The phone replied by tellin... him to “Shut the f*** up, you ugly t***.”
“The phone read my mind,” Mrs Le Quesne said.
The mother of a 10-year-old boy in Coventry has been expressing her shock after a demonstration model of Apple’s iPhone 4S swore at her son. Kim Le Quesne told the Coventry Telegraph that her son Charlie was out shopping with his father in a local branch of Tesco, saw the handset in a display and asked the Siri personal …
Ummm, your friends must be tamer than mine. The pranksters I hang out with would do this in a heartbeat because I AM their friend. They would not however pull something like that intentionally on a stranger like what was done here.
But an unprotected phone in a shop? Lax info security policy...
I'm wondering how many iPhones are about to be "Updated" in the stores.
Best thing is.. this was in the UK where people are pretty understanding. In the U.S., I can imagine all the law suits about to turn up.
I think it's about time that Apple allows people to set a password for things like that haha
... local computer shops would have demo programs which would ask you to input your name. Naturally nobody would think of inputting the name "Idiot" in and then scrolling the page so "press enter" was the only bit visible such that when enter was pressed, the presser would be greeted with "Hello Idiot!"
And certainly nobody would edit the list of words in a Basic Hangman program to add a fine selection of obscenities either...!
but having just acquired a copy of ResEdit for my MacLC, the hostess in the game "Wheel of Fortune" first lost most of her clothes, then aquired a rarther large wardrobe of sleazy outfits, then became male. There were two bitmaps - one at rest, and one smiling and waving (swapped in when you won a turn). Lets just say my final version of the nude male host wasn't waving his arm (though he certainly was smiling a lot)!
I have a Minolta Xg camera that let you record your own shutter sound.
For a lark I got mine to say 'Paedo' every time I took a picture.
Then a girl friend was going on holiday and wanted to borrow a camera. Two days later I got a text asking 'Why does the camera keep saying paedo?' - oops, guess I forgot to reset the sounds!
...do these apparently-cloned suburban housewives really think that Apple said, "Hey, it'd be a great idea to have our phones fling obscene invective at people who ask innocuous questions! Yeah! Now, if only we could find a way for it to punch the user in the face when they place a call..."
I mean, really? Why are they never asked anything aside from, "Exactly how enraged -are- you, Mrs. Stockcuffer?" OK, I know that one, but geez, I'd really like to know how they think this happened and who did it...
In this case at least it seems that Mrs. Gobknoblin is blaming Tesco for their ignoring the issue, rather than accusing them of having a foul plot to create an army of superchavs by teaching young children what a curse sounds like without the children knowing that the words are supposed to be curses (if they already know, then presumably the ship has already sailed).
Also, am I the only one who's thinking about ncurses now? :/
Back in the days when DOS was prime, and windows software was in the up-and-coming stage, I was testing some corporate windows (win16) software.
Under normal conditions, windows was run in the autoexec.bat, but I tried running the windows software under a DOS prompt anyway (I was bored and had time on my hands, so sue me).
Where I was expecting the standard "this is a windows program" message (forgive me for paraphrasing, this was a long time ago), instead, it went along the lines of "this is not DOS software you fucking moron".
While this may have been acceptable for shareware of the time, it wouldn't cut it for corporates on the off chance they want to have a "play" with their computer. These guys pay a rediculous amount of money for the software, and bucketloads more for the data feed. No really, the fees are just plain fucking scary. So no, callilng them fucking morons was not on, these guys have heavy duty lawers on the payroll for normal day to day work, so taking us to the cleaners for a "funny" statement would have been a breakfast snack to them.
I did report the "bug" to management. I suppose the programmer responsible who thought it was funny at the time, would still have a sore arse today. Whoever it was, sorry dude, but I can't let something like that slide. No matter how funny *I* found it. :-)
I used to have a special version of command.com with a whole bunch of the messages changed... Ah, what sweet naive innocent entertainmants we had back then [fx nostalgic glow]. Later on we moved on to the delights of customised Windows shells. What happened to those carefee days of youth?
I hacked up command.com on my 286, back when I was, what, 12 or so... only problem was that one time I accidentally saved it with CRLFs and didn't notice. Hellooo, file system with 47,000 lost clusters! And that's a lot on a 40mb drive.
Still kickin' myself over that one. Luckily, my copy of Duke Nukem was on the other drive.
I remember a mate telling me that he and a colleague were developing a system and had become bored with the error messages while testing it. To relieve the tedium they played silly B's with the error message data table, with an incentive of free beer for the one making the other laugh out loud in the office. A rich vein of comedic material was supplied by the fact that the client was a Merchant Banker.
Their boss learned the value of checking with the developers before demoing the unfinished system to the client the hard way......
...I remember wiping about 30 - 40 Win95 machines in a Byte superstore once.
Amazing what you can do in an autoexec.bat. Ahh deltree, how we loved you.
Still they learnt about Screensaver passwords quickly.
And about 3 weeks later, they learn't how pointless they were on Win95 machines.
Anon?
well I've worked for the original parent company for about 14 years now.
@casinowilhelm: "So far I just got the "trip over pavement cracks and sue the council""
hehe, I'm from the town in question and when I was 8 yrs old (32 yrs ago to be precise) , I stumbled on a loose paving slab. Lost my front teeth becasue of it. My parents never dreamed of suing the council. A strongly worded letter later (no legal threats or anything), and the slab was fixed along with many others.
"shut the fuck up, you ugly cunt" - I always thought that was our local greeting here in Cov :D
That's nothing compared to what I did in our local WH Smith's back in the day. They had a seperate store for home computers and there were several display models in the window. Picture walking past a shop window, and seeing 20 or so screens saying "Fuck off, Wankers!!!".
Kids will be kids, and idiots will still allow full access to display models.
Oh, and news must be slow if El Reg is culling stories from the Coventry Telegraph :)
10 ON BREAK CONT
20 MODE 0
30 INK 0,0: INK, 1,5,26
30 PRINT "RUMBELOWS ARE RUBBISH!!!!!"
40 GOTO 30
On the Amstrad CPC that would disable the Escape key and would mean they would have to power cycle the computer to reset it. Although frankly even at the age of 8 it baffled me that shops left the computers just sitting at the BASIC prompt rather than loading up a demo or a game. The CPC came with a proper rolling demo on one of the CPM system discs!
There was one in a local Dixons/Comet/<insert electronics retailer here> locally on a display loop with no mouse attached. There were keyboard shortcuts for mouse movements - I knew them - I started up the TTS system on Workbench and typed several fruity words. Turned up volume to full on telly attached, asked kid nearby to press enter on the count of 10 - started walking out of shop.
Just as I left it sounded like Stephen Hawking had developed tourettes at top volume...
Them were the days...
OK, sad I know, but my earliest experience of this was with a Sharp MZ80K running BASIC from tape in RAM, and we got (heaven only knows where!) a memory map for it which allowed this exact thing. Really cool part was, you could write the hacked BASIC back to tape, so everyone had their own boot tape with their favourite messages.
:)