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Ethical question.

M

Michael Gross

Jan 1, 1970
0
Jeffrey said:
So, what to do?

Jeff

Give it to the first nigger you see and say, "Here, trade this for da
rock homey."
 
J

Jeffrey Angus

Jan 1, 1970
0
Customer brings in a lap top. "Won't boot"

So you do the usual amount of diagnostics
and knock a little sense back into the machine.

Being nosy of course, you check out the
pictures folder to see what their kinks are.

Oh, my definitely a bozo no no there.....

So what do you do?
(Some answers giving below are tongue in cheek
for the humor impaired.)

Act like nothing happened?

Congratulate them on their tastes?

Wipe the drive with something like bcwipe and
give it back to them?

Spin up the drive separately and bang it against
the desk repeatedly until you knock a head loose?

Make copies for yourself?

Hand it over to the local police?

Give it back to the customer and turn them in
after a few weeks?

Charge the customer extra and demand payment to
keep quiet?

The two things that bother me the most are the
police have a terrible track record on anonymous
and the lawyers like to claim that YOU put it
there.

So, what to do?

Jeff
 
D

D Yuniskis

Jan 1, 1970
0
Customer brings in a lap top. "Won't boot"

So you do the usual amount of diagnostics
and knock a little sense back into the machine.

Being nosy of course, you check out the
pictures folder to see what their kinks are.

Ah, well that's your *first* mistake! :-(
Oh, my definitely a bozo no no there.....

So what do you do?
(Some answers giving below are tongue in cheek
for the humor impaired.)

Act like nothing happened?

Congratulate them on their tastes?

Wipe the drive with something like bcwipe and
give it back to them?

Spin up the drive separately and bang it against
the desk repeatedly until you knock a head loose?

Make copies for yourself?

Hand it over to the local police?

Give it back to the customer and turn them in
after a few weeks?

Charge the customer extra and demand payment to
keep quiet?

The two things that bother me the most are the
police have a terrible track record on anonymous
and the lawyers like to claim that YOU put it
there.

So, what to do?

Of course, that depends on what you found.

Pix of "him" (?) spanking his neighbor's wife? <shrug>

Pix of "him" pouring cement over Jimmy Hoffa's body...?

To get *it* into the hands of police, you have
already given up any chance of anonymity -- even if
you shipped it to them in an unmarked envelope.

"Hey, I came in to pick up my laptop... What do
you *mean* 'you don't have it'? Where did it go???"

There was a girl named Pandora who made a similar
mistake (except it was a *jar*, in her case)...
 
C

Cydrome Leader

Jan 1, 1970
0
Jeffrey Angus said:
Customer brings in a lap top. "Won't boot"

So you do the usual amount of diagnostics
and knock a little sense back into the machine.

Being nosy of course, you check out the
pictures folder to see what their kinks are.

Oh, my definitely a bozo no no there.....

So what do you do?
(Some answers giving below are tongue in cheek
for the humor impaired.)

Act like nothing happened?

if you can't resist snooping, try to make up for being nosey by keeping
your mouth shut. Unless their files are corrupt, it's not your job to
snoop, judge then tattle if you don't like what you found.
 
M

Meat Plow

Jan 1, 1970
0
Customer brings in a lap top. "Won't boot"

So you do the usual amount of diagnostics and knock a little sense back
into the machine.

Being nosy of course, you check out the pictures folder to see what
their kinks are.

Oh, my definitely a bozo no no there.....

So what do you do?
(Some answers giving below are tongue in cheek for the humor impaired.)

Act like nothing happened?

Congratulate them on their tastes?

Wipe the drive with something like bcwipe and give it back to them?

Spin up the drive separately and bang it against the desk repeatedly
until you knock a head loose?

Make copies for yourself?

Hand it over to the local police?

Give it back to the customer and turn them in after a few weeks?

Charge the customer extra and demand payment to keep quiet?

The two things that bother me the most are the police have a terrible
track record on anonymous and the lawyers like to claim that YOU put it
there.

So, what to do?

Jeff

I'll assume you found some child porn. If it were me I would hand it over
to the cops. Can't say I really hate much about the world but child abuse
and those who do the abuse would be 1 of the few things I hate.
 
W

William Sommerwerck

Jan 1, 1970
0
The customer brought in the computer to be repaired -- not to be searched by
a nosy serviceman. You are obliged, if only by common courtesy, not to poke
your snout where it doesn't belong.

Unless you have good reason to believe someone's life is in danger, you
should keep your trap shut.

If this is kiddie porn, you might contact the police anonymously and ask
them what they recommend doing.
 
G

Geoffrey S. Mendelson

Jan 1, 1970
0
Jeffrey said:
Being nosy of course, you check out the
pictures folder to see what their kinks are.

Oh, my definitely a bozo no no there.....

So what do you do?
(Some answers giving below are tongue in cheek
for the humor impaired.)

