February 25 2018, 23:58

CreditKarma presented me with a report on which leaks and hacks my data had been exposed. Just a typical service, there are many like it. Out of the list of 8 services, one was Russian (QIP, leak from 2011, 33M accounts). And guess which service was the only one on the list where passwords were stored in plain text, not as salted hashes? No matter how excellent our programmers in Russia might be, many projects are hastily put together and carelessly executed.

February 25 2018, 21:37

In the article linked, there is a symbol that, if sent via SMS or WhatsApp, will crash any outdated iPhone and cause dozens of Mac applications, including native ones, to crash. What’s worse, you can no longer access the message history for this user until you update, as the crash will occur every time you try to open the history.

This symbol causes any of the three browsers on my Mac to crash. Just paste it from the clipboard into the browser’s address bar, and without even pressing enter, the whole application crashes. This happens with Safari, Google Chrome, and Opera.

TechCrunch reports that this “symbol of death” causes Mail, Twitter, Messages, Slack, Instagram, and Facebook to crash. “While it initially appeared that the Chrome browser for Mac was unaffected and could safely display the symbol, it later crashed Chrome and the software would not reopen without crashing until uninstalled and reinstalled.”

https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/15/iphone-text-bomb-ios-mac-crash-apple/

Additionally, Facebook automatically marks any post containing this symbol as spam and deletes the entire text. I already did this about five minutes ago, and now, I am rewriting everything from scratch.

Even the Apple Watch crashes. So, update everything you have as soon as possible.

https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/science-technology/919343/iPhone-Text-Message-Crash-WhatsApp

February 25 2018, 21:36

Just an evil bug at Apple.

If you enter this symbol జ్ఞ‌ా into the address bar of any browser on a Mac (I tried with Google Chrome, Safari, and Opera), the browser crashes with a fatal error – you don’t even need to press enter. Just copy-paste. As far as I understand, this bug hasn’t been widely reported anywhere. Moreover, I can’t even search for it properly, as the browsers keep crashing 🙂

The same symbol in text messages, WhatsApp, and many other places will crash an iPhone unless it’s updated (an update has just been released). Moreover, once you receive a message with this symbol, you won’t be able to open that contact again, as the phone will keep resetting whenever you try to open the history.

https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/science-technology/919343/iPhone-Text-Message-Crash-WhatsApp

February 24 2018, 02:56

Interesting from the Chicago Manual of Style:

(night notes in the margins)

***

I found out that verbs which always amazed me with their mutual transitivity have a special name – ergative. Thus, “change” can be used both as “to change something” and as “to change oneself”. For example, people change. Here I wrote about it a year and a half ago:

And here’s both a list and a description: https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/english-grammar/verbs/reflexive-and-ergative-verbs

***

Along with, as well as, in addition to,

together with do NOT make the nouns before and after them plural. For example, in the sentence The bride as well as her bridesmaids was dressed in mauve, the correct form is was, not were.

***

There is a preposition in English that consists of four words. “For the sake of” is a preposition.

***

There’s a concept in linguistics called pied-piping. I don’t even know how to translate it: pied means mottled, piping is playing the pipe, and the phrase comes from the title of the fairy tale about the Pied Piper, who, as revenge for the king not paying him, lured all the children out of the town to the river using the same method. So, it’s when a question word pulls something else along. To whom did you speak? Which house did she buy?

***

***

For example,

in 1220 the noun husband meant one who tilled and cultivated the earth {the husband has worked

hard to produce this crop}. It became a verb meaning to till, cultivate, and tend crops around 1420

{you must husband your land thoughtfully}.

***

(to be continued)

February 22 2018, 00:32

English punctuation is quite intricate. For instance, The Elements of Style and the Chicago Manual of Style say nothing about commas after prepositions, like many other sources. Yet, it’s a pretty common feature in writing.

Example: In this document [,] you will find a lot of pictures and diagrams.

So, should I put a comma? I always do, but for some reason, I can’t find a proper grammar guide that addresses this situation. No doubt, Russian language rules are thoroughly crafted, though they are much more complex. As for English, the grammar seems somewhat underdeveloped.)