* Posts by redpawn

982 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Sep 2013

Israeli Moon probe crashes at the last minute but SpaceX scores with Falcon Heavy launch

redpawn
Pint

Better than the Space Shuttle,

almost as cool and much more reusable. Go Falcons!

As Alexa's secret human army is revealed, we ask: Who else has been listening in on you?

redpawn

The revolution starts now!

I can finally reach a large captive audience. Previously people would walk away from the busy street corner before I could fully inform them and convert them to my cause. Armed with my manifesto, the thousands in the Google Army will launch my revolution at last.

Town admits 'a poor decision was made' after baseball field set on fire to 'dry' it more quickly

redpawn
Alien

Re: Bah!

Better to use large satellite mounted mirrors to focus more sunlight on the area. That's how how we do it here on Proxima Centauri Two.

NASA's first all-woman spacewalk outside ISS cancelled – due to lack of spacesuits that fit

redpawn

Re: Basic Logistics

Magical thinking works on paper and makes good PR. I wonder if the decision to announce the walk came from a Trump appointee.

Spyware sneaks into 'million-ish' Asus PCs via poisoned software updates, says Kaspersky

redpawn

We know you want it,

LOADS of freeee software and automatic updates. Slothful performance and reduced security are a small price to pay rather than to perform a clean install of Windows. Heavens, you might have to install some drivers to get those custom buttons to work. Too difficult! Besides, the vendor always has your best interests at heart, because the customer always comes first, just check on their web page.

Yes! Pack your bags! Blossoming planetary system strikingly similar to ours found by boffins

redpawn

If you leave now,

you'll get there just about the time it becomes habitable.

What do sexy selfies, search warrants, tax files have in common? They've all been found on resold USB sticks

redpawn

I used to

shred all my mail. Now I sell it on ebay as recycled paper.

Thought you'd seen everything there is to Ultima Thule? Check this out: IN STEREO!

redpawn

If you are having trouble seeing it...

I got a nice view using relaxed eyes and reading glasses. Ultima definitely appears flattened as opposed to sphereish, nice! If you are having trouble seeing this, try reading glasses, get close to the screen ~30cm, relax your eyes and concentrate on the center image. You may need to be a bit closer or farther depending on the size of your screen and the strength of your glasses. Good luck.

Buffer overflow flaw in British Airways in-flight entertainment systems will affect other airlines, but why try it in the air?

redpawn

BYOE

I don't know about you, but I find a book more entertaining. Other than the flight tracker showing how much longer the plane will be over the ocean it has little value. Low rez movies on bad screens and a terrible selection of music hardly qualifies as entertainment and the WiFi solution is oversubscribed with hundreds of devices inside a metal cylinder which causes frequent failures.

The very presence of an entertainment system causes people to close all the windows and create an atmosphere akin to a tomb or the Elevator to Hell. BYOE (Bring Your Own Entertainment) and you will be happier.

IT guy at US govt fraud watchdog stole 16 computers from... US govt fraud watchdog

redpawn

He didn't steal enough

Manafort just got under three years for not paying millions in taxes, lying to congress, breaking plea agreements and being a tool of autocratic regimes. I bet this guy gets a longer sentence because he didn't steal hundreds of times more. Possession of marijuana has resulted in more time for less well off offenders than these two will serve.

Level up Mac security, and say game over to malware? System alerts plus Apple game engine equals antivirus package

redpawn

Spy Engine

Sounds like it could flag all sorts of machine events and make judgments based on them. It could just as easily be used to flag suspicious employee behavior and report it as well.

Did you know?! Ghidra, the NSA's open-sourced decompiler toolkit, is ancient Norse for 'No backdoors, we swear!'

redpawn

It would be a good test as it is a bajillion lines long and complex. You could compare it to its source code which you compiled it from.

Real life sci-fi: Massive exoplanet booted out of home by binary parents – then slipped back inside by passing friendly stars

redpawn
Alien

Good Samaritans

returned the abused planet to its parents God knows what will happen to it now. They should have called Planet Protective Services instead.

Qbot malware's back, and latest strain relies on Visual Basic script to slip into target machines

redpawn

You can lead a user to security,

but you can't make them implement it. However Microsoft doesn't even lead users toward security.

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

redpawn

Re: @Redpawn ... Gun show

Yes but it is unclear how many of the sellers at gun shows are licensed dealers. Different rules apply to the "private" sales which are common at "Gun Shows". All you have to do is claim it is your hobby and not a business to sell without background checks, so get facts straight. Quit reading NRA propaganda!

The "Gun Show Loophole" is still large enough to supply an endless stream of mass killings.

redpawn

Gun show

At many gun shows you can purchase a gun with no checks what so ever. No ID check no forms, just cash. No need for test firing near the police. However this guy sounds like a candidate for the Darwin award.

