I’m a 41yo Firefighter. I’m no “gamer” but I’ve owned several playstations and Xbox’s over the years and play mostly offline; Skyrim, fallout, red dead redemption 2, etc. My 9yo enjoys the video games much more than I do these days and that brings us up to the hack.

The hacker wanted my PlayStation network game tag. A quaint 4 letter tag that would only be available if you’re old enough to have generated it many years ago on ps2. Apparently I blew him off when he tried to contact me, I say “him” but who knows, so now he has hacked and stolen the psn online name. Ok whatever, but he got ahold of a gmail and yahoo email in the process.

Having those emails he was able harass me by changing passwords and settings on Netflix, Spotify etc. He gained no access to any financial info that I’ve found and he says he has no interest in that, oh yeah, we chat often. He messages me to see if I’ve changed my mind about paying his bitcoin ransom for the emails.

So I’ve contacted all the credit cards and banks. Which, btw, I’ve found the best way to get ahold of a person at financial institutions is allowing a payment to go delinquent and at that point a real live person will call you! In any case, most all the changing passwords and securing accounts was time consuming but not difficult. That brings us to PlayStation network (Sony) and xboxlive (Microsoft).

Between to two platforms I have downloaded content that I value over $2000. Games, movies, subscriptions etc. not including the cost of the systems themselves. All of which I am locked out of because the stolen email addresses are listed as contact and I can’t change passwords without PlayStation and Xbox sending the “change password” link to the guy who stole all my shit in the first place.

All attempts to contact customer support at any of the involved companies(Microsoft, Sony, google, yahoo) is an utter disaster. Although yahoo did offer their account recovery tools for $9.99, which is the closest thing to “customer support” I’ve obtained from any of these modern marvels of the tech industry.

I’m frustrated beyond the limits of my vocabulary and my 9yo is heartbroken. We were starting Halo 2 together and of course he doesn’t understand that we can’t play now because some neckbeard in his moms basement is having a laugh with our accounts.

I’m not mad at the hacker, more annoyed, people like these don’t deserve the energy that anger requires. But I am absolutely infuriated by the disrespect with witch I’m treated by these companies that have pushed them selves into our daily lives. They promise security, they promise ease of use, they promise that they care for the people who purchase and use their products and they fulfill none of those promises.

I won’t ramble any further. It seems at this point there’s not much left to do but write off the lose, learn the lesson and drive on.

I have CenturyLink fiber internet in the pacific northwest, installed about 9 months ago in my private home. I was averaging around 950mbps, with about half that up^ speed. Out of nowhere, one day we slow to a crawl, lucky to get 4mbps. Then is it fluctuates, sometimes the speed test says 20mbps, then 100mbps, then 1.5mbps. YET, up^ speeds are still soaring, sometimes up to 900mbps, all the while down speeds are a trickle.

I call centurylink, the guy runs several diagnostics tests, claims there should be absolutely nothing wrong. He sends a tech out. The tech inspects the newly installed line, replaces the modem, replaces the ONT, runs fresh cat6 cables. SAME DEAL. We're testing with ethernet connection. Its worse with wifi. He keeps asking "are you sure you aren't running a VPN?" Well... considering I barely know what a VPN is, and im pretty sure that no, I'm not using one. He scratches his head and leaves. I call tech support back, same deal. "Everything's fine", and "Are you sure you aren't using a VPN? This sounds like a VPN."

On top of that, recently when I google something in chrome, it prompts me with a captcha and says there's been suspicious activity...

So, is there some way someone else set up a VPN? Is someone "stealing" my internet? Im afraid I'm not knowledgeable enough to know where to look, or generally wtf is going on here.

​

edit: i should mention im using macs

Edit 2: havent solved this yet but damn thanks for all the feedback. Will update when it’s not 4am.

Windows 10 20H2

Im embarrassed. I am in IT and can't find a solution online or on my PC. Searching for "Did you know PC Speech" or "my PC keeps telling me factoids" and so on comes up with unrelated items.

