Posts by onefang

Oz digital health agency tightens medical record access as watchdog warns of crim honeypot

Re: No worries, its all good, nothing to see here....

"the web site stage two identification may barf if one uses a drivers license or passport as identity documents."

It barfed on me trying to use my Medicare card.

Spectre rises from the dead to bite Intel in the return stack buffer

"I think I'll use the money saved to buy a new vehicle instead."

There'll be lots of CPUs inside your new vehicle, some of them controlling security stuff. You ain't getting off that easily.

UK.gov commits to rip-and-replacing Blighty's wheezing internet pipes

Re: Not wanting to state the obvious

"Instead, they've flogged the dead horse (copper/aluminium) as far as it will go, and will continue to resist a full FTTP rollout as long as they can."

Sounds like what the Aussie NBN, er sorry nbn, became after the Liberals came into government. The original was supposed to be FTTP everywhere (almost). If I recall correctly the nbn kept claiming they where following best in the world practice, with BT as a shining example. Will BT now follow nbn in a race to the bottom? The Kiwis are laughing at us.

Fake prudes: Catholic uni AI bot taught to daub bikinis on naked chicks

Re: Crime opportunity

"Owning the software to do the criminal manipulation would also be deeply suss in some courts."

That would be things like Photoshop and GIMP. I've removed tattoos from photos for friends using GIMP, and done other fancy things with it. I could probably add / remove clothes if I tried. With a bit of effort you could use simple paint programs for that, and with a lot of effort a hex editor. Magnets, magnifying glasses and butterflies for the show-offs.

"It's socially acceptable to walk through busy areas & shops in shorts, not so much in Speedos."

Our previous Prime Minister made budgie smugglers* socially acceptable for the conservative crowd.

* For those that don't spik 'strain, "budgie smugglers" is Australian slang for Speedos, which in turn is an Australian brand of very skimpy swim pants for men. Why we call them budgie smugglers is left as an exercise for those imaginations that choose to imagine the smuggling of small birds in your briefs.

Paris, coz it looks like she's checking out Mr Abbott's budgie.

Looking at those examples, might be more productive to automate the application of that censor blur instead of faking bikinis.

I guess naked men are not a problem. Or the naked children you see on prime time TV adverts for baby shampoo. Or naked baby Jesus in Mother Mary's arms. I was walking to the supermarket the other day and a saw naked ten year old wander past on a busy street. No one batted an eyelid. Probably would have been police called if it was her mother that was naked. Front page of a popular news web site was showing a "photos of the week" teaser, that featured a naked child in an empty tub, right next to an "evil pedo caught with evil pedo photos" article teaser.

Would be even more productive if we just all got over this silly nudity taboo. Even sillier that it's a sexist and ageist taboo. Women nipples bad, men and child nipples good. Meh, I'd rather look at women's nipples given a choice.

Re: No one has ever been killed by a nipple

"That sounds like a challenge I could enjoy trying to prove or disprove!!"

You'll dive into a mosh pit with razor sharp pasties, and see what sort of damage you can do?

Sysadmin sank IBM mainframe by going one VM too deep

"Which is why my TV subtitles routinely indicate singing by bracketing it with £ symbols ..."

Do the make you pay per verse?

Re: del *.*

"It was a short but sharp brown underpants stuff and I don't think that my friend really twigged how serious it was."

She didn't notice the bad smell coming from your suddenly colour changed undies?

"There's no such thing as a development machine, they're all "production" to somebody."

Not true at all, the little test PC on my desk has always been a development / test box from the day I bought it, and likely always will be.

Re: Octothorpe

"This is analagous to the '&' character which is known as an ambersand but pronounced as 'and'."

I thought that was ampersand? My spell checker agrees with me.

"The US hasn't had a currency called the pound for about 240 years."

And USA has been officially metric since the 1860s, but no one told the people. Too hard to learn a new system or some such excuse.

"'sharp' as in C#, the computer language."

That was borrowed from the musical symbol # for a sharp, so C# could refer to a particular musical note.

Re: Just to mudddy the waters a trifle ...

So what you are saying is that the UK should all take LSD after Brexit? I suspect some Remainers think that's how Brexit got voted for in the first place.

Re: #2 Pencil?

"Am I the only one who remembers it being the 'number' sign?"

Not the only one. Perhaps we could just start calling it "The symbol previously known as (insert what you usually call it here)", though then Triple J DJs will start calling it Dave.

Re: "the default being a hashtag #."

