Growl is being retired after surviving for 17 years.

Its page on GitHub explains:

Growl is a notification system for OS X. Growl has been around since 2004, and was originally called Global Notifications Center. The name was changed to Growl (like the noise a dog makes) since we felt the name Notifications Center was too geeky. We were wrong about that haha.

Growl was meant as a proof of concept which became something more for a long period of time. Before Growl was made developers either had to pop up a very basic window or some other ugliness nobody liked. Working with developers on Adium and Colloquy who wanted to implement their own custom notifications into their applications is what birthed this project.

Growl is a retired project, we couldn’t think of another thing to change which would be substantial enough to bring out a new updated release. Growl is stable and should work for as long as intel based programs work. Anyone who wants to run Growl is free to do so in an unsupported fashion.

Lead developer Christopher Forsythe writes at 336699.org:
With the announcement of Apple’s new hardware platform, a general shift of developers to Apple’s notification system, and a lack of obvious ways to improve Growl beyond what it is and has been, we’re announcing the retirement of Growl as of today.

It’s been a long time coming. Growl is the project I worked on for the longest period of my open source career… There’s even a SourceForge project for Global Notifications Center still out there if you want to go find it… Without Growl I do not know that we would have any sort of decent notification system in OS X, iOS, Android or who knows what else…

For developers we recommend transitioning away from Growl at this point. The apps themselves are gone from the app store, however the code itself still lives. Everything from our rake build system to our code is available for use on our GitHub page.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – After 17 Years OS X Notifier App ‘Growl’ Retired

A new bug in the PlayStation game Spider-Man: Miles Morales “turns Miles into various inanimate objects, including bricks, cardboard boxes, and even a trash can,” reports GameSpot:

Despite Miles’ changed appearance, he can still perform many of his heroic antics, including web-swinging and beating up bad guys. It’s an important lesson to all of us in these trying times: You might look like trash, but you can still do your job.

Today Engadget reports that the glitch even turns Spider-Man into a patio heater:

If you’ve ever wanted to keep people toasty warm while fighting crime, now’s your chance.

We’ve asked [the game’s creator] Insomniac Games for comment, although it already tweeted that the hiccup was “equally embarrassing as it is heart-warming.” Into the Spider-Verse’s Phil Lord joked that the heater would find its way into the sequel if the team had “any self respect at all.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – New Videogame Bug Turns Spider-Man Into a Trash Can

Pig Hogger (Slashdot reader #10,379) writes:

According to this Tom’s Hardware story, a Belgian PhD student managed to wrest full control of a Tesla Model X SUV, by way of hijacking the Bluetooth keyfob and reprogramming it, using a Raspberry Pi.
Tesla has since issued a software update to protect against that kind of attack
Since the attack is done via Bluetooth, control could be gained wirelessly from 5 meters away.

According to the article this is the third time the same student “has managed to exploit the key fob and gain access to the car. Previously he was able to clone the fob…”

Computer Weekly also got an interesting quote from a senior security consultant at the electronic design automation company Synopsys, who argues that the research “demonstrates the impacts of security requirements and security features not having proper validation.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Raspberry Pi Used To Hack Tesla Model X SUV Key Fob

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike brings some big news from outer space. European Space Agency announced this week that they’re signing “a €86 million ($102 million USD) contract with an industrial team led by the Swiss start-up ClearSpace SA to purchase a unique service: the first removal of an item of space debris from orbit” in the year 2025.

“With this contract signature, a critical milestone for establishing a new commercial sector in space will be achieved…”
In almost 60 years of space activities, more than 5,550 launches have resulted in some 42,000 tracked objects in orbit, of which about 23,000 remain in space and are regularly tracked. With today’s annual launch rates averaging nearly 100, and with break-ups continuing to occur at average historical rates of four to five per year, the number of debris objects in space will steadily increase. ClearSpace-1 will demonstrate the technical ability and commercial capacity to significantly enhance the long-term sustainability of spaceflight…

“This is the right time for such a mission…” says Luc Piguet, founder and CEO of ClearSpace.

[I]n the coming years the number of satellites will increase by an order of magnitude, with multiple mega-constellations made up of hundreds or even thousands of satellites planned for low Earth orbit to deliver wide-coverage, low-latency telecommunications and monitoring services. The need is clear for a ‘tow truck’ to remove failed satellites from this highly trafficked region….” Supported within ESA’s new Space Safety programme, the aim is to contribute actively to cleaning up space, while also demonstrating the technologies needed for debris removal.

