Posts by VikiAi

It's not your imagination: Ticket scalper bots are flooding the internet according this 'ere study

Round up all the scalpers,

and scalp them?

Web hacker 'Alfabeto Virtual' thrown in the clink for 3 months by US judge who wanted to 'send a message'

Re: "these kinds of intrusions undermine confidence in government"

The fact that entry points for these kinds of intrusions are left wide open for any semi-skilled skiddie to exploit undermines confidence in the government.

Spooky! Solar System's Planet NINE could be discovered in the next NINE years (plus one to six), say astroboffins

Much like the way they completely revised/rewrote/retracted astrology when the other outer planets beyond naked-eye detection were discovered?

Re: It's Dark out there.

Though that is more like a vampire - it can only torment you if you invite it in to your system.

Re: It's Dark out there.

Your ex- had a soul?!?!

Foldables herald the beginning of the end of the smartphone fetish

Re: Kiss-touch

Present your tongue-tattoo ID, citizen!

Nuisance call boss gets 8-year ban after trying to dodge firms' £700k fines

Yes. While I am all in favor of throwing every resource available at those who are genuinely capable of reforming, the rest really should just be kept away from society as much as possible for as cheaply as possible.

Careful what you wish for!

Do you really want C-level managers who have friends that have names like Flat-nose Bill and Crusher? (Yes, I know what you meant by 'friends' but I am inclined to believe even scumbags of entirely different feathers will happily flock together, given the opportunity!)

'They took away our Cup-a-Soup!' Share your tales of bleak breakout areas with us

The student fridge here would fit that description if I didn't trolley it outside for a defrost and hosing out every 4 months! (Note, that is a different fridge to the one I mentioned above which I keep in pristine condition, since I am the only one regularly using it - I'm the only full-time staff at the outpost, though part-time staff are welcome to use it too, they usually buy their lunch).

Re: A fridge!!!

Our new building (under construction) explicitly doesn't have space for a fridge in the tech office. Little do they know that when they close my remote outpost and move me there, the lovely large fridge I have all to myself will need a new home and by damned, the other techs and I will make it fit somewhere!

Why are there never free power sockets when my Y-fronts need charging?

I regularly raid the worksite eWaste bin for, among other things, a good selection of different-length cables for both mains and USB extension. I the latter I have everything from 10cm to 3m from salvage (plus some repeater-boosted 10m and a 20m USB I purchased).

Also, making sure there was power (both mains and high-current USB) on every desk and every 2m along walls in my part of the new building they are just digging the foundations for now was a goal I set myself at the design-consultation stage. A separate up-coming battle is RJ45 ports along with them (connected into the WiFi backbone - we have separate networks for managed and BYOD devices, the latter being exclusively wireless at present, which always ends up oversubscribed, so giving BYODers the option to hard-plug in should make life better for everyone, if I can just convince Networking of that!).

Insane homeowners association tries to fine resident for dick-shaped outline car left in snow

Re: Deformity or wart?

Her HOA resembles that remark!

Re: GoFundMe?

No need. She told them where to stick their fine and they reluctantly agreed.

Not so smart after all: A techie's tale of toilet noise horror

Re: Ironing... racking up enormous numbers of steps.

My mum has this strange hot metal thing called an 'Iron'.

I think it might be some sort of old NetBurst-related thing.

Re: It's not just young kids ...

A bit like the new dosage-regulating pill bottles: "Take one tablet every time you can get the cap off!"

Re: Musicians too

It's a marching band. With diarrhea!

Artificial Intelligence: You know it isn't real, yeah?

Re: Data Regurgitation

Call it a "Similarity Engine" since it is effectively pointing out similarities across vast tracts of data.

Decoding the President, because someone has to: Did Trump just blow up concerted US effort to ban Chinese 5G kit?

Re: @RealFakeDonaldTrump

Careful there! That is starting to sound more and more like a crime against machinery!

Visited the Grand Canyon since 2000? You'll have great photos – and maybe a teensy bit of unwanted radiation

I went there once. I left a glowing review of the place.

