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youtube.com - Musician and Best Buy employee, Keith Parsons, rocks his Best Buy holiday campaign audition.
182 Comments
- EvlD99, on 10/12/2007, -1/+78I highly doubt that Best Buy has a side business of selling used hard drives. It was probably the result of some kid that worked at Best Buy selling the used hard drives for personal profit. However I still think that Best Buy is legally responsible for the actions of its employees.
- Bobcat7, on 10/12/2007, -3/+75I smell a lawsuit coming.
- drpatter, on 10/12/2007, -2/+63$25 dollars for a used HD at a flea market? I would have haggled the guy down to $15 at least. :)
- xLiKx, on 10/12/2007, -1/+60yea, and they're lucky that the guy actually contacted them in the first place
- twollamalove, on 10/12/2007, -3/+37Whoa, Nelly. You might want to try a comma here or there.
But seriously, Best Buy makes a lot of money on people who are in no way tech savvy. This obviously requires a level of trust. With a company as large as Best Buy, there are probably many tech savvy people who would trust Best Buy to do the right thing. Unfortunately, the less tech savvy of us are probably not reading this article or any of the numerous others which show Best Buy's apparent disrespect of its customers.
It may be dumb to have trusted BB, but we've all done dumb things. Even more so, we've all trusted when we really shouldn't have. The folly is 90% on BB and 10% on the consumer. As always, caveat emptor. - rewritable, on 10/12/2007, -6/+36I have a better idea http://img295.imageshack.us/img295/2186/img05443ht.jpg
- Technopundit, on 10/12/2007, -6/+36Hrm... buying up old hard drives might be a more lucrative endeavor than I ever thought.
- Kirsha, on 10/12/2007, -4/+33But the drive was being sold in a flea market. Who knows how many people had access to that drive before.
- Scottamus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+22If it was anything like my 15 minutes, it involved a cashier, a goat, a pair of egg beaters, and lots of vegetable oil.
- RandomSkratch, on 10/12/2007, -2/+22I wouldn't trust BB employes with my computer, let alone power tools!
- TheCount, on 10/12/2007, -6/+23This sounds like BS to me. I used to work tech at a Best Buy a few years ago, and whenever we did a HD replacement/upgrade we ALWAYS gave the HD's back to the customers by policy. Even if the drive was toasted, we always told them, "If you don't want to keep it, there's a trash can just outside." We never kept one, and we certainly never promised them we'd wipe everything off of them.
I'm not saying everything was always done by the book, a fair number of shady things went down, but having a customer deal with their own trash was just easier on us.
And as for junk out, you can't "junk out" items from customer machines, you can only junk out items with sku's. - iamsure, on 10/12/2007, -1/+17"If you had a program that just turned every bit on the drive to the same value (on, let's say)... how exactly can any data recovery service find out what direction the magnetics were previously in?"
You can measure the amount of magnetic resistance in a given sector, which (as odd as it sounds) can be measured to fairly reliably tell you what the charge was. The reason that proper crypto cleaning tools (Like Derik's Boot and Nuke disk) use multiple passes is to ensure that those resonances are changed substantially. By changing them rapidly and repeatedly, and in random directions, it makes it extremely hard to detect the former/original magnetic settings.
Think of it like a chair sitting on plush carpet. The longer the chair is there, the deeper the indention. Thankfully, it doesn't take months to undo months of sitting there - it just takes lots of passes over the carpet. - joeyjojo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+17Best Buy is an amazing icon of american capitalism. They sell lots of crap. Have staff that really don't know anything about the crap the sell, technicians that really don't know how to fix things, and, typically, the place is just a headache to go into.
Yet, quarter after quarter, record profits.
Huh. - shiftt, on 10/12/2007, -2/+16actually best buy does sell used hardware
it goes to "junk out" which in turn goes to the highest bidder, which buys pallets at a time of used hardware - shikaga, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13Lets just say that once you have drilled holes in your HDD, trying to access the data is more trouble than it is worth for identity thiefs, there are plently of other people to steal from.
- rewritable, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13@twollamalove
I took that picture 15 minutes ago just for digg, that is my shotgun, and that is my samsung 500MB HDD out of my first computer.
The gun is a Mossberg Maverick 12 guage. - itsallgeektome, on 10/12/2007, -4/+15You know what they say about "if you want something done right"...
- SoundDoc, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11Best Buy, Future Shop, just about any retail store with a computer service department should be taken out and shot.