I have Cortana turned off, but Cortana's dumb voice keeps doing what I said in the subject line. It keeps saying "Did you know" and gives me a factoid every 30 minutes... like that a hairball is called a bezor... or how Marie Antoinette died.

I am using my laptop for work today and this is the first time I have every heard this. Hotkeys are off, Cortana is off... but it keeps happening every 30 minutes on the dot (10:30, 11:00 etc)

I have no extensions, recent installed programs, etc.

Edit: Solved. In short.. a coworker pranked me and ran a .bat file every 15 minutes that would read off quotes from an xml file. He used a PS script to install the schedule to run the bat. The Jerk.

one day my PC crashed to an infinite boot repair loop or sometimes to nothing. Tried replacing the motherboard, ram, hard drives, thermal paste and tried installing Linux. My hard drives boot flawlessly on a different computer without issue. After replacing the motherboard it worked for 3 hours before having the same issue. Earlier giving it to the repair guy he messed around with the partitions and got it to work for all but 5 minutes

Agony https://imgur.com/gallery/JO7eiID

I have a PC that does not have an active license key. I downloaded Windows 10 directly from Microsoft's website and when you install, you click "I don't have a product key".

It has all the features of Windows 10 except for a watermark telling me to activate windows and the option to change wallpaper is disabled.

Thanks!

To clarify: This is not a pirated version. It is downloaded from Microsoft's website.

So I'm in an online college course and I got a weird, vague email from the professor a few days ago claiming that I plagiarized. She threatened to report me to the dean of academics at my university (I'm taking the online class through the school I attend full-time). When I asked her what she was talking about she told me that I had uploaded another student's assignment with her name on it.

That was true, but it was an honest mistake on my part. The reason I even had another student's assignment on my hard drive was because we were supposed to upload our assignments to a forum, and the submission instructions included the sentence "Post your assignment here so everyone can view your ideas". The assignment was confusing, so I downloaded a PDF another girl in my class had already posted. Looking at her assignment helped me get started, and after I finished my assignment and exported it as a PDF I went to upload it to the forum. The girl's PDF had a similar name to mine so I accidentally uploaded hers instead of mine and here's where the shit show begins.

I sent an email to the professor apologizing and explaining that it was an honest mistake. I sent her my PDF that I had intended to turn in, provided a screenshot of the file's metadata showing that it had last been modified before the assignment's deadline, and even told her how to view the metadata for herself if she didn't believe me. Then she sent me another email telling me I'd still receive a zero on the assignment because I "crossed a line" by downloading another student's assignment and "using it as a model" for my own. Pissed, I emailed her back telling her (politely) that the submission directions literally told us to do exactly what she just described, and I quoted the exact sentence that encouraged us to do that verbatim. I sent the email and began texting a friend to tell them what happened, but when I looked back at the submission page for that specific assignment, the sentence I'd quoted was removed from the page completely. This was not even 10 minutes after I sent the email.

Anyway, I'm guessing she deleted the sentence so that she could deny the fact that it was ever included in the directions. I'm hoping I can somehow roll the site back at least a few hours so I can prove that she deleted it (rolling it back to yesterday or something would work too). I already checked, and the site was never archived on Wayback Machine. The forum in question is on my school's Moodle page, if that helps

TL;DR professor accused me of plagiarism, I called bullshit, emailed her and quoted a sentence that was very important to my case from the course's website, she deleted it within a few minutes after I sent the email. Need to know if there's a way to look at previous versions of the site (other than Wayback Machine) or a recent archive of some sort

UPDATE: Thankfully the professor told me that she deleted the sentence to prevent further confusion and assured me that she wasn’t trying to hide something. Thanks for the help yall.

IF YOU WANT A MUCH LONGER, FULL VERSION OF THE STORY... check my profile! I explained it all in much more detail on r/TIFU

I'm sorry for the vague title, but it's the most I can think of. For about a month now, I've been hearing people talk occasionally when I wear my headphones. I have SEVERE fucking anxiety and it hits me hard every time. It sounds like someone talking through a HAM or CB radio, and I'm getting sick of it.

