Online Revenge 645
Many people have submitted this story of a broken laptop purchased on e-bay. The buyer gives a little lesson on why you should always clean your hard drive before you sell a computer.
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Online Revenge
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There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
karma (Score:4, Interesting)
I honestly love when ppl's stupidity overrules their lack of honesty and it bites them.
Yawn. (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sick (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:and the seller... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Extortion (Score:3, Interesting)
It is also doubtful the laptop is stolen, it probably is indeed Amir's.
He also used a free service (Which supports AdSense if he took the time to set it up.), why would he need to worry about bandwidth?
Re:Sector encryption (Score:1, Interesting)
Has this guy got much legal defence? (Score:4, Interesting)
Its like someone selling a house then going back 6 months later trying to reclaim property they left behind.
Re:Extortion (Score:4, Interesting)
He simply stated that it was broke.
No pictures of the broken item, no description of what was broke. Just a statement that the ram and DVD-Rom was wrong, again, -hear-say.
For all I can tell, it was missing a charger which can lead to all sorts of assumptions.
The extortion part comes in to play with the statement that boils down to you pay, it goes away.
Re:Boot and Nuke (Score:3, Interesting)
I noticed that the Disk Utility in recent releases of MacOS/X also has a paranoia-erase setting: you can tell it to overwrite a disk with zeroes once, seven times, or (for the tinfoil hat crowd) 35 times(!). It's a pretty slow process, though -- doing the 7x option took my G5 about 4 hours. I can almost see now why the military prefers to physically destroy the drives.
Re:Unverifiable? Let's give it a go... (Score:4, Interesting)
Amir's last name is Tofangsazan.
Re:Unverifiable? Let's give it a go... (Score:1, Interesting)
And it's not like authorities do anything about these small cases. I've been thru this a couple of times before too. Your credit card won't chargeback paypal, and paypal usually won't do anything either. In most cases, it's your word against theirs, and you can't really prove anything. Sucks.
Re:CFNM (Score:3, Interesting)
And someone would have had the decency to write a FAQ about it.
John.
Re:Unverifiable? Let's give it a go... (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, the one piece of positive feedback showing on Amir6626's eBay profile [ebay.com] is from nicktofang [ebay.com], who seems to share a name quite similar to Amir Tofangsazan. nicktofang also has mediocre feedback, is no longer a member, and started with one piece of good feedback from amir6626.
Certainly looks fishy to me.
just wondering? (Score:3, Interesting)
the Seller sold the buyer the equipment... the harddrive thusly becoming the property of the "buyer"....Didn't the contents of the harddrive also became the property of the buyer????
Assuming that is correct... would it really be "wrong" for the buyer to utilize the contents of the drive to his choosing????
i certainly hope no action is taken agaist the "buyer" (assuming of course the lappy was as described broken and otherwise not as advertised).
Re:Wisdom foolows, pay attention! (Score:4, Interesting)
Except that pimpy neoliberal nerds of America do not make law in Europe (yet). Certain unalienable things cannot be sold, just like you cannot sell yourself to slavery.
Even when the law allows you to voluntarily provide your data for handling to certain private economic entities (like marketing agencies), the data recepient must have an established corporate legal framework and EU-compliant privacy protection charta approved by the authorities. The laptop buyer certainly meets none of that.
Europe, especially continental Europe is very paranoid about personal data handling. We have gazillion paragraphs to protect people over that. Personal info databases of separete functionality must not be connected just for ease of operation, but for a compelling need, approved by 2/3rd parlamentary vote or supreme court decision, and many other restictions like that.
The avenger guy will be held responsibly almost as seriously as if he had found state secrets on that laptop and uploaded that confidental info on the open web.
Look at from this viewpoint: the photos the laptop buyer uploaded allege that the seller is homosexual or at least bisexual. In the Holocaust, same-sex people were the third largest minority group persecuted by the nazi (after jews and gipsy). That was a mere 60 years ago. Hope you understand why we think such data better not be handled, collected, traded, disclosed by anyone in Europe or anywhere in the world. The data privacy situation in the USA is frightening for any european.
BTW, if this reported event happened in Switzerland, the laptop buyer would have been murdered two dozen times already. That country values absolute privacy over justice, truth or honesty due to its entire reliance on banking, much of which is very dirty (dictators, drug barons, arms smugglers, world politicans, speculants, spies all keep their fiscals there).
say hello to the 1950s for me (Score:5, Interesting)
Are you posting that from the Victorian era?
We now have Big Brother as one of our most popular TV shows (attention seeking nobodies stuck in a house and monitored live 24/7), the most CCTV in Europe etc...
Re:Boot and Nuke (Score:2, Interesting)
the auction says that the laptop comes with all paperwork, but it might be a stolen laptop - so the police might be investigating that also. the price for that laptop configuration is quite a sweet deal!
