Apple was on a collision course with South Korea on Friday over new requirements that it stop forcing app developers to use its payment systems, with a government official warning of a possible investigation into the iPhone maker's compliance. From a report: The development comes after South Korea amended the Telecommunication Business Act in August to try to curb the tech majors' market dominance and stop the big app store operators such as Apple and Alphabet's Google from charging commissions on in-app purchases. The law went into effect last month but Apple had told the South Korean government that it was already complying and did not need to change its app store policy, a Korea Communications Commission (KCC) official in charge of the matter told Reuters. "This goes against the purpose of the amended law," the official said, requesting anonymity as the KCC was still in talks with Apple on compliance.

Blender today announced that Apple has joined the Blender Development Fund to support continued development of the free open source 3D graphics tool. From a report: Alongside a contribution to the Development Fund, Apple will provide engineering expertise and additional resources to Blender and its broader development community to help support Blender artists and developers, according to the announcement. Blender CEO Ton Roosendaal said the announcement means that "macOS will be back as a complete supported Blender platform."

ZDNet reports: "Python 3.10.0 is the newest major release of the Python programming language, and it contains many new features and optimizations," CPython maintainers announced in a blogpost...

One of the headline features is "structural pattern matching" in Python 3.10 -- a technique for handling data that's already available in C, Java, JavaScript, Scala and Elixir. "Structural pattern matching has been added in the form of a match statement and case statements of patterns with associated actions. Patterns consist of sequences, mappings, primitive data types as well as class instances. Pattern matching enables programs to extract information from complex data types, branch on the structure of data, and apply specific actions based on different forms of data," the project explains in release 3.10 notes. "While structural pattern matching can be used in its simplest form comparing a variable to a literal in a case statement, its true value for Python lies in its handling of the subject's type and shape," it adds.

Python core contributors presented the update in a meeting this week. Pablo Galindo Salgado, a physicist and core Python contributor, explained how the project is using Microsoft's GitHub Actions DevOps (CI/CD) tools to test Python changes on Windows, Linux and macOS systems. "When you merge something to Python, there is a CI in GitHub Actions, and we have other providers, although we are mainly using GitHub Actions now. It tests your commits on every single commit on Linux, Windows, and macOS," said Salgado.
Besides better error messages (including more precise and reliable line numbers for debugging), other changes to the language include overloading the pipe operator to allow a new syntax for writing union types, and type aliases (a kind of user-specified type, offering a way to explicitly declare an assignment as a type alias).

ZDNet reports that Python "is now the most popular language, according to one popularity ranking."

"For the first time in more than 20 years we have a new leader of the pack..." the TIOBE Index announced this month. "The long-standing hegemony of Java and C is over."

When Slashdot reached out to Guido van Rossum for a comment, he replied "I honestly don't know what the appropriate response is...! I am honored, and I want to thank the entire Python community for making Python so successful."

ZDNet reports: [I]t seems that Python is winning these days, in part because of the rise of data science and its ecosystem of machine-learning software libraries like NumPy, Pandas, Google's TensorFlow, and Facebook's PyTorch. Python is also an easy-to-learn language that has found a niche in high-end hardware, although less so mobile devices and the web — an issue that Python creator Guido van Rossum hopes to address through performance upgrades he's working on at Microsoft.

Tiobe, a Dutch software quality assurance company, has been tracking the popularity of programming languages for the past 20 years. Its rankings are based on search terms related to programming and is one measure of languages that developers should consider learning, along with IEEE Spectrum's list and a ranking produced by developer analyst RedMonk. JavaScript, the default for front-end web development, is always at the top of RedMonk's list. For Tiobe, its enterprise focus, has seen Java and C dominate in recent years, but Python has been snapping at the heels of Java, and has now overtaken it...

Python's move to top spot on the Tiobe index was a result of other languages falling in searches rather than Python rising. With an 11.27% share of searches, it was flat, while second place language C fell 5.79% percentage points compared to October last year down to 11.16%. Java made way for Python with a 2.11 percentage point drop to 10.46%.

