 I look at me using my flip camera. I haven't used this thing in probably over a year. This is just a random video. Just some thoughts on something I've experienced today. So, someone I know, I don't know if I say any names, calls me up today because they were having computer issues. They just brought their Windows 7 or 8 machine into the shop and they paid someone 200 bucks to fix it and they upgraded them to Windows 10. They get home and within a day the machine is locking up. Okay, I would get my money back number one there but that's just me. So, what's happening and I'm not there, this is just them telling me over the phone is that they can't get it past the screen, a window keeps popping up telling them there's some sort of error and it gave them an 800 number to call, which they called. Now, this is someone who I've had confrontation with before trying to help them with their computers and they argue with me at everything I say. They call me for help but then don't want to listen to what I have to say. So, I'm trying to be as polite as possible but first off I just want to say any software on a computer pops up a screen saying to call a phone number. Don't call that phone number. It's just a screaming scam. Anyway, they've already called this number. It's some geek company. I don't remember the name of the company but it was Geek Something and it wasn't Geek Squad. It was something else, at least what they said the name was. So, while they're talking to me on the phone, they've already called this company and they've given them remote access to their computer. It's just... And they're calling me to see if what these people are saying... One, to see if what these people are saying is true and most of the time there's so many computer repair or tech shops or whatever you want to call them and they're just a load of crap. Everything they say. So, they tell this person I know that the problem, the reason their computer is getting these error messages on their screen is because their network is dirty. They need to encrypt their network and remove computers from the network that are on the network that shouldn't be on the network. So, first of all, these people, their computer, their network is already encrypted which I told them because I've been there. I know they're using WPA. And they were told that they have somewhere around 12 devices on their system and I don't know if that's 12 devices, network devices on their network currently or if they're looking at, if these people have now accessed their router and looking at recently connected devices. I'm assuming they're talking about at that time, which makes sense because these people, they have at least one or two desktops, at least two laptops, a tablet, a couple of phones, a network printer, at least two webcams, network cams on their system that I know of. So, the fact that they have 12 devices and they have two routers too, a router and a repeater which should be showing up if you do a network scan. So, the 12 devices make sense. Again, these people are telling them that the network is not encrypted that at least once a year, if not every month, they need to have professionals come in and clean their network. Whatever the heck that means. So, I'm trying to politely tell this person, this person that I know that these people are either lying to them or really have no clue what they're talking about. Having someone come in to clean your network, what does that even mean? So, now they're asking me, okay, they're worried because they run a business. They ask me, are these people that they've now given access to their computers and they're currently on their systems as far as I know while we're talking. Could they screw things up? Which is a hard to answer question. I'm like, I said, can they screw up your computers beyond repair? No, no, I mean they could screw up the software, but that can always easily be fixed. Well, you're running Windows, so it's a little more difficult. But in general, it's easy to fix. And they said, well, no, no, you know, I run a business. I have everything backed up on a server. I've disconnected that hard drive. I've turned off the computer, another computer, and disconnected the hard drive that most of the business stuff is on, although this is also a business computer. He wants to know if these people can later on get in and then access not only that computer, but another computer and delete files. I'm trying to politely tell them that yes, they can. Because once you've given some remote access, you have no clue what they're doing. You have no clue what they're installing. And I'm trying to tell them this politely, but bluntly, you should have never given anyone access. Someone you don't know remote access to your machine to begin with. And I know for a fact the way their network's set up, because I've told them time and again over the years, is basically their two computers that they do all their office stuff on, all their business stuff on. They have pretty much the whole hard drive shared between the two computers, the entire C drive basically. So if these people do log back in on one computer, they're going to have access to the other computer and be able to delete those files. And he's like, well, can you make sure that once they're out, they're out? And the answer is no. And I tried to give him an example and I gave a bad analogy, which has kind of brought me to bring this view, because I thought of a better analogy and I wanted to share it with somebody. I said, it's like you gave someone the keys to your house and now you're asking if they can get into your house when you're not around, of course they can. And he's like, well, can't I just change my locks? He wants to change his password. And really the key analogy is not a good analogy, because really what you've done when you've installed software from somebody else to give them road access is that you've put in a new door that they only can change the lock on. Now you can try to remove that door, but now that you've given them access to your system, they could have made as many doors as they want. Now, can you look for doors that are currently open, ports on your system, active running software? Yeah, but they could have installed something that will activate later on, whether it be on a time delay or something that constantly checks a website for some sort of update. And that's something you can't really monitor unless you're really carefully, because your computer has so much internet traffic that one more link to a page somewhere randomly running, for updates to activate something is impossible. Once a system is compromised, the system is compromised, the only thing you can really do is wipe the whole system and start from scratch. Some people may disagree with me that. Those are probably also people who believe that antivirus actually helps, which I have a video coming up. Let me talk about that. Antivirus is a complete BS, short version of the video I have coming up. He seemed kind of disappointed and he's like, well, I've given at least 20 different companies access to my computers over the years because I can never get anyone to come out twice, which is interesting because most of these companies, what they do is they come in temporarily fiction machine but screw something else up so that you call them back later. So I'm surprised he hasn't been able to get anyone to come back out more than once. But I basically told him, and he was kind of mad and you give people bad news and they always shoot the messenger. I'm like, no, you shouldn't have done that. You shouldn't have given someone you don't know, someone that you don't completely trust, remote access to your machine. And once you've done it, you've done it. There's no real undoing it. Of course, again, there'll be people who say that you can't. No, you can't. I mean, if they really knew what they were doing or even half knew what they were doing, there's no way you can find every little thing that they've left behind. So my point is there's always going to be a level of trust. You're going to either trust Microsoft if you're using a Windows machine, Apple if you're using Apple machine, if you're running Debian, you're trusting the Debian developers, if you're running Ubuntu, you're trusting Ubuntu developers. If you're adding in extra repositories or PPAs or whatever they're called onto your system, you really trust who you're getting that stuff from. And you have to trust somebody. But when you're just calling up random numbers, companies you don't even know, and you're giving them access to your machine and you're installing software they're telling you to install and you don't really even know what it is, that is the bad thing. And as I told them, it's easy to keep people out of your system. But as soon as you let somebody in, you either give them access or you install any piece of software that they've given you, you've now basically given your system over to those people. And once you do that, there's very little you can do to undo it to truly know that it's undone besides wipe your system and start from scratch. Which if you're running your system properly really shouldn't be that hard to do, but at the same time you shouldn't have to do that for this particular situation. Anyway, this is just me ranting and raving and I was trying to be very polite to the person I was talking to because they do this regularly, they ask me for my advice and then basically yell at me when I give my advice and then I usually end up yelling back. This time I didn't do that, I kept my cool. They still seemed upset with me. People just don't like to hear that they've done something they shouldn't have. But anyway, this is just a random video. Hope I didn't bore you too much. Comment below, let me know what you think. But I think we can all agree that giving random people, you don't know, remote access to your machine, especially from a phone number that just randomly popped up on your machine when it was malfunctioning, is probably a bad idea. So anyway, thanks for watching. Have a great day.