Absoultely nothing. To be blunt if the word gets out that you did look,
you will NEVER get another computer to fix. While not everyone has a something
to hide, everyone has something they don't want you to see. Whether it's tax
records, letters home from their kid's teachers, or pictures of them, barnyard
animals and interesting approaches, everyone values their privacy at some level.

In fact, I hope for your sake, this is an alias, or the person, or any other
of your customers have no clue about usenet.

With that said, I want to point out a real life experience. A friend of ours
died a few years ago. She was fairly famous in the Jewish community, to the
point that although she lived in Jerusalem, a California community newspaper
had done an interview of her a few years before.

My wife did a web search on her and found that interview. When she brought it
up some porn flashed on the screen for 2-3 seconds. She asked me to look at it,
and to make a long story short, I found that of over 15,000 pages of articles
at that website, well over 2000 had hidden porn links.

The porn ranged from just people without clothes to videos best described as
"Dog and Pony shows" Tiajuana style. It was so well organized that you could
tell all of this without downloading any of these links just by the directory
structure of the file servers they were on, all of which were also "hacked".

Anyone who ever went to this news site had a one in ten chance of having
accessed and downloaded to their cache some porn, and frequent or long term
visitors would have been loaded with it.

I called the owner of the site and explained the situation to him. He had no
idea that not only was his site hacked, but that he had to check it often.

Geoff.
 
C

Charlie

Jan 1, 1970
0
Jeffrey Angus said:
Customer brings in a lap top. "Won't boot"

So you do the usual amount of diagnostics
and knock a little sense back into the machine.

Being nosy of course, you check out the
pictures folder to see what their kinks are.

Isn't that an nvasion of privacy? Did you have a search warrant?
Do you open yourself up to a lawsuit?

Advice I one got from an attorney. You never want to be in the witness box.
And you don't know the ansewer until the judge tells you.
 
D

D Yuniskis

Jan 1, 1970
0
Isn't that an nvasion of privacy?

Well, "it depends"... if you deliberately went snooping
around, yes. OTOH, if you happen to open something in
the course of repairing/verifying the machine's operation,
you can justifiably claim innocence.

E.g., I routinely am called on by friends/neighbors
to fix broken laptops. Usually, it's a software issue.
Regardless, I often end up having to image the disk
or do other triage to try to salvage as much of their
"stuff" as is possible. Almost always, this requires
looking at the "stuff" (is this something they downloaded
and can potentially re-download? or, is it something they
created that can't be replicated -- like photos, email, etc.).

I *always* come across something that the owner would
rather not let others know about. Especially kids not
wanting their parents to know what they do when Mom/Dad
aren't watching.

To date, I have never even *flinched* when handing the
repaired laptop back to the owner. Even if they *know*
I may have seen their tax returns, bank statements,
"private photos", personal correspondence, etc. It's
just not "professional" and definitely not what a "friend"
would do.

OTOH, had I found a photo of one of the neighbor *kids*
engaging in some outrageous behavior, you can bet I would
approach *them* about it -- even if they were minors.
Did you have a search warrant?

I don't think the police are bound by that if the materials
come to them from a "third party". I.e. *you* may be subject
to civil (even criminal?) prosecution but I don't think
that taints the authorities' use of the materials.
Do you open yourself up to a lawsuit?

Probably. Especially if you can demonstrate financial
losses as a result of those actions (reputation, loss
of employment opportunity, etc.)

In some situations, you might also open yourself up
to criminal prosecution as an accomplice after the
fact.
Advice I one got from an attorney. You never want to be in the witness box.
And you don't know the ansewer until the judge tells you.

Best advice is not to go looking for things -- as you have
no control over what you might *find*! E.g., you *don't*
want to know where Hoffa is buried...
 
C

Cydrome Leader

Jan 1, 1970
0
Charlie said:
Isn't that an nvasion of privacy? Did you have a search warrant?
Do you open yourself up to a lawsuit?

Advice I one got from an attorney. You never want to be in the witness box.
And you don't know the ansewer until the judge tells you.

this is good advice.
 
M

Meat Plow

Jan 1, 1970
0
this is good advice.

Let's say the computer is returned with no mention of contraband. Down
the road the owner is arrested, computer seized and contraband found.
Owner says he has no knowledge of the contraband and that he had it
repaired not long ago and the contraband must have been placed their by
the repair person. You are served taken in to be questioned. Do you now
lie about having knowledge about the contraband? What if you are called
to testify? Do you purger yourself and deny knowledge?

Just some food for thought.
 
J

jeff_wisnia

Jan 1, 1970
0
D said:
Ah, well that's your *first* mistake! :-(



Of course, that depends on what you found.

Pix of "him" (?) spanking his neighbor's wife? <shrug>

Pix of "him" pouring cement over Jimmy Hoffa's body...?

To get *it* into the hands of police, you have
already given up any chance of anonymity -- even if
you shipped it to them in an unmarked envelope.

"Hey, I came in to pick up my laptop... What do
you *mean* 'you don't have it'? Where did it go???"

There was a girl named Pandora who made a similar
mistake (except it was a *jar*, in her case)...

