS 2.0, and has a number of old letters and documents on it. There's no identification or repair shop identification on the drive itself, but I have thought of returning the data to the drive's prior owners. I suspect though, that the best thing to do would be to go via the shop's owner (still the same guy) and have him return the data.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 13 2015, @11:13PM
I know there is lost data from some of my old disks I really wish I could recover.
For average people who lost it through 'average' problems, it is often a huge boon.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 13 2015, @11:29PM
I used to work at a small computer shop. Back in 2008, we had a guy come in who was a cop. He was trading in his old computer, and we bought the hardware on the condition that we would destroy the old hard drives, because they had some old police evidence on them, and simply erasing wouldn't do the job.
The manager agreed, the guy left happy with our agreement.
The owner (not the manager) then on-sold the hard drives to someone else, claiming that it was his right to do so.
Never, ever trust someone to fulfill an agreement like that.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Sunday June 14 2015, @04:33AM
In my Ex-Day-job, we were occasionally asked to analyze hard drives for the Police.
They were from seized computers, and this was before there were standard forensics software packs available.
Arrive in a sealed bag, chain of custody signature tags and the whole thing.
(Got the job because of personal friend of D.A, and assistant chief, in a small town).
One drive they were looking for child porn, - non found even in erased sectors. lots of pics of the guys wife, ahem,,,
Another they were looking for erased documents, - embezzlement case, found plenty, and the guy also had a BSDM fetish and the pics to prove it.
Back then, you could jumper drives for write protect, which we always did, before mounting the drive under linux. (Any change after the date it was seized can be challenged by a knowledgeable lawyer).
You can't always do any more. Some drives don't have write protect jumpers any more. These days you often need a special harness [sharkoon.com] to disconnect the write circuit, and even that can't prevent all changes on some drives.
Other than that it was a revolting job, and I'm glad we got out of it.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Funny) by bradley13 on Sunday June 14 2015, @05:50AM
Chain of custody? Evidence tags? Nah...
Back in the dark ages, when I was a college student visiting family, one of the in-laws was a Secret Service agent. They had a case of credit-card fraud, and had a computer that they thought contained a bunch of stolen credit-card information. I needed to find it, extract and format it and print it out. So he asked me if I could help. So he sat me in an office with the computer; I fiddled, found the data, wrote a program to decode and sort it (it wasn't encrypted or anything) - all of this directly on that computer.
Being a naive 19 or 20 year old, it didn't occur to me what a absolute idiocy that was, I mean, I was all flattered and working for the Secret Service, gee, golly whiz. Given that I wasn't even a CS major at the time, and just programmed for a hobby, it's a miracle I didn't destroy the data by accident.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.