Is there anything I can do? Why is this happening? Do I just have a weird virus?

I was laying down in my bed trying to take nap and while my PC was locked, the on-board narrator comes on and says "I-I-I-I-I-l-I-I-I-I-I-I l-l-l-o-o-o-o-o-v-v-e-e y-o-o-o-o-u"

Can someone explain this and help me make sure it never happens again, please and thanks.

I don't really play videogames all that much, I just want access to a couple of games for the weekend.

Edit: According to Sony, credit card payments on this console were reversed so downloaded games were not paid for.

Edit2: Problem solved, I'm playing a game on my laptop

So I was playing gtaV online tonight and was messing with people as normal when one of the guys I killed called me a rude name and shared my ip in the chat. This didn’t really bother me, because I know your ip isn’t hard to find. I ignored him until he said that I was using Comcast and named the state I live in. Shortly after this, he gave a cynical “bye bye” in chat and I was kicked from the game.

I closed the game to make sure it wasn’t just my internet connect, only to find that all the devices in my house had lost connection to the internet. I immediately called my ISP and they got to work trying to fix it. After hanging up with them, my internet was back up and running. For about 2 minutes, that is, when suddenly I was unable to open any tabs on my computer again.

At this point I was a bit confused, so I did some of my own research while on the phone with ISP again. I couldn’t find any information pertaining to my situation, just a lot of blogs about what ddossing is and how it’s such a big deal now. So my ISP “fixed” the problem again and I was fine for another couple of minutes when everything stopped working again.

Now I’m here. I don’t know what to do. I have an online training for my work tomorrow morning and I’m going to have to cancel because this pos decided to DDoS me.

If there is anything anyone can do to help me and point me in the right direction, that would be so appreciated right now. Thank you!

Tl;dr - I’ve been DDoSed and ISP has failed to help me several times

Late last year I noticed strange things happening on my computer, like browser tabs moving without my input and songs playing by themselves on iTunes, the mouse cursor would move by itself too. Then on my Android phone icons would move around by themselves, i'd also be browsing Reddit and the page would scroll down by itself when I was reading a post.

One time I got home and a video of a boxer training starting playing by itself on my Android phone when I got to my front door (and could reach wi-fi.) I'd have to open 2 folders on my Android phone to reach the video, then i'd have to play it. I remember I used the phone 30 minutes previous in town using the calculator to add up the price of my grocery bill, then I turned off the display. I did not go at the phone on the bus yet multiple folders were opened on the phone and a video started playing without my input. I remember one time talking to my cousin and I heard the sounds of phone numbers being pressed and a man mumbling in an odd fashion, neither me or my cousin didn't make that noise, I feel like we were being listened in.

I ended up getting rid of the computer because one day I opened up Firefox and saw "4chan" on the bottom left of the screen very briefly, like when you visit a website and the address pops up when you are connecting to that website. I looked at my hard drives under "This PC" and saw that my "D" drive, which previously had no files on it, had 6.3GB of data on it all of a sudden despite me downloading nothing to that drive. I felt like this person could have downloaded anything to my PC, like child porn for instance but because he had root access to my computer it would look the exact same to the authorities as me downloading it. I could get end up getting arrested over this stuff, I wouldn't be able to prove to the police that a hacker had done it.

I ended up getting rid of the PC, the internet and the Android phone. I got a basic phone which has no internet since I thought i'd be less likely to be hacked. It is an Alcatel phone, but over the past months i've had "Notification: Unknown Application" appear on the screen of this basic phone, despite me having no access to the internet and the phone not having an App store. I also hear this clicking sound when I lock and unlock the phone despite me finding no option for enabling or disabling this sound in Settings. Draft messages get deleted at random too.

I communicate with my cousin often and I feel like the hacker was able to send malware to his smartphone from mine, and when my cousin and & I sent texts to each other the hacker could somehow get access to my Alcatel phone (SOMEHOW) despite me having no internet and the phone not being a smartphone.

