Failure :(

I just had one of those “We’ve detected a virus on your system” scam calls.

I only managed 5 minutes before he hung up. :(

Saying Netsurf as the browser didn’t seem the phase him much, but when I said RISC OS for the operating system, he went to speak to a supervisor and then hung up.

I think my error was volunteering too much information.

C’mon, there are better ways to troll scammers like that. (Luckily, I’ve not had to deal with them.)

“Start button? I don’t see a start button! It’s in the lower left, you say? All I see there is HardDisc4, :0, and Apps.”

“It says that an application that loads a file of this type has not been found by the Filer!”

“Operating system? How do you expect me to know what operating system I have?” (Alternately, give Firefox as your OS (hey, it does run on RISC OS), like many people give Internet Explorer as theirs on Windows. The fun part with that is, Firefox actually is an OS.)

Yes. I volunteered too much information. In my defence I was tired after a long day at work (or more the travelling).

A friend said he had managed 25 minutes using Netware 6.5. That would have been funny.

They’ve learned to detect people who are too clever and don’t seem to take much time in answering the questions/following their instructions. You need to sound and act slow and confused and you can string them out for ages. When they ask me to download the remote access software I refuse to and I finally break the news that I’m a Microsoft trained and certified computer consultant and I know it’s a scam. I was once asked why I didn’t tell them earlier and wasted their time… :-0

You need to discover your internet is very bad and the download of their rootkit is very very slow. I once managed 3 hours that way, including having a shower with them listening to the running water.

Had another the other day when I was about to go out – managed to drive off (cordless phone) with them still on the line…

I once managed 3 hours that way, including having a shower with them listening to the running water.

…watch a master at work…

I just had one of those and told him he was a thief and F off and die.

I’m not a polite as you lot.

I just had one of those and told him he was a thief and F off and die.
I’m not a polite as you lot.

Well, I suppose that works too but when have time to do a multi-task time slice of your attention to wind them up to the point that they want (or do) tell you F.O.A.D it can be a real day brightener.
Besides, every minute you keep them talking is a minute they aren’t using to thieve someone else.

I’d been out in the rain most of the day and wanted a hot bath more than I wanted to waste their time.

Next time I might play dumb and say I’d get my computer guy to phone them the next day as the deals with that side of thiings.

Then report them.

I used to get a few “unusual” calls on the landline, despite being on the liste rouge – but thankfully these calls are pretty easy to spot.
So the conversation is usually along the lines of:

Them: Blah blah blah.
Me  : Eh?
Them: Blah blah blah (repeating)
Me  : Hé?
Them: Blah blah-blah (slightly different)
Me  : Nihongo-ga wakirimas ka?
Them: [stunned silence]
Me  : Um... tu... parre... m'wa... japonaise... oui? Japonaise, né?
    : <click> 

[I can’t say “do you speak English” because knowing my luck, somebody there probably does; but I figure I’m on safer ground with asking if they speak Japanese!]

Suffice to say, I only get bothered now by Orange trying to:

• Flog me a satellite receiver I am not that interested in (I told the girl to call me back when I can watch FilmFour on it!)
• Flog me an M6 mobile contract which as far as I can work out is exactly the same as my current Origami Style contract, only €10/month more expensive. I told the guy I might be English but I’m not stupid, then I hung up on him.

Sadly Orange, being the telco, tend to phone you to punt rubbish, and they’re quite persistent, even when dealing with “troublesome” clients, like that poor receptionist girl who phoned me for a customer satisfaction survey. She asked me “What can Orange provide for you to make you happier?” I knew there was no point asking for faster internet, I’m at the end of nearly 5kms of cable. So I said “ice cream, caramel flavour… and doughnuts, the type with the hole in the middle” ¹. She asked me to repeat that, which I did (“glace, goût de caramel, et aussi des donuts, les avec le trou dans les centres” ¹). Then there was this really really long silence. To which she finally said “merci monsieur” and timidly carried on with less interesting questions.

¹ I didn’t mention tea. I don’t think the French understand the British obsession with tea. I’m not sure anybody non-Commonwealth does. If you have any doubt – watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eELH0ivexKA

Next time I might play dumb and say I’d get my computer guy to phone them the next day as the deals with that side of thiings.