How's this for sci-fi: A cosmic river of 4,000 stars dazzles lifeforms as it flows through a galaxy. And that galaxy is the Milky Way

redpawn

Continents and Stars

All the important continents are in the northern hemisphere, so are the important stars. That's why compasses point north. Four thousand stars hiding in the southern sticks just haven't yet been assimilated by the northern stars. Bet my best load stone they wont stick together for another orbit of the galaxy core now that they have been discovered and found to be aberrant.

Blockchain is bullsh!t, prove me wrong meets 'chain gang fans at tech confab

redpawn

Because Block and Chain

Blocks are solid and so are good chains. Sounds like a solid investment, kind of like gold, except gold is a bit on the soft side, but never mind. Just keep your eye on the ball, I mean chain. Solid investment. Got to love it.

It's now 2019, and your Windows DHCP server can be pwned by a packet, IE and Edge by a webpage, and so on

redpawn

How oh how

does that acrobat keep falling down and getting hurt. Time for retirement before all that is left of the poor thing is patches. Adobe, if you had an ounce of concern you'd put it to pasture before it ruins any more security unconscious lives.

It's OK, everyone – Congress's smart-cookie Republicans have the answer to America's net neutrality quandary

redpawn

Neither fish nor foul

but let us insist the cow is in the category that most benefits big business. Legally these are the only allowed categories and if business is not placated, congress critters won't get their free steaks.

LibreOffice 6.2 is here: Running up a Tab at the NotebookBar? You can turn it all off if you want

redpawn
Pint

I thank all the developers

I too have been using since StarOffice and the trend has been toward better and better versions. It's not perfect but neither is MS and Libre doesn't push you to subscribe to some cloud service, but do think of donating. Thanks again and Cheers!

National Enquirer's big Pecker tried to shaft me – and I wouldn't give him an inch, says Jeff Bezos after dick pic leak threat

redpawn

I miss "Bat Boy"

What a poor excuse for a soul Pecker has. He probably goes into his vault of blackmail to get off. Too bad he signed an agreement with federal prosecutors. He might not get prosecuted for blackmail but computer crimes and possession of stolen materials could still get him trouble in three jurisdictions, two state plus federal and his company promised not to be involved in any crimes for three years on his agreement. "Bat Boy" may finally be avenged for being slandered.

Wells Fargo? Well fscked at the moment: Data center up in smoke, bank website, app down

redpawn

Single point of failure

Well... They got it down to one, can't get much better than that.

US lawmakers furious (again) as mobile networks caught (again) selling your emergency location data to bounty hunters (again)

redpawn

The free market will fix this

People will naturally gravitate toward providers who respect their privacy and the others will slowly go out of business over the next hundred and fifty years.

At least Sony offered a t-shirt, says macOS flaw finder: Bug bounties now for Macs if you want this 0-day, Apple

redpawn

But

macOS is so secure you don't even need....

Pixaaaarrrrrrghh! Mars-snapping CubeSats Wall-E and Eve declared dead (for now) by NASA bods

redpawn

Was it the Pixar image

of being too wretchedly cute which caused them to quit? Are they plotting robotic revenge such as redirecting asteroids in our direction with their remaining fuel to get back at us?

European Commission orders mass recall of creepy, leaky child-tracking smartwatch

redpawn

Don't be so alarmist

This is just to get the IoT generation used to the corporate surveillance state. Early exposure will make these children better equipped to function in the brave new IoT world.

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

redpawn

Famous saying...

See no evil, speak no evil, be a weevil

You think election meddling is bad now? Buckle up for 2020, US intel chief tells Congress

redpawn

Re: Can't Wait

I no that.

redpawn

Can't Wait

for CGI audio and video showing all sorts of nastiness without enough time or resources to refute before the election. After the election we'll once again be told the misinformation had no effect on the outcome, as Americans (don't laugh) are to smart to be fooled by such things.

Worried about Brexit food shortages? North Korean haute couture has just the thing

redpawn

Must use insecticide instead of deodorant

otherwise these fine garments will keep insects from starving.

Raspberry Pi Foundation says its final farewells to 40nm with release of Compute Module 3+

redpawn

What do you destroy

if you plug it in to a memory slot because you know it has to happen? By the way, I like these little computers and use a number of the regular variety in projects. Now I need some coffee to go with my Pi.