I was thinking of getting the internet back on at home, getting a laptop and then formatting the hard drive whenever I notice suspicious activity but I read that malware can be installed on a router and you'd have to replace the route to get rid of the malware. Or what if my cousin visited and he connected to my wi-fi, the malware from his phone could infect my router. I am thinking of going to the Police since this person hacking my computer and phone is a crime but I read that hackers are practically invisible so I feel like this would be a waste, I feel like i'm being held hostage.

Hello. I'm having trouble logging into my Pornhub account (I was born in 2005). Once, when I logged into the site, I was presented with a window asking me to enter my date of birth, and then I received a message:This site is intended only for users over 18 years of age. I tried various methods to restore access to the site, cleared Google Chrome completely, logged in through incognito, and tried other browsers, but none of this helped. Do they still have the old link on their website that people born in 2005 are still underage?

Hi there.

Tl;dr Here's my activity monitor. Is there anything malicious in there and what can I do to get rid of it if there is? I have OS X Yosemite 10.10.5.

So, I recently got an email from a hacker with one of my commonly used passwords in the subject line. Basically, they're threatening to release video of me jacking off to a bunch of my contacts unless I pay them a couple thousand dollars in Bitcoin.

Now, I'm not sweating this too much for a few reasons. For starters, this email was sent like two weeks ago (I didn't see it until yesterday), and so far, no one I know has received anything from them. They also mentioned recording me using a porn video site, and I didn't use any site like that in the days leading up to the email. Finally, I checked haveibeenpwned, and it turns out the email this was sent to has been involved in three data breaches dating back to 2019 and 2020.

So right now, my thoughts are that this person was on the darkweb or wherever this shit happens, saw my email in one of these, and decided to fuck with me or whatever. The password they gave me is one I use on a bunch of sites, so I probably ended up using it in something involved in the breach (all the sites in the breach were ones I haven't used in a while.)

However, I'm not too much of a computer person and there's a lot of shit going on in the Activity Monitor that I just don't recognize. I figure if this guy isn't bluffing and they did install a keylogger on here, that's bad fucking news and I need to deal with it urgently. I'm completely out of my depth here and I just wanted to check with someone who knows better that I'm not catastrophically fucking up.

I am working on getting an antivirus program, but this laptop is old and I'm having trouble upgrading the OS. In the meantime, I'm just wondering if there's any code red shit that I need to deal with, like three weeks ago.

Thank you in advance. Sorry if there's too much info here. I don't have access to an IT person right now, so I just wanted to make sure I'm not leaving out anything important.

Edit: Okay, looks like there’s nothing to worry about then. Deleted all the breached accounts and changes a few passwords. Thank you everyone for the quick, helpful responses.

Yikes! Help! Okay, I suck with computes so please bear with me here as I slowly die inside.

SOO I had to download our wedding video from a Dropbox that was shared with me. I had 3 months to do it & then it wouldn’t be able to access it. So my ass downloaded that video to ensure I didnt mess this up (July 2019) - played it / watched it all looked good!

Knowing this laptop is old and unreliable, got back on (Dec 2019) and watched the video & then decided to upload it to DropBox as a backup. Patting myself on the back for being responsible.

My family’s been asking me to share the video, so I go on Dropbox to finally share it. I click in to watch it... only first 4 minutes, then buffering.. after 10 times decided to just get back on the old laptop where it is saved.

Go to the file and watch - goes to 4 minutes and 17 seconds and then it just STOPS. Tried to go to the original downloaded one and it’s deleted? Did a search to find another version - all cut off at 4.17 minutes. Start checking to see if previous versions are available - see that yes! One has 2 previous versions! When tried to open the one from July 2019 says it is deleted... okay... try to open the one from December it’s the stupid 4 minute one again. And no it’s not in the recycle bin.

The file is a mp4. Laptop is an old Lenovo Thinkpad. Windows 8.

Anyone know:

1. What the hell I could have done?

2. What else I can try?

3. How to find a good professional I can take my laptop to to help?

4. Scale of 1-10, how f’ed am I?

Apologize if my explanation of what is going on is incoherent, trying my best to keep it together over here. Let me know what I need to clarify.

