Re: Fingerprint unlocking...
Considering the habit in some less-savory parts of the world of cutting off the required appendage... possibly not!
Posts by LaeMing
2410 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Dec 2009
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Don't panic, Florida Man, but a judge just said you have to give phone passcodes to the cops
Chip design chap arrested for using photocopier
Thursday 4th May 2017 05:25 GMT 
On the other hand....
.... I was once on an interviewing panel for a mid-sized Chinese tech company (they wanted a native English speaker to verify the applicants actually could speak intelligible English). Several of the interviewees were from competing companies and each was asked if they had any inside information they could bring with them.
Plot-twist: the one who said "Sorry, No" got in the take-serously tray and the ones who claimed they could were binned. This company was smart enough to realise that if a prospective employee would do it to their previous employer on the way in, they would later do the same to them on the way out.
Forgetful ZX Spectrum reboot firm loses control of its web domains
Ewe, get a womb! Docs grow baby lambs in shrink-wrap plastic bags
Don't install our buggy Windows 10 Creators Update, begs Microsoft
Thursday 27th April 2017 01:14 GMT 
Last week they removed all the old windows from my apartment. Ancient-looking things and full of bugs (redbacks at the front, a bull-ant nest under the bedroom window). They then installed nice new windows, which look much better: cleaner, newer design, easier to operate. Only downside is I can't use more than one major appliance at a time until I upgrade the RAM.
....
Thank you, I'm here all week! :-P
eBay threatens to block Australians from using offshore sellers
Monday 24th April 2017 03:27 GMT
A typical shopping trip in Australia for me.
Me - Goes to shop that could reasonably be expected to sell ITEM. "Do you have ITEM?"
Shop - "What is an ITEM?"
Me - Shows diagram or picture, "One of these."
Shop - Looks at me like I am a bug squashed on the sole of their shoe. "There is no such thing as ITEM."
Me - "Yes there is. Could you order one in for me?"
Shop - "No. We only stock NOT-ITEM. You should buy NOT-ITEM as it is what we want to sell."
Me - "Sorry, I can't use NOT-ITEM for what I want to do with ITEM." Leaves shop, goes home (via several other shops with same result, if I am feeling particularly masochistic). Orders online. Has it a few days later.
Shop (to government) - Waaaaaaaaah. We can't compete in a free market by selling crap no-one actually wants to buy. Waaaaaaaaaaaah. Protect us from the evil foreners! Their supplying what the customer actually wants is unfair trade! Waaaaaaaaaaaah.
Would you believe it? The Museum of Failure contains quite a few pieces of technology
Monday 24th April 2017 02:44 GMT
Bic pens perfectly good!?
You obviously have different Bic pens over there. Horrible scratchy, jam-uppy things guaranteed to run out mid-word at least once a sentence, in my personal experience (which is admittedly a couple of decades old - haven't used that brand of ball-point since I got sick of them in junior high back in the 80's).
Make America Wait Again: Trump hasn't stopped H-1B visas
BDSM sex rocks Drupal world: Top dev banished for sci-fi hanky-panky
So my ISP can now sell my browsing history – what can I do?
Federal Police toss nbn™ under a bus over leaks to Senator
UK Home Sec: Give us a snoop-around for WhatApp encryption. Don't worry, we won't go into the cloud
Happy Motherboards day: Here's some (Optane) memory
USA can afford golf for Trump. Can't afford .com for FBI infosec service
Australia bins safe harbour, presses ahead with Minister-as-NetAdmin plan
Oxford Uni boffins say internet filters probably won't protect teens
Scott McNealy: Your data is safer with marketers than governments
Wednesday 15th March 2017 00:27 GMT
Re: What if you do want to buy pantihose
I always used to phrase conversations with classes of 8-12year-olds concerning data security in terms of the purchase of donald-duck or disney-princess-of-the-week underpants, and who you might or might not want knowing about it.
(No, data security and privacy isn't in any primary-school curriculum I know of, but it damned well should be! Meanwhile the state government is stripping down the teaching of how our voting systems ork because 'common' people growing up knowing how preferential polling works is damned inconvenient when trying to keep them voting for only the two major groups of idiots).
