358
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
358 points (98.6% liked)
News
23301 readers
3341 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Unsurprising. Most repair shops will ask for your PW to "test that the device works". If it is for a battery change, or screen fix or whatnot, refuse to give it! It is not required. They can confirm the fix just by accessing the lock screen itself.
Samsung phones have this but apparently the Samsung diagnostic tool doesn't work in the repair mode. Dumbest thing I've ever heard.
I just use a secondary app to lock down all apps when it needs serviced then.
Shitty people will do shitty things. That said, if you don't give your password, be prepared to have the technician test all sorts of stuff in front of you. The selfie camera, ear speaker, microphone, etc. sometimes are mounted on the screen. If there are problems, the tech will need to redo the repair. Not advocating for giving your pw, but be prepared for the process to be less convenient.
Edit: My bad, should have clarified I'm talking about phones exclusively. If you're worried about your computer, create a non-admin user and give them that password. If they had the skills to bypass that, they wouldn't be working at a repair shop.
What are you talking about? I worked at a geek squad back in college days and no one there needed your admin password to get into your computer. We'd just remove the password. The only reason we asked for your password was so you'd get your computer back with the password still on it, lol...
I'm more shocked that none of the techs found the monitoring software and assumed it was something malicious and disabled or removed it...
Bitlocker? FileVault? If you're cracking those, why the fuck are you working at a Best Buy?
Bitlocker or Filevault for the pin/password to get onto your computer? I don't think that'll be a common scenario. I also imagine they bypass the whole password thing, rather than cracking the actual password.
Yup. A majority of the time people didn't have any of that setup anyway. But also most of windows security is centered around external attacks over a network, not someone actually having your computer so there are lots of ways to just remove the password if you can plug in a flash drive or insert a CD.
If someone actually security conscious brought in a computer truly locked down, we would have had a tough time of it, but people that know how to do that aren't bringing their computer to geek squad to be fixed, so it's a catch 22.
Yeah I had a buddy who bought a PC that had a BIOS password on it(which now I realize was probably stolen.. but it was like a big box store 2010 desktop which is weird to steal) I was surprised with how easy it was to bypass that, and gain access with a flash drive and 3 minutes of googling
Phones. Also technicians aren't that amazing most of the time, if you drop off your thing at the place you bought it they might know the procedure to change a screen but that's it.
Also, even on laptops/desktops this might not always be possible depending on the bios configuration. Corporate devices for example might have the bios and booting from untrusted media locked down.
Corporate devices shouldn't be going to Best Buy.
Yeah, absolutely not.
One user got his work iPhone replaced in the apple Store by himself and never told us. Obviously no work apps or anything got installed properly.
And the work phones aren't even ours, they are leased 🤦 That was a pain in the ass.
Ah yeah I suppose that's true
If someone has physical access to your device, they also have the ability to access your files without your password. Unless you are using sophisticated full disk encryption, but that makes it more time consuming to gain access.
I wish Android still had full-disk encryption. It was dropped in Android 10 for file-based encryption, but as far as I know the keys are just somewhere on the device. But I am not sure about that. Like 10%.
They'll be in a hardware security module, just like the computer should be storing encryption keys with the tpm. Tbh I don't know what's actively implemented but definitely on the devices I manage in MDM they're non-compliant without that. I'm sure you probably can get cheap devices without though. Just like you can get home level laptops without tpm.
What it was really dropped? 😱
A lot of times, the camera/earpiece speaker/microphone cables are really fragile and tolerances are tight. The phone isn't designed to be opened. You should, therefore, make sure they work after the repair by making a test call.
You almost always need to the password to test a phone thoroughly. You can see that the screen works on the lock screen, but what about the front facing camera, and secondary microphone that are attached to the screen and need to be transferred, or replaced if you do it like Apple. On newer iPhones the slightest defect can cause face id to not work. On laptops it depends. Sometimes live USBs don't have the right drivers to test all the hardware. When you assume things are simple you're usually wrong.
Weird that you'd mention the cameras, one of the only things you can access from the lock screen.
For everything but data recovery you can get by fine without a password. You aren't gonna have a hardware issue that makes Facebook slightly slower, your device won't turn on.
Incorrect. On most devices after the power is cycled you can't use the camera on the lockscreen. You have to enter the password once before that feature is enabled. And if you're doing a screen replacement you need to power it off or you risk frying the backlight. How many cellphones have you repaired? 1? Hundreds? Thousands? It was my job for years, and my point is just don't assume things are simple.