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How Best Buy’s Computer-Wiping Error Turned Me into an Amateur Blackhat

posted by martyb on Saturday June 13 2015, @08:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the It's-Milliner-Time! dept.

Phoenix666 writes with an interesting anecdote posted on Ars Technica:

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?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 13 2015, @10:36PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 13 2015, @10:36PM (#195909)

    [ ‭amazon.com (Warning: Unicode in URL)⁩ ]

    I actually tried to remove all the crap amazon puts into links. I have no idea why that warning is important, but I apologize if it causes an issue.

  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday June 14 2015, @01:20AM

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Sunday June 14 2015, @01:20AM (#195936) Homepage Journal

    The Unicode character seems to be a registered-trademark symbol: ®

  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday June 14 2015, @08:43AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday June 14 2015, @08:43AM (#196049) Journal

    The URL doesn't actually contain Unicode, but ASCII characters which decode to Unicode. The only system which needs to know how to handle them is the web server; any other system can just treat them as the sequence of ASCII characters it is. That's the whole point of the ASCII encoding of Unicode characters in URLs: It allows systems which have no idea about how to handle Unicode still correctly handle the URL. Indeed, you could enter this URL into a browser from the last millennium, and it would work quite fine (well, except that the browser might not be able to handle other aspects of HTTP which changed over time, and almost certainly would not be able to correctly display the resulting page).

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.