Has your spouse stayed on after Mobile World Congress? This sex doll brothel might be why
Wednesday 8th March 2017 02:30 GMT
Re: Nothing for the wimmin?
Sorry, you are confusing feminism with something else. Actual feminists have no problem with anything adults consent* to or do on their own. Anyone (of any gender) who tries to claim otherwise should be avoided.
*Consent should be both informed and free of any form of coercion, of course.
Boffins exfiltrate data by blinking hard drives' LEDs
'Hey, Homeland Security. Don't you dare demand Twitter, Facebook passwords at the border'
Installing disks is basically LEGO, right? This admin failed LEGO
Pack your bags! NASA spots SEVEN nearby Earth-sized alien worlds
Is your child a hacker? Liverpudlian parents get warning signs checklist
Magic Leap sued for sex discrimination … by woman it hired to stamp out sex discrimination
Want to come to the US? Be prepared to hand over your passwords if you're on Trump's hit list
BOFH: Password HELL. For you, mate, not for me
Saturday 4th February 2017 04:02 GMT
I think I am now off the cold-call list for a funeral-insurance slinger. My preferred method of burial is to be left on the side of the road in a burlap sack and the council can dispose of the body at their expense or let everyone put up with the smell and associated public health risks. (#deathhacks)
AMD's daring new money-making strategy: Sue everyone! Mwahaha
Trump's immigration clampdown has Silicon Valley techies fearing for their house prices
Sunday 5th February 2017 22:46 GMT
Re: I bet Donald has been having a tantrum(p) or two over the past couple of days:
I am pretty confident he is, for now, still under the popular impression that the US President can do anything (s)he wants like some sort of unaccountable and unrestricted dictator. Of course here in the real world, the US government was expressly set up to limit such power-focusing. For good reason, QED!
W3C's bright idea turned your battery into a SNITCH for websites
Sunday 5th February 2017 22:25 GMT
Re: About that...
..."when running out of battery one may still needs to access a MINIMALISTIC (= ads free, no animated gif, superfluous information ) version of a web site"...
Orrrrrrr... a MINIMALISTIC (= ads free, no animated gif, superfluous information ) version of a web site all along might stop the user running low on battery power in the first place!
Coming to the big screen: Sci-fi epic Dune – no wait, wait, wait, this one might be good
Human memory, or the lack of it, is the biggest security bug on the 'net
Thursday 2nd February 2017 03:13 GMT
Re: "sneak a key logger"
I use option 1.5 - A small number of hard+unique passwords for important stuff (Financials, home computer, message boards I frequent often, etc). A few hard+shared passwords for non-critical things I trust, but also wouldn't be mortified by a compromise on (message boards I don't care about so much, work PC - mainly due to their crappy password rules!), mentally-generated-on-the-fly soft passwords for all those crappy sites that insist you have an account do do things that shouldn't actually need one for (usually linked to likewise-generated throw-away email accounts).
Trump's cartoon comedy approach to running a country: 'One in, two out' rule for regulations
LG's $1,300 5K monitor foiled by Wi-Fi: Screens go blank near hotspots
It's that time of the year again: Texas school district blabs staff tax documents to phishers
Linux is part of the IoT security problem, dev tells Linux conference
350,000 Twitter bot sleeper cell betrayed by love of Star Wars and Windows Phone
Make America, wait, what again? US Army may need foreign weapons to keep up
Tuesday 24th January 2017 01:52 GMT
Re: Military-industrial 101
Orrrrr. You could have spent a lot of that money directly on developing those things, and had change over to develop more. The 'military spending promotes non-military development' is, while true as far as it goes, a myth in terms of monetary efficiency. At best, civilian spin-offs help ameliorate only a smallish portion of the costs.
BOOST! LEGO's computing future and its ground-breaking past
Wednesday 11th January 2017 02:32 GMT
Re: One of the world's great companies
Professor Clifton Shallot - "I think these days they too often go too close to just being toys"
I recently discovered if, instead of the retail channels, you track down local education equipment suppliers, there is a whole world of much less kitchy-thematic Lego* that the ordinary consumer doesn't get to see!
* Yes, official Lego. There is a whole 'hidden' catalogue of much more education-y stuff out there! Even reasonably priced kits that can be made into more than just 3 things!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
