Peeping Tom Mac spyware suspect cuffed

A PC repair technician has been charged with planting spyware on the machines of clients as part of a ruse designed to capture pictures of them in various states of undress. Trevor Harwell, 20, a former Mac specialist at Los Angeles-area home computer repair outfit Rezitech, allegedly surreptitiously planted a package called …

[Getter lvl70 Druid]

Ever since the movie 'Die Hard 4'

I've had this odd mental disability for disabling my LT webcams and placing a piece of electrical tape over them.

Call me crazy but I wonder sometimes.

;)

[Connor]

Wait...

What, those message weren't real? Damn that sick pervert. I feel violated.

[cloudgazer]

hmm - this all seems very demonseed

I'm concerned that we may end up with a generation of horny macbooks out there impregnating californians.

[nyelvmark]

impregnating Californians

Don't worry about it. The resulting offspring would be indistinguishable from ordinary Californians.

[Bumpy Cat]

I don't understand

There are millions of pictures of naked ladies on the internet. Of all varieties. (Errr, so I've been told). Why go to so much trouble, and go to jail, for some blurry photos of unwitting victims?

[johnnytruant]

pics

Or it didn't happen.

Research purposes only, naturally.

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, I saw this on 4chan /g/ last night.

Someone had posted 'OK, which one of you was it'

[Graham Bartlett]

All this lead-up

And no-one's yet come up with the comment of "dirty Mac brigade"? Shame on you, El Reg!

[Anonymous Coward]

pics or it didn't happen

somebody had to.

[irish donkey]

I remember the story that.....

you could crack a car stereo code by putting it into a freezer. Sounds equally implausible. But everybody round here has heard the story.

Did it work?

I don't know as I don't work on stolen gear.

One story I can verify if you hang a creased suit in the bathroom and have a shower it does help the straighten it out.

[david 63]

Don't know about the car stereos...

...but I'm told baking broken graphics cards can bring them back to life.

[Anonymous Coward]

@david

Take the heatsink and all other screwed or clipped on pieces off the card, put it on a baking tray covered with tinfoil and raised up with a few balls of tinfoil and put it in the over for 10 minutes at 200 degrees C. Let it cool for an hour, apply fresh thermal paste under the heatsink and reattach everything. The technique is called re-flow soldering and is essentially what the manufacturers do with cards under warranty anyway. It works on pretty much any recently manufactured circuit board so you could do the same with a laptop motherboard as well.

[Jacqui]

it worked

on first gen eeproms as the sub zero temps would null out the cheapo eeprom - setting the passcode to all zeroes. Newer eeprom and storage tech means this trick now fails.

And yes I have seen it work - my company Astra stereo came without the passcode and

after the alarm had been fitted no stereo.... Asked a neighbour (mechanic) who popped the

stereo out of the DIN slot (I know the good old days) and froze it for a few hours then

let it warm up in the sun and popped it back in and entered 0 0 0 0 ... until it worked.

Jacqui

[Robert Carnegie]

I can't help a sneaking respect for his (alleged) ingenuity

So it worked (allegedly)... it's despicable behaviour, but I'm really hoping I'm not the only reader who is just a bit impressed as well as appalled.

[Aaron Em]

Impressed? By a window-licking creep?

That's just disgusting. But good on you for having the courage to admit it in public, I guess?

[Tchou]

Dumbest malware

ever released. How could he thought he could get away with it?

[Anonymous Coward]

What surprises me...

in these cases is how dumb the perps are. They install software that leads right back to them and they don't expect to get caught? Either that or the thrill they get out weighs whatever penalty they think they'll get.

[vincent himpe]

uhhuh

their level of dumbness is only surpoassed by the dumbness of the users that actually did take the machine into the bathroom...

People should be required to have a computer license, just like you need a drivers license.

[Lance 3]

I disagree

Why should they need a license? What should happen is that they should be laughed at and told to deal with it. Stupidity hurts and they get what they deserve.

What the cops should have done, had some fun with him. Find the ugliest people they could and have them disrobe for him.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: uhhuh

Let's knock the "dumb" users who know sod all about IT. What do you do when your central heating goes tits up, your car breaks down or maybe your roof leaks. No doubt there are any number of plumbers, mechanics and roofers having a good old laugh at dumb users who can't fix such things. There are quite a few people who get taken in by cowboy tradesmen of various flavours charging for unnecessary repairs. I don't see why IT support personnel can't be included when the word cowboy is used.

[Old Handle]

Just a big misunderstanding

It turns out he just had a tea kettle fetish. If anybody misinterpreted the directions as a suggestion to take the laptop into the shower with them, that was purely incidental (and may void their warranty).

[Anonymous Coward]

let me be the first to say ...

pics or it didn't happen

[Anonymous Coward]

FAIL

You weren't the first or even the second.

[Stevie]

Bah!

I, wait, no...blurg!

I cannot process this story. The monumental levels of stupid have shorted out my brain.