Archive for August 30, 2022

Tuesday, August 30, 2022

Making the “The Swift Programming Language” Book Open Source

Kyle Murray (Hacker News):

We’re happy to announce that “The Swift Programming Language” book is now an open source project. This new project will be the basis of publishing the book on Swift.org in the future […] and will use the open source DocC tool.

[…]

When the open source repository is able to generate a high-quality version of TSPL, we will switch over to publishing directly from that repository. At that time we’ll also start taking pull requests for more content changes.

Previously:

Active Mac Malware Scans

Howard Oakley:

In the last six months macOS malware protection has changed more than it did over the previous seven years. It has now gone fully pre-emptive, as active as many commercial anti-malware products[…]

[…]

These are orchestrated by XProtectPluginService, an XPC service which is scheduled and dispatched using the DAS-CTS system that does the same for most periodic background tasks.

[…]

The DubRobber (XCSSET) scanner is by far the most frequently run, performing scans lasting 15-35 seconds every hour or two during periods of low user activity.

Previously:

Update (2022-09-03): See also: MacRumors, Hacker News.

Update (2022-09-14): Josh Avraham:

Users on macOS Catalina and onwards can manually trigger an XProtect scan any time they want to by running /Library/Apple/System/Library/CoreServices/XProtect.app/Contents/MacOS/XProtect

Claris Pro, Go, Server, and Studio

Adam Engst:

Claris will rename FileMaker Pro, FileMaker Go (for deploying FileMaker apps on the iPhone and iPad), and FileMaker Server (for hosting multi-user FileMaker apps) to Claris Pro, Claris Go, and Claris Server. A new Web-based development environment called Claris Studio will join and integrate with the other products to provide a modern, cloud-based system.

[…]

The more important change for longtime individual FileMaker users is that there will be a freemium version of Claris Pro with free access to Claris Studio (and presumably Claris Go). Its only restriction is that databases created with the freemium version are restricted to a single user—but there are no size or time constraints.

Previously:

Janet Jackson Music Crashed Laptop Computers

Raymond Chen:

And then they discovered something extremely weird: Playing the music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to crash, even though that other laptop wasn’t playing the video!

[…]

It turns out that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used.

The manufacturer worked around the problem by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback.