Author Archives: pappp

Article note: The article is basically a "Get over it, after complexity lost with Multics, now complexity has won" argument. Posting partly to test my stupid syndication gadget.

Article note: Shit, that's low-hanging to trigger, and highly abusable. Apple users, disable Facetime until patches are applied.

Enlarge / Apple demonstrates Group Facetime at WWDC 2018. (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Users have discovered a bug in Apple's FaceTime video-calling application that allows you to hear audio from a person you're calling before they accept the call—a critical bug that could potentially be used as a tool by malicious users to invade the privacy of others.

When Ars reached out to Apple for a statement, the company replied, "We're aware of this issue, and we have identified a fix that will be released in a software update later this week." An hour or two after this post went live, Apple disabled Group FaceTime to mitigate the bug.

The bug requires you to perform a few actions while the phone is ringing, so if the person on the other end picks up quickly, they might not be affected. Knowledge of how to use the bug is already widespread. The steps include:

Article note: Article is trading structure for different structure instead of addressing the problem. Are kids having high-quality minimally-supervised interactions with low but extant stakes? Then it's developmentally good. Are kids stuck on a rail with no meaningful influence or ability to explore? Then it's likely developmentally a waste of time. This axis has _nothing_ to do with electronic or not. It doesn't matter much if they're locked-in to electronic content or locked-in to a scheduled-and-monitored sports activity, they're not developing from it. It doesn't matter much if they're on a forum or on a stoop with the other neighborhood kids, if they're organically and independently interacting and learning, they're developing. Put some limited supervision on top to make sure they're not learning anything too egregious. I do agree with the assertion at the end that making sure children have opportunities (and nudges) to find and develop their interests is important; there is an awful lot of evidence in the literature that people are unlikely to get deeply into anything they haven't had a positive exposure to before puberty, so supplies and low-stakes classes ... and websites and communities for lots of different activities are the best kind of stimulus.

Article note: Years ago I started calling this "Dung beetle programming": rolling up bits of other people's crap into a monolithic ball until you have sort-of the program you want. Someone in the comments referred to it as the "Invented here problem"; developers now tend to reflexively avoid writing any code they'll be responsible for, and push off the dev time and maintenance cost onto anyone else.

Article note: The regularly scheduled gaben quote "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem." Fragment up the market into expensive silos and people go right back to piracy. Make a convenient legitimate single-source, and people stay put.

Article note: Breaking aggressive content-editing extensions for ad-blocking and such would turn Chrome(ium) into another Google product I like killed or rendered unusable by Google's business interests. I always think about Alan Kay's Dynabook paper "One can imagine one of the first programs an owner will write is a filter to eliminate advertising!" when I read these "general purpose platforms are too powerful, we need to restrict them so only the really powerful bad actors can scam the serfs" arguments. It's a vast failure of computer literacy.

Article note: I don't' expect there will be anything here I don't know, but I'd like to see their proposal for a way out.

Article note: Astounding! Ads designed to slip through as content have a 9/10 success rate at slipping through as content. Perhaps we should fucking regulate advertorials as advertising...