Ftrain, by Paul Ford

Things breaking and changing

“Software error doomed Japanese Hitomi spacecraft,” Nature:

The spacecraft then automatically switched into a safe mode and, at about 4:10 a.m., fired thrusters to try to stop the rotation. But because the wrong command had been uploaded, the firing caused the spacecraft to accelerate further. (The improper command had been uploaded to the satellite weeks earlier without proper testing; JAXA says that it is investigating what happened.)

“Apple Stole My Music. No, Seriously,” James Pinkstone, Vellum:

What Amber explained was exactly what I’d feared: through the Apple Music subscription, which I had, Apple now deletes files from its users’ computers. When I signed up for Apple Music, iTunes evaluated my massive collection of Mp3s and WAV files, scanned Apple’s database for what it considered matches, then removed the original files from my internal hard drive. REMOVED them. Deleted. If Apple Music saw a file it didn’t recognize — which came up often, since I’m a freelance composer and have many music files that I created myself — it would then download it to Apple’s database, delete it from my hard drive, and serve it back to me when I wanted to listen, just like it would with my other music files it had deleted.

“Security Analysis of Emerging Smart Home Applications”:

We exploited framework design flaws [in Samsung SmartThings devices] to construct four proof-of-concept attacks that: (1) secretly planted door lock codes; (2) stole existing door lock codes; (3) disabled vacation mode of the home; and (4) induced a fake fire alarm. We conclude the paper with security lessons for the design of emerging smart home programming frameworks.

“The Feed Is Dying,” Casey Johnston, Select/All:

No one knows how little we respect reverse-chronological feeds better than the companies that produce them for us. Social media services have a vast amount of second-to-second information informing them of what people want to see and when; even the time we linger on a photo, or type something and delete it without posting, they know. You are not immediately aware of how much time you’re consuming flicking past dozens of posts waiting for your crush’s user name to stick at the top of the feed; Instagram is. Twitter knows which tweets from your feed you have clicked on, and maybe linked to in a DM, but never liked or retweeted. They know that your approach to the feed, even for an experience you yourself had a hand in creating, is not neutral. And they’re going to help you out.

“A brief history of the fireball in fantasy games,” by Jon Peterson, Gamasutra:

Most of these early computer games did not incorporate Fireball, perhaps because it was harder to program an area-of-effect spell than a single-target spell like Magic Missile. One 1970s computer game that did include Fireball was the amateur “dnd” game written by Dan Lawrence, which years later would get a commercial release under the name Telengard (1982). But the earliest commercial role-playing games for personal computers, classics like the Temple of Apshai or Akalabeth (the precursor to Ultima), didn’t let players cast Fireball. Strategic Simulation Inc. (SSI) included Fireballs in their early computer role-playing games such as Wizard’s Crown, and once they licensed Dungeons & Dragons as a media property, it would appear as well in their famous Gold Box games like Pool of Radiance (1988).