“Imagine how dangerous sailing the high seas would be if all the ships ever lost in history were still drifting on top of the water,” says ESA Director General Jan Wörner. “That is the current situation in orbit, and it cannot be allowed to continue. ESA’s Member States have given their strong support to this new mission, which also points the way forward to essential new commercial services in the future…”

“NASA and ESA studies show that the only way to stabilise the orbital environment is to actively remove large debris items. Accordingly we will be continuing our development of essential guidance, navigation and control technologies and rendezvous and capture methods through a new project called Active Debris Removal/ In-Orbit Servicing — ADRIOS. The results will be applied to ClearSpace-1. This new mission, implemented by an ESA project team, will allow us to demonstrate these technologies, achieving a world first in the process.”

The ClearSpace-1 mission will target the Vespa (Vega Secondary Payload Adapter) upper stage left in an approximately 800 km by 660 km altitude orbit after the second flight of ESA’s Vega launcher back in 2013. With a mass of 100 kg, the Vespa is close in size to a small satellite, while its relatively simple shape and sturdy construction make it a suitable first goal, before progressing to larger, more challenging captures by follow-up missions — eventually including multi-object capture. The ClearSpace-1 ‘chaser’ will be launched into a lower 500-km orbit for commissioning and critical tests before being raised to the target orbit for rendezvous and capture using a quartet of robotic arms under ESA supervision. The combined chaser plus Vespa will then be deorbited to burn up in the atmosphere.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – The ESA Starts a New Commercial Sector in Space: Removing Space Debris

47 of Python’s core developers participated in this year’s Core Development Sprint, according to this report — “but what’s more important is the very real and necessary community building that seemed to have taken place…”

It’s an especially critical time for Python, which switched to a steering council model in February of 2019, after Guido van Rossum had stepped down as the language’s “benevolent dictator for life….” [During the Python Steering Council and Core Developer Q&A] core developer Ned Deily asked a question which had probably been on everyone’s minds: how is the steering council experience working, now that van Rossum is no longer serving as the language’s benevolent overseer? And core developer/councilmember Carol Willing was the first to respond.

“I’ve been involved in a lot of governance organizations, and I would say the Steering Council has been towards the top in terms of sticking to the agenda and being thoughtful and collaborative in how things are working.” They meet every week for an hour — with a pre-set agenda — and “in general, I think it’s working quite well. If there’s anything I take away from it, it’s I’m amazed that Guido was able to do this function as a single person for as long as he had been. Because it’s a lot of work, even amongst five people….”

Core developer/councilmember Barry Warsaw agreed. “A couple of us have been on the Steering Council since its inception. And there was a lot of things that the governance PEPs didn’t really cover. So we really had to figure out the process for a number of things. I couldn’t be more happy to work with both the first year of Steering Council members, and this year of Steering Council members. I think everybody is doing this for the right reasons — because we love Python, and we love the Python community…”

Deily agreed with their assessments. “My impression is things are going really well, better than might be expected. I was very proud how we as a community met the challenge of coming up with a governance, kind of from scratch. And I think — I don’t know for sure all of Guido’s motivation for doing it, but I think in a lot of ways he did it the right way, just kind of forced the community to come up with things. And I think all in all that worked out really well….”

About 48 minutes in, there was a question from van Rossum himself about the issue tracker at Bugs.python.org (affectionately known as “BPO”). “So I’m desperately curious about the status of the BPO to GitHub migration.” He paused, then asked delicately, “Uh, how much is the Steering Council willing to share of what they know, and how much do you actually know?”

Cannon responded, talking about the group hired to run it, and thanking the groups whose donations had funded it. And then Deily suggested van Rossum volunteer for the working group, “because it’s going to affect all of us.” van Rossum asked if it would be appropriate if he volunteered, everyone agreed, and he responded, “Okay, I’m game.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Python’s Steering Council Assesses the After-Guido Era

Facebook’s employees and executives “are battling over how to reduce misinformation and hate speech without hurting the company’s bottom line,” reports the New York Times, after employees had spotted false and misleading election-related misinformation going viral on the site.

The solution? Make temporary changes to the controversial algorithm “which helps determine what more than two billion people see every day” by highlighting “big, mainstream publishers like CNN, The New York Times and NPR, while posts from highly engaged hyperpartisan pages, such as Breitbart and Occupy Democrats, became less visible, the employees said.”

The Wrap reports:
Zuckerberg’s decision came after Facebook employees, seeing President Trump claim the election was rigged against him, “proposed an emergency change” to make “authoritative news” more prominent. It’s unclear how long the changes were in place for, but they appear to have ended. Facebook vice president Guy Rosen told the Times “there has never been a plan to make these permanent….”

Since making the changes a few weeks ago, some Facebook employees have pushed for the “nicer” News Feed to become permanent, the report added.

The New York Times argues the incident “illustrates a central tension that some inside Facebook are feeling acutely these days: that the company’s aspirations of improving the world are often at odds with its desire for dominance….

“Even as Election Day and its aftermath have passed with few incidents, some disillusioned employees have quit, saying they could no longer stomach working for a company whose products they considered harmful.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Facebook Removes Temporary Algorithm Change That Had Blocked Misinformation