What is Digg?114 Comments
- Yarnage, on 10/12/2007, -1/+69I wouldn't be surprised if they receive tons of bogus information.
- adml_shake, on 10/12/2007, -5/+71Doesn't really matter, most people (even non techies) know that geek squad is a sham. When I worked at Best Buy all our tech guys were mostly just script kiddies who thought they were elite because they could run netstumber. You started talking about stuff like IRQ's, the various Buses on a PC, and they were completely clueless. I worked in Home office and me and another kid were talking about MAC addresses and spoofing them, the Tech back there was listening in and said "why are you guys even talking about that kind of crap? We don't even service apples here, and why would you want to spoof the address of one anyway." I laughed because I thought he was just kidding around....oh how wrong I was.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -13/+47Proves Winternals are a bunch of idiots who dont understand the current internet culture. Did they really expect to post a survey on the net unprotected and not have people post bogus stuff? Come on.
- lagrange, on 10/12/2007, -5/+32"8. Please provide us with any specific information that you think might be helpful."
SOYLENT GREEN IS MADE OF PEOPLE!!!!!!!!
ITS PEOPLE!!!!! aGGGGGGGGGGGGGGH! - kidlinux, on 10/12/2007, -14/+38You're an idiot.
What you're doing is not "funny", and it's not "cool". You're not impressing anyone. This goes to all of you submitting bogus information. Surely you've got something better to do.
Grow up. - garrycam, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15Winternals has posted more information about the situation here:
http://www.winternals.com/legal/
makes for interesting reading. - ReinMasamuri, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11I used to work for them, filled out the survey. Hope they get their cash.
- prot0col, on 10/12/2007, -5/+15I cannot wait for the outcome of this. Cha Ching$$$$$
- Splitt3rxx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9 my dad got his computer at BB, the employees are *****. They asked us if we wanted thier stupid extended warranty like 4 times even after my dad said no. Then they gave us this stupid "fact sheet" that basically said Hp doesn't cover anything but the BB warranty does. If a part dies in teh comp it will be "well worth the $$$" then they had to walk my dad to the front so they could make one more sales pitch. the bastard also asked what i was using for virus/malqare protection, I said "spybot, ad-aware, zone alarm, spyware blaster, and AVG" and he said "those are OK for free programs but you aren't really protected, you get what you pay for" he then tried to sell us horribly overpriced norton software.
- dchaosdx, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10how are you a sucker if you willingly pay for a legitimate service? geek squad isn't forcing it upon you, and there's plenty of other places to go for the same service.
- kidlinux, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9If you bothered going to the Winternals home page, you'd find the court documents there.
In them, it's stated that Winternals employees have called the Geek Squad for service on several occasions, during which the GS employee used a pirated copy of Winternals' software or admitted to having a copy in their possession. One such incident was videotaped. - ericab, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Did you read the actual complaint? They were in talks to license the software to BB/GS and BB/GS abruptly ended the negotiations. You should actually read before you comment next time.
- doublebackslash, on 10/12/2007, -8/+16I one worked at Circuit city's equivelent of geek squad, and let m etell you I was *way* over qualified. I would use tools like knoppix, VNC, and eventually I had a linux server up and running for DNS, proxying, and file dumps. (A lot of updates go a lot fater if you serve them off of a proxy, but not all) Eventually I got fired be cause a)one day when my internet down (read, I couldn't do my job) I switched from the corporate line to the comcast line that was never hooked up to anything (cable modem unplugged) and b) I had a VPN tunnel running from work to home so when the other half twit techs couldn't fix something I could VNC or ssh in and give them a hand.
Now I hava job where I'm paied to know those things.
Anyone who has an issue with their computer should find an independant person who is not protected by a corporate shroud. Although that has its risks too.
Its ugly out there. - ThomasCJohnson, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8Getting info from the internet is like saying "The following sentence is true. The previous sentence is false."
- Legion303, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6That was infinitely more useful than the "Winternals servey w00t!@" link at the top in terms of conveying actual information about why Winternals is looking for this information. Thanks.
- TAGG, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Actualy they need to find only one person who will provide them needed information.
Costs of running this survey is nothing compared to possible payoff they can get. - JAppi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6That's why they ask you to submit your address and phone number. They want to actually contact people who used unlicenced software and get them to testify.
- ericab, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6More power to em. Geek Squad used to be respectable but after BB bought them out they went downhill really fast. I once interviewed for a PT job there (gotta support the shopping habits) and was basically told "You'll need to be able to sell people stuff they really don't need. If they have a virus, tell them more RAM and a bigger hard drive will help to fix the problem." :| I told the interviewer I would do no such thing. I didn't get a call back.
