A reader wrote in to tell us that the Western Digital hard drive he recently bought new from Best Buy had hidden dirty pics buried on it. He was running a program to retrieve some accidentally deleted images when he discovered the secret files. Read his story below. [Update: our tipster has written back in to clarify that the HD was not necessarily "brand new."]
Imagine my dismay when, while playing around with folders on my external hard drive (Western Digital 160GB), I deleted all of my personal pictures. Pictures of myself, my friends, my cats, parties and vacations all deleted in one fell swoop. It is times like these when it’s good to have a friend that downloads all of Lifehacker’s suggested applications. This friend turned me onto a little program called PhotoRescue (http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/v3/) for Mac, which I used and it worked in restoring nearly everything on my hard drive, including videos.
Though, perhaps this program worked too well.
Upon examining the cornucopia of recovered pictures and videos I stumbled upon a few gems that were not my own. Unfamiliar Asian faces accompanied my pictures of the Philadelphia Flyers playoff game and concerts past. Puzzled, I examined these first few pictures. The list started with a few anime pictures. I must add, I have not once watched an anime movie or even viewed an anime site on my computer — ever. Scrolling down the list I came across some pictures that perplexed me even more. My best guess at the next few pictures was what seemed like some type of Asian CD artwork, an American Express picture, and a picture of Asian Norton Anti-Virus?
And then I got to the good stuff – naked Asian ladies.
I wish I could say that the pictures on the hard drive were mine; however, I am positive they are not. Believe me, I would be the first to admit if they were.
My question now is, how did these pictures get there? No one else had access to the hard drive and I bought it brand new from Best Buy. Was Western Digital selling refurbished hard drives as new? Were the people assembling these hard drives testing them by loading some porn onto them to test them out? That’s where The Consumerist comes in.
Have you heard any similar cases as mine or do you have any insight into my mysterious HD of porn?
We’re as curious as you are.
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retail rental strikes again?
just be grateful there’s no scatporn in there
naa, just a secret external hdd lottery. you won. congratulations.
Finally, Best Buy providing the customer with something to earn repeat business.
She looks like she’s 12, are you sure you want to post that stuff anywhere? There are witch-hunts going on, you know.
LoL must be an Open Box. At least it was wiped before it was resold…just not good enough.
@Prions: If it was sold as new, though, then BB broke the law…
@Prions: Not according to OP:
“No one else had access to the hard drive and I bought it brand new from Best Buy.”
I’d bet its a return that Best Buy or Western Digital formatted and resold. A plain format doesn’t actually get rid of the data on your HDD so I bet this is what happened when the guy before you returned it for whatever reason. Now I need to try this with all new HDDs I buy.
*stalks off to Best Buy to buy three Western Digital HDDs*
Hmmm. Two girls, one hard drive?
@Opie: haha
If this happened to me, the post would read, “Western Digital: Best company ever?”
Problem found… you bought something NEW from BEST BUY Nothing is ever new there…
@12-Inch Idongivafuck Sandwich:
However, Best Buy has been known in the past to re-shrink wrap returned product and sell it as new. How would the OP know?
@Prions: It’s doubtful that this happened in the factory. I’m in agreement that it probably was purchased and returned. If the original purchaser was very careful about repacking it and then lied to the customer service rep, they might have taken it as unused. At worst, it could have been a reconditioned model.
Was it shrink wrapped? They generally don’t/can’t do that in the store.
@Jaysyn: not that I would know…BUT…you must be new to asian porn. They ALL look like they are 12
I hate to ask a stupid question but what does OP stand for? I’ve only seen it recently on the consumerist.
Some people are just too spoiled. I’ve had to work hard for years to build my asian porn collection. Some people just buy a hard drive and WHAM! Free porn. Say, can I have the sku of this product please?
@Juice Box Hero:
Oh yeah they can. The Circuit City I used to work for had a shrink-wrap machine to wrap opened merchandise.
@linus: Usually means Original Poster, the person who wrote the letter to Consumerist
@plural_of_moose: Thanks…been bugging me the past few days.
Wow your lucky your girlfriend/maybe wife didn’t see that.
awesome.
@EaGle1337:
Pssh, my wife would have said, “Are those new? Haven’t seen them before.”
I worked at Best Buy in the 1994-1995 timeframe. There was more than one occasion where a manager would look at returns, sort out anything that could be passed off as new, then hand a pile to me and tell me to take it in back and shrinkwrap it so it could be sold as new, rather than as an open-box return return at a discount.
So this story doesn’t surprise me in the least.
I know my shrinkwrap jobs weren’t as neat as factory originals, but some employees were better at it than others. If you see several boxes on the shelf and the wrap is a lot sloppier on one of them (hint: look at the edges and the stress relief holes), you may want to avoid it, as that would be a sign of it being re-wrapped.
You sure someone wasn’t using your computer when you weren’t looking? Check the dates on those files because if “Asian faces accompanied my pictures” indicates that either they were in similar directories or had similar saved dates…
@BSAKat: lucky you i have a feeling it wouldn’t be the same for me >_<
Nude does not equal Porn. Maybe some actual porn is blurred or not shown, but pictures of naked women smiling at a camera isn’t porn.
@HFC: actually what’s given as example up there is considered softcore porn.
playboy and penthouse are just naked women smiling at a camera, those are also softcore porn.
A long time ago in a suburb far, far away, I worked at a CompUSA that would re-shrink wrap things all the time.
Usually a customer just wanted to inspect an item closer or made an accidental purchase of something and didn’t realize it until it was opened.
