So, there I was in my office working hard (during summer break, no less, I hope my boss reads this) on LESSON (our school’s marking system) when I received a distressing email from a friend of mine.

Apparently he had been mugged during a trip to Spain (something I found very surprising as we’d just had dinner with him on Thursday, and he hadn’t mentioned a trip then), and the miscreants had stolen everything but his passport. All my friend needed was a small loan of €2000 to cover his hotel bills and taxi to the airport. Sent via Western Union, that admirable institution that takes such pains to make sure that money ends up where it’s supposed to.

Yeah. This particular friend would have trouble racking up a €200 hotel bill, much less ten times that amount. I immediately got on the phone and called his wife. Sure enough, their Yahoo account had been compromised and she could no longer access it. I talked her through Yahoo’s compromised account process, and she was able to reset her password using her security questions (apparently the scammer hadn’t changed those yet). Checking the original email showed that the scammer was accessing Yahoo’s webmail through a web proxy, hidemyass.com.

When she finally got into their account, all of their contacts had been deleted along with the last few months of their sent mail. She sent an email to Yahoo explaining the situation and got an automated reply saying that she would be contacted within 24 hours. In the meantime, she has no way of letting her contacts know the message is a fraud. Even worse, the “SOS from Spain” email had a reply-to address that was subtly different from the original, an added i between first initial and last name. This means that, even though she has regained control of her own account, anyone replying to her email will be replying to an account still under the control of the scammer.

I didn’t want all that effort by the scammer to go to waste, so I sent an email to the fake account asking how I could help my dear friend in Spain. To make a long story short, I went back and forth with my “friend” for three and a half hours, finally offering to loan him €1000. I only ended the fun when the scammer insisted on having the Western Union confirmation number.

I ended the conversation with a supposed link to the confirmation number, but which was actually a tasteful picture of a donkey braying. I then contacted a technician at hidemyass.com and forwarded them the emails along with the log of the scammer accessing the donkey picture. Surprisingly, the originating IP was from Nigeria. What a shock!

It did turn out that the scammer was actually paying to use the web proxy, so the technician suspended their account. Which means that instead of making money of this particular scam, the scammer actually lost money. It’s not much of a win, but I’ll take what I can get.

Padlocked gate credit – Padlock by Ian Britton. Used under the CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

Last September, while I was on sabbatical in the States, I bought an HP laptop (along with my HP tablet and HP phone). I ordered it online and specced it to have a full HD display and a Radeon video card in addition to the built-in Intel video, and was very happy with it.

The one complaint I had was that the fan started making noise after four or five months (at which point I was back in Lebanon). I tried disassembling the laptop to clean the fan, and it didn’t fix the problem. So I just let it go, and, eventually, the noisy fan got quieter.

A few weeks ago, I noticed that my laptop was running visibly slower than usual, and I rebooted. As came back up, I got a warning from the BIOS saying that the fan was no longer working correctly. I put my hand next to the fan outlet, and there was almost no air movement. The fan wasn’t completely dead, but it sure wasn’t working the way it should. When Fedora finished booting, it was running slow again. I checked the sensors, and, sure enough, it was running hot. Very hot. Obviously the fan needed to be replaced.

I checked the warranty status on my laptop, and found, to my surprise, that, even though I bought it in the US, it was covered with a world-wide warranty. Supposedly I could take my laptop anywhere in the world and have it repaired for free.

Now, I’ve lived in Lebanon for many years, and found that ‘customer service’ here normally consists of waving goodbye as you walk away with your new purchase. And a warranty is worth its weight in gold… until you leave the shop. Then it no longer applies, because, obviously, warranties aren’t intended to protect you once you’ve started using the product. This applies to the bigger international companies as well as the smaller mom-and-pop shops. I remember asking the local official Skoda dealer about a warranty on a used car and he told me, “I’ll give you a verbal warranty.” For some reason, I was less than impressed.

I contacted HP in Lebanon and they directed me to one of the HP authorized repair centers called Computer Information Systems (CIS). I took my laptop in last Friday and fully expected to be told that, for some obscure reason, the fan wasn’t going to be covered under warranty. Instead, they took my laptop without any hassle at all.

On Tuesday (two working days later!), I got a call from CIS telling me that it was ready. I went back in and got my laptop back, again with no hassle at all. They did tell me that I was in luck that they had the part because it was a US model, but they would have ordered the part if they hadn’t had it in stock.

So, while I’m not impressed that the system fan died so quickly, I’m very impressed that HP automatically gave me a worldwide warranty and I’m astounded that CIS did the work quickly without trying to find some way to charge me. Thank you both for your professionalism!