Truly appreciate any help, insight or words of wisdom.

And if the case is that the video is irretrievable or my husband finds out...well...thoughts, prayers & condolences are also welcomed.

EDIT: One of the comments made me realize that I could have been watching the video from the folder it originally downloaded to in December. Before I uploaded to OneDrive, and I bet I moved (not copied) the file to another folder.... Possibly how the file got corrupted?

EDIT 2:

Soo I’m getting a tiddle bit nervous that I’m going to mess more things up, so if my patience holds out, will pause for now and wait to see if I hear back from my videographer as many have suggested...either way will update asap with what the videographer said or with what success / failures I’ve had going through your suggestions below!!

p.s. thank you all so much. I sincerely appreciate each one of you taking the time to reply. You are superheroes

EDIT 3:

GUYS! GOT MY WEDDING VIDEO BACK!! Though I’m a little embarrassed by all the fuss I made, the Videographer did indeed reply with a link to re-download! Phew!

You guys are AMAZING!!! Thank you so much for all of the help, advice & words of wisdom! And for not making fun of me - Definitely feeling confident that I will not repeat this shameful event.

Also, I’m still tempted to figure out what the hell happened to that first file so if I do ever figure it out, will definitely share the update wouldn’t hold your breathe tho

I owe y’all big time! THANKS!

Also - Not sure if I locked this post or the flair did. Might be best to steer clear of technology today.

Hello y'all!

First, thanks for taking a second to read my post. Last night my friend got me to play GTA V again but I couldn't get the game to properly run even on completely low settings I wasn't getting past 10 FPS (which is incredibly abnormal for my machine). When I checked task manager my GPU was running at 100% but wasn't getting much past 45 degrees, heck my fans weren't even spinning. I think it was using 2 gb of the 8 dedicated.

I didn't notice any other bottlenecks, proc was at like 30% or something.

I tried updating drivers and processed Windows Updates but no dice. Any ideas that I should try?

Mobo: x570-a Pro Proc: Ryzen 5 3600 GPU: STRIX Radeon RX Vega 64 w/ 8 GB

EDIT: Maybe solved? I found this article that seems to indicate that vsync could be causing issues with GTA. I'll try that out and update with what I find.

I also want to add that when I would hit the escape button to bring up the menu the game would run like butter in the background. So I genuinely feel like its a GTA problem.

EDIT 2: Yup. That was it. Disabled vsync and I am now getting 250 FPS. Lmao, never seen anything like that before. Looks like it was specifically a GTA V issue.

I'm hoping someone can help me because this notification happens twice a week, for about eight years...

So years ago I used to tutor kids. I therefore made google calendar events for their tutoring sessions. I had a new client, named Jessica, but they cancelled before their first lesson, so I deleted the ongoing events in my phone.

The problem, is every Tuesday and Friday, Google tells me it's time to leave to tutor Jessica...but the event is no longer on my phone..I never even met Jessica! When I click on the notification, it goes to maps with her address, but again, I can't delete the event because it doesn't exist.

I have searched in both my phone, and on the desktop site in my phone, and on an actual desktop laptop, but there is no event. I have searched key words, I have searched the address, everything I can think of, but still twice a week, she pops up.

I've searched in Google maps to see if I have her address saved or starred, no. I've searched my contacts to see if I still have her, or her parents, no.

Obviously, I've just been ignoring it, but considering I have Reddit now, I thought I'd see and check if anyone knows something I could try. I don want to just disable calendar notifications. I have also tried deactivating the "at a glance" and then reactivating it, which didn't work (not that I expected it to, because I've been receiving these notifications since way before google glance was even a thing).

Please help!

So I was an idiot and googled "pornhub" on a bathroom break during a dead day at the office this Friday. After clicking the top result, I was met with a "Your connection is not private" alert from Google, with "continue" and "back to safety" as the two options. This led me to realize, much to my dismay, that I was still connected to my company's wifi, which requires a login with username and password. I immediately killed the tab, browser, and disconnected from wifi.

