We get depressed over some new stats confirming our worst fears about the huge number of outdated and unpatched android systems. But, in some good news, Github wants to help you, and your open source projects, stay secure with their new Security Alerts feature. We discuss the details and what it needs to be relevant.

Plus some handy tips for getting out of a sticky situation in git, a net neutrality PSA, and some big news from Dan.

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Show Notes:

Net Neutrality – mail your Congressional Reps and Senators & state

governor – do not email or fax them. Put it in the mail.

Security Alerts from GitHub

  • define dependencies in one of the supported manifest file types, like package.json or Gemfile.

  • similar to FreeBSD vuxml database – uses dependencies already listed in each FreeBSD port

here are over a billion outdated Android devices in use

  • It’s common knowledge that Android device tend to be more out of date than iOS devices, but what does this actually mean?

  • People sometimes compare Android to Windows XP because there are a large number of both in the wild and in both cases, most devices will not get security updates. However, this is tremendously unfair to Windows XP, which was released on 10/2001 and got security updates until 4/2014, twelve and a half years later.

  • Another difference between Android and Windows is that Android’s scale is unprecedented in the desktop world. The were roughly 200 million PCs sold in 2017. Samsung alone has been selling that many mobile devices per year since 2008.

  • If we look at the newest Android release (8.0, 8/2017), it looks like you’re quite lucky if you have a two year old device that will get the latest update. The oldest “Google” phone supported is the Nexus 6P (9/2015), giving it just under two years of support.

  • But even with the data we have, we can take a guess at how many outdated devices are in use. In May 2017, Google announced that there are over two billion active Android devices. If we look at the latest stats (the far right edge), we can see that nearly half of these devices are two years out of date. At this point, we should expect that there are more than one billion devices that are two years out of date! Given Android’s update model, we should expect approximately 0% of those devices to ever get updated to a modern version of Android.

  • Project Treble

Flight rules for git

A guide for astronauts (now, programmers using git) about what to do when things go wrong.

  • Flight Rules are the hard-earned body of knowledge recorded in manuals that list, step-by-step, what to do if X occurs, and why. Essentially, they are extremely detailed, scenario-specific standard operating procedures. […]

  • NASA has been capturing our missteps, disasters and solutions since the early 1960s, when Mercury-era ground teams first started gathering “lessons learned” into a compendium that now lists thousands of problematic situations, from engine failure to busted hatch handles to computer glitches, and their solutions.

  • What did I just commit?

  • I wrote the wrong thing in a commit message

  • I committed with the wrong name and email configured

  • I want to remove a file from a commit

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