IT Repair Installs Webcam Spying Software 606
Vapon writes "A lady noticed her computer was running slower after she had brought her computer in to be repaired. She took the computer to a second repair shop where they found that one of the problems was that her webcam would turn on whenever it detected her around and was taking photos and uploading it to a website. The repair technician that installed the software has done this to at least 10 women and has photos of at least one undressing."
Speaking of technicians doing things.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Lesson. Whenever taking your machine into those places, write down the serial numbers. Unfortunately, if you buy a new machine, repairing it yourself is not an option if you want it done under warranty.
Extended warranties are rip-offs - no exceptions.
Re:Speaking of technicians doing things.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Did the swapout comp at least work? I knew a guy that took his PC into "BigBoxStoreA" for repair becuase the thing 'squealed' and then stopped. They returned it a few days later stating they couldn't find the issue and ultimately determined the mobo had fried. He took it to a different repairshop for a second opinion. Turns out a mouse wiggled his way ontop of the HDD and chewed through the IDE cable; squeek; crash. BigBoxStoreA didn't even open the case, LAME.
Heck for ranting on terrible repair shops, someone else I knew bought a computer from BigBoxStoreA (Yes, same company) which bust in a week. He took it back, they neglected to repair it for two weeks and ultimately voided the warranty on the HP machine because they were not licensed to repair those PCs.
I got more, and I'm sure everyone else does. Computer repairmen are becoming the new age Mechanics. Yes, they can do it, some are sketchy, and a lot will rip you off. The simple answer is to learn on your own and know exactly what to look for.
Re:WTF (Score:2, Interesting)
It's a valid question (Score:5, Interesting)
I see it got modded off-topic, but it seems to me like a valid question. What the heck was this guy thinking? Or the recent story on The Register [theregister.co.uk], where a 47 year old techie got jailed for a similar stunt, except he also tried to blackmail a 17 year old girl into underessing in front of the camera. (Which is how he got caught.)
I mean, seriously. What. The. Fuck.
Didn't these guys find enough photos of naked women on the internet? I mean, seriously, how did that train of thought go? "Man, if only I could see some photos of women at least partially undressed... Nah, surely nobody publishes something like that. I guess I'll just have to bug someone's web-cam." Or what?
Or was it just a psychopath's power game?
Since the story is about him, it doesn't seem to me offtopic at all. No, seriously, I want to know. What goes in the head of that kind of idiot? How do you recognize one?
Re:Lawsuit! (Score:5, Interesting)
Depends on the state and its laws.
A few years ago...in L.A. we had a guy that was sneaking video cameras into peoples' homes, and video taping them doing pretty much everything.
Turns out, they could not prosecute him since there was no law on the books against it. He got off scott free, but, they did pass a law down here making it a crime.
I dunno what the exact wording of the law was, but, if it specifically mentioned video taping equipment...the computer trick might be legal?
Anyway...it depends on the states laws as to if this will be illegal or not. Unless the Feds try to get in on it...if they try to argue that the signal over the internet might cross state lines or something....hmm.
Re:Shoot him (Score:1, Interesting)
Death for a PC? If you take my parking space can I shoot you?
Webcam lights... (Score:0, Interesting)
Isnt that the point of having a light on your camera? So that you can tell when it is taking pictures of you?
Re:Speaking of technicians doing things.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Great idea! Can you tell me how I can build my own laptop?
Re:Extended warranties are rip-offs - no exception (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you think Apple is losing money on the extended warranties?
(They could still be worth it; spending $250 now may well make a lot more sense than facing the possibility of spending $500 tomorrow; the point is that Apple sells them because they are profitable for Apple, so on the balance, they aren't profitable for Apple customers.)
And how is this possible? (Score:2, Interesting)
To preface this: I am not a Windows (tm) user.
After all, the Tripwire program (Kim and Spafford) was created in 1992. That would have been in the Windows 3.1 era. Windows 98 doesn't include it (My wife uses that product), but it should be a standard part (or option) in later versions. I always presumed that it (or its underlying concept) is a standard part of "anti-malware" software. I do have an instance of Windows XP SP2 running, and it complains ON EACH BOOT of missing an approved anti-malware program. Mind you, since I don't run anti-malware, or a firewall, the XP instance is run in an isolated virtual container.
Of course she didn't trust the technician; why didn't she apply the obvious measures?
Don't the commercial anti-malware programs or Windows incorporate this protection?
Now, it would be difficult to defend against boot-sector attacks (I was reading an article on Microsoft Vista, and it's defense against this -- also ref. /. and its recent article on the subject), but that would take considerably more skill than the typical PC jockey has. Typical prevention of this would be (at least with the COMMERICIAL anti-malware programs), should be a boot and scan from CD-ROM. Something easily mentioned in the anti-malware instructions (Note that my Windows 98 CD doesn't boot; a boot floppy is required, making this defense difficult in THAT environment. But, like I said, I *know* Windows 98 doesn't offer this protection. Windows XP? Certainly should, but with the warning about not running anti-malware, maybe it defers this function to external software. Which is ok, after all Tripwire is external software for Unix as well).
I have a hard time actually believing that Windows could be such a security clusterfuck, that a vendor default installation could suffer from problems like this.
About the only thing I can say is: Class-action suit hammer time! This is SO basic -- it's like seatbelts.
Why can't people understand WHY he did it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Lawsuit! (Score:3, Interesting)
Poorly worded, but not absolutely backwards. In the context of personal rights, the constitution doesn't grant anything, it simply makes statements about things that the government cannot do (just read the bill of rights if that still sounds stupid, it says stuff like 'the right of blah shall not be infringed' not stuff like 'the government can give money to religious groups but only in the context of community blah').