Other languages that made the top 10 in Tiobe's October 2021 index: C++, C#, Visual Basic, JavaScript,. SQL, PHP, and Assemblyy Language. Also rising on a year-on-year basis and in the top 20 were Google-designed Go, number-crunching favorite MATLAB, and Fortran.
"Python, which started as a simple scripting language, as an alternative to Perl, has become mature," TIOBE says in announcing its new rankings.

"Its ease of learning, its huge amount of libraries, and its widespread use in all kinds of domains, has made it the most popular programming language of today. Congratulations Guido van Rossum!"

The U.S. Supreme Court turned away a lingering appeal by Oracle stemming from its challenge to the now-scrapped $10 billion cloud-computing contract the Pentagon awarded to Microsoft in 2019. From a report: The rejection was a formality given the Defense Department's decision in July to drop the contract and divide the work among multiple bidders, potentially between Microsoft and Amazon. Oracle's appeal centered on alleged conflicts of interest involving Amazon, and on claims that the Pentagon violated its own rules when it set up the contract to be awarded to a single firm.

Oracle's Java magazine takes a look at some current JDK Enhancement Proposals, "the vehicle of long standing for updating the Java language and the JVM." Today, concurrency in Java is delivered via nonlightweight threads, which are, for all intents, wrappers around operating-system threads... Project Loom aims to deliver a lighter version of threads, called virtual threads. In the planned implementation, a virtual thread is programmed just as a thread normally would be, but you specify at thread creation that it's virtual. A virtual thread is multiplexed with other virtual threads by the JVM onto operating system threads. This is similar in concept to Java's green threads in its early releases and to fibers in other languages... Because the JVM has knowledge of what your task is doing, it can optimize the scheduling. It will move your virtual thread (that is, the task) off the OS thread when it's idle or waiting and intelligently move some other virtual thread onto the OS thread. When implemented correctly, this allows many lightweight threads to share a single OS thread. The benefit is that the JVM, rather than the OS, schedules your task. This difference enables application-aware magic to occur behind the curtains...

Project Valhalla aims to improve performance as it relates to access to data items... by introducing value types, which are a new form of data type that is programmed like objects but accessed like primitives. Specifically, value types are data aggregates that contain only data (no state) and are not mutable. By this means, [value types] can be stored as a single array with only a single header field for the entire array and direct access to the individual fields...

Project Panama simplifies the process of connecting Java programs to non-Java components. In particular, Panama aims to enable straightforward communication between Java applications and C-based libraries...

Several Amber subprojects are still in progress.

Sealed classes, which have been previewed in the last few Java releases and are scheduled to be finalized in Java 17. Sealed classes (and interfaces) can limit which other classes or interfaces can extend or implement them...

Pattern matching in switches is a feature that will be previewed in Java 17...
The article concludes that Java's past and current projects "testify to how much Java has evolved and how actively the language and runtime continue to evolve."

An anonymous reader writes: This week saw the annual check-in with Linux creator Linus Torvalds at the Open Source Summit North America, this year held in Seattle (as well as virtually). Torvalds took the stage for the event's traditional half-hour of questions from Dirk Hohndel, an early Linux contributor (now also the chief open source officer and vice president at VMware) in an afternoon keynote session.... And the theme of community seemed to keep coming up — notably about what that community has ultimately taught Linus Torvalds. (For example, while Torvalds said he'd originally planned on naming the operating system Freax, "I am eternally grateful for two other people for having more taste than I did.")

But even then Linux was a project that "I probably would've left behind," Torvalds remembered, "if it was only up to me." Torvalds credits the larger community for its interest (and patches) "that just kept the motivation going. And here we are 30 years later, and it's still what keeps the motivation going. Because as far as I'm concerned, it's been done for 29 of those 30 years, and every single feature ever since has been about things that other people needed or wanted or were interested in."

Torvalds also says "I'm very proud of the fact that there's actually a fair number of people still involved with the kernel that came in in 1991 — I mean, literally 30 years ago.... I think that's a testament to how good the community, on the whole, has been, and how much fun it's been."

And Torvalds says you can see that sense of fun in discussions about writing some Linux kernel modules using Rust. "From a technical angle, does that make sense?" Torvalds asked. "Who knows. That's not the point. The point is for a project to stay interesting — and to stay fun — you have to play with it....

"Probably next year, we'll start seeing some first intrepid modules being written in Rust, and maybe being integrated in the mainline kernel."
"I really love C," Torvalds said at one point. "I think C is a great language, and C is, to me, is really a way to control the hardware at a fairly low level..." Yet Torvalds also saw Hohndel's analogy that it can be like juggling chainsaws. As a long-time watcher of C, Torvalds knows that C's subtle type interactions "are not always logical" and "are pitfalls for pretty much anybody. And they're easy to overlook, and in the kernel that's not always a good thing." Torvalds called Rust "the first language I saw which looked like this might actually be a solution"

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a ZDNet article, written by Liam Tung: [A] survey has come up with another reason why your engineers might want to quit -- their fellow developers' terrible code. Software engineers have long struggled with 'technical debt' created by past coding practices that might have been clever but also were undocumented and exotic. At a high level, technical debt is the price paid by supporting legacy systems rather than overhauling them or implementing a better, new system. The term can span everything from a major IT implementation, such as a core banking system that requires a decade of bug fixes, to the choice of programming language to build backend systems. In the latter case, subsequent language updates can require today's developers to rewrite old code written by long-gone developers who wrote under different conditions and who might not have documented what they did and why they did it. That's a big problem for companies that have millions of lines of code written in a language.

Stepsize, a firm that focuses on technical debt by tracking development issues in major code editors such as VS Code, conducted a fairly small survey of 200 software engineers to find out why they leave their jobs. The company said that 51% of engineers in its survey have considered leaving or left a job because of technical debt. Of that group who feel irked by technical debt issues, some 20% said that type of debt is the main reason they left a company. The results should be taken in context: the company's key selling point is trying to solve technical debt challenges that organizations face, but at the same time, technical debt could be one area worthy of attention considering how hard it is to hire and retain software engineers.

Technical debt, or 'code quality and codebase health', was the fourth most important issue cited by respondents. Salary still trumped it, with 82% citing it as one of the "most important factors" when interviewing for a new role. The survey allowed respondents to choose several primary factors. "Technical challenges and growth opportunities" was the second priority, with 75% choosing it as the one of the most important factors. Some 68% of respondents said remote work was the most important actor, while 62% put said 'code quality and codebase health' was one of those prime factors. Slashdot reader ellithligraw first shared the report, adding: "Yet another reason developers are quitting... to escape the technical debt, or schlock code, or code rot. COBOL anyone?"

The Supreme Court of California has thrown out Oracle's appeal against a decision to award $3 billion damages to HPE in a case which dates back a decade and relates to Big Red's commitment to develop on Itanium hardware. From a report:On Wednesday, the court denied a review of Oracle's appeal against a summary judgement, apparently without comment or any written dissents. The decision follows a ruling made in the California Court of Appeal that affirmed HPE's $3.14bn win for alleged contract violation, stating that an agreement between the firms had created a legal obligation for Oracle to support software on HPE's Itanium server. The case hinged on the companies' statements that they had a "longstanding strategic relationship" and a "mutual desire to continue to support their mutual customers." The agreement stated that Oracle, for its part, "will continue to offer its product suite on HP platforms" while HPE "will continue to support Oracle products (including Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM) on its hardware." The ruling reads: "We conclude that the second sentence, moreover, does more than declare an aspiration or intent to continue working together, as Oracle claims. It commits the parties to continue the actions specified (Oracle offering its product suite and HP supporting the products)," as it had done previously.

Stack Overflow's copy-paste keyboard, an April Fools' Day prank that ribbed lazy programmers, is now actually for sale. CNET reports: It's been a joke in programming circles for years: Instead of writing your code from scratch, just head over to the Stack Overflow forums and copy the way another programmer already solved your problem. The meme is such a fixture that Stack Overflow turned it into an April Fools' Day prank this year, saying it would limit free access to its site unless people bought The Key, a device with buttons for opening Stack Overflow, copying and pasting. Enough people said they'd actually buy one that Stack Overflow, with help from keyboard aficionado Cassidy Williams and custom keyboard maker Drop, designed one for real and began selling it for $29. A portion of the keyboard sales' proceeds will go to Digitalundivided, a nonprofit set up to help Black and Latinx women succeed as technology entrepreneurs. Further reading: How Often Do People Actually Copy and Paste From Stack Overflow?

