2000 year old Greek automaton showed movement of starts and planets

 The Antikera mechanism was discovered in a ship wreck in 1901. It was split into 82 fragments, only a third of the original survings, including 30 corroded bronze gearwheels. Scientists have reconstructed the mechanism and published an article in Nature.

It calculated the ecliptic longi-tudes of the Moon, Sun and planets; the phase of the Moon; the Age of the Moon; the synodic phases of the planets; the excluded days of the Metonic Calendar; eclipses—possibilities, times, characteristics, years and the heliacal risings and settings of prominent stars and constellations; and the Olympiad cycle. It has a a ring system with nine outputs—Moon, Nodes, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Date—carried by nested tubes with arms supporting the rings.

The top picture shows the reconstruction, the bottom picture the original findings:

Major tech firms compromised by dependency confusion using public package distributions

Security researcher Alex Birsan found out that public software packages by private companies often also included links to dependencies to private packages. For example in a package.json file, with npm node.js dependecies from paypal, there was a list of dependencies, that did not exist as public packages.

He concluded that those packages must be paypal internal packages. Then he started crafting public packages with the same name containing malware.

And lo! the package builds at paypal mistakingly pulled in the public malware package.

He continued using the same technique on other comanies and other package distribution systems (Python and Ruby), infecting companies like Apple, Uber, Netflix, Microsoft and Tesla. He received about $150.000 in bug bounties.

The SonaType malware scanner detected the malware on the public server and added them to their malware detectors to protect their customers, but let Birsan continue his research for a while.

The attack is very similar to malware public packages that have names that are very similar to popular public packages, hoping to be picked up by accident.

Microsoft issued a paper with recommendations to mitigate the risks of working with public packages.

Google Slides: HOWTO restrict your mouse-drag selection

When selection items by dragging the mouse in google slides, you select all elements that are partially within the area you selected.

If you do the same in PowerPoint you only select elements that are completely in the selected area.

The Google Presentations behaviour is undesired. Typically you want to move some smaller objects, but you will always select the main text area of your slide as well.

How to make Google Slides behave like PowerPoint? Use this not so well documented feature: hold ALT while dragging the mouse.

Firefox users: unfortunately ALT is used to hide/show the firefox menu bar, so you get this as an annoying side effect. To disable the ALT behaviour on Firefox, follow these guidelines.

Gitlab star a group: workaround

In gitlab we make extensive use of subgroups to organise projects.

I am member of a gitlab group with about manyu subgroups (about 50 direct subgroups, and > 1000 projects).

Maybe there is something wrong with this structure, but anyway, it is not easy to navigate to the subgroups I often use.

Problem in gitlab is that you can only start projects, not subgroups.

The solution is really simple: star a (dummy) project in the subgroup, navigate to it and go one level up.

In a recent update you can now set your home page to your starred projects, making this workaround more effective.

Salesforce buys Slack

 Cloud CRM juggernaut Salesforce has gobbled up the Slack team collaboration platform for $28bn.

Although Slack was still growing at a healthy pace, it was bypassed by MS Teams last year.

With the backing of Salesforce, Slack will be have the means to strike back.

 

A Salesforce MVP (Most Valuable Professional) : 

There is still no compelling reason to use Slack over Chatter. You still should NOT share your corporate data out to any external system, even Teams.

They're already convinced it's better than Teams. But why did day cash out all that money if they've got something better in house?