Ah, yes that version. The wife normally plays dumb, dangles the play mouse in front of the phone kitty for a while – and then tells them what I do for a living :-)

We use the corporate-sounding but actually nonsensical “There’s no one available right now”.

I didn’t mention tea. I don’t think the French understand the British obsession with tea. I’m not sure anybody non-Commonwealth does. If you have any doubt – watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eELH0ivexKA

Nice to see the good Professor is speading the word to the less civilised parts of the globe :)
 

Whilst we are on the subject, spookily enough, new single from Professor Elemental this week:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkF_XpA5P48

This is still my favourite though:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iRTB-FTMdk

Bloody marvellous what? ;-)

Not related to crank/spam calls, but the topic heading fits.

So I’ve just come across Great Teacher Onizuka and knowing that stuff on YouTube tends to vanish when you blink ( except stuff like this ), I decided to batch-download them.

Yeah. Well, that was the plan. Reality, however, kicked in and let me know that it just wasn’t going to happen.

• First, a browser extension. Read the playlist quickly, got the video info, and then told me the videos could not be downloaded. Spent some time patching the slightly older one I had (older browser) with the latest sources off GitHub. Still wasn’t going to play along.
• So then I Googled. Found a little program that… crashed on loading.
• My next attempt wanted some version of .Net I didn’t have available. The help talked about a quad-core CPU. That, ladies and gentlemen, is everything that is wrong with software engineering today. You pull a file from YouTube that lists the videos in the playlist, either XML or some sort of data. You parse it. You open a connection for each video on the list and you read in the video data (URL, format, blah de blah), and finally you download ‘em in turn. You do not need a quad-core with 2GB to do this. I bet the JGHarston’s of the world could do it (a little slowly) on a BBC Master. Grrrr! Over-engineered rubbish.
• Talking of rubbish, my final choice was “4K Video Downloader”. Terminally slow at retrieving the playlist info, and prone to “just dying” (it absolutely choked on the full 50-video playlist). I’m using it right now for the per-episode playlists. It works. But I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

Jeez. Something that ought to be simple. Really. Isn’t.
<sigh>

I’m sure I’m playing right into the hands of some elaborately set-up punchline here, but…

Did you try using Murnong?

There’s a Python script called Youtubedl which works very well but I don’t know if it will do batch downloads.

Did you try using Murnong?

Bookmarked, it’s useful to know.
However… it appears (from the website description) that it downloads one by one. I’d be happy to do it via RISC OS if it worked ! Goodness knows, it’s been a big douleur dans ma fesse trying to find something reliable.

I have YouTubeDownloaderHD for single downloads (easier cut’n’paste of URLs).
Actually, I’m using that right now – got four running at once (!) – ‘cos I’m fed up with 4K’s crashiness.

However… it appears (from the website description) that it downloads one by one. I’d be happy to do it via RISC OS if it worked !

It does work. (Well, it works at the moment, but breaks periodically whenever YouTube changes something, so make sure you’ve always got the latest version.) But it does work one by one, which would get tedious.

I was not intending to imply that Murnong didn’t work – however when you are looking for a batch downloader…

There’s another lurking gotcha – if you download “too much”, YouTube will stop giving videos to everything except its player (and accesses to the real site will demand a captcha).
For those with a normal domestic ADSL, it is simple enough to get around. Just clear all your YouTube cookies (including Flash LSOs) and then tell your router to reconnect (or reboot it). This ought to reassign a new IP address without cookies for state. Then YouTube will play nice… (^_^)

Next time I might play dumb and say I’d get my computer guy to phone them the next day as the deals with that side of things. Then report them.

No point reporting them. We tried that once, keeping them talking on one phone and ringing the police via another. But the police said that basically because these folk are phoning from India there is absolutely nothing they can do about blocking calls or prosecuting. The only way is to raise awareness of the scam.

A former colleague who does not even own a computer mentioned in a letter recently that he was in trouble with Microsoft and might get his phone line cut off. I think that was the impression he had got from one of these people.

O/T but ….
Rick,
I don’t know if you’ve already come across it, but there is a Firefox add-on called ‘DownloadHelper’ which has the batch capability.
I’ve no idea how well it works, only having used it for single downloads.

HTH