fataugie - Slashdot User

Submission + - Geek Squad outsourcing their "In Store" re

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22, 2007 @01:09PM

An anonymous reader writes: BestBuy's GeekSquad has had hundreds if not thousands of employees silently laid off accross the country in the past couple of months. All these in-store technicians are being replaced by "Agent Jonny Utah". (Jonny Utah being a pop culture reference to the movie Point Break.)

"Agent Jonny Utah" is basically a KVM switch and a piece of software similar to PC-Anywhere that allows technicians from remote locations do diagnostics, virus removals, and software procedures on computers.

This is link where GeekSquad technicians can see what computers are being worked on listed be each store. http://www.dudev1.com/StoreViewExample/StoreView.a spx

Most disturbing is that GeekSquad agents have a tool to talk directly to the remote agent's, a majority of whom admit they work as far away as India, but BestBuy is claiming that all work is done from a remote center in the U.S.

All customer's private and sensitive data is being put on line and being accessed by people on the other side of the world and these customers are either not being told about it or are being directly lied to be BestBuy about it.

This is a call for GeekSquad agents to post what they know here and for everyone to start calling BestBuy and asking "who" really will be working your computer and how they intend to keep your data private on the other side of the globe.

Journal Journal: The Earth was warming before global warming was cool. 4

Journal by Alien54 on Thursday February 22, 2007 @12:40PM

Sometimes it is useful to be a devil's advocate in discussing matters of scietific import. Thus we get this column from Pete du Pont in the WSJ

Submission + - Junk Faxes

Submitted by olddoc on Thursday February 22, 2007 @11:31AM

olddoc writes: I am having a growing problem with junk faxes. Unlike email, it costs me money when I get a fax so junk faxes really tick me off. A while ago, I gave my number to a removal number and now I am getting more junk faxes than ever! Does anyone know how to make them pay? What devious methods can I use to get even? Can I sign up for a phone number that will drive up their costs when I call the toll free removal number? What have other readers done?

Submission + - Egyptian Blogger Gets 4 Year Prison Sentenced

Submitted by bored_lurker on Thursday February 22, 2007 @11:26AM

bored_lurker writes: According to a story carried on the washingtonpost.com (among others) an Egyptian blogger was convicted of insulting Islam and President Hosni Mubarak and sentenced to four years in prison on Thursday in Egypt's first prosecution of a blogger. The judge issued the verdict in a brief, five-minute session in a court in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria. He sentenced Nabil to three years in prison for insulting Islam and inciting sedition and another year for insulting Mubarak. Nabil had faced a possible maximum sentence of up to nine years in prison.

In some places discussing politics and religion in the workplace is considered bad taste, but jail time for doing it in a blog? Will the rest of the world stand by and say nothing?

Submission + - DNS Attack only a warning shot?

Submitted by ancientribe on Wednesday February 07, 2007 @04:47PM

ancientribe writes: The attack on the Internet infrastructure yesterday may signal a hint of bigger things to come: the distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack on the Domain Name System (DNS) root servers was likely a test-run for a potentially larger and more disruptive attack.

It was the latest in a series of DDOS attacks on DNS servers that began late last year with attacks on EveryDNS and EasyDNS. Experts had predicted it was only a matter of time before botnet operators hit a bigger and higher-profile DNS target, and that's just what happened yesterday, according to this article in Dark Reading.

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=116 685&WT.svl=news1_1

Slashdot Top Deals