I personally never re-shrunk anything that I knew was used but I could conceive of it happening. At the time every CompUSA store had a small warehouse with shrink wrapping equipment.
This is totally the story I’m going to have ready for my wife when I need it.
I wonder how long before (in this post 911 world) someone like this guy gets busted for kiddie porn and he has to prove it’s not his.
Off topic: but I freaking love Card Captor Sakura.
Naked Japanese women? Only slightly.
This song should be the official soundtrack to this post yes?
Are you sure the HD wasn’t just storing your browser’s cache file?
@Bladefist: Yeah, get me in on that Card Captor Sakura action …
or not.
Seriously, it looks like a return or something but depending on the person this might have been pretty humorous.
I’m almost afraid to scan the 40GB hard drive I pulled out of a tag sale computer this weekend.
This is what is known in the biz as “value-added”
@AgentTuttle: Probably 2 or 3 years ago.
Is there a ‘hard’ drive pun in here somewhere? Could have sworn there would be.
/r/ rapidshare of the drive plox
@EaGle1337: I know the OP and his girlfriend didn’t mind. Thank god she’s cool about porn (@HFC: it’s considered soft core). I can only imagine how much funnier this situation would be if she was some sort of crazy woman like Denise Richards. Apparently she wasn’t too hot about Charlie looking at young Asian girls… pft.
@MMcNasby: i see.
@katylostherart:
@MMcNasby:
From the dictionary:
Pornography – obscene writings, drawings, photographs, or the like, esp. those having little or no artistic merit.
Obscene – offensive to morality or decency; indecent; depraved.
Legaly, obscenity has a three part test.
“The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be:
(a) whether “the average person, applying contemporary community standards” would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, Kois v. Wisconsin, supra, at 230, quoting Roth v. United States, supra, at 489;
(b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and
(c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”
The photos shown above, much like Playboy, are not obscene and are not pornography. The term “soft core” usually refers to images or video of simulated sex, rather than actual sex. These images, much like Playboy, do not depict sex of any kind and are not “soft core.”
The OP should run a good virus/spyware/rootkit scanner on all the machines where this drive was ever connected. I know he was using a Mac, but perhaps he hooked this external drive up to a Windows box at some point. It’s possible he was a zombie fileserver at some point.
I suppose there are two conceivable scenarios where this would happen:
1) Re-shrink wrapped product at Best Buy sold as new. Technically illegal, but not an uncommon practice in retail stores.
2) A refurb hard drive from WD was put into an external hard drive and sold as new. This is possible scenario, since they are creating a new product, and thus isn’t a ‘refurbished’ technically. This might be why the hard drive manufacturers are really getting into the external drive market, as it makes for a good dumping ground for refurbished merchandise but packaged as new. This is mostly theoretical, not sure how prevalent this is. There’s a small problem with this theory in that you would have to pool refurbished hard drives sent to your local facilities, back to China for manufacture into external ones. Not sure if the economics of this make sense, since shipping TO China is actually very expensive.
I have three of these same hard drives. Two I bought for school stuff and the last one I had to buy when my home computer crashed and I needed something to back up all of my files on before I performed a full system restore. I can see how someone who had a similar system problem and was forced to buy a hard drive to back up files might try to return it afterward. I think they are handy to have around, but others might see them as a waste and just use them once and bring it back to the store…
he just saved you 39.95 a month
I call shenanigans. Shenanigans of a closet anime fan kind.
“The list started with a few anime pictures. I must add, I have not once watched an anime movie or even viewed an anime site on my computer – ever”
Then why didn’t you call it japanimation like everyone else?
It’s cool that you like Sailor Moon, bro. It’s cool.
@mandiejackson: Wait, people still pay for porn on the Internet? How… quaint.
damn…this is the BEST EXCUSE for my wife if she found out those “photos” in my external drive…
@HFC: wtf is up with consumerist today? it keeps having login issues and not posting comments. so let’s see if this comes up twice.
the classical definition of porn is “writings or drawings of a prostitute”. the general accepted definition of porn is this:
“S1507 uses as the definition of “pornography” (which has no legal definition) the definition provided in USC Title 18, Section 2256 which defines “sexually explicit conduct” as actual or simulated:
(i) sexual intercourse, including genital-genital, oral-genital, anal-genital, or oral-anal, whether between persons of the same or opposite sex; (ii) bestiality; (iii) masturbation; (iv) sadistic or masochistic abuse; or (v) lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of any person.”
that’s from the free speech coalition. most people generally accept porn as something intended to cause sexual arousal. naked women smiling at the camera ARE softcore porn in this context. they ARE softcore porn in the context of playboy and penthouse. playboy and penthouse are not available for sale to minors because they contain explicit “non-artistic” nudity.
hardcore porn is generally accepted to mean showing penetration of an orifice. military bases do not allow pornography with penetration to be shown, most prisons do not show it. some states do not allow anal or gay pornography. some statse do not allow words suggesting fetishes. osbcenity is a subjective term.
every time the us gets uppity about sex and the government tries to stamp us out we laugh because some jackass always stretches the limits and redefines obscenity. to get a look at absurdity up close, research individual state laws on indecency and sex crimes. in some states public urination is a sex crime, in other states, you’re allowed to simulate rape of a minor as long as it’s “artistic” content (see dakota fanning).
i work for a porn magazine. i know what the minimum definition of porn is and it has to do more with context than content. fashion mag nude? fine. playboy nude? porn. really freaking simple.
the legal definition of obscenity has nothing to do with the dictionary definition of pornography. playboy, penthouse, and THOSE pictures up there in the example ARE softcore porn.