August27th
@August27th@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Australian's criminal history went viral after annoying the wrong repair guy 1 week ago:
I haven’t been following this, and I imagine others already have similar thoughts on this, but this article raised my hackles on this Louie dude.
When Rossmann searched for Luan Tahiraj, he was stunned.
News articles revealed that in 2013, Tahiraj had been jailed in Australia for offences against two girls, aged 13 and 14. In total, he served an eight-year sentence, with parole after four.
Court records show that Tahiraj sent the 13-year-old a file while chatting to her on MSN Messenger. He promised he would help her get more friends on MySpace, but it was, in fact, a remote administration tool (RAT).
Using the RAT, Tahiraj took over the girl’s computer and threatened to destroy it and hack her social media if she didn’t perform certain sexual acts for him.
He then recorded these acts via her webcam and shared the video online.
Jesus Christ. What a fucking monster. Only 8 years and served half that? Unbelievable.
McEwen says the AFP found evidence that Tahiraj had hacked 133 people using the RAT technology.
“They prosecuted on two matters, but there were many more out there that they did not prosecute, because it’s about the quality of cases that you bring to court,” he says.
There is no suggestion that these other people were underage.
“But it shows that the appetite didn’t stop at two,” McEwen says.
“It went far broader than that.”
A serial psychopath. Unbelievable they could only get him on 2 counts.
My spidey senses are tingling, I wonder if he couldn’t help himself and was doing the same thing again with his PS5 diagnostic software.
But she had repeatedly told him she was not trying to pirate his software, and also that she thought one of his security systems, called Digital Rights Management (DRM), was invasive and beyond the norm.
Other people were saying the same thing, pointing out that Louie’s DRM system could identify if you were running competitors’ software.
Some voiced concerns about the risk of malware or spyware if you did as Louie suggested on his website and turned off your anti-virus to run his software.
Alarm bells.
“There is no actual proof that I hack my customers, spy on my customers, breach any laws, or even go outside my own terms and conditions,” he wrote on the Better Way Electronics website.
“The fact that nobody has proven otherwise […]”
There it is. One of these brazen unremorseful psychos that didn’t learn shit from his imprisonment. They only got him on 2 of 135 crimes in which he did heinous shit to people after all, so now he thinks he can keep doing the same thing. He thinks he is such a genius, he is outright daring people in front of their faces. It’s a game to him.
Jones paid about $300 to buy a licence for the software, which at first worked perfectly. “It was maybe two weeks later, after we were like, ‘Oh, this is gonna be so great,’ that we started to have problems,” she says.
I bet it took about 2 weeks for him to get around to remoting into their PS5 diagnostics computer where the software was installed. The software does have to work of course, to be a tasty enough bait.
Access revoked
Better Way Electronics’s owner, Louie, fired off an email as a warning: Jones would be banned from the software she just bought if she kept running it “in a modified state”.
She had no idea what he meant, and told him she had only used it as advertised — to fix PlayStations. But Louie was unmoved, pointing to his terms and conditions, which stated he could revoke access at any time, even without providing a reason.
The pair went around in circles, Jones assuring him she wasn’t trying to pirate anything and suggesting the problem must be at his end, and Louie not having a bar of it, until things got heated on both sides.
Their interaction ended with Jones being banned from using the software.
But Jones soon saw she was not the only one having problems; other people were saying online they were getting banned without cause, and without a refund.
My speculative take is, these repair folks were running this software on clean-room machines used only for PS5 diagnostics, in a DMZ (or something similar), especially if the advice was to disable antivirus in order to use the software. I speculate when he eventually remoted in and snooped around, this would either a) look like a reverse engineering environment, or b) piss him off because he couldn’t get into anything else, or it was boring compared to his expectations/whatever his intent was.
Presumably, when he couldn’t get what he was looking for, he’d just jump right to fucking with them plainly over email instead of some other m.o. we’re unaware of, perhaps because this blew up too soon. I mean, why not, he’s already got their money and the terms let him do it; he set it up that way. And “stopping piracy” is the perfect smokescreen.
It makes sense when the primary goal isn’t actually money. Any business that isn’t “interesting” is competition to another business that actually is interesting, therefore the competition for them should be culled, so that the “interesting” business pool is stronger. Perfect psycho logic.