I had one of our dispatachers come to me about a month ago, he had popup's on his home machine, and took it in to Best Buy to be looked at. They called him back, told him they couldn't clean it, so the wiped the drive and reinstalled windows! All without his concent! Then, they charged him $150 for the service!
He lost all his family photos, and all the applications he had installed, all they did was install XP.
So, after 5 hours of recovery, I managed to get back about 99% of his family pictures, then we went down to Best Buy together. I reamed the service tech out, reamed his manager out, got his money back, and they gave him a $250 in store credit.
I mean come on, "you had popups, we couldn't save your data, we wiped your machine, pay us and suck it?"
Their first commandment should be to do no more harm. How hard is it to pull a image before you work? If I'm doing any invasive work on a office machine, or a home machine, or a friends machine, the first thing I do is toss a usb external on it, fire up WinPE, and ghost the drive. This should be SOP for places like this. I know, time is money, but when some poor computer illiterate fool brings a machine to you, because your a "expert" and prays you can fix it, tossing the last 5 years of his family's photos is just plain evil.
It takes really no extra time, and you can make it a value added service, so what if the machine sits on the side for a extra hour unattended while it pulls a image? You could sell him that image back on a few DVD's for extra money if he wants his data back.
I also couldn't believe the excuse for the format, "Well, we tried norton on the machine, but it couldn't clean it, so formatting was our only option."
Is this the level that trusted computer repair people has fallen to? I thought it was their job to help people, not just make a quick buck off you. Just think if the medical field went this way, you go to the doctor, since your not a "medical expert" with a splinter, he says no problem, they knock you out, and when you wake up, they took your arm, saying they couldn't fix the splinter, this was their only option!
Would you accept that? I don't think so.
As for destroying drives, all my "dead" drives get the platters and boards pulled, and end up in a 5 gallon tub of aqua-rega (real nasty nitric acid and peroxide mix, eats platters in a boil of froth and foam), same with pc edge connectors and the like. A recovery company comes in twice a year and swaps the pails, then PAYS me for the gold, silver, etc.. that they recover. Now thats erasing data! - YourTechSupport, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11Sadly, that would probably still be recoverable.
Try thermite or something to turn the platters into mush. - vmerc, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11Come on guys. At least he got the right "you're". That's more than you can say for most on Digg.
- TuffGhost, on 10/12/2007, -4/+14Once the law is passed, will you turn yourself in?
- ahhell, on 10/12/2007, -4/+13"I am now some idiot"
Wow, I never met a genuine idiot before. - KarateMedia, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10@ratrip
"What do you people have on your hard drives that so desperately needs to be kept private? I sense a fear of discovery here that surpasses my imagination."
Let me guess -- you're still in high school and you live with your parents. Otherwise, you'd be concerned about things like your banking information, passwords, paystubs (many of us working folk get our paystubs in .pdf form now), credit card statements, insurance information, and whatever other information might be useful to a criminal.
You have heard of identity theft, correct? It's been mentioned a couple times here. It actually happens, and people actually do buy used hard drives to look for personal information to steal.
When you get a job and a bank account, you'll understand. - MyDocuments, on 10/12/2007, -6/+13best buy is the worst.
- MuffinMan, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10then hire...
a. the Joker's henchman?
b. Droids?
c. Storm Troopers? - Brewdaddy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Advertising and lies, baby, preying on consumers' ignorance. How else would Bose make a profit?
- Technopundit, on 10/12/2007, -4/+11I wouldn't have given them more than five bucks. Must have been a pretty sizable drive.
- Technopundit, on 10/12/2007, -6/+12d:) community college students?
- Matteos, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7As for Dell. At work we got a replacement drive from Dell. It was supposed to be a "clean" drive. But when I booted the machine to install the OS wasn't I surprised to see Windows 2000 start up, but not only that, it was an image for Wachovia Securities! including all of there software.
- ani-pockdotnet, on 10/12/2007, -6/+11Correct me if I'm wrong but even if you managed to drill holes in the platter, Drive recovery places have tools that can read sectors by location, so the only way to suceed by the drill method would be to drill enough holes to cover the entire surface...
Just put it on 35 pass random write kay Best Buy mmm kay? - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6is this a haiku?
- Alphateam, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6They average user doesn't know any better.
I was out of work last summer and I got told "Why don't you work for the Geek Squad" several times.
