It's a shame this dude got scammed but this cracked me up!

Jstas

Back story:

Dude in Russia buys 500GB external hard drive from Chinese store on the other side of the river.

Takes it home.

Looks pretty, right?


But the drive was not working. If you, saved a movie onto the drive, playing the movie back resulted in replaying just the last 5 minutes of the file. Something's up. So he brings it into a repair place.

Apparently, the external HDD box had two nuts glued to the inner surface of the box with a 128MB flash drive pinned between them.



Apparently, the hack was pretty slick. If you attempted to write a file larger than what the 128MB flash drive could handle, it would cycle the process. This is a trick used in segmenting large backup files to fit on multiple piece of media without having to physically chop up the file before backing up. Saves on media costs too. It became a necessity when file sizes started outpacing media sizes in the early 90's and you had to drop installation files across a dozen floppy disks. Basically, what happens is the file gets written in multiple segments but each segment contains the full file info and will present the full file size to the OS. They hacked the software though to keep rewriting the header with the file size while continually overwriting the last 128MB of data until the file had been fully processed. Needless to say, storing a 4.5GB movie on the drive, you'd only get the last 5 minutes because that's all that fits in 128MB of space.

Pretty messed up but the crooking of this guy was so creative I have to give the scammer props! What's worse is that as creative as the software hack was, the hardware hack is pretty mickey mouse but effective! I like the cheap, black plastic USB gender bender glued up as the "port" with the flash drive shoved in the other end and flappin' around in the breeze!

Here's the original story:

http://blog.jitbit.com/2011/04/chinese-magic-drive.html

Joe08867

Wow, If they just used there minds for good this world would be a much better place.

Although I do have to say I laughed pretty hard at at that.

cokewithvanilla

Wow, for the time and effort it doesn't seem worth it. How much could they possibly be making off that?

I think the nuts are part of a symbol....

polkfarmboy

Its kinda like a millionaire stealing from the dollar store

Definitely a candidate for scam of the year

TECHNOKID

Jstas wrote: »

Back story:

Dude in Russia buys 500GB external hard drive from Chinese store on the other side of the river.

Takes it home.

Looks pretty, right?


But the drive was not working. If you, saved a movie onto the drive, playing the movie back resulted in replaying just the last 5 minutes of the file. Something's up. So he brings it into a repair place.

Apparently, the external HDD box had two nuts glued to the inner surface of the box with a 128MB flash drive pinned between them.



Apparently, the hack was pretty slick. If you attempted to write a file larger than what the 128MB flash drive could handle, it would cycle the process. This is a trick used in segmenting large backup files to fit on multiple piece of media without having to physically chop up the file before backing up. Saves on media costs too. It became a necessity when file sizes started outpacing media sizes in the early 90's and you had to drop installation files across a dozen floppy disks. Basically, what happens is the file gets written in multiple segments but each segment contains the full file info and will present the full file size to the OS. They hacked the software though to keep rewriting the header with the file size while continually overwriting the last 128MB of data until the file had been fully processed. Needless to say, storing a 4.5GB movie on the drive, you'd only get the last 5 minutes because that's all that fits in 128MB of space.

Pretty messed up but the crooking of this guy was so creative I have to give the scammer props! What's worse is that as creative as the software hack was, the hardware hack is pretty mickey mouse but effective! I like the cheap, black plastic USB gender bender glued up as the "port" with the flash drive shoved in the other end and flappin' around in the breeze!

Here's the original story:

http://blog.jitbit.com/2011/04/chinese-magic-drive.html

Wow! Nice hard drive, very high tech! ...and I have to admit it is very funny, LoL :biggrin:

nadams

My boss purchased 6 "8gb" flash drives from some deal website. They arrived, and I was using one to back up a users data. Went to copy the data to a new laptop, and was getting all kinds of weird files out of place and files that wouldn't open.

I cracked the case open, and found that it was a 1gb flash drive. Then I downloaded and ran this tool to verify that it was fake - http://www.heise.de/ct/Redaktion/bo/downloads/h2testw_1.4.zip

Jstas

TECHNOKID wrote: »

Wow! Nice hard drive, very high tech! ...and I have to admit it is very funny, LoL :biggrin:

You really had to quote the whole post? Like nobody knew what you were referring to? :rolleyes:

Sherardp

Brilliant, though it is pretty sad. The idea and time behind it was very creative. Sucks for the buyer of this crap though.

amulford

they're gonna be all pissed off when I start crackin cases....

cnh

Joe08867 wrote: »

Wow, If they just used there minds for good this world would be a much better place.

Although I do have to say I laughed pretty hard at at that.

There is definitely truth in this insight. China has, in many ways, become a free for all with scams and piracy galore, anything to make a buck. It's amazing how fast they've processed the message we've been hit with since the last financial debacle here in the U.S. 'Money for nothing and chicks for free'

cnh

inspiredsports

Joe08867 wrote: »

Wow, If they just used there minds for good this world would be a much better place.

Although I do have to say I laughed pretty hard at at that.

I had that same thought the other day.

What if hackers were good people and secretly hacked in to clean up problems and keep your PC running in tip-top shape instead of installing spyware :biggrin:

cokewithvanilla

inspiredsports wrote: »

I had that same thought the other day.

What if hackers were good people and secretly hacked in to clean up problems and keep your PC running in tip-top shape instead of installing spyware :biggrin:

then a lot of people wouldn't have jobs