This is some weird power trip on many levels. Just like his previous 135 victims were subjected to his power. Disgusting.
This is all speculation on my part, of course.
“I feel you don’t understand me and my business goals.”
I fucking bet.
- Comment on The future of Amazon coders is the present of Amazon warehouse workers 4 months ago:
Left unsaid: the future of Amazon coders is the future of industry coders. Every other organization will clamor to do the same, and Amazon will productize it and offer it as yet another 3-letter service on AWS. Developers will be made to devops themselves into their own demise.
- Comment on Why is OCR for handwritten content still that bad? 5 months ago:
How else do you write them?
In a single (but not smooth) stroke, like how one would write a (mirrored) h, but where you would end the h normally, you connect it back to the bottom of the stem instead.
I learned cursive
That’s even weirder that you’d do ol for d then. I’d expect you to do a single stroke o, starting at the right hand side, but upon completing the o, continue straight up to make the stem of the d.
IMO a hallmark of messy writing should be the shortcuts taken to reduce the amount of lifts of the stylus for efficiency’s sake. You need to improve the efficiency of your sloppiness, to make things worse so it gets better 😂
- Comment on Anon tries stand-up comedy 6 months ago:
Howie Mandel origin story?
- Comment on Microsoft's LinkedIn: If our AI gets it wrong, that's your problem 9 months ago:
“We will provide you with a tool to emit garbage and a platform to share content. If you put the two together, you are liable.”
Attractive nuisance much? Is it too much to ask that they should have to label it a garbage generator instead of “AI”? Why does honesty always have to take a back seat?
- Comment on Massive issues with sleep and desperate for a solution. 1 year ago:
Brother, if you are having sleep issues and haven’t cut out caffeine yet, you owe it to yourself to start weaning off of it asap and see how that works for you. I can’t have any caffeine after noon, for instance, or else my sleep is fucked.
Other folks on here have already made the Xanax-anxiety connection for you, so I think it’s relevant to point out that in some people, caffeine is an anxiogenic, just saying.
I hope you find better sleep even if this is a dead end.
- Comment on "PSN isn't supported in my country. What do I do?" Arrowhead CEO: "I don't know" 1 year ago:
against your bias and narrative
If being a regular person who just wants to enjoy the things they pay for in peace is bias, and being fed up with this crap is narrative, what does that make you?
Stop trying to normalize exploitation by greed, and normalizing the acceptance of it.
Just because Sony can manufacture a bait and switch with some boilerplate doesn’t mean they should. Regular people should not be blamed for being exploited when purchasing in good faith. The developers made a game that works, clearly, and Steam delivered it, so they are culpable, but if Sony can stop their horseshit, and this all goes away, it is clear who really is to blame.
- Comment on "PSN isn't supported in my country. What do I do?" Arrowhead CEO: "I don't know" 1 year ago:
Did the CEO of Sony write this? A bait and switch scam is fine apparently, as long as there’s some legalese to protect the company in there.
It seems Steam should have some limitation in place on their end, and the Dev picks sales on Steam, not the publisher.
Then what is the job of the publisher? To perpetrate scams it seems, because seemingly the devs published the game just fine all by themselves Steam. If they didn’t do that right, the publisher suddenly has no responsibility to make sure that was distributed correctly? Whose job is it to ensure the product is published in line with their inevitable goals, we wonder.
so why would they list it for sale in those countries?
Because they botched the bait and switch. And now Valve is cleaning up Sony’s mess. Too bad they couldn’t clean up Sony’s mess of leaked customer data. I guess they can’t fix it but prevent the next one by making publishers agree up front that they can’t require data from players, in order to publish a game, but I digress.
no one seems to want to accept personal responsibility
No one should have to expect to be subject to a bait and switch scam in the first place. Which is what this clearly is, because if they were truly up front, they would have required the account on day one and had the appropriate region filters in place, so consumers could never be in this position.
Stop blaming the victims of corporate greed and scams; people should be able to reasonably enjoy things they paid for without being molested and exploited. Personal responsibility my ass when there should be laws to prevent this kind of thing in the first place.