"According to one measure, Python is potentially on the verge of becoming the most popular computer programming language," reports ZDNet, joining C and Java as the only other two languages to attain the #1 spot.

Of course, it depends on who's making the list... Python has been snapping at the heels of Java and C for the past few years on the 20-year-old Tiobe index and recently knocked Java off the second spot to rival C. Tiobe, a software testing company, bases its rankings on searches for programming languages on popular websites and search engines.

The Tiobe index is updated monthly, and it doesn't align with other language popularity rankings. For example, the electrical engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum has ranked Python as the most popular language since at least 2020, followed by Java, C, and JavaScript, while developer analyst RedMonk has JavaScript in top place, followed by Python and Java, and places C at tenth...

"Python has never been so close to the number 1 position of the TIOBE index," writes Paul Jansen, chief of Tiobe software. "It only needs to bridge 0.16% to surpass C. This might happen any time now..."

Python is hugely popular because of machine learning, but it has no place in mobile app development or web applications or development on mobile devices. It's also slow. Python's creator, Guido van Rossum, who works at Microsoft, recently conceded Python consumes too much memory and energy from hardware. He's working to improve Python's performance and reckons double is feasible...

Tiobe's top 10 programming languages in September 2021 were C, Python, Java, C++, C#, Visual Basic, JavaScript, Assembly language, PHP, and SQL. The top 20 languages also included Classic Visual Basic, Groovy, Ruby, Go, Swift, MATLAB, Fortran, R, Perl, and Delphi. Fortran's re-emergence as a top 20 language is notable. Just in July 2020, Tiobe ranked it as the 50th most popular language. But earlier this year, Fortran shot up to the 20th spot in Tiobe's index.
Paul Jansen, chief of Tiobe software, also called out some other interesting moves in this month's calculation. "Assembly gained 1 position from #9 to #8, Ruby gained 2 positions from #15 to #13, and Go went up even 4 positions from #18 to #14."

destinyland writes: A newly-released video at GNU.org shows an hour-long talk given by free software advocate Richard Stallman for the BigBlueBotton open source conference (which was held online last July). After a 14-minute clip from an earlier speech, Stallman answers questions from the audience — and the first question asked Stallman for his opinion about the AI Copilot [automated pair programming tool] developed for Microsoft's GitHub in collaboration with AI research and deployment company OpenAI.

Stallman's response?

There are many legal questions about Copilot whose answers I don't know, and maybe nobody knows. And it's likely some of theo depend on the country you're in [because of the copyright laws in those countries.] In the U.S. we won't be able to have reliable answers until there are court cases about it, and who knows how many years it'll take for those court cases to arise and be finally decided. So basically what we have is a gigantic amount of uncertainty.

Now the next thing is, what about morally? What can I say morally about Copilot? Well the basic idea seems okay. Why shouldn't a program be able to give you hints like that?

But there is one pitfall, which is that if you follow those hints, you might end up putting a substantial block of code copied from a GPL-covered program, written by someone else, or one hint after another after another after another — it adds up to a substantial amount of code, perhaps, with very little change, perhaps. And then you've infringed the GPL by releasing that code, unless your program is covered by the same versions — plural — of the GPL, in which case it would be permitted. But you might not even know that. Copilot might not tell you — it doesn't endeavor to inform you. So you're likely not to know. Which means Copilot is leading users — some of its users — into a pitfall. Well, they should fix it so it doesn't do that.

But basically, what can you expect from GitHub? GitHub gives people inadequate advice about what it means to choose a license. They tell you you can choose GPL version 2 or GPL version 3. I think they don't tell you that really you could choose GPL version 2 only, or GPL version 2 or later, or GPL version 3 only, or GPL version 3 or later — and those are four different choices. They give users different permissions over the future. So it's important to make each program say clearly which choice covers it. And GitHub doesn't tell you how to do that.

It doesn't tell you that you need to do that. Because the way you do that is with a licensed notice that is supposed to be in every source file. It's unreliable to put just one statement in a free program and say "This program is covered by such-and-such license." What happens if somebody copies one of the files into some other program which says it's covered by a different license? Now that program has been inaccurately mis-licensed, which is illegal and is going to mislead users. So any self-respecting — any repository that wants to be honest has to explain these things, not just tell people to make the licensing of each piece of code clear, but help users do so — make it easy.