Techie in need of a doorstop picks up 'chunk of metal' – only to find out it's rather pricey

Re: Uranium? What me worry?

Part of the PC refresh above included a chemistry-department move to a building on the other side of the city. One professor moved his collection of small glass bottles of just about every liquid-form chemical in circulation in a single large cardboard box in the back of his car (he didn't want the removalists to handle them). The chemistry Tech. was not amused. Shouting may have occurred.

Never got to play with anything that exotic, though did get to refresh some PCs in a lab with neat little stacks of lead blocks around a few things I was advised not to touch (I don't think it was lead-poisoning they were worried about)!

Then there was the bio-chem labs, where you were advised - after working in them - to wash your hands /before/ going to the bathroom too. Just to be sure!

(Safety was actually pretty high, despite my dramatised description - I was properly inducted and supervised, and the lead blocks, and biohazards were nowhere near where I was working, and I wouldn't have even noticed them across the room behind transparent barriers if they hadn't been pointed out to me by enthusiastic-to-share researchers).

New claim dogs Oracle: After $11m of sales, I was unfairly axed before next big deal – because I am a 64yo woman

Re: No legacy

Quite possibly some of 'management' may need their expectations re-adjusted. Their expectations of how long they have left to live!

Check with the French - they no doubt have those guillotines packed away in storage somewhere!

...

I'm pretty sure, like the hydra, if you chop off ALL the heads, a corp. can still die!

Australian prime minister blames 'state level' baddies for Oz parliament breach

^^ Not my best work, I'll admit

But it was 90 minutes past bed time, keeping myself upright in my computer chair because lying down made me vomitous (I did get whatever was disagreeing with me cleared not long after and got to bed, though! and I already have this-morning off work so could sleep in to make up.)

As sung by "Bruce Clearwater Revival" (ft: Bruce, Bruce and Bruce)

Just got home from Canberra, secure the front door, oh joy!

Got to sit down, take a rest on the veranda.

Legislation kicks in, pretty soon I'm singin',

.

[CHORUS:]

Private user data, flowin' ... out my back door.

.

There's a hacker doing cartwheels, a cracker gettin' good feels.

Look at all the data miners on the under-net.

A dinosaur politician, run' by superstition.

.

[CHORUS]

.

KGB and 5-eyes spooks are on the NBN.

Won't you take a ride on the flyin' goon?

Doo, doo doo.

Spurious apparition provided by politician.

.

[CHORUS]

.

Liberal and Labor play together in the band.

Won't you take a ride on the flyin' loon?

Doo, doo doo.

Don't bother me with maths, kick-backs 'll buy my 'facts'.

.

[CHORUS]

.

Forward troubles to our kids, they can deal with what we did!

Look at all the data miners dancing on the lawn.

Bother me tomorrow, poli-pensions buy no sorrows.

.

[CHORUS]

Bloke thrown in the cooler for eight years after 3D-printing gun to dodge weapon ban

Re: The USA loves it's guns

It isn't really that different to accepting the road toll as the price of letting just about any idiot drive a car.

Re: One down thousands to go

They almost succeeded in removing all the crazy people from the world once! But 20-80 thousand survived and we are up to 8 billion now!

Pandas so useless they just look at delicious kid who fell into enclosure

Re: In other news

And is certainly a weapon of mass distribution!

US kids apparently talking like Peppa Pig... How about US lawmakers watching Doctor Who?

Re: I have never had the chance to see or hear Peppa Pig.

I'm not sure what the down-voters think I was saying, but I was referring to when I happened to buy some Peppa Pig biscuits from the local dollar store specials bin once while changing buses on the way to work. And, as one tends to do with biscuits, I ate them for morning tea!

I have never had the chance to see or hear Peppa Pig.

Though I have eaten her.

In biscuit form.

From Red Planet to deep into the red: Suicidal extrovert magnet Mars One finally implodes

No, Adams was definitely setting up a really really great-on-the-surface-sounding idea for the explicit purpose of shooting it strait down in one sentence at the end. It is understandable the meta-humor there passes a lot by though!

