“Emacs itself was one of about half-a-dozen dispatch-vector-driven editors developed circa 1971-1972, and is known to the world at large primarily because it absorbed the functionality of all the others before one of them could successfully absorb it. Emacs has been much like an amoeba from the very beginning.”
— Lum JohnsonDear Apple,
Oh, hell no!
Good news, Apple users! The mothership has released critical security updates this week for all platforms.
Bad news, iOS users! If your device supports iOS 13, you can’t get the update to 12.4.2, and have to accept all the new bugs and brokenness in 13.1.
iOS 12.4.2
Released September 26, 2019
Available for: iPhone 5s, iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPad Air, iPad mini 2, iPad mini 3, and iPod touch 6th generationImpact: A remote attacker may be able to cause unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution
iOS 13.1 and iPadOS 13.1
Released September 24, 2019
Available for: iPhone 6s and later, iPad Air 2 and later, iPad mini 4 and later, and iPod touch 7th generationImpact: A person with physical access to an iOS device may be able to access contacts from the lock screen
The watch updates are similarly fucked.
Update
If you update your iOS devices to 13.1.1 (yes, 13.1 lasted only a few days before they figured out it sucked, too), not all of the iCloud functionality is compatible with Macs running Mojave. You must upgrade to Catalina (which hasn’t been released yet, and which is likely buggy as hell; the betas certainly were) to get everything to sync cleanly again.
9/30 Update
…and here’s iOS 13.1.2, fixing Even More Bugs. It’s almost like they knew they were inflicting buggy crap on millions of customers and didn’t care.
No, wait, it’s exactly like they inflicted buggy crap on millions of customers and didn’t care.
If you give an Apple an app...
The publishers of the DanMemo mobile game learned an important lesson Wednesday: never update your servers until you’re sure Apple has approved the new version of your app for download. The resulting lengthy “unscheduled outage” could be painful when your business model is based on convincing people to constantly buy imaginary coins to trade in to collect imaginary toys.
Up next, a Halloween Hogwarts event:
"Hey, I know that voice!"
Finished watching Kanata No Astra (which really needed 18 episodes, but got 12, with 2 of them double-length), and when Ulgar’s brother got some screen time, I immediately recognized his voice as a very different character: Dennis Elbaji, from the first story arc in Cop Craft.
What didn’t hit me while watching either show was that it was the same voice actor as Kane McDougal from Mouretsu Pirates. Also Dionysus from Sword Oratoria and the DanMemo mobile game (a character who admittedly doesn’t get a lot of lines).
Kanata, of course, is another voice I hear a lot of, as Welf Crozzo. And Aries is Hestia, Yunhua is Ryu, Polina is Tsubaki (Sword Oratoria), and Ulgar was Soma (DanMachi 2).
Another interesting note: the primary scriptwriter for the series was the creator of the School Live! manga.
Sadly, fan-art of this series is pretty limited. There’s some inept porn, some awkward attempts at drawing something that resembles one of the characters, and maybe five decent pics of the girls. Nothing like, say, an extended remix of the bikini paradise scene.
The thing that makes episode 12 so unsatisfying is that they wrapped everything up by telling, not showing. Laying it out all at once as talking-heads scenes highlighted every weakness in the backstory, drawing attention to elements that frankly don’t work. Playing it out over, say, 4 more episodes would have improved the story by letting them reveal less about the universe.
Seriously, “we established a world government that abolished guns, religions, nations, languages, and the history of the world, and all of the survivors went along with it for the rest of their lives. Also, abolishing guns (except the world government’s, who never lets them fall into the wrong hands or abuses their monopoly on force), religions (nobody cares enough about those to ever, y’know, worship in secret and have their faith strengthened by persecution), nations (trivial!), and languages (even more trivial!) created lasting world peace.”
“And we all agreed to hide the secret of wormhole technology by leaving it in the hands of the company who invented it and made themselves royalty, despite the fact that they somehow let it fall into the hands of random terrorists and criminals who were responsible for accelerating the fall of Earth.”
…and that’s just the parts I noticed while they were plotsplaining. If I actually went over episode 12 and compared it with what we were shown at the start of the series, I think it would come off a hell of a lot worse. I just don’t want to, because I liked the parts leading up to that point.
Weasels gotta weasel
It is indisputable that the Google Chrome updater crashed thousands of Macs, primarily those used by video production studios. FFS, the smoking gun is right there in their updater logs:
GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent[1213/0x7fffc9d683c0] [lvl=3] -[KSLockFile(PrivateMethods) deletePathIfSymlink: except: ] Found and deleted symlink at path /var
And it logs an error message if it can’t delete /var, which means nobody in Google QA reviews log errors before saying “ship it!”.
But how did they spin it? (emphasis mine)
“a Chrome update may have shipped with a bug that damages the file system on macOS machines with System Integrity Protection (SIP) disabled”
There are reports that it has affected people who have SIP enabled, which seems to be due to them having gone through multiple OS upgrades, starting from a version that didn’t have SIP, with permissions somehow getting changed from the defaults over the years.
The reason it hit video studios so hard is that they were all running external Thunderbolt 2 GPUs to accelerate Avid, and to run the required unsigned kernel drivers, they had to turn off SIP.
Pixiv Champloo 8
A little something to stir up my Pixiv recommendations, which are a bit heavy on foxgirls after that last post.
Not from The Babylon Bee...
Landfill Road with ‘Putrid Stench’ to Be Named After Barack Obama
The SFGate source for the story leads with the Republicans Pounce angle, of course.
Divine Diversity
In the DanMachi universe, the economy of Orario is adventurer-driven. Not only do they protect the city (and the world), the magic stones that monsters drop are the basis of all technological advancement, and their most lucrative export. But to get magic stones, you need adventurers, and to get adventurers, you need gods to provide their blessings.
So when the gods make requests…
(from the mobile game)
The novelist came up with a pretty good way to make sense of classic fantasy RPG tropes, but while he’s fleshing that out and exploring some of the darker implications in the side series, if you really step back and look at it, the ugliness and brutality goes to the bone.
All those sweet, pretty guild advisors are sending children to their deaths every day. Not just in the sense that the gods view all their followers as “children”, but young teens and tweens, and if you look around in crowd shots, sometimes much younger. How long do they last, before it hits them that the upper levels are a meat-grinder lined with the bones of the kids they sent in?
It’s not a story I’d enjoy nearly as much as the cheerful harem comedy we got, but sometimes I think about how the world we’re not shown is seriously fucked-up.
Good Eats! The Return 7-10
Don’t ask me why the episode list on the Food Network web site is in a completely different order from how they’re actually airing. By air date, the most recent episodes are:
- 7: Oyster poor boy sandwich
- 8: Steak tartare and poké
- 9: Dates (stuffed; sticky toffee pudding)
- 10: Sourdough (cheese crackers; waffles; post-apocalypse)
All entertaining to watch, none of them things I’ll ever make.
Three more to go (one double-length) before we’re back to reruns, although there’s the promise of more revised classic episodes.