I was way over qualified for that kinda work. People have no idea what they do. They think..."He knows computers....they know computers...I have no clue. I'll just take what they say as fact". So I don't blame the average user. If it was a Digg user....then I'd blame them. - deweyhewson, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Someone should make note of the finder's honesty. Much like finding a lost wallet, the temptation for personal gain is definitely there, so kudos to the guy's integrity.
- derek20cali, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/sec96/full_papers/gutmann/
"In conventional terms, when a one is written to disk the media records a one, and when a zero is written the media records a zero. However the actual effect is closer to obtaining a 0.95 when a zero is overwritten with a one, and a 1.05 when a one is overwritten with a one. Normal disk circuitry is set up so that both these values are read as ones, but using specialised circuitry it is possible to work out what previous "layers" contained. The recovery of at least one or two layers of overwritten data isn't too hard to perform by reading the signal from the analog head electronics with a high-quality digital sampling oscilloscope, downloading the sampled waveform to a PC, and analysing it in software to recover the previously recorded signal. What the software does is generate an "ideal" read signal and subtract it from what was actually read, leaving as the difference the remnant of the previous signal. Since the analog circuitry in a commercial hard drive is nowhere near the quality of the circuitry in the oscilloscope used to sample the signal, the ability exists to recover a lot of extra information which isn't exploited by the hard drive electronics (although with newer channel coding techniques such as PRML (explained further on) which require extensive amounts of signal processing, the use of simple tools such as an oscilloscope to directly recover the data is no longer possible)." - Thuktun, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7@TheCount "This sounds like BS to me. I used to work tech at a Best Buy a few years ago, and whenever we did a HD replacement/upgrade we ALWAYS gave the HD's back to the customers by policy. "
Not necessarily BS. I had a laptop with the extra service plan at Best Buy. They (the ones in my area anyway) refused to do work on the laptop in-house and had to ship it off somewhere whenever anything needed to be done.
In a continuing attempt to get a faulty battery charging board fixed, I had to keep sending it off. One of the times that it was away not being properly fixed, they replaced my hard drive even though they had previous explicit non-authorization. They did NOT give it back to me, instead assuring me that it was destroyed in a manner that sounds disturbingly like the story these people gave. - master_of_fm, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6DBAN works great especially since hard drive degaussers run upwards of $2000, if i have a drive that doesnt finish with DBAN i will finish it off with a nice 20 lb sledgehammer. Plus I am always looking to to add magnets to my hard drive magnet collction. I had an old full height scsi drive recently that had some killer magnets in it, nearly took my finger off trying to stick it to a workbench in my office
- DigginDave, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5I hope this guys sues the pants off of Best Buy. They need to understand that it is unacceptable to be so wreckless with people's data. It boggles my mind that Best Buy is so successful given it's terrible track record for abusing their customers.
- mandarin, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Yeah 3 cheers for the stranger!
"You're the man!"
And damn Best Buy to hell! - Brewdaddy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5I don't know... Dell might have them topped... that or AOL.
- autobahn, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6Best buy's computer tech services are the worst in the world - and it's entirely because of corporate policy.
The people who took care of that drive probably were told by their manager to not bother wiping it as to not waste any time. - o0joshua0o, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5This guy is lucky the buyer was nice enough to track him down and notify him of the situation. Someone more unscrupulous might have used the information for their own financial gain.
Imagine getting a call from a stranger like this: "I have your old hard drive. If you want it kept private, send me $5,000." - astrotrain, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Amen brother Admin!
Nice idea there getting paid to PROPERLY dispose of others bad PC parts. - twollamalove, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5@rewritable: out of sheer curiousity, why do you have this picture?
- card2570, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5@SoundDoc:
Now THAT'S a post! - shikaga, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Come to England and use PC World.
- mjordan4343, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3giving the hard drive back should be standard protocol.
- arizonagroove, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3"Come to England and use PC World."
Or if you won't want to come to England, just watch Weebl and Bob's experience -
http://www.weebl.jolt.co.uk/upgrade%202.htm - sonmiles, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Make an effigy and webcast for the world to see! I'd DIGG that!
- astrotrain, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I would say yes...Best Buy computer associates in sales have no idea what a computer is nor what they are
comprised of.
For a test, ask them the difference between a CD-R and a CD-RW....
Its like asking Kelly Bundy the color of an Orange. - djdole, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Everything RETAIL is more expensive than online. :-/ That's comparing apples to oranges.
Compare BB to CC, or Compusa, but not to an online retailer. -
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