Posts by onefang

BlackBerry KEY2 LE: The first budget Android QWERTY for years

Re: Close but no cigar

"Unfortunately Hacker's Keyboard was recently pulled from the Play Store."

F-Droid has it. That's where I installed it from.

https://github.com/klausw/hackerskeyboard/issues/668

Which mentions a few places you can get it, including F-Droid, and obviously Github.

"Funny thing is I had been using Hacker's Keyboard up until a few months ago, but the English completion dictionary disappeared from the store."

Those should be "available from the website" according to F-Droid. Which means Github I think.

Re: Close but no cigar

Dvorak. D-v-o-r-a-k.

Not a keytard though, I'm happy with my Hacker's Keyboard in Dvorak mode.

Woman who hooked up with over 15 spectres has found her forever phantom after whirlwind romance and plane sex

Re: Dear God,

"That it turned out to be my personal purgatory has mainly to do with the fact that it is the origin of ex-Ms Evil Auditor."

Now I have to ask. Was she more evil or less evil than you like?

Re: Maybe...

"perhaps she's just a fucking idiot."

To be pedantic, if her ghostly lover doesn't actually exist, that's more wanking than fucking.

Ghost have a hard time making things hard.

I guess it makes joining the Mile High Club a bit easier, if one of the participants can't be seen, and takes up less room in the cramped aircraft loo. You know what they say, the spirit is willing, and the flesh is week at the knees.

The D in Systemd stands for 'Dammmmit!' A nasty DHCPv6 packet can pwn a vulnerable Linux box

Re: Time to troll

"On the systemd angle, I, too, am in the process of switching all my machines from Debian to Devuan but on my personnal(*) network a few systemd-infected machines remain, thanks to a combination of laziness from my part and stubborn "systemd is quite OK" attitude from the raspy foundation."

Devuan has bootable SD card images for Raspberry Pi, if that helps.

Re: Time to troll

"Bah any system that comes with bash in the base install isn't a proper UNIX system."

It's entirely possible to have a Linux system without bash. Just like it's entirely possible to have a Linux system without any GNU in it. You can even do both at once. It might even be fairly common.

Re: Now hang on, please!

Devuan killed it, dismembered it, but left some small and bloody body parts scattered around the distro. Now we need a clean up crew.

Re: how did it get to this?

"a worthy successor shall rise, perhaps called SystemV"

Or some French coder might write SystèmE, could take a while to get to SystemV.

Re: There is a reason ...

"why bother with networkd in the first place if you don't have to use it."

Likely coz its optional status might be temporary.

Re: how did it get to this?

"Init scripts are shell scripts."

While generally true, some sysv init style inits can handle init "scripts" written in any language.

Re: Meh

"Providing you've got /home and as many of /opt, /usr/local and /srv that you use on their own partitions why not go for a clean reinstall?"

Not so much on their own partition, but backed up elsewhere is what I did, on my desktop and remote server. I wrote a script that started with -

debootstrap --arch amd64 --variant=minbase ascii /devuan http://deb.devuan.org/merged

Note the minbase, which when combined with 'APT::Install-Recommends "0"; ' makes for a very clean install.

"us grey beards don't have long enough lives to become vetern admins."

For some of us, that's how we got grey beards in the first place.

Sorry friends, I'm afraid I just can't quite afford the Bitcoin to stop that vid from leaking everywhere

Re: I've seen a definite uptick in these

"That malware make your front-facing camera capturing video"

Hmm, the front-facing camera might only capture your face, not what your hand that's not holding the phone is doing. Maybe they need to capture video from both cameras? Or, if you are like me, and the only porn you watch on your phone is VR porn, both cameras have a very close up view of the inside of the VR headset, and nothing more.

Re: Rat Software?

"Still can't work out how grabbing an old site password would allow access to my computer!"

The scammer is assuming you used the same password everywhere.

Re: I've seen a definite uptick in these

"You could always blacklist anything not containing one I suppose, but would need to be pretty disciplined about it."

That's what things like mailfilter are for.

"Only your face while your get overexcited,"

Oh, they have video of the overexcited look on my face when I finally solved that bug that had been driving me nuts all week?

On the other hand, with all that hair on my face, it can be hard to tell what sort of expression I have.

Re: Confusing

I guess my post about "reversing the polarity or something" should have had the joke icon, I was referencing the Doctor Who trope.

