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Best Buy’s Geek Squad was hit was massive layoffs this week. According to 404 Media, who spoke to several employees, many Geek Squad members were told to work from home on Tuesday and wait for a call letting them know if they were still employed. Employees reported that the layoffs came suddenly, and were reportedly because the company could no longer afford to pay them. “It sucks, I spent more than half my life with this company and sacrificed a lot of personal time and experiences just to be let go,” a laid-off worker told the site. “At the same...

A Christian employee of Geek Squad, the tech support arm of major electronics corporation Best Buy, was reportedly rebuked and told that he couldn’t display evidence of his Christian beliefs after he objected to the LGBT flags and other paraphernalia adorning the office space. The report comes after another “citizen journalist” went public with a screenshot of a training program made available exclusively to non-white Best Buy employees, sparking accusations of racial discrimination. The Geek Squad employee, Christian Serbian immigrant Enis Sujak of Jacksonville, Florida, said he was told by his manager that the LGBT rainbow flags and other “pride”...

A child pornography case involving a California doctor has revealed that Best Buy's Geek Squad technicians allegedly worked with the FBI to uncover data on customer's computers for years, CBS Pittsburgh reports. A non-profit organization claims that the nature of the FBI's relationship with the technicians may have violated the U.S. Constitution. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit last year after it learned that the FBI allegedly paid Geek Squad employees to pass along information about illegal materials on devices sent in by customers for repairs. One search led to felony child porn...

The Justice Department was sued Wednesday by a privacy group seeking information on the FBI recruitment of Best Buy employees to search consumer computers for child pornography during repairs — a practice that came to light in court documents in a recent case in Santa Ana, California. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Trump administration’s Justice Department, demanding access to records about any FBI training and payment to Geek Squad workers to search customer computers without a court warrant. At issue isn’t the criminality of child pornography or efforts to stop the...

My Toshiba Satellite L305 has crapped out. It did not come with the reinstallation disk. I can get a new hard drive but I need an O/S. It is too old to run Windows 7, which I can't really afford. Does anyone know where I can buy a Windows Vista Home Premium (or sumtin') disk or product key for a good price?

Best Buy plans to lay off 1,800 store employees and 600 Geek Squad workers, according to a source at the company. The 2,400 cuts represent 1.4 percent of the company's 167,000 workforce and come on top of jobs associated with store closings the company announced previously.

The stereotype of computer scientists as geeks who memorize Star Trek lines and never leave the lab may be driving women away from the field, a new study suggests. And women can be turned off by just the physical environment, say, of a computer-science classroom or office that's strewn with objects considered "masculine geeky," such as video games and science-fiction stuff. "When people think of computer science, the image that immediately pops into many of their minds is of the computer geek surrounded by such things as computer games, science-fiction memorabilia and junk food," said lead researcher Sapna Cheryan, an...

Best Buy's Geek Squad isn't exactly known for respecting people's property. This time, however, instead of us catching them, they caught a guy with child porn. A middle school custodian sent in a hard drive back in August of 2007 to recover lost data. Upon performing their usual search (and invasion of personal privacy), the Geek Squadders at a Twin Cities location found over 800 images of young girls between the ages of 7 and 15 in various states of undress and performing sexual acts. The Geek Squad promptly turned the evidence over to the police. The police eventually obtained...

HOUSTON (AP) - Russian cosmonauts on Saturday began turning back on some crucial systems that had been shut down more than four days ago when a computer system on the Russian side of the international space station crashed. The first system turned on was a machine that scrubs carbon dioxide from the air inside the space station. Just a day earlier, Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov were able to get four of six processors on two computers working again by using a cable to bypass a circuit board. It took four days to restore the capability of the computers. “In...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Starbucks Corp. may be next on the target list of a consumer-health group that this week sued the operator of the KFC fried chicken restaurant chain for frying foods in oils high in harmful trans fat. The Center for Science in the Public Interest said it is planning to campaign against the global cafe chain because of the increased risk of obesity, heart disease and cancer associated with high-calorie, high-fat products it sells. And the possibility of legal action against Starbucks, similar to the case it is taking against KFC owner Yum Brands Inc., has not...