So GitHub has had this enormous problem for all of its existence, and Copilot has the similar — a basically, vaguely similar sort of problem, in the same area. It's not exactly the same problem. I don't think that copying a snippet of a few lines of code infringes any license. I think it's de minimus. But I'm not a lawyer.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: [R]esearchers in Finland are experimenting with growing coffee from plant cells in bioreactors. There are several reasons why it might make sense to have such an alternative, says Heiko Rischer, a research team leader at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, the state-owned organization developing the coffee. "Conventional coffee production is notoriously associated with several problematic issues, such as unsustainable farming methods, exploitation, and land rights," he says. "Growing demand and climate change add to the problems." In Vietnam, for example, coffee production is driving deforestation.

The researchers are using the same techniques to make coffee that others are using to make "lab-grown," or cultivated, meat. Coffee plant cells were cultured in the lab, and then placed in bioreactors filled with nutrient medium to grow. It's a little easier to grow coffee than something like beef. "The nutrient media for plant-cell cultures are much less complex, i.e., cheaper, than those for animal cells," Rischer says. "Scaling up is also easier because plant cells grow freely, suspended in the medium, while animal cells grow attached to surfaces."

The process results in an off-white biomass that's dried into a powder, then roasted to a dark brown color that looks like coffee grounds. The scientists recently brewed their first cups of the lab-grown coffee, which they say tastes and smells like ordinary coffee. It's also possible to make different varieties. "Cell cultures of different coffee cultivars can be established, and the roasting process can be modified, in order to produce coffee with very different character," says Rischer. "The cultivation process can be modified in order to generate more or less of certain compounds, such as caffeine or flavors." The lab plans to work with companies that can commercialize the new process.

Treehouse, which launched in Portland a decade ago in an ambitious effort to teach software development online, plans to lay off most of its staff by the end of the month. Oregon Live reports: CEO Ryan Carson didn't answer emailed questions about the cutbacks, but said in a brief reply Tuesday that "we are going to continue to serve our students and customers." Carson, who moved to Connecticut last month, said Treehouse is no longer based in Portland and that its remaining staff now works remotely. In an announcement sent last week over the company's internal Slack messaging channel, later viewed by The Oregonian/OregonLive, Treehouse notified employees that their jobs and benefits would end on Sept. 30, without severance. "A small team will be remaining, along with Ryan, to continue to support students," the company wrote to staff.

Workers later posted an online spreadsheet with the names of 41 employees looking for new jobs. Treehouse has a geographically distributed workforce and the company's employees live in cities across the country. Treehouse attracted national attention in 2013 and 2015 with two unorthodox management strategies: The company eliminated all layers of management and it moved to a 32-hour-work week. Neither experiment worked. [...] It's not clear what triggered this week's cutbacks. Online education has been booming during the pandemic.

"Linux creator Linus Torvalds has agreed to include Paragon Software's NTFS3 kernel driver, giving the Linux kernel 5.15 release improved support for Microsoft's NTFS file system..." reports ZDNet, adding that the driver "will make working with Windows' NTFS drives in Linux an easier task — ending decades of difficulties with Microsoft's proprietary file system that succeeded FAT...."

"But he also had some process and security lessons to offer developers about how to code submissions to the kernel should be made." "I notice that you have a GitHub merge commit in there," wrote Torvalds.

He continued: "That's another of those things that I *really* don't want to see — GitHub creates absolutely useless garbage merges, and you should never ever use the GitHub interfaces to merge anything...GitHub is a perfectly fine hosting site, and it does a number of other things well too, but merges are not one of those things."

Torvalds' chief problem with it was that merges need "proper commit messages with information about [what] is being merged and *why* you merge something." He continued: "But it also means proper authorship and committer information etc. All of which GitHub entirely screws up."
TechRadar supplies some more context: One of the shortcomings Torvalds highlighted are GitHub's concise, factually correct, but functionally useless, commit messages. For instance, GitHub's commit message for Paragon's merge read "Merge branch 'torvalds:master' into master", which didn't impress Torvalds one bit...