- guymc, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8No Digg on this one. The real story is in the http://www.winternals.com/legal listed above by garrycam, and that should have been where the Digg entry pointed. That page leads to the survey for those who want to take it.
- Mitchl, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6Oh, you gonna pay BEST BUY.... YOU GONNA PAY!
Hope you saved some of that stolen money from your bogus service contracts.
If there was one brick and morter that finds a way to be as unethical as the worst sham .COMs it is Best Buy.
Is BlueHippo a subsidiary of Best Buy? - vandalet, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Work their and start gathering incriminating evidence aginst best-buy then sell it to winternals
- wastern, on 10/12/2007, -4/+8maybe next time put some actual information about what it is in the story description. i had to go to the site just to make the connection
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Now that's what I'm talking about! This would mean very good things for "mom and pop" home IT technicians.
- Boondoggle, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4You are an idiot or you have not read the questionnaire.
There are fields for contact info. They will be confirming the information based on the contact info provided. Sure they'll get a lot of bogus crap but that can be weeded out. - briangig, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4damn...56 pages to say "they pirate software"...gotta love the legal process.
- Tobey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Die Geek Squad, die!!
My neighbor needed someone to install a stick of ram in his computer, I told him I could do it for free, but for some strange reason he took it to the Geek Squad anyway. Long story short... 3 weeks and $350 later, he finally has his $30 stick of ram installed.
If only he had come to me... - btmow, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3The paygrade isn't as bad as you might think. Entry level starts at $10.25 per hour here and you can make a maximum of $24 per hour. GS is paying me $16.75 per hour to sit in the back and remove spyware/viruses with little or no customer contact. Everyone seems to hate GS, but considering that I'm 1 year out of high school and into college, thats pretty good money to push a few buttons. I guess you could still call me disgruntled because they took away all our Winternals and ERD commander discs :(
- zlajoie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Seriously, how many people do you really think would go to best buy to purchase a tool like this? Since most of us reading this thread are techs, we would purchase and download this straight from the vendor. I dread the thought of even going to best buy and being asked, "What can I help you with". 99% of the time, they don't have a clue of what I would be asking for in the first place. And like ericab said, read the frickin complaint. They were trying to license their product to these losers.
- steal_apps01, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4dude nice. I think i'll work at best buy. I might be able to act stupid enough they will give me a job. It would be alot better then my job now.
- raremage, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5One thing that won't help is they aren't smart enough to mask the same IP address from submitting multiple surveys. While they could be screening that on the backend, the appearance is anyone who had the link could submit as many survey responses as they want.
I'm guessing the goal isn't so much to see the results of the survey as to get a few names of potential witnesses.
Of course, given the Internet culture and what a bunch of pricks we all can be, I do wonder how many different 'Lucky O'Day's and 'Jack MeOugh's will be named as witnesses. - GoatHerderEd, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Quit, and cite this lawsuit.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -15/+18They are idiots cause they are gonna get a whole buch of bogus , useless information. Some of it from me. Apparently some from that soylent Green dude.
- VerbalIronyX, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4NO!!!.... I just got a job in Geek Squad!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- engalicorn, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5I am a former Geek Squad employee who worked in the most profitable Canadian Best Buy store. The only legal copy of software I was aware of was a 1999 copy of Mcafee Enterprise edition which would only work in command prompt in Windows XP and for some reason would work on one computer and not the other.
I personally didn't use any Wininternals software but I do remember on more then one occasion some of the GS techs using it. We scrounge what ever we could off the Internet that we thought would fix the problem.
We commonly used trial editions of Spy Sweeper and Ad-Aware. Or we would convince the customer to buy Spy Sweeper before the repair and then use their copy to clean their system. When I could I would recommend people to use Ad-Aware or Microsoft Anti-Spyware. - funked, on 10/12/2007, -5/+8So what? It's called data mining. For some reason, people entering bogus information tend to enter the same bogus information so they throw those away. It's been used in every study or survey for a very long time.
- Technopundit, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Considering the pay scale at Geek Squad, combined with the frustration of working with untrained users, there are bound to be a lot of disgruntled employees.
- filovirus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2RAAAAMONE, bring more RAAAAMONE posts and pests to digg
- takeda, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Actually, I just downloaded it, and it looks like all of them are false positives.
Citing one of the comments:
|UBCD 2.0.isoIMAGESSGD.ISObootsdgS10enS30_specialbootS30hide_and_seekcdhd0part2menu.lst
|malware name: VBS:Davinia
|malware type: Virus/Worm
This is a plain text file, with something appearing to be a configuration for partitioning program, (anyway you cannot even run .lst files by clicking on them)
So it's definitively a false positive.
|DUBCD 2.0.isoPROGRAMSSAMINSIDESAMINSIDE.EXE
|malware name: Win32:Trojano-2729 [Trj]v
|malware type: Trojan Horse
Not trojan but a hack tool, allows to "recover" passwords from a SAM file.