Re: Oh noes! I got one too. 4 days ago. With a 2 day deadline...

"There will be laughter when I send these photos to your contacts!"

...

"After receiving the specified amount, all your data will be immediately destroyed automatically."

So, the choice is to share a good joke with your contacts, or wipe your computer clean after paying the ransom. Guess which one I'd choose?

Re: "dancing in the dragon's fiery breath"

"Where would they host thousands of these videos?"

On the porn sites they allege they caught you watching. Then they can catch other people watching those videos, and threaten them, rinse, repeat, until they end up threatening the originals. Thus turning it into a complete circle jerk.

Re: Confusing

"It doesn't have a camera at all, nor anything plugged into the audio inputs."

You can turn a speaker into a microphone by reversing the polarity or something. Then record your heavy breathing. Which I'll admit has gotten me into trouble in the past, but I'm asthmatic, heavy breathing is what we do.

Re: Racist?

"El Reg seems to have acquired some SJW police - possibly emanating from San Francisco. Your editor may be quaking in fear of them."

I suspect some of the moderators are just as fearful.

Re: Racist?

"throwing darts at imaginary dart boards"

So long as those imaginary dartboards are not the type of thing that tends to bleed when you throw darts at them.

Re: I've seen a definite uptick in these

"You're going to have to explain this one to me, I'm afraid."

Youngsters, and those that want to avoid seeing "interesting" descriptions of genitalia should stop reading now.

"Had a few land in my spam folder this week."

"We've moved on to euphemisms for the women now, have we?.."

One euphemism for labia is "beef flaps / roast beef flaps / meat flaps", particularly those with, shall we say, a lot of external structure and definition. One of those "opened up" for the activity that is the subject of this article may look like an open folder. Spam is also a sort of meat, allegedly. "a few land in" could be rather descriptive of what happens with the various objects that women might use for said activity. Do I need to go deeper? Er, in my explanation I meant.

Paris, coz she might know all about these things.

Re: I've seen a definite uptick in these

"I've tried emailing site owners with a link to the RFC that defines valid characters for email addresses, but haven't had much response. By not much response, I mean absolutely nothing, not a single reply."

Probably coz they thought the email address you used to send that email was considered bogus, and it went straight to their spam folders?

I'm on the naughty step

"We try to be broad-minded and consistent", yes I know I quoted that bit above. I think it's worth repeating it. Now I have been rejected for "nipple", "nips", and "tits". I guess that's consistent, though not particularly broad-minded. Oh wait, not that consistent either, since other people on the same comment thread as my most recent rejections had some of those words let through. I guess that was one of these articles marked for moderation, my recent comments on other articles had no moderation.

Is this a TITSUP, Total Inability To Sensor Us Properly? Oops, should be TITCUP, my bad.

AI can predict the structure of chemical compounds thousands of times faster than quantum chemistry

The specific example they give is cocaine. I wonder what sort of drug research they are planing on doing?

I'll get my coat, it's the one with the mysterious patches of white powder.

Re: "AI" = Fake News daily

"Wake me up when Winter starts."

Winter is com... oh wait, am I allowed to say that?

Microsoft teaches a 10-year-old Red Dog new tricks and the Windows 10 1809 delay hits Exchange 2019

"Samsung claims that the tech, which is presumably a bit cleverer than spreading Vaseline over the lenses, will create a ‘perceived’ PPI of 1,233. The previous headset which lacks the new-fangled light diffusing grid could only manage 616 PPI."

A claim that has been getting a lot of flack. There is the same number of pixels, they just look a little bigger to squeeze out the screen door effect, which is just the gap between the pixels.

With the 6T, OnePlus hopes to shed 'cheeky upstart' tag and launch assault on flagships

Re: No waterproofing?

"IP67 is a necessity in the tropics."

Or carry a small plastic bag in your back pocket in the tropics, just like I do. Actually I carry two, the other one is for my wallet. Sure the notes are plastic, the coins are metal, but not all the cards I carry are plastic, some are cardboard.

Californian chap sets his folks' home on fire by successfully taking out spiders with blowtorch

Re: blow torch... pfft

"But not compared to the ones with lasers!"

Wait, they are putting lasers on coconuts now?

Re: I killed a spider with a blow-torch last night...