Torvalds also had some pertinent security advice, perhaps useful in light of recent software supply chain cyberattacks that the Linux Foundation wants to address by improving supply chain integrity through tools that make it easier to sign software cryptographically. As Torvalds points out, this is particularly important for new contributors to the Linux kernel. "For GitHub accounts (or really, anything but kernel.org where I can just trust the account management), I really want the pull request to be a signed tag, not just a plain branch," Torvalds explains...

Torvalds suggests Paragon do future merges from the command-line.

"A.I. Can Now Write Its Own Computer Code," blares a headline in the New York Times, adding "That's Good News for Humans. (Alternate URL here.)

The article begins with this remarkable story about Codex (the OpenAI software underlying GitHub Copilot): As soon as Tom Smith got his hands on Codex — a new artificial intelligence technology that writes its own computer programs — he gave it a job interview. He asked if it could tackle the "coding challenges" that programmers often face when interviewing for big-money jobs at Silicon Valley companies like Google and Facebook. Could it write a program that replaces all the spaces in a sentence with dashes? Even better, could it write one that identifies invalid ZIP codes? It did both instantly, before completing several other tasks.

"These are problems that would be tough for a lot of humans to solve, myself included, and it would type out the response in two seconds," said Mr. Smith, a seasoned programmer who oversees an A.I. start-up called Gado Images. "It was spooky to watch." Codex seemed like a technology that would soon replace human workers. As Mr. Smith continued testing the system, he realized that its skills extended well beyond a knack for answering canned interview questions. It could even translate from one programming language to another.

Yet after several weeks working with this new technology, Mr. Smith believes it poses no threat to professional coders. In fact, like many other experts, he sees it as a tool that will end up boosting human productivity. It may even help a whole new generation of people learn the art of computers, by showing them how to write simple pieces of code, almost like a personal tutor.

"This is a tool that can make a coder's life a lot easier," Mr. Smith said.
The article ultimately concludes that Codex "extends what a machine can do, but it is another indication that the technology works best with humans at the controls."

And Greg Brockman, chief technology officer of OpenAI, even tells the Times "AI is not playing out like anyone expected. It felt like it was going to do this job and that job, and everyone was trying to figure out which one would go first. Instead, it is replacing no jobs. But it is taking away the drudge work from all of them at once."

theodp writes: On Monday, tech-bankrolled Code.org announced the CS Journeys program, which the nonprofit explains is designed to help teachers "excite, encourage, and empower your students to continue their CS journeys in and beyond your class." Besides live, virtual field trips to Amazon's Fulfillment Centers, kids aged 5-and-up will also participate in live, weekly classroom conversations with professionals from the likes of Google and Amazon, where they "will learn about a number of ways they can use computer science to have a positive impact, as well as different journeys that people have taken to get to meaningful careers and achieve their goals." A Googler will speak to kindergartners and other younger students about Developing responsible artificial intelligence on Sep. 22nd. Teachers are also being asked to show students inspiring Careers in Tech videos featuring employees from Facebook/Instagram, Microsoft, and Google.

Explaining that "students who hear from parents that they would be good at computer science are 2-3 times more likely to be interested in learning it," Code.org urges teachers to also "connect with parents and recruit their help in encouraging students to learn and continue on their computer science journey." Code.org even provides teachers with talking points to include in emails and letters home. A sample: "Computer science teaches students critical thinking and problem solving. In fact, studies show that students who learn computer science do better in other subjects, excel at problem solving, and are more likely to go to college. [...] Parent/guardian encouragement is critical to student success and interest in learning and success. So ask your student to see something they created in class."

The launch of CS Journeys comes less than a year after Google VP Maggie Johnson -- a long-time Code.org Board member -- reported that a Google-commissioned Gallup report showed that "students are generally unconvinced that computer science is important for them to learn," adding that "Interventions from parents, educators, community leaders, policymakers, nonprofits and the technology industry are needed to encourage girls, Black students and Hispanic students to take computer science courses. These students also need to be shown how CS knowledge can help them meet their goals in a variety of fields including the humanities, medicine and the arts." According to the report, only 22% of boys and 9% of girls "believe it is very important to learn CS."