I remembered that it was her *box*. <G>

Jeff
 
J

Jeffrey Angus

Jan 1, 1970
0
Owner says he has no knowledge of the contraband and
that he had it repaired not long ago and the contra-
band must have been placed their by the repair person.

Glad to see you paid attention to the original posting.
and the lawyers like to claim that YOU put it there.

To answer the point of invasion of privacy.
You have no expectation of privacy if you hand your
laptop to someone.

I find the "I would never...." answers humorous. You
don't have to try and prove to me that your morals
are un-impeachable. "Me thinks you doth protest too much."

Unfortunately, with the current state of affairs these
days, it makes it almost mandatory for you to check any
media for illegal material and report it.

And yes, I don't doubt for a minute that the RIAA
would like nothing more than to hang you up by the
balls for failing to report pirated music as well.

But child abuse and child pornography are both very
high up on the "witch hunt" scale right now, and
anyone even remote connected with it, accidentally
or otherwise has to consider the potential damage
to yourself by getting sucked into that situation.

You really have only two options.
1. Deliver the laptop to the police and prepare to
have to testify in court as to who's laptop it is,
what you found on it, and why you had access to it.

2. Cause a physical failure to the drive and return
it to the customer, "Sorry, drive failed can't fix
it, unless you want a new hard drive. But you're
data is gone."

If you're lucky, customer will know why the drive
"failed" and accept that. Of course, if they're total
assholes, which is typical, they'll want to sue you
for losing their "valuable company data they didn't
back up." And you really don't want to have to explain
in civil court why you didn't turn them in to the
authorities.

Jeff
Oh and to the other Jeff, thanks for the consult,
you're check's in the mail.
 
D

D Yuniskis

Jan 1, 1970
0
It was a jar. According to the wikipedia, it was mistranslated (around
500 years ago) as box and that has stuck in some places.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora's_box

Ah! I forget how many little bits of tid wikipedia hordes!

In my case, Greek friends set me (and a few teachers)
straight on this decades ago (along with "pea" vs. "pie",
"mee" vs. "mew", etc.)
 
M

Meat Plow

Jan 1, 1970
0
...while snooping somewhere where you weren't authorized.

Now you have a reputation
not only as someone who does unauthorized snooping but as a nark.

Word gets out that you are a jerk
and people immediately stop bringing you their work. Another jackass out
of the business. Good.

A NARC is urban slang for someone who squeals on narcotics dealers.

I will report child porn all day long. But it's nice to see that you
support child porn by not reporting it.
 
M

Meat Plow

Jan 1, 1970
0
Glad to see you paid attention to the original posting.

I tend to lose my ability to focus when posts are long and ambiguous.
Next time just get to the fucking point. And my arguments are still valid
but also involve morality and honesty. Obvious you know nothing about
either since you were snooping.
 
M

mm

Jan 1, 1970
0
I'll assume you found some child porn. If it were me I would hand it over
to the cops. Can't say I really hate much about the world but child abuse
and those who do the abuse would be 1 of the few things I hate.

I think I would make a distinction between child porn the owwner
created versus stuff that looks clearly purchased, even though both
are illegal.

I bought a big harddrive at a hamfest last summer and it wasn't wiped
like most are, adn on it was nothing involving children, but there was
some porn, a little bit of labeled with a web-addreess, so it was
clearly downloaded, a free sample perhaps, and a couple short videos
that had no one in them that looked anything like the owner of the
hard drive.

OTOH, there were others that looked home made, because the same "girl"
appeared in the bedroom and ohter plces like at a restaurant.
Actually some of the girls wree in their 50's and quite unattractive,
and a couple were darn good looking and pretty young, but still 25 or
30. I think the man is not married. He also had a lot of family
pictures. (I've thought of trying to find him in case these were his
only copies of the pictures.)

My point is that maybe the op can tell if it was user created, or
received from a friend?, versus bought, where the customers arrest
wouldn't have any repercussion for the sellers, iiuc. I don't know
entirely how, but I could clearly tell the differnce in what I saw.


Any other evidence of a real crime, like videos of vandalism,
muggings, arson, murders, should be turned over to the police, and I
don't think any defense claims, if any, that the computer repair man
inserted anything will be believed by anyone.

Just a couple days ago there was another example of some group
videoing their beating up a homeless man.

OTOH, how can a customer be so stupid he takes teh computer in if it
contains anything illegal. There are some people who wouldn't even
ask advice and woudl take it to the police if it showed someone
spitting on the sidewalk. That's illegal too some places.
 
M

mm

Jan 1, 1970
0
Isn't that an nvasion of privacy? Did you have a search warrant?

FWIW, search warrants don't relate to private parties, only the
government. They don't give search warrants to private parties, not
even private detectives. Only to government law enforement persons.
Like DY said.

"Invasion of privacy" is a term that can apply lots of places but only
a few of them are illegal or tortious.

However the OP says he was nosy and snooping. If he says that
elsewhere or used his real name here, he's weakened his defense a lot.
 
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