Linked List: March 20, 2022

Sunday, 20 March 2022

Plain Text Sports 

“Live sports scores, play-by-play and boxscores, in plain text. No ads, no tracking, no loading.”

I love this, and yet despite being out for about a year, only heard about it today for the first time. Any website that is slower than this is too slow.

Only some sports have live box scores (like the NBA); others (like NCAA basketball) link through to external sites for box scores. But the scores are all live, and the website is fast fast fast.

MacStadium 

My thanks to MacStadium for sponsoring last week at DF. MacStadium is the premiere provider of cloud-hosted Macs. You’re probably already familiar with them — they’re a longtime sponsor here, for one thing — but they’ve got a lot of new stuff:

  • M1 Macs — Move from Intel to Apple silicon with MacStadium. They have a full selection of M1s in the US and Europe.

  • Orka — Virtualize MacOS on M1, Intel, or in a mixed cluster with Orka 2.0.

  • Mac Remote Desktops — Provide remote workers access to MacOS on cloud-hosted Macs.

There are so many potential uses for MacStadium but a big one is app development — MacStadium lets your team build, test, and deploy from the cloud. Gain efficiency by cloning VMs instead of manually re-imaging individual Macs.

Learn more and keep up with what’s new at macstadium.com.

Update to Popular NPM Package Deletes Files to Protest Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine 

Ax Sharma, writing for Bleeping Computer:

This month, the developer behind the popular npm package ‘node-ipc’ released sabotaged versions of the library in protest of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War. Newer versions of the ‘node-ipc’ package began deleting all data and overwriting all files on developer’s machines, in addition to creating new text files with “peace” messages. [...]

Popular JavaScript front end framework ‘Vue.js’ also uses ‘node-ipc’ as a dependency. But prior to this incident, ‘Vue.js’ did not pin the versions of ‘node-ipc’ dependency to a safe version and was set up to fetch the latest minor and patch versions instead [...]

The way the Node community works, just blindly slurping in other people’s package updates without knowing what’s in them, continues to boggle my mind.