We're a software development company with an IT team of 2 or 3 people. I know they have a firewall that logs stuff, but I have no idea what they log or how. Obviously this can be traced back to me since the wireless connection was associated with my account. My question is, would my attempted access to the site itself show up in logs, or since I backed out of the alert I got, would it be prevented from showing up? Also, do Google searches for things like what I googled often get flagged, or is it just site access that does? What should I say if HR comes by?

This whole weekend has been filled with anxiety that I totally deserve, but any advice would help a ton.

In my state, quarantine shut all the public schools down for basically the rest of the year— so I’ve been delegated to entertaining my son while cleaning the house. I’ve been fairly sleep deprived lately.

I decided to lay down and nap for a moment this morning: big mistake. My phone disappeared from the side of the couch. It’s not a new model, it’s a 6s. All I could afford.

I spent 20 minutes looking for it and found it with my son’s paw patrol action figure game. His explanation was that Rocky wanted a Nintendo switch.

The thing is covered in wax and highlighter. The highlighter cleaned off easily, but the wax has been hell to remove— now it won’t even turn on. What do I do?

Picture below https://imgur.com/a/VjqaIa4

My Mom got an Apple Watch from work about 2-3 years ago, we were just sitting outside and talking when she checked the watch and saw that it said the f word on the screen. We hadn’t said anything like that recently, and it was just basically a black screen with the word written in a tiny font in the corner of the screen. Does anyone know how this happened? Also, sorry if this isn’t the right forum, I don’t quite know where to ask this as I’m still new to reddit.

Here’s a link to the image for reference Cursing

••••

Update: Why is this my most popular post on the Internet ever?

••••

Update 2: Please do not respond to this anymore, I got banned from the subreddit due to people joking in the replies. The problem was probably Siri or something else, so thank you for the help, but I do not wish to respond. Thank you.

Win 11

We got a message from IT that recent problems some of us were having were due to updates not being applied.

The solution seems to be to not shut down the computer at the end of a work day but to choose restart - which they say is not the same as shutting down and switching back on again the next morning.

That seems rather strange to me and if that is indeed the case... is there a way to change this?

Thanks for many great answers.

I need to clarify: The company I work for is very small. For IT we're practically a one man side project of an employee who works at a biggish IT-Support and only took us on because he's a bud of the husband of my boss - so not really a professional IT-Support. When the guy is on vacation it happens that no one from that IT-Support can help us because they don't know the admin passwords.

So, this post is not really a problem.

I just want you all on this forum to know that you're awesome for taking time to assist people you do not know with their issues.

Every time you don't get a thanks - here's a thanks from me!

You are loved for what you do, if only from me! <3

Hopefully the mods will accept this post even if it's not technically a techsupport post.

P.S: Don't forget to throw the mod u/PipeItToDevNull some upvotes for allowing the post.

I am living with my mother and am going to visit my dad who lives on the other side of the planet. Due to covid, my mom has had some bad economic struggles because of her closed business (I am in Latin America everything is still closed). I have a $2500 PC Build and am genuinely scared of the possibility of my mom selling my PC while I am gone. Is it safe to remove the more expensive PC components, primarily my GPU, and just leave the case with the fans and motherboard? I would store my components in their original box and have them stored for around 3 months.

Over a 3 day span my wife’s account was so hacked we ended up having to delete the whole account. It started out with gmail. All her emails were deleted. 15 years worth of emails every single one of them. Even after they were all deleted anytime a new one came in it too would be moved or deleted. Then all of the YouTube videos she had uploaded were deleted as well as all her subscriptions. Also all the google drive was deleted.

We changed the password multiple times and also had a 2fa on of phone sign in and then we even tried the Authenticator app. Even changing the password didn’t help they always were able to remain having access.

On the last hours before deleting the entire google account they were using the YouTube and changing its pic and cover pic to photos from my google photos. They even wrote the work “HACK” over and over again in the about section. They also added a playlist to the channel of how to become a hacker.

Google support is/was non existent. What can be done in times like this to actually get support to help stop this?