The Truth: Adobe Patches, Docker Outage, Google Kills its VR Headset
Wednesday, 16 October 2019
Welcome to this week’s hump day edition of The Truth. As always, I’ve read all the tech news so you don’t have to. Here’s the important stuff:
It turns out that Adobe not having any patches on Patch Tuesday wasn’t down to them not having anything to fix. The patches were simply late. The company has now emitted security updates that address 67 different CVEs. Adobe Acrobat, Reader and Experience Manager are affected.
Symantec brought the blue screen of death back to Windows yesterday, as its Endpoint Protection Client caused an exception in the kernel for some users. The problem has now been fixed with signature version 2019/10/14 r62, they say.
Meanwhile, Cisco’s security group Talos has updated its rules for the network analysis tool Snort. There are 76 new rules, including for the big vBulletin vulnerabilities I’ve been reporting on recently.
Google is discontinuing its virtual reality headset Daydream VR. “Following the company’s annual hardware event today, Google confirmed that the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL do not support the VR platform.” VentureBeat says this is because phone-based VR is dead. I think VR in general is pretty much dead. If it ever was alive.
In the ongoing controversy of tech companies taking money from the notorious U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, GitLab has said it’s fine with it. “We do not discuss politics in the workplace and decisions about what customer to serve might get political. Efficiency is one of our values and vetting customers is time consuming and potentially distracting”, says GitLab co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij. The Register, meanwhile, is comparing this to IBM providing technology to the Third Reich.
Amazon has moved its last internal database from Oracle to its own AWS service. “75 petabytes of internal data stored in nearly 7,500 Oracle databases were migrated”, according to The Register. There are still “some third-party applications” that they can’t migrate because they are too tightly integrated with Oracle, though. Database market share by revenue has Oracle leading in front of Microsoft’s SQL Server and AWS in third place.
Something, something, Fortnite…
“Twitter says it will restrict users from retweeting world leaders who break its rules. The social media giant said it will not allow users to like, reply, share or retweet the offending tweets, but instead will let users quote-tweet to allow ordinary users to express their opinions”, TechCrunch is reporting. Well, at least they aren’t deleting these tweets. Aside from it being debatable if Twitter’s rules should have precedence over the right of people to inform themselves on the net and the ability of world leaders to share their viewpoint, their rules are pretty arbitrary anyway. And their history of enforcing these rules is even more arbitrary.
There was an outage at Docker on Tuesday morning. After the container registry went down and was later fixed, its web portal started having problems. “Docker has been unable to say what exactly the cause of the outage was.”
The german edition of Technology Review is reporting that with all these satellites that everyone (Elon Musk, Airbus, Facebook and Amazon among others) is shooting into orbit, the available radio frequencies are getting sparse. To minimise interference, satellites have to pause their transmissions regularly, as the sky gets fuller and fuller and they keep passing each other in orbit. The competition for the usable spectrum is, apparently, getting tougher and tougher – with large companies naturally being able to outbid other players. The International Telecommunication Union, responsible for regulating radio communications on earth and in orbit, oversees both the frequencies as well as placements of satellites, but companies also need to clear launches with local agencies of the countries the satellites are flying over. It’s becoming a big mess up there.
Speaking of space, NASA has unveiled its future space suit designs. The shoes look suspiciously like Nike sneakers.
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