Hackronomicon

 
In this ever changing landscape both in the tangible world and in the virtual world, there are scams, pitfalls, rogues, thieves, spies, predators, trojans, virii, and that is just the tip of the titanic iceberg. You never know when someone is going to try to fool you into something or out of something! You may think to yourself “Nobody can fool me, I’m fool proof!” “it will never happen to me!” but now you are just fooling yourself. It is not always easy to know when you are being taken advantage of.
 
These problems come in all shapes and sizes from the massive to the minute. Take it from nekromant. He was recently a victim of on online purchase scam involving SD-CARDS. What he thought was going to be a bunch of 5 microSD cards, 4 GB. each, actually turned out to be a scam. The cards only had the capacity for approximately 115 MB. worth of data instead of advertised 4 GB. Did he lay down and give up or dismiss this offensive antisocial behavior? No he did not.
 
“Luckily, I managed to get my money back, via opening a dispute and later a claim (Scammers didn’t want to give the money back, did they?), but the cards still remained here.”
 
After getting his money back he also wrote a improved utility program that will check the storage capacity of any SD-Card without making the user wait forever and a day.
 
“To test such shitty cards there exist 2 tools: h2testw and f3. First for windows, second for linux. They figure out the real capacity for you. I didn’t like them, because they took ages to scan one 4 GiB card. And, they operated upon a upon a filesystem, that I didn’t like as well. So I wrote my own tool.”
 
“It’s dumb as hell, and was created while f3 was still scanning one card. And it’s a lot faster. Meet ‘scam-o-matic’.”
 
If you are interested in the utility you can find it < -- here -->
 
“It writes some preudorandom data to the card, until it detects something bad. Usually that happens when we reach the boundary of ‘good’, somewhat ‘reliable’ memory. Then it double-checks the region, and if everything is fine (e.g. no mismatches between first and second pass) it creates a partition table for you, with one partition that covers only working area of the card. Now just format it, alter the type with cfdisk, and make use of it.”
 
Moral of the store: Never lay down and give up when someone wrongs you in any way. Get back up dust yourself off and find a new resolve to an old problem.
 
Stay Vigilant!