Friday September 5
 
15:20
 
What Is Going On?

187.918

No doubt it will be back up again before I can take advantage of it with my next pay check!

Monday September 1
 
17:32
 
Double Damn It

194.348

Friday August 29
 
13:57
 
Damn It

Just after I transfer 3,000,000 yen into British quid, the rate falls from 204 to 200. Three hundred squid. Bet it falls further also.

Damn fiends. (Don’t know who is a damn fiend, but someone is.)

At least 204 is better than the 210-215 rates of the past few months and I’ll get a decent interest rate back in the UK - 5.5% compared to 1% in Japan.

Tuesday August 5
 
22:58
 
Skype Exposes Kids To Porn

I am really getting sick of getting these pornographic “Contact details requests” on Mac Skype. It wouldn’t be so bad if they actually wanted to shag me but they only want to use me for my money.

Seriously though, I cannot find a way to prevent these appearing on Skype on my Apple Mac - unless I hide myself from being online altogether or choose Do Not Disturb, which means friends cannot contact me.

I wrote to Skype support and they gave me Windows only instructions on how to block contact pop-ups - stupid arses, given that they know my version of Skype is Mac. When I followed that up with “There is no such configuration option for Mac”, they ignored it.

While Windows users have an option to block these pop-ups, Mac users don’t. I don’t have Skype-Me set, so I am not receiving them because of that.

There is a serious side to this: If this was a family Mac and children were playing games or using iPhoto, the “calienter mujer - sexy dirty bitch xxx” pop-up could appear at any time. That’s bad enough, but since the default is to let dirty bitch see my computer is online and allow contact, kids could very easily get exposed to pornographic chats by just clicking OK.

I’ve tried raising this again with Skype and they didn’t respond. I contacted the news desk at The Register, The Guardian, and The Sun and only The Register responded - however it seems they then got sidetracked with the latest iPhone rumour and stopped following it up.

Skype exposing kids - and innocent me - to pornography. It’s only a matter of time before pedophiles catch on and I hope then that Skype gets sued to the heavens in a high profile case - because if they ever claim they didn’t know, I’ll be the first one providing evidence that they did know they were exposing children to sex and refused to do anything about it… and I’ll be keeping my emails to show The Register, The Guardian, and The Sun also ignored the issue.

Tuesday July 29
 
00:12
 
Up-Skirt

From Times Online:

Here is one from the creep-ware department. Japanese tech reporter Nobuyuki Hayashi reports that Apple is equipping the new iPhone 3G models for the Japan market with a country-specific feature to stop local perverts from snapping so-called “up-skirt” or “down-blouse” photos of unsuspecting women.

Evidently, this form of “gotcha!” amateur photography is becoming an increasing problem in some public places in Japan, like on the escalators of Tokyo subway stops, Cult of Mac reports. As a result, camera phone manufacturers have been selling handsets that make a distinctive shutter sound to warn women (or, anyone nearby for that matter) that someone is taking a photo with their mobile. The first generation iPhones, however, had a silence mode that disabled this warning function. The new models, now on sale in Japan, however, “do make a sound if you take picture even when it is set to silent mode,” Hayashi writes.

In the UK and USA no sound is required because the iPhone doesn’t have a wide angle lens - the arses are just TOO GOD DAMN FAT to be captured with an iPhone.

But this is not new. In Korea and Japan all cell phones need to make a noise when taking photos. It has not been possible to up-skirt or down-blouse in Japan or Korea for a long time… not that you need to in Japan, the skirts are so damn short that no “upping” is required.

The iPhone is not available in Korea, so that is probably why it is country specific to Japan - the only country where the arses are small and sexy enough for people to WANT to photograph them secretly.

By the way, “hayashi” is “chopsticks” in Japan - so this man is called Mr Chopsticks. Lovely.