After seeing that photo of a spider dragging a mouse up the side of a 'fridge, and the one of the spider eating a frog, not to mention bird eating spiders, I'd say you got lucky. Did you sneak up on the little bugger, or was he having trouble getting the blow torch lit?

Re: Newspaper?

"Usually rolled up and used with great impact."

I've always said that physics beats chemistry for pest control. Pun unintended, but I'll roll with it.

Yahoo! $50m! hack! damages! bill!, Russian trolls menaced by Uncle Sam inaction, computer voting-machine UI confusion, and more

Re: Return to Sender ..... Re Cease and Desist or Seize and Persist?

Or the right / wrong (delete whichever isn't applicable) drugs.

Re: !Celebrated !Mac !Malware !Still !Requires !Manual !Installation

Soooo, what's a good anti malware proggy for Macs? One that doesn't install hooks all over the system, just runs when I ask it to, does a scan, then gets the hell out of the way. I have a Mac Mini, I rarely use it, mostly for watching iView and Netflix. An open source one would be preferable.

Florida man won't be compelled to reveal iPhone passcode, yet

I'll admit that I had just skimmed the original El Reg article, all that legal stuff bored me, and I was more interested in answering my questions above. So I may have missed this bit if it was there. I've now read a bit more from the recent Ars Technica article covering the same case. To quote that article -

"Investigators argued that they needed the iTunes password so that the phone's firmware could be updated prior to actually searching the phone."

That makes no sense to me. Um, see icon ->

Yes, but the title says "Florida man...", hence my confusion.

This two-year-old X.org give-me-root hole is so trivial to exploit, you can fit it in a single tweet

Re: And this is news how?

"systemctl stop [displaymanager].service

"Where displaymanager is gdm, sddm, etc. Not really that difficult really."

invoke-rc.d [displaymanager] stop

Slightly easier, it's less typing.

/etc/init.d/[displaymanager] stop

If you don't happen to have invoke-rc.d installed.

service [displaymanager] stop

If you have that installed, though for some odd reason it allows systemd units to override sysv init scripts.

Or if you are really pissed off at things -

killall -KILL [displaymanager]

Still no mucking about with run levels. Out of all of these choices, the systemctl variation involves the most typing. That counts as "made it more difficult".

Re: Any actual configurations where this might work?

Not on my desktop anymore, the patch hit Debian / Devuan mirrors and I already applied it. Maybe you need to try it on an old unpatched install?

Re: X has always scared the hell out of me...

There's this old TV show that tries to explain things. I think it was called The X-Files. Oh wait, might make you more scared.

Assange catgate hearing halted as Ecuador hunts around for someone who speaks Australian

Re: Secret memo

"Childs electronic cat to be substituted for Assange's mental health."

Wait, you can swap out your mental health, and install an electronic cat instead? Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

Re: What's he doing with his time?

To help cut through the thick Aussie accent he speaks Spanish with.

The 'roid in Spain drills mainly on the plain: Plucky Brit Mars robot laps up sun, sand and, er, simulated science

Re: 'roid?

Not asteroids?

Opportunity has taken the opportunity presented by the big dust storm to sneak off and snuggle up with that Martian ice warrior it pretended to not see earlier.

The best way to screw the competition? Do what they can't, in a fraction of the time

Re: Ahhh beancounters

I'm sure we can figure out a variant on https://xkcd.com/356/ to help with that second problem.

Re: Non IT angle

"Unsure how you can share Binary-Coded Decimal, but . . ."

Upload it to Pirate Bay?

Re: Karma

"they'd had to hire two contractors to replace me, and neither of them was getting as much done as I did in 1/2 the time"

I've had that a couple of times, been replaced by two guys, coz one couldn't cope with my work load.

Re: "Ethernet is so much better"

"but a floppy disk taped to the back of a turtle would have had a faster transfer rate."

Ah, you've not seen the IP over giant African snail? A small cart is hitched to the snail, where the wheels are two optical disks. Lousy latency, but throughput was impressive over short distances, and could be increased by swapping the CDs for DVDs, BluRays, whatever the next tech is.

Jeez, not now, Iran... Facebook catches Mid East nation running trolly US, UK politics ads

After all that commentarding about the trolley problem in another article, I was wondering if Iran was trying to figure out if it should let the trolley run over USA or UK.