Many AV programs mark such tools as a trojans, I guess it's to scare potential script kiddies.
Kaspersky: SAMINSIDE.EXE - infected by HackTool.Win32.SAMInside.23
|DUBCD 2.0.isoPROGRAMSTRENDMICROSYSCLEANSYSCLEAN_SFX.EXEsysclean.exe[UPX]
|malware name: VBS:Redlof
|malware type: Virus/Worm
Another false positive, VBS virus in EXE file? Funny thing is that sysclean.exe is another AV program.
Some people reported this to Avast already:
http://forum.avast.com/index.php?board=4;action=display;threadid=3274;start=msg23410#msg23410
http://forum.avast.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=45a0b86fd71bfe0d1869ad5ef04305f3&topic=4070.msg29274
Kaspersky's:
Scanned file: sysclean.exe
sysclean.exe - OK
sysclean.exe - OK
|DUBCD 2.0.isoPROGRAMSUTILITIESDIALUPASS.EXE
|malware name: Win32:Dialer-gen. [Trj]
|malware type: malware type: Dialer
My Avast! doesn't detect this as a virus anymore (I guess they updated their definitions)
Kaspersky's online scanner shows it as:
DIALUPASS.EXE - infected by not-a-virus:PSWTool.Win32.Dialupass.f
Which is correct - it's a hack tool, to "recover" your password for a dialup
|DUBCD 2.0.isoPROGRAMSUTILITIESMAILPASSVIEW.EXE
|malware name: Win32:Trojan-gen. {UPX!}
|malware type: Virus/Worm
Hack tool.
Kaspersky's MAILPASSVIEW.EXE - infected by not-a-virus:PSWTool.Win32.MailPassView.130 - LavaHot, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2You bring up a good point, and I personally don't know why Best Buy does not embrace open source software, especially for its internal use. I too would like to see a side-by-side comparison on STD and ERD.
- FlyboyP, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2If there's anyone that you don't want investigating you in the computer arena, it would be Mark Russinovich and company. He's already knocked the teeth out of Sony once with the XCP debacle.
I'll be very interested to watch the outcome of Winternals vs Best Buy. I hope BB have to pay back licensing fees plus penalties to them for ripped-off ERD Commander as well as ALL the companies whose software is pirated on Hiren's Boot CD. - designflaw, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Yep, Geek Squad used to be a good company but once the evil empire best buy got a hold of it, they basically ruined the whole idea. The true focus of geek squad now is to scam the dollars out of normal people, thats all. I used to work for them up until I could no longer take it. Filled out the form, hope they got all there dollars.
- dest, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I used to work for the GS. We used pirated software, but never while I was there did we use ERD Commander. I preferred Mini-PE.
- joel8x, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Ramooooooone, Call over the Geek Sqad so I can laugh at their ineptitude.
- Zzzzzz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2What does Winternals, partion magic, ghost, norton, etc... have that Knoppix-STD does not?
- LavaHot, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Wow, I am so happy that I actually work at a GOOD BestBuy. Besides a few stupid merches, everybody knows their stuff. The Geek Squad is heavily certified and PCHO is full of HUGE geeks. The employees at the Best Buy Stores that steal software, hassle customers, and arrest customers for paying in $2 bills have broken established protocol and give the rest of us a bad name. Hell, the only thing that my other employees have done is abuse their discount.
- monsieurgrand02, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3This survey has absolutely NO reliability. Anyone could fill this out.
Rediculous. - haxx4, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Lots of people I know who have called Geek Squad ended up having their hard drives formatted. In most cases, Windows will be so messed up that this is necessary, but that's given you're able to back up the person's files. One experience I've heard from a friend of mine is that Geek Squad backed up her entire hard drive into one file because she had a virus. After they reinstalled Windows for her, they weren't able to restore anything because the virus would come back apparently.
Anyways, here's a boot cd that would be incredibly useful for the Geek Squad. http://ts.searching.com/torrent/630141/David_s_Ultimate_Boot_CD_2_0_4in1. However, I don't recommend them using it because that's exactly why they're in trouble in this digg: unlicensed software use. But if you own the stuff, this compilation can be vital. - Boondoggle, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5Oh noes was that one mouse click too much for you?
- HappyScrappy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I saw two Geek Squad vehicles parked at Fry's the other day. I wish I had a decent camera on my phone.
- Mexrocker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2werent a lot of digg users reporting viruses/trojans on that thing?
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