Apple Shares Its Toys With Android Team
Also crypto scams and email typos

The Inter-Departmental Swift Handshake

Apple, the corporate entity that has always kept the good paperclips to itself, is now giving Google’s Android team permission to play with the latest version of the Swift development kit. It is currently in a "nightly build" state, which means it probably works until 3 AM and then forgets to set an out-of-office reply. The engineering memo suggests the idea is to let developers write shared code between operating systems; essentially, giving the back-end teams a common language so they can finally stop bickering about semicolon placement.

This feels less like open-source collaboration and more like a mandated HR initiative to improve cross-team communication. The developers in the comments are excited, but they are also nervously checking to see if Apple put tracking tags on the shared code snippets, just to make sure they are not misused. One commenter noted that a good portion of the industry seems to be waiting for the moment a language is declared "The Last Language" so they can retire, and this is just another delay.

Airlines Get Hacked By An Expense Report Loophole

British Airways, a company that operates on the general principle that all customers are slightly inconvenient, had its paid WiFi system bypassed by a developer who treated it like a bad expense report form. The security mishap was not a complex zero-day exploit, but a simple failure of authorization logic; the system was tricked into thinking a user had paid by replaying a small, static token that was supposed to be unique for a purchased session. This is the digital equivalent of finding out you can get free coffee by just walking past the barista with a confident expression and a travel mug.

A commenter noted that the best defense against this kind of simple reversal is to hire engineers who treat network traffic like sensitive corporate data, not like a discarded sticky note on a server rack. The post-mortem meeting at British Airways is expected to conclude that it would be cheaper to just give everyone free WiFi than to fix the underlying architecture, but they will fix the underlying architecture anyway because nobody likes free things that much.

Digital Commodities Crash Leaves Valve Holding The Bag

The virtual economy around Valve’s popular *Counter-Strike* game is now in what financial analysts are calling a “steep downward correction” or what Systems Administrator Ken calls “another Tuesday.” The value of cosmetic items, which somehow ballooned into a multi-billion-dollar shadow market, is in freefall. This mishap can be attributed to the simple laws of supply and demand, which apparently apply even to digital camouflage patterns.

A new influx of items, combined with an overall lack of speculative enthusiasm, means that the digital briefcase full of assets is now worth about as much as a regular, non-digital briefcase. Many players are now realizing that their investment strategy relied entirely on other people being equally delusional about the worth of a glowing knife texture. Maybe if they framed the crash as a 'beta test' for a new, more sustainable economy, the market would recover.

Briefs

• Document Compile Wars: Yet another document typesetting tool, Typst 0.14, is out and still trying to convince everyone that LaTeX is the problem, not their inability to compile a simple PDF without an hour of Stack Overflow.
• Inventor Remorse: A co-author of the landmark paper "Attention is All You Need," a kind gentleman named Ashish Vaswani, says he is "sick" of transformers. It is always the inventor who wants the product recalled after it gets too popular and makes too much money for other people.
• Airline Error 404: Alaska Airlines issued a press release after an IT outage that, like all press releases after an IT outage, promised to do better without actually saying what broke, though the title confirms they have a record of the outage.