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 I've been playing World of Warcraft lately. This is a shot of ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) cloverdose's character on the right and my character on the left. The horses crack me up. |
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I need to put the Consumerist on my RSS reader.
I've been watching this line of stories with particular interest. I just started working in the field at a Mom & Pop competitor to Best Buy's Geek Squad*. I also saw, a couple of weeks ago, a youtube video of a similar sting operation to see if a computer stores would catch a really simple problem and how much they would charge.
Hashand, in the interview, makes some interesting points about how low-paid professionals (ostensibly feeling under appreciated and untouchable, and probably apathetic) won't show proper regard to their customers. He gets a bit sidetracked by IP issues, I think, but his advice is about pulling your computer's hard disk drive and/or keeping all your important information on network attached storage.
Can I use by best bottle-blond middle school girl voice? PUH - LEAZE!
First off, the network attached storage idea is great for a bunch of reasons but privacy isn't one of them. Who are you going to take that NAS to when it breaks? Stealing your porn/financial data off a USB device is just as easy, if not more so. I wholeheartedly support the concept behind distributing the system and everybody ought to have some sort of external storage now a days for backup purposes. Storage is cheap; recovery is not.
Furthermore, unless Joe Consumer boots off the network and wipes his hard drive, there's going to be sensitive information on your computer. I could get lots of tasty information from your browser cache or program files directory**.
Secondly, pulling the HDD before you give them your machine is a terrible idea. More the half the stuff I fix is software related, and if possible I prefer to find a software fix for a problem as it is usually less expensive for the customer. Without their HDD and the stuff on it, I can't do any of that. 90% of the customers in the store wouldn't be able to pull their HDD on their own at any rate.
That last note drive the heart of the problem I think. The people who frequent a computer repair shop, for the most part, aren't going to be tech savvy enough to handle the kinds of tasks they'd need to undertake if they don't trust aforementioned repair shop. I know my customers would cock their heads to one side like a lost spaniel if I tried to explain how to secure their data in such a way that I couldn't misuse it. On the converse, anyone tech savvy enough to effectively manage their data securely has probably picked up enough other skills to forgo the expense of hiring out the repair of the equipment and just do it themselves.
There is no clean solution to this problem, people are going to have to trust the guy in the back room who actually doing the work on your machine. Hashand mentions bonding a solution but I fear that government requirements could easily be used to force smaller businesses like the one I work at out of business. If Best Buy lobbied the state legislature to set the cost of license exorbitantly high or makes the process overly complicated or expensive, my bosses would probably have to close the store and I would be out of a job. Hashand claims to be a libertarian a would welcome some regulation, but I'm practically socialist and it poses a serious worry to me.
So far I've spent my whole post talking about how this other fellow is talking out his ass. Do I have anything useful to add to the discourse? Maybe not. I'm going to think about it for a little while and get back to you.
* I occasionally have to clean up the messes they make of customer's machines.
** I know for a fact I can find out the character names, account name, and server info for your World of Warcraft game just by glancing at the WoW folder. I just looked at my own. I wonder if my password is cached anywhere... |
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May. 21st, 2007 @ 11:59 am
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Well, I mentioned I was looking for a new naming scheme for my computers and it's finally arrived.
Office box - Benedict
Laptop - Claudio
Living room HTPC - Laertes
Bedroom HTPC - Demetrius
Linux Box - Lysander
My PDA will probably be Hero or Hermia when I get around to changing it. Workgroup and SSID will be Act1Scene1. |
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This article is a distillation of a study done on the correlation between the conception date of a child and that child's future academic progress.
Go ahead and read it, I'll tell you what I think was wrong with it after the cut.
( Read more... ) |
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