* lon3st4r *
Re:Wisdom foolows, pay attention! (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh, that fine old British community of gentlemen. Give up; I'm British and I have no idea what community you're talking about.
The guy who posted the site is already doing a university degree (in cognitive science, apparently) whilst the seller is apparently doing two A-Levels in the hope of becoming a barrister, which suggests to me that they have lowered the threshold of that qualification, two A-levels being hardly enough to get you into Kingston Poly^WUni.
Not sure I see much sign of specific homophobia, unless the site is also to be seen as foot-sucking-fetish-phobic.
As it happens, I think what the British mentality does value (if anything, and it is worth bearing in mind here that there are a lot of flavours of British) is not privacy of the individual but operating within reasonable limits. You could call it playing fair if you were of a 1920s hockey-playing sort of persuasion, but what it means is that those who kick the ass out of the system don't get much respect. You can go on about presumption of innocence all you like, but then you're not stuck with a faulty laptop and a buyer who claims to have moved to Dubai...
Re:Sector encryption (Score:3, Interesting)
#shell> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
?
maybe some modifications to the line, but it should work
as for why not to use encrpytion: unless seagate has implemented it without a significant overhead, the reason for me would be performance. i didn't buy my laptop to have another sloppy lagging slow computer on my lap or desk.
I have mixed feelings about this (Score:2, Interesting)
I really have mixed feelings about this. I agree that when you are cheated on, the punishment has to be harsher than the cheating itself to discourage future cheatings. We can't know if the laptop wasn't really working and if the memory and CD/DVD driver specifications where incorrect, but most of us agree this laptopguy is ruining the boy's life.
Anyway, just to tell you an anedoct of my own life, I once honked to a guy who cut my way on the street. I just honked. It wasn't a long honk, I didn't yell or anything. I just thought "he didn't see me, I will honk and make my presence known". But the guy started to slow down in front of me and then waved a gun. I turned in the corner between us and sped away from there. The lesson I learnt that day:
Don't mess with who you don't know, you have no idea what the reaction will be!
And about leaving sensible information in a computer you are selling, sorry, but it's all your fault. Like an old chinese saying goes (I swear it's a real old chinese saying, I'm not making it up), "he who sleeps with his ass dirty wakes up with the fingers stinking".
Re:karma (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not so funny when/if the seller commits suicide (Score:3, Interesting)
Why would he commit suicide?
Have you looked at the pictures on the blog? I saw some that I found icky -- but nothing severely embarassing. I mean, the gay pic is gross (although possibly taken out of context -- one occasionally winds up with that sort of stuff when, for example, using an automated usenet binary leeching program on a straight newsfroup, or as part of a supposedly straight series), and the foot thing is yucky, but if he doesn't find those to be a turnoff, then what's the problem? The pictures that appear to be leg shots on public transporation could possibly get him in trouble if perpetrator, location, intent, and unwillingness of participants can be proven; and all of it is sure to get him some teasing from his friends either way.
Anyway, this is what happens when jerk A meets jerk B. From sources linked in this discussion, I gather that the following happened:
1. Jerk A advertises item with 2gb RAM and a DVD-RW drive, but ships with 512mb and no DVD-RW. The Register's article did not say anything about him denying that. Perhaps it was working when he shipped it, but considering that he failed to erase his potentially embarassing pictures, I'd guess that it wasn't (and that he's not saavy enough to remove the hard drive and wipe it on another machine).
2. Jerk B is angry, and does not respect existing dispute processes enough to really make an effort to follow through. Maybe he sent some "polite messages" and was told that the seller moved far away, maybe not, but this sort of revenge deserves all other avenues to be completely explored first.
Don't forget another possibility -- maybe Jerk B fabricated most of it...but he'd have to be a Major Super Mega Jerk to do all that if Jerk A is completely innocent too.
Re:Unverifiable? Let's give it a go... (Score:2, Interesting)
A threat of bad feedback got my purcases shipped.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:karma (Score:1, Interesting)
Actually, I believe you can rip them off for up to at least $999. If it's under $1000, the police will "put it on file" (forget about it). Afterall, they've got better things to do, like meet that speeding ticket quota or raid parties for free beer.
There's the miniscule chance that the buyer will get ahold of somebody at eBay/Paypal that will actually help them but it's unlikely it'll be for the full amount and there's a good chance that you can eventually get ahold of someone who'll undo it anyway.
Folks, this is why you never use eBay to buy anything that costs more than you're willing to lose. It's also why you never attach Paypal (if you have to have it) to a real bank account - credit can be chargebacked (or is that charged back?), EFT from your bank, to say nothing of funds Paypal is holding, is much harder.