🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #93

Top of the Thursday to you! Let's keep the momentum going.

#Alexa - We heard Amazon’s Alexa was telling people to vote for Kamala Harris, but only gave a lame reason when asked about Trump! Can you believe it? Apparently, Alexa thinks Harris has a plan to address racial injustice, is tough on crime, and has a record on criminal justice and immigration reform. But when it comes to Trump, Alexa just said no thanks! The Trump team is even calling it biased and wanting Amazon to fix it ASAP.

#Tinder - Tinder announced a series of updates to Tinder U, its in-app feature that caters to current college students ages 18 to 24. This includes new badges to add to their profiles, such as graduation year, major, clubs, and Greek life. Tinder is also offering students 50% off any Tinder premium subscription.

#Snapchat - Snapchat will soon start placing sponsored messages next to chat threads from friends. These “Sponsored Snaps” from brands will appear as unread messages in Snapchat’s main Chat tab. This is the first time Snap will show ads in the most used part of its app.

Spotify Expands Daylist Feature Globally
Spotify is launching its personalized playlist, Daylist, globally, allowing users to access it in all markets where Spotify is available. The playlist evolves throughout the day based on listening habits, and is available to both free and premium users.

Starlink Defies Brazilian Ban on X[dot]com, Then Complies
Starlink is an internet satellite constellation project being developed by SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, aiming to provide global internet connectivity. Musk recently got into a dispute with the Brazilian government over his decision to allow supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro to use a social media platform called X, which was subsequently ordered to be blocked in the country. Despite initially resisting the block, Starlink has now complied with the ban and restricted access to X in Brazil, while still vowing to fight against the ban.

India's Param Siddhi Supercomputer to Receive Powerful Upgrade with NVIDIA H100 GPUs
India's Param Siddhi supercomputer will be upgraded with NVIDIA H100 GPUs, delivering up to 9x faster AI training, 30x faster inference, and improved energy efficiency, boosting AI and scientific research capabilities.

Yocto Spinner | Tiny terminal spinner

Multicast Stream | Create a multicast stream that lets multiple consumers independently read the same data

Stack Overflow's Regex Outage
In 2016, Stack Overflow experienced a 34-minute outage due to a regular expression (Regex) used in a part of the code that handled user input. The regex caused catastrophic backtracking, leading to significant delay and eventual outage. A case study on how not using regular expressions properly can lead to some serious consequences

Bypassing airport security via SQL injection
A security researcher discovered a SQL injection vulnerability in the FlyCASS system, which allows unauthorized access to the cockpit and bypass of airport security screening.

GitHub Millionaire: Earning A Million Dollars Through Open Source Projects
Software developer Caleb Porzio has made over a million dollars on GitHub sponsors by creating valuable open-source projects and selling educational content around them. He shares his strategy: create something people like, then sell them a reason to support you.