"Someone needs to get control of the octothorpes!"

So that would be Ian Thorpe the well known Aussie swimmer, Billy Thorpe the well known Aussie rock star, and six other people called Thorpe? I suppose that technically our head of state is the Queen of England, so the UK already has control of us Aussies?

"DTMF had (as the name implies) two tones. Each tone had four frequencies for a total number of combinations of 16. 12 (3x4) were used in the telephone keypad and the other four (ABCD?) did "other things" if you could generate them..."

ABCD is correct, you can buy keypads at electronics shops that have all twelve keys. There's likely apps for that.

"On my UK keyboard, I have a pound symbol (Shift+3=£) , a dollar symbol (Shift+4=$) and a hash key (#). What does a US keyboard have? What do US people call a real pound (currency) symbol?"

When they have to produce one, they just pound the keyboard until it produces one, or make a complete hash of it, which then costs them dollars to replace.

I'll get my coat, it's the one with a pound of hash in the pocket that I bought for a dollar.

If Brussels wants Android forks, phone makers aren't helping

Re: Sony's Open Devices

I think Motorola do something similar for their Moto Z range. I'll likely find out for sure later this year when I try to open up my Moto Z. I currently use one of their Moto Mods that is completely open, running a modified firmware on it. Though admittedly that's their development kit.

Re: Android forks?

"a forspork"

Isn't that the bit they cut off the end of young cutlery for religious reasons?

I'll get my coat, but someone seems to have removed the collar.

Official: The shape of the smartphone is changing forever

Re: Blast from the past.

Well done. Have one of these, sorry craft beer is all they got in this new fangled hipster pub.

'I think removable batteries are a thing of the past. Probably better to invest in an external "power bank" if you find the power running low'

I want both though. I use a solar powered battery to charge my phones, and I want to be able to remove the phones battery when things inevitably go wrong. Though I'll admit that part of the reason for that is my last smartphone's proximity sensor died, it would keep the screen blank during phone calls, so the only way to hang up was to pull the battery.

Fork it! Google fined €4.34bn over Android, has 90 days to behave

Re: I would like to ask a question

"with the others basically limiting users only to apps that they want the users to use"

Except for stores like F-droid.

"Same. And not just on Android. There is desktop software like Geosetter which works with it just fine..."

I wrote a module for OpenSim that drags in OpenStreetMaps data and other stuff to build a portion of the real world in the virtual world, all you do is feed it lat/long of one corner.

Or you can just point a web browser at https://www.openstreetmap.org/

"and openstreetmaps (is that still about, I lose track)"

Yep, it's still around. I use it instead of Google Maps.

Re: Apple

"Nobody would buy Android phones if they didn't contain Google apps!"

I would. Though I would have some trouble with the lack of an open source Google Daydream replacement, at least until I can get around to writing one.

Re: it is only fair that we fine some of theirs back!

"So why didn't they just wait until the GDPR took effect so they could take advantage?"

Coz GDPR was not in force when the bad things happened. They could only punish Facebook for things that where considered bad at the time, no backdating law.

Sad Nav: How a cheap GPS spoofer gizmo can tell drivers to get lost

Re: Spoofing GPS is only optional

Two TomToms, plus buying a new one = TomTom TomTom TomTom. Obviously they are trying to get you to seven Toms, Tom 7.

I'll get my coat, it's the one with the sound of tom-tom drums coming from the pocket.

LabCorp ransomed, 18k routers rooted, a new EXIF menace, and more

I wonder if the yanks will hire those wonderful people that did such a sterling job with the Aussie census to do theirs?

You wanna be an alpha... tester of The Register's redesign? Step this way

Re: "Expand comment" - we're Regtards, we have attention spans

Also in a lengthy comment thread, it's easier to quickly glance at the scroll bar to see how much more you have to read if they are all expanded. Otherwise you end up going through the page clicking all the expand comment buttons, then go to the top to start actually reading.

Re: Less images on homepage

"Fewer"

Perhaps we need fewer less-ons on grammer?

me grabs me coat

Re: Geolocating options to turn it off?

'US, AU, and "GB/Rest of World"'

Ah, so Aussies like me, how are in Oz, but use the web via a European proxy, will get "GB/Rest of World" stories. Might explain why I tend to see more GB and less AU stories.

Re: Setting cookie already takes JavaScript

'Second, the needless "expand comment..." - if you are paging/scrolling through the comments, it breaks the flow to have to click "expand comment" . It's not necessary - vertical scrolling is inevitable! If you do want an easy way to skip long comments, a 'skip comment' anchor href is all that is needed.'