Re:It's a valid question (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Extended warranties are rip-offs - no exception (Score:2, Interesting)
Drop damage of any sort? Not replaced, you pay more for repair than you would out-of-warranty, and your warranty is cancelled without any compensation.
Re:Lawsuit! (Score:2, Interesting)
"It's illegal to secretly record people, especially in their own homes (reasonable expectation of privacy)."
This falls apart with leasor/ee agreements and what fraction of a population owns the property of another.
"No laws on the books," is what i've heard repeated through the years-- citing technology as the specific without enforcement
Re:Extended warranties are rip-offs - no exception (Score:3, Interesting)
"Profitable for apple" could mean that they aren't making a profit on the warranty and repairs themselves, but they cover the costs easily in the profit of the pc and the customer is so happy they buy more apple stuff later.
"Not losing your customers to the competition" can have a value too. It's a bit too indirect for most modern companies unfortunately, they seem to instead prefer to give all sorts of incentives to new customers and allow their existing customers to be drawn away by their competitors' new customer incentives. "We'll treat you like crap when you try to claim on the warranty, to make sure you never buy from us again!"
Re:Lawsuit! (Score:2, Interesting)
Some of them were xtian and thus believed as much... but many were freemasons who rejected all the invisible-guy-in-the-sky crapola. To the latter, 'inalienable' means "anyone who interferes with you is wrong, and the state ought to protect you".
In any case, it is perilous to base your rights on the assertion that some god granted them to you, because anyone else might just claim you're wrong, and how could the matter ever be settled? In other words, if you take a shortcut to certainty ("God said so"), you are building your house upon the sand.
Re:Lawsuit! (Score:4, Interesting)
> The reason is that the Roe v Wade decision rested on the idea that
> we have a right to privacy and anti-abortion laws violate it.
Except that almost every serious scholar now admits the Supreme Court was simply finding a justification for a decision they had already made. Roe is horrible Constitutional law and nobody uses it as an anchor for an argument anymore since it is only a matter of time before a future court revisits it, the outcome of which revisit is totally unknown.
Note that I'm not trying to open up an abortion thread here, even well respected pro abortion scholars admit the weakness of the reasoning in Roe. When it falls abortion itself will simply get tossed into the political arena where it should have been decided thirty years ago and nothing much will change.
Re:Lawsuit! (Score:5, Interesting)
For those that don't believe in God, the same rights can be dervived through logic.
I'm going to need a derivation before I believe that. If we set up a set of goals (happy populace, efficient society, etc.) then we can derive a set of rights that we should have in order to achieve those goals. But a set of unalienable rights that all humans do have derived through logic? That seems a little tough.
We can infer a lot of rights that the founders believed that their God bestowed on Americans based on documentation that they left behind. We can define rights that we believe that we deserve and should defend (or possibly fight to acquire or take back). But I defy you to illustrate how simple logic can spell out a set of rights that all humans do have without invoking some kind of divine standard. And, assuming that these rights are not divinely inspired, did these rights also belong to all societies in the past? What about foreign societies? Or can you logically derive what set of unalienable rights that modern Americans have that would not apply to Europeans/Chinese/cavemen?
I'm all for logic over superstition any day. But the idea that the rights that the founders believed that their God bestowed on Americans could be exactly replicated through simple logic while supporting the notion of why they are unalienable as opposed to why they should be unalienable just seems nonsensical.
Re:Lawsuit! (Score:5, Interesting)
As you correctly noted, the word "privacy" does not appear anywhere in the Constitution. What you are talking about is what is sometimes called a "reasonable expectation of privacy," and is largely non-controversial (at least it's not controversial that it exists; the extent to which it exists sometimes is). It means that the government can't do certain things without sufficient cause.
The controversial "right to privacy" (which I'll tell you up front I'm not a fan of) is something the Court found in the "penumbras" of the fourth, ninth and fourteenth amendments in Griswold v. Connecticut. And it has nothing to do with the government searching your home. It has to do with whether, and to what extent, the Supreme Court can import into the Constitution, via the 14th Amendment due process clause, certain rights that existed in English and American common law (including a vague, ill-defined "right to privacy") in order to overturn state and federal statutes. The current jurisprudence has basically devolved into "if you can convince 5 judges that the law is not fair, it violates the common law right to privacy, and is therefore unconstitutional." This has led to very inconsistent, unprincipled jurisprudence that depends more on the judges' personal whims than what the Constitution actually says.
The way it should be is the Court should leave states alone to make laws---even stupid ones---regardless of whether they personally agree with them. For example, the law in Griswold was a law passed by the Roman Catholic majority nearly 100 years earlier that forbade use of contraceptives. In his dissent, Justice Potter Steward (correctly) called it an "uncommonly silly" law, but (correctly) concluded that it was nevertheless constitutional. Justice Hugo Black, my favorite judge of all time, in his dissent commented, "I like my privacy as well as the next one, but I am nevertheless compelled to admit that government has a right to invade it unless prohibited by some specific constitutional provision. For these reasons I cannot agree with the Court's judgment and the reasons it gives for holding this Connecticut law unconstitutional."
Re:Lawsuit! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:hmm... (Score:1, Interesting)
Most monogamist societies are/were dominated by (some) males as well.
Lots of women prefer to party and sleep with many men when they are young, and try to settle down with a man who's dependable when they're older - and coincidentally, when they have a much lower value as mates.
Besides, there has been a heavy stigma against women sleeping around and in favor of monogamy for millenia. Most people are loath to express unpopular opinions to the public, even anonymously.
Plus, I've learned to distinguish between what women say and what women do.
Re:Lawsuit! (Score:3, Interesting)
I've just reviewed my vest pocket copy of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and I do not see any qualification of the Fourth Amendment to limit its scope solely to intrusions by government.
Maybe I'm just blind?