Personal computing discussed
Moderators: askfranklin, renee, emkubed, Captain Ned
killadark wrote:Anyway to stop such insane amounts of spam from ever happening?
Like some posting restrictions for new users
anotherengineer wrote:Hey Damage,
Did you get a call from someone with an east Indian/Pakistani accent saying he was from MS and do what he told you to do to your windows machine??
My mom actually did this about 4 months ago, basically resulting in a format, and man they must have called my place about 3 times in the past 2 months.
anotherengineer wrote:Hey Damage,
Did you get a call from someone with an east Indian/Pakistani accent saying he was from MS and do what he told you to do to your windows machine??
My mom actually did this about 4 months ago, basically resulting in a format, and man they must have called my place about 3 times in the past 2 months.
just brew it! wrote:Or if you're prepared, you can do what this guy did: http://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsu ... lls_today/
My parents got one of those calls recently. My son too.
cphite wrote:anotherengineer wrote:Hey Damage,
Did you get a call from someone with an east Indian/Pakistani accent saying he was from MS and do what he told you to do to your windows machine??
My mom actually did this about 4 months ago, basically resulting in a format, and man they must have called my place about 3 times in the past 2 months.
I was getting calls from those a-holes almost twice a week back in May-June.
If I have time, I'll try to keep them on the phone as long as possible. For example, one guy I kept on the phone for almost 20 minutes pretending that I thought he was referring to my house Windows; almost had to admire his persistence... Another fun one is to just keep asking "Can you repeat that?" until they get frustrated and hang up.
NovusBogus wrote:Good show, though sadly the inability to troll those chumps is one of the (few) drawbacks of screening one's calls.
just brew it! wrote:One of my co-workers (another old fart like us) has his cellphone ringer set to a classic rotary dial phone ring. And he has it turned up all the way. First time it rang I did a double-take, it was pretty realistic. But after a few days it got old. Been thinking of asking him to turn it down...
Captain Ned wrote:Don't know how they do it, but when power is out, landline phone stays up.
ThatStupidCat wrote:I just checked a wiki and found out 9-1-1 was invented in 1968. You'd think in the days of rotary phone they'd use 1-1-1 but I guess that's better than 9-9-9.
just brew it! wrote:...and just to complete (maybe?) this little diversion into telephony trivia, the ring signal on a POTS line is 90 VAC, since it needs to be capable of directly operating an electromechanical bell in spite of the voltage drop from the resistance of several miles of fairly thin wire. You can get a pretty nasty jolt from 90 VAC! (And because of this, it has always amazed me how thin and flimsy modern modular telephone cords and jacks are.)
Wren wrote:So are they just bots? How do they get through the filtering system?