No More Contacting Employees Off Hours in Portugal, Trojan Source Attacks, Another Apple Settlement, & more on DevNews!

The DevNews editorial team is back for this week's episode of our show where we investigate and discuss the latest and most important software developer news stories

S6:E4 - Trojan Source Attacks, Features in .NET 6, Another Apple Settlement, and No More Contacting Employees Off Hours...At Least in Portugal

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Hosts: @saronyitbarek & @joshpuetz

Guests:

• Nicholas Boucher is a PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge and a graduate of Harvard University. He performs research on the security of systems ranging from machine learning pipelines to compilers.
• Safia Abdalla helps build open source web frameworks at Microsoft and helps build the Nteract Solutions universe.

Safia AbdallaFollow

I make open source at @nteractio, make software at @Microsoft, and write books and blogs. Dream big and follow through even bigger.

In this episode, we talk about a new Apple settlement and a big win for workers in Portugal. Then we speak with Nicholas Boucher, PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge about new research into something they are calling a “Trojan Source” attack. And finally, we chat with Safia Abdalla, senior software engineer at Microsoft about new updates and features in the recently released .NET 6.

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Acknowledgements

• @levisharpe for producing & mixing the show
• Our Season 6 sponsors: Cosmos HackAtom & Microsoft Azure

We hope you enjoy the show this week! 📰

Comments

[Steve VanSickle]

Oh geez, the discussion about invisible characters brought back a somewhat recent, if traumatizing, memory:

I was working on an invoicing system that had existed for years and been rewritten at least once before I joined. One day, I had a bug ticket that said that when this table cell was left blank and saved (and only one or two clients had the setting to even allow this table cell to exist), it would save in the database as "???". After a LOT of searching, I found a site that would show the full character-encodings of any text pasted inside, and it turns out that the "" empty quotes had three zero-width control characters inside them! I think those characters are traditionally used for print-formatting or something like that, so I have NO idea why they'd make it into a digital accounting app. But...wow XD

[Gracie Gregory (she/her)]

Super interesting stories this week. Thanks for sharing!