The Apple Mac is 35 years old. Behold the beige box of the future

redpawn

They were upgradeable sort of

I bought one of the original 128K boards for for $20 and built a circuit to combine the video signal into a kind of composite output. Powered it with an old Apple II power supply. I put this into an old briefcase along with an old speaker. I changed out a resistor in an Apple /// monitor to get it to scan faster and ended up with a green screen Mac. Yes it was not good enough, so following instructions found in a book, I changed out the ram and a controller chip for 512KB. Copied the the protected ROM from a work computer but it still was clunky until I bought a daughter board which clipped onto the CPU and allowed 6MB, 2MB for RAM drive and had a SCSI controller. Another $400 for a 40MB drive, a great deal at the time, and the Hackintosh finally became useful. Sadly the clock chip died years later and it would not run without a functioning clock and it got dumped.

You're an admin! You're an admin! You're all admins, thanks to this Microsoft Exchange zero-day and exploit

redpawn

Equality for all

Microsoft just keeps giving and giving. No wonder they are so popular.

IBM HR made me lie to US govt, says axed VP in age-discrim legal row: I was ordered to cover up layoffs of older workers

redpawn

But Look...

at the pretty organizational flow chart. Look at the policy documents.

Now how could you claim this is not reality? You have nothing as pretty to support your claims, so move along.

Q. How exactly do you test car seats? A. With this sweaty 'robutt' that twerks for days and days

redpawn

Last I checked

sweat is not just water and how does this help the seat keep my hands from going numb from bad back pressure points?

What's the fate of our Solar System? Boffins peer into giant crystal ball – ah, no, wait, that's our Sun in 10bn years

redpawn

Re: Glad they helped me understand

Yes, but my comprehension of temperature pretty well tops out at a glass blowers kiln.

redpawn

Glad they helped me understand

the high temperature of these stars by using Celsius as Kelvin would confuse me.

Windows 10 Insiders sent on quest deep into Registry to fetch goblet of Reserved Storage

redpawn

Just a little nose under the tent for now

And just why do you think you should have any control over how full your drive is anyway?

Killer superbugs in space... are something astronauts on orbiting science lab don't have to worry about right now

redpawn

E = 1/2mv^2

makes small things quite dangerous and probably causes more worry for astronauts, though traveling to and from a well populated space colony might be problematic in the Musk era.

Excuse me, sir. You can't store your things there. Those 7 gigabytes are reserved for Windows 10

redpawn

I tried

to make 32GB work with a set top box for streaming for my elderly parents. Spent hours just updating. Gave up and it now runs Mint which streams Netflix just fine without confusing them or popping up update notices. I feel sorry for the technically challenged who get these entry level machines which are not fit for purpose.

Hope you're over that New Year's hangover – there's an Adobe PDF app patch to install

redpawn

Because they Love You

Adobe through the goodness of their heart adds bad code to every project so you will appreciate good code more. This hurts their business but they know in the long run the computing universe will be better off and you will be motivated to produce better code.

Can't unlock an Android phone? No problem, just take a Skype call: App allows passcode bypass

redpawn

They fixed it!

Governments now love for people to use Skype.

It's a lot of work, being popular: Apple, Tim Cook and the gilets jaunes

redpawn

I have one of those SEs

but I'd love to put on few stone and buy new trousers so my pockets would be big enough for a new iPhone. Bigger is always better and that goes for price too. How is the public to know a phone is good if the price is too low?

Silicon Valley CEO thrown in the cooler for three years, ordered to pay back $1.5m for bullsh*tting investors

redpawn

Bigger Fraud is Safer

fraud. You need to steal at least twenty times as much to get away with fraud. Just look at trump. Except for the mistake of being elected president, by sealing hundreds of millions he had immunity for decades.

Your two-minute infosec roundup: Drone arrests, Alexa bot hack, Windows zero-day, and more

redpawn

"It is confirmed to be a legit exploit"

Does that make use of the exploit legit also?

It's a Christmas miracle: Logitech backs down from Harmony home hub API armageddon

redpawn

Failing Strategy

How are they going to get their yearly upgrade sales now that there is no promise to brick old kit. Giving in even once shows weakness and users will soon expect products to function for a year and a half to two years. Sales will plummet.

2018 ain't done yet... Amazon sent Alexa recordings of man and girlfriend to stranger

redpawn

Unfortunate-

Lacking fortune. This leak of data did not net Amazon income like the fortunate ones.

A few reasons why cops didn't immediately shoot down London Gatwick airport drone menace

redpawn

Get another drone

and just follow the offending one home. Take pictures of the culprit. Allow for inefficiencies of law enforcement and the courts and the problem will be solved any month.

A year after Logitech screwed over Harmony users, it, um, screws over Harmony users: Device API killed off

redpawn

Be like me

Just replace all your tech every year and the problems will go away. You know you'll feel safer too. Come on get with the program now. The tech industry depends on you and your new kit will be secure for the better part of six months.