Sky News exposes dodgy laptop repair shops

[RichardCranium]

Perhaps it wasn't actually a web cam at all but a small spy cam.

[alreadypacked]

Not only that but it must be dumping images or a video stream to the hard drive. Can't imagine that any decent techie wouldn't notice the hard drive whirring away for some unknown reason.

Must be running as a Windows service, I guess. Personally, I always like to check the processes in Task Manager from time to time on any third party machine I use for anything unusual...so that service would need to be well-disguised too.

I thought they would just transmit the images wireless, by pass the laptop operating system, use a seperate chip, just use the battery. Sure this type of this is do able now

[EddieNambulous]

I thought they would just transmit the images wireless, by pass the laptop operating system, use a seperate chip, just use the battery. Sure this type of this is do able now

Yep, that must be it. Just had a look at the TV headlines on SkyTV and the picture quality and frame rate of those captured pictures were very high.

Almost definitely wireless spy-cam.

[minestrone]

I would suspect that it was just streaming the output of the screen into a file internally to be played back later. Probably fairly easy with some windows shenanigans.

EDIT: Something like this...

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/1...creen-capture/

[expat]

Not only that but it must be dumping images or a video stream to the hard drive. Can't imagine that any decent techie wouldn't notice the hard drive whirring away for some unknown reason.

Must be running as a Windows service, I guess. Personally, I always like to check the processes in Task Manager from time to time on any third party machine I use for anything unusual...so that service would need to be well-disguised too.

Like, called SVCHOST? Don't Windows machines whirr away all the time anyway?

[PM-Junkie]

Not only that but it must be dumping images or a video stream to the hard drive. Can't imagine that any decent techie wouldn't notice the hard drive whirring away for some unknown reason.

Must be running as a Windows service, I guess. Personally, I always like to check the processes in Task Manager from time to time on any third party machine I use for anything unusual...so that service would need to be well-disguised too.

er...you did notice that the story referred to "technicians" from, for example - PC World?

[EddieNambulous]

I would suspect that it was just streaming the output of the screen into a file internally to be played back later. Probably fairly easy with some windows shenanigans.

EDIT: Something like this...

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/1...creen-capture/

I've used software like this before (with employer's consent, really!) to monitor certain machines and those programs basically take snapshots of the screen at predetermined intervals and save those snapshots secretly to the hard drive for later retrieval either directly or by remote login.

The one on Sky was high-quality full-streaming video of both user and the computer desktop, so unlikely to be one of those applications IMHO.

[Clippy]

Hardly a ground breaking story and not much different to when you take your car into a garage - most garages would charge you for more work than is needed.

The only difference, I guess, is the sensitive data element.

[EddieNambulous]

er...you did notice that the story referred to "technicians" from, for example - PC World?

Yeah, not being much of a hardware guy, that's the place I go to boost my self-esteem.

In my younger days, I would hang around Dixons for much hilarity, ear-wigging on spotty-faced kids blagging to equally computer-illiterate customers.

Harder to do now in these bigger stores.

[chris79]

Shock horror - some bint goes into a shop with a laptop not switching on, the dodgy shop quote her £130 for a new motherboard and browse the pics she took of herself with her knockers out for her boyfriend..

Hardly deserves the title "REPAIR SHOPS HACK YOUR LAPTOP"...

People need to take more responsibility for their personal data such as encryption or NAS drive rather than leaving it to chance that other people are 100% trustworthy.

As for scamming them for a new motherboard, personally speaking the technician may have been justified to quote this if they had deliberately left the memory chip loose as it could have constituted an intermittent fault, or could re-occur again in the future. Memory modules don't just work themselves loose unless you're playing american football with the laptop...

Besides, what's wrong with the lazy bint going to get several quotes from various places?

Crap story, crap justifications, misleading article.