A bug in the McDonald's Monopoly VIP game in the United Kingdom caused the login names and passwords for the game's database to be sent to all winners. BleepingComputer reports: After skipping a year due to COVID-19, McDonald's UK launched their popular Monopoly VIP game on August 25th, where customers can enter codes found on purchase food items for a chance to win a prize. These prizes include 100,000 pounds in cash, an Ibiza villa or UK getaway holiday, Lay-Z Spa hot tubs, and more. Unfortunately, the game hit a snag over the weekend after a bug caused the user name and passwords for both the production and staging database servers to be in prize redemption emails sent to prize winners.

An unredacted screenshot of the email sent to prize winners was shared with BleepingComputer by Troy Hunt that shows an exception error, including sensitive information for the web application. This information included hostnames for Azure SQL databases and the databases' login names and passwords, as displayed in the redacted email below sent to a Monopoly VIP winner. The prize winner who shared the email with Troy Hunt said that the production server was firewalled off but that they could access the staging server using the included credentials. As these databases may have contained winning prize codes, it could have allowed an unscrupulous person to download unused game codes to claim the prizes. Luckily for McDonald's, the person responsibly disclosed the issue with McDonald's, and while they did not receive a response, they later found that the staging server's password was soon changed.

joshuark writes: Harry McCracken is not the name of a Cold War superspy, but a man who is now the tech editor of Fast Company and, in his younger days, a developer of games for Radio Shack's TRS-80 microcomputer. McCracken, who is also a regular Slashdot reader, recently went back to have a look at his first game, Arctic Adventure, which he wrote when he was 16 around 1980-81 -- a text adventure inspired by the work of Scott Adams in particular, a pioneering designer of the Adventure series of games for the TRS-80.

As was common in the 80s, Arctic Adventure was distributed in book form. This was The Captain 80 Book of BASIC Adventures: pages of type-it-yourself BASIC code, each entry its own adventure game. [...] "Decades later, I didn't spend much time thinking about Arctic Adventure, but I never forgot the fact that I hadn't received a copy of the Captain 80 book. Thanks to the internet, I eventually acquired one. But typing in five-and-a-half pages of old BASIC code seemed onerous, even if it was code I'd written."

McCracken eventually got around to it this July. "After five or six tedious typing sessions on my iPad, I had Arctic Adventure restored to digital form. That was when I made an alarming discovery: As printed in the Captain 80 book, the game wasn't just unwinnable, but unplayable. It turned out that it had a 1981 typo that consisted of a single missing '0' in a character string. It was so fundamental a glitch that it rendered the game's command of the English language inoperable. You couldn't GET SHOVEL let alone complete the adventure."

"One project going dark — due to a DMCA takedown or otherwise — can impact thousands of developers," GitHub warns in a blog post this week: We saw that firsthand with both leftpad and mimemagic. That's why GitHub's designed its DMCA process to follow the law in requiring takedown requests to identify specific content. We want developers on our platform and elsewhere to have a clear opportunity to remove infringing code yet keep non-infringing code up for others to use, modify, and learn from.

Ensuring that software copyright allegations are specific and actionable benefits the entire developer ecosystem. That's why GitHub submitted a "friend of the court" brief in the SAS Institute, Inc. v. World Programming Ltd. case before a Federal Court of Appeals.

This case is the most recent in a ten-year litigation spanning both the UK and the US. SAS Institute has brought copyright and non-copyright claims against World Programming's software that runs code written in the SAS language, and the copyright claims drew comparison to the recent Google v. Oracle Supreme Court case. But this case is different from Google v. Oracle because here the alleged copyright infringement is based on a claim of "nonliteral" infringement. That means there is no allegation that specific lines of code were literally copied, but only that other aspects, like the code's overall structure and organization, were used. In nonliteral infringement claims, the questions arise: what aspects of the "nonliteral" features were taken and are they actually protected by copyright...?

GitHub believes that for claims involving nonliteral copying of software, it is critical that a copyright owner provide — as early as possible — examples that would allow a developer, a court, or a software collaboration platform like GitHub to identify what was claimed to be copied. Our brief helps educate the court why specificity is especially important for developers.... We urged the court to think about efficiency in dispute resolution to avoid FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). The sooner infringement allegations can be made specific and clear, the sooner infringing code can be changed and non-infringing code can stay up. That should be the result for both federal lawsuits, as well as DMCA infringement notices.