Software : Amazon Lumberyard's zombie clause proves it pays to read the EULA

Amazon Lumberyard's zombie clause proves it pays to read the EULA
Twitter pulls a Facebook, putting the best tweets first starting today
Apple Music support is finally added to Sonos speaker systems
Severe security flaw affects a shocking amount of Mac apps

Amazon Lumberyard's zombie clause proves it pays to read the EULA

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Who reads end user license agreements (EULA)? Anyone? Well, you might start now, because Amazon just trolled all of us in the service terms for its new game development engine, Lumberyard.

In Section 57.10 of the agreement, as delightfully pointed out by Daring Fireball's John Gruber without context, it is said that this tool cannot be used with "life-critical or safety-critical systems," like medical equipment, air traffic control and military applications.

That is, unless the world is in the event of, "a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that causes human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of organized civilization."

And the government has to approve it. Seriously, look it up.

The beauty here is that this is both hilarious and, well, dead-ass serious, legally speaking. Amazon's legal team may be joking now, but there damn well better be the servers and bandwidth to get us back on Netflix when everything on this spinning rock goes down the tubes. (Oh, and the power, but they can wing it.)

I can't wait to see the EULA for the next iOS release. How are you going to protect us, Apple?

Twitter pulls a Facebook, putting the best tweets first starting today

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Don't be surprised to hear the defeated howls of a thousand media people in the air today, as Twitter has just pressed the go button on its controversial shake-up of the Twitter timeline.

Last week, the hashtag #RIPTwitter started trending after rumors emerged that the company would switch so that timelines are not reverse chronological, as they are now, but instead generated by an algorithm. The thinking is that this would make Twitter more like Facebook, where upon visiting you're presented with only the items which the algorithm thinks you'll be most interested in.

The company has now made it official, rolling the feature out to accounts that use the Twitter app.

"We've already seen that people who use this new feature tend to Retweet and Tweet more, creating more live commentary and conversations, which is great for everyone", the company explained in an official blog post.

Opt-in ... for now

That nervous unease that you can see across the #RIPTwitter hashtag is coming from the power users who spend every day on Twitter. People like journalists, who require the real-time functionality in order to properly do their jobs.

So, the good news is that this new approach to the timeline is opt-in, at least initially. To switch the feature on, simply go into the timeline section of your settings and choose "Show me the best Tweets first". Even with the feature turned on, you can pull to refresh your tweets and it will switch back to normal, chronological view.

The launch comes at a difficult time for Twitter, which has been frustrating investors with slow growth and struggling to figure out how to make any money. This has led to executive shake-ups and the promise of new features to tackle some of the platform's biggest issues, like trolling.

5 things Twitter needs to improve if it wants to grow.

Apple Music support is finally added to Sonos speaker systems

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Seven months after launch Apple's streaming music service has finally appeared on Sonos, the connected-speaker system, providing high-end audio nerds with a reason to pay up for the new service.

It joins a long roster of existing services that are already supported by Sonos, including Spotify, Google Play Music, Tidal (remember that?), and SoundCloud. Like Spotify and the other services, Sonos owners can now seamlessly play their tracks and playlists wherever they have a connected speaker by using the Sonos app.

Launch countdown

Support for Apple Music officially launches today at 9am ET (2pm UK time), after being in beta for some time. This is likely the first time that Apple Music has been made available outside of an official Apple-made app.

To add the service Sonos owners must enable it using a mobile device, rather than the desktop app. Annoyingly, you need to be an Apple Music subscriber to access all of the features - including the streaming Beats 1 station, which is available subscription-free on Apple devices.

Our review of Apple Music.

Severe security flaw affects a shocking amount of Mac apps

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It would seem that a massive amount of Mac apps are vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks because of a flaw in a third-party software updater.

The security hole exists in the Sparkle Updater framework – which is used to receive automatic updates by a large amount of apps on Apple's computers including uTorrent, Camtasia and Sketch – and could be used by an attacker to hijack the victim's machine, providing the attacker is on the same network (connected to the same Wi-Fi hotspot, for example).

The vulnerability was highlighted by a security researcher known simply as Radek who posted in detail on the exploit, as Ars Technica reports, and tested it working on both El Capitan, the latest version of OS X, and the previous version, Yosemite. He said that a "huge" amount of apps are affected.

Radek notes: "The vulnerability is not in code signing itself. It exists due to the functionality provided by the WebKit view that allows JavaScript execution and the ability to modify unencrypted HTTP traffic (XML response)."

In other words, apps which use unencrypted HTTP (as opposed to HTTPS) and the vulnerable version of Sparkle Updater are open to being exploited.

Update that Updater, devs...

A new version of Sparkle Updater which addresses this issue (and a second lesser vulnerability Radek pointed out) is already available, but software developers may not have updated their product to use it yet.

Hence this is a bit of a minefield in terms of what apps could be affected – obviously it's only software which uses Sparkle, but not all these apps use insecure HTTP, and some programs may have already moved to the latest version of Sparkle Updater.

So for the moment, while developers patch up their software now news of this vulnerability has become widespread, if you're concerned about the apps on your machine then as Ars Technica advises, you're best off avoiding the likes of public Wi-Fi hotspots.

The incident is also another reminder that Mac security isn't cast-iron, a belief still held by some, but one being rapidly eroded these days.

Best Mac to buy in 2016: Apple's top iMacs, MacBooks and more

Yahuui Blog

Wednesday, February 10, 2016