A Bad Technology Week

 

Time to backup my f- ...shit.

This has been an awful week. And I can assume it'll only get worse from here because next week I'll be bombarded with projects, tests and presentations from Tuesday to Friday. Not cool, not cool at all. And I could be ranting about a girl I met on a bus who asked me to "move" but that's not what I'm here to talk about today. I'm here to talk about technology's hate on me this week. Its been awful and I have to say something about it.

So first, I basically (sort of) lost all my photos and music only my phone. What? Are you serious? Don't you talk about backups like all day, everyday? Yeah I do. And I lost my photos and music. Great.

Basically I applied the SDFix for Kitkat phones because I was trying out Camera FV-5 or something its called and it wouldn't want to write to my SD card. So I tried out the fix, took a shot on the camera app and yeah it works, but too bad the .jpg files don't save properly. So that's gone from my phone and it was a pretty cool app. Few days later I looked into my Google Photos app to delete some photos from the internal memory because that's the only way to do it without deleting all my files off the cloud as well. So I entered the device folder's tab, and there was nothing there. I was like "Oh great, its bugged. What else could go wrong?" I checked my phone gallery and yeah my photos were there so I thought, "that's strange" and my immediate reaction was to try and roll back whatever the SDFix did to my phone and so I did. I tried installing and re-running the app, nope, no reversing it there. I looked at the description and there it was, instructions to reverse the fix. So I sort of followed it, went into root explorer, deleted the changed file and renamed the backup file to the original file name and rebooted my phone. Looked at my photos app and nothing changed. Looked at my gallery app and oh look, there was nothing. Yes, I renamed a file and it basically wiped my phone clean. It wiped EVERYTHING except my apps and the data it held inside of the app packages. That means all my WhatsApp media, photos, music and saved snapchats that I sent out.

Now I would have went into freak mode and panicked but thank god I had all my photos automatically synced onto Google Photo's cloud. THANK YOU CLOUD. THANK YOU. But they weren't the original photos but rather compressed versions but it was better than nothing. I immediately took the SD card out of my phone to avoid any more writing on it and ran Recuva. Lost 90% of my video files but managed to save about 80% of my photos. WhatsApp media though... are unfortunately all gone. And that's what happens when you don't do frequent backups. But hey, Neko Atsume still works and I didn't lose my progress! ... Bright side of everything huh...

Messages sent out to this "live" user who wasn't in my contacts.

And with that out of the way, this happened today. I was in school and I didn't even turned on my Skype because I was busy focusing on the practical that was going on. I got home and guess what? I find out my Skype had been compromised. Great. That "what else could go wrong" actually happened. I immediately went out and spammed all my contacts that got the link with an apology and a warning to not click that link. I'm lucky that this compromising and bot spamming wasn't too bad because the link that was being spammed around just leads to some diet ad website (are they trying to target me or something?). But anyway, that really shocked me and I wasn't expecting my Skype to ever be hacked and used for "advertising" purposes. But my computers have been scanned and nothing bad was found and passwords have been changed.

I am pretty pissed off with myself for letting this happen. If I had focused on Skype for even a minute that I had been spamming links around, I could have removed them in time because there's a 1 hour grace period for me to remove/edit what I've sent. Also, why on earth did I use a stupid password that had actually been compromised, months ago. It was at that moment, I felt so dumb and humiliated. Worse part of all I am in a IT course and I'm expected to know how to secure my accounts. It was shameful and let this be a lesson learned for me, change my passwords frequently and seriously, don't use the same passwords on multiple services. I'm so grateful LastPass is able to identify which sites I have which share the same passwords so all those have been changed. I've activated 2-factor-authentication for now and I'll be doing another scan tomorrow because I'm that paranoid.

Well, that pretty much sums up my horrible week.

"What else could go wrong?" You know what?
"Things will get better? Maybe?"