Az-RoAcH

I'm not even sure how I got infected to begin with. I don't click on links in emails.. or attachments from strangers. I don't visit rouge websites... no porn.. no warez... been there done that. I'm very, very careful. Obviously not enough... something got thru at some point.

All the files - jpg, pdf, doc, etc. are encrypted. I booted up into Linux.. they are there, but I can't do anything with them. Unless I pay the $$$ and *hope* they give me the key. Once I reformat and I'm back up, I'm going to get a backup program for everything sans music/video. Work stuff is fine... fortunately. I would be totally hosed if that weren't the case... I'm just pissed that I lost some personal pictures of friends and family. And puppies. I foster puppies a few times a year and all those pictures from the last bunch of puppies are gone.

So I come home this morning and notice right away something is wrong with my pc just by looking at the monitor across the room. Majorly sucks. Fortunately all my work docs are backedup to three places... so I didn't loose any of that. Non-work files... biggest hit are lost pictures. Probably some PDF files here and there... work and non-work related that weren't super important or that I hadn't backed up yet. Probably about 18 months worth... They want $700 to unlock them... within the next day or two.. then it goes up to $2100.. If it were like $50 I would try it... but $700 with no guarantee of getting the key... And of course they want payment in bitcoin... I can not believe this happened... Ordered a new hard drive.. will start the process this weekend. What sucks is I was going to do a reformat once W10 drops... All my vid/music files are fine.. just jpg, pdf, and I'd assume office files are trashed. Talk about a day going from decent to whoreable in 2 seconds flat!!!

All the cards have been given away...

If the code doesn't work for the other two members, you will be next. I just have to wait to hear back from them one way or the other.

I did it several times... both on my pc.. and on my ps3... called Sony... called my bank... Many tries over the course of at least two days. Sony said it was my bank, my bank said it was Sony.. Didn't even dawn on me to get gift cards. I went to the store to get a visa debit gift card and saw the Sony ones.... Still could have been their servers... who knows.

No... I just sent the first one.. Not sure if it will work in Canada or not... but you are 2nd.

Alright this is the long story. I have a PS3... When GTA 5 first came out, I wanted to purchase a shark card. I don't have a lot of time to play games... so making money in the game to buy things would be pretty much next to impossible. I'm self-employed and work a lot... So I tried to register my debit card with Sony.. and it kept saying there was an error with the card. My bank said everything on their end was fine... I came up with the idea of just getting the PS store gift cards... so I did that and purchased a shark card. Well... I'm out of in-game cash, and wanted to do that again. I went to try registering my debit card again, this being many months later from the first time I tried, and the box where you enter all that info (on my desktop pc) just closed... so I figured it didn't work. I then went to the store and bought 3 cards... came home... put the shark card in my shopping cart, and pressed checkout or whatever... and low and behold, it worked. I'm in NJ, USA... Not sure if they can be used outside of the US.

Long story short, I have three $20 gift cards to the PS store. I scratched off the bar to reveal the code, so I can not return them, and I think I'd have trouble selling them as well. So I'm just going to take a loss and give them away. I'd rather give them to three different members.. one each, then all three to just one person. So if anyone would like one, just reply and let me know. -R

Just under 4tb... about time to get a new drive and consolidate everything to one.

Nice review Linus. I listen to music 90% of the time I'm working... or driving...so fairly often. I just have basic earbuds... but I've been thinking of upgrading to something nicer. I didn't know these were as much $$ until you mentioned it - mainly since I haven't really looked around yet. Anyway, not sure I wanna spend that much... but they do sound like they are really nice. I was looking over the comments on Amazon.. and a few were talking about getting fakes when ordered thru them... Not really sure how you could prevent that - aside from getting them elsewhere... but just something to keep in mind if anyone is thinking about ordering them. -R

I agree... I love the guests... Chris was really good last nite. (I had only heard of him thru ApprenticeEh! vlogs) but it's also interesting hearing from viewers since they have some really good questions as well. Just as a side note - on ICANN banning dotless domains... I had @Home for my isp way back when, and they used some form of them. I remember you could just go to http://mail or http://home to get to mail or the home page... my guess is it had to do with their internal network and only usable for @home users, but I always thought it was pretty neat that they could do that. I can see the potential problems with them being open to anyone..... but it was pretty handy at the time. -R (and shaw does suck)