Ah, you humans and your obsession with squatting at the bottom of gravity wells!

But then we'll have to clean our own telephones!

'Now is the winter of our disk contents'... Decision on Lauri Love's seized gear due next week

Re: Now is the winter...

There is also the long-circulating-on-the-internet camping-supplies advert, too.

Cops looking for mum marauding uni campus asking students if they fancy dating her son

"Freud is somewhat discredited these days"

Heh, about 20 years ago we studied his research in a Child Psychology course.

As a case study on how not to do research!

(IE: don't do all your research on people in mental hospitals, then extrapolate to the general population)!

Tell NASA to grab the margarita mix – a sextillion-kg salty ring found floating in space

Time is relative

And the more time spent a long distance from relatives, the better.

Re: CRISPS IN SPAAAAACE!

Since alcohol is a hydrocarbon, I imagine there are some moons awash with the stuff not to far away from here (some filtering and distillation may be required)!

Never mind that naked selfie scandal... Brazil lights the, er, kindling, dot-Amazon saga roars back into life

Re: An Indonesian island next?

I vaguely recall a journalist jokingly asking Sun about this back when Java (the programming language!) was new and the CEO saying they wouldn't have any issue at all with the island using the word for anything not programming-language related.

It was a different age.

How I got horizontal with a gimp and untangled his cables

Re: they call them fins

People from Finland do make good cable-runners, though. They can get into all the tight spaces because they are quite Finnish!

Pants-purveyor in plea for popularity: It's not just any pork push... it's an M&S 'love sausage'

They don't seem to make them anymore, but as a kid (back in the dinosaur days) we could also ask the tuck-shop lady/man for a "finger".

Sorry, I'm holding out for something special - Feb15th: discount chocolate day.

Re: Shopfront advertising gone too far #OffTopic

I don't mind them, but here they stopped stocking Portuguese tarts to make room for them.

Re: missed opportunity

Mandarin Chinese, too.

Come to sunny Australia where you can buy a Gaytime:

https://www.streetsicecream.com.au/brands/golden-gaytime/golden-gaytime-.html

Lovely website you got there. Would be a shame if we, er, someone were to sink it: Google warns EU link tax will magnify media monetary misery

Re: Ah, capitalism at its best

I use StartPage and while it isn't included in FireFox or Chrome's default search options, it is easy enough to open preferences and add it. Or just click on the helpful links on the StartPage entry page itself to have it automagically added to the options and set as default.

Anyone who can't handle clicking a hyperlink should probably not be on the web. It is sort of an expected skill in the domain!

Boffin suggests Trappist monk approach for Spectre-Meltdown-grade processor flaws, other security holes: Don't say anything public – zip it

Re: Security through obscurity

Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal confirmed!

Aaaaaand I should have read ahead to the next sub-thread vvvv

Know thy enemy (bugs in this case)

The second a fix for an unreported vulnerability is distributed, black-hats are all over it to see what was changed and how to exploit it before everyone has had a chance to test and deploy the patch (BIG assumption that the majority of users ever get around to it!), so what is the point in 'quietly' patching vulnerabilities again?

Bug-hunter faces jail for vulnerability reports, DuckDuckPwn (almost), family spied on via Nest gizmo, and more

Re: Pretty soon, you won't be able to turn them off

Smart (not even /that/ smart, so much as motivated) people can build their own from commonly available parts.

Re: My house is so smart it will never talk to hackers, crooks or perverts.

Oh, I'll talk to them fine. It's just my snooty smart house that won't.

Amid polar vortex... Honeywell gets frosty reception after remote smart thermostat tech freezes up for a week

Yes, and even if you want remote control and/or monitoring, there is no (good) reason it has to be via someone else's web interface!

Re: IOT=Crap

I call it "Designed for sale, not for use." It is endemic in the modern 'tech' sector, and not at all exclusive to IoL (Internet of Landfill).