Agreed, that's a pet hate of mine. All those "Expand comments", "Read more", "Load more comments" links are very annoying.

Re: How about...

"shut-up, loser, I was going to say that."

Well played sir and/or madam.

Samsung’s new phone-as-desktop is slick, fast and ready for splash-down ... somewhere

I can dock my Motorola Moto Z to my KVM, or any handy keyboard / monitor / mouse. Using the Moto Mod development kit with a hacked up version of the kits firmware, and two small USB adapters (USB C to HDMI and USB C OTG). Motorola offer their development kit firmware as open source. The development kit is just another Moto Mod, it clips on the back of the phone. I intend to install Devuan Linux on this phone in the near future.

Re: Ridiculous

"I wouldn’t want a bed which doubled up as a bath and a dining table."

I guess you have never lived in a caravan, or even the tiny houses that are becoming popular. Where a bed that converts into a dining table is a great idea. Coz you don't usually use both at the same time, and you don't have enough space for both bits of furniture.

People hate hot-desking. Google thinks they’ll love hot-Chromebooking

Re: Javastation/javacard

"Sun did this years ago only all you needed was a card that you plugged into Java stations"

I vaguely recall a Java ring as well, not sure off the top of my head what exactly it was, and I need sleep now.

But then your rampant football supporter is stuck when they are all out of red, blue, green, or yellow Chromebooks.

Wearable hybrids prove the bloated smartwatch is one of Silly Valley's biggest mistakes

Re: I don't get the distinction...

'I really don't get the distinction you are making between the iWatch being a "smart" watch and my Garmin 935 being a "dumb" wearable?'

Might be the same distinction I've been noticing recently. Some people call an iPhone a smartphone, but all others are not smartphones. The distinction is likely marketing driven.

Re: Still need that "killer app" ?

"Young people today (the lucky bastards!) no longer wear normal watches."

Some of us old farts also don't wear watches either. It's been almost two decades since I last wore one.

Survey: Tech workers are terrified they will be sacked for being too old

Re: Inexorable

Ah, but by the time Zuk is a stale old fart, he'll be so rich he can buy people to freshen up his farts for him. I don't think he cares.

Re: Our generation

It become a catch cry for hippies during the '60s. The ironic thing is that any that survived are now well over 30, and a lot of them seem to be trying to fulfill that prophecy.

Re: This is worth waiting for...

I'm in tune with this plucky series of puns. Chordn't of done it better myself.

Re: any grad born after '66

"Cheap yes men that will do what management ask of them - even if its fucking stupid."

Ah, that's what I'm doing wrong. Born in '61, but spent my entire career in computers, starting at school, I would class myself as a digital native. I'm dirt cheap. I'm no yes man though.

Re: Us old fogeys

If you can afford it, do volunteer work IT for a local charity or three."

That's what I've been doing for the last year and a half. Ironically at a seniors place, where all the clients and half of the staff are older than me. Sometimes greybeard me is the youngest person in the building.

Re: Experience?

I've used somewhere between 66 and 100 programming languages in my career, depending on how you count. In my early career I would often learn the language on the job, it doesn't take me long to become expert. A lot of those languages were "We got this ancient system written in an obscure language no one has ever heard of, point onefang at it, he'll sort it out". My party trick amongst geeks is to learn a programming language in an hour. Did that for an exam once, with the blessing of the IT department head, first cracked the textbook open an hour before the exam started, got top marks.

Tech billionaire Khosla loses battle over public beach again – and still grants no access

Re: use it during those wee hours!

Or invite those sharks that have frikin' lasers mounted on their heads, and a few carefully aimed mirrors during the parties.

Re: I hope....

I was gonna make some pun about being denied Sun and surf, but couldn't think of one. Have an upvote for both of you.

Microsoft's TextWorld gives AI a Zork-like challenge

Re: The real test, surely...

'journalists throwing the term "AI" around'

Depends on what the "I" stands for. There's a good case for Idiot / Idiocy / etc. Other nouns are available, I just can't think of any funny ones right now.

Y'know... Publishing tech specs may be fair use, says appeals court

Re: Dear Reg editorial staff:

I may be wrong here, or at least inaccurate, some 'Murican can correct me if I am wrong. I believe "The Nine Seniles" is also on offer if you don't like "The Supremes". Though likely not on offer to professional journalists that want to stay out of court.