Saturday thread

[scripting]

I'm working on the Feed Viewer page today. It was the very first page I developed for FeedLand, and it's stood the test of time, but now it needs a rewrite to use all the latest stuff.

Here's a screen shot of the Feed Viewer page for Scripting News before today's work.

I also timed it, it took approximately 0.3 seconds to render the info on the page. I already have that down to 0.13 seconds, and there's still more work to do.

BTW one more thing -- Wired has a review of their top 5 feed readers. Very timely piece. I plan to read it carefully. It would be interesting to compile a list of the feed readers each of you use. And also get ideas of how you imagine FeedLand being used with them, if at all. I'm looking less to compete than to drive new interop.

Not sure if people take me seriously when I say my product is interop, but it really is. I don't do these products to make money. I do it because the RSS world is a mess because it lacks leadership. I'm trying to add some of that back via this product.

[scripting]

Here's a voicemail -- how to make sense of all of this.

http://scripting.com/publicfolder/feedland/voicemails/makingSenseOfAllOfIt.m4a

Hope it helps make sense of all of it. 💥

[scripting]

Speaking of interop!

Here's a guy with a micro.blog site who has adapted it to generate the source:markdown element.

https://twitter.com/moritz/status/1563577639990067200

First interop. 💥 💥 💥 💥 💥 💥 💥 💥 💥

[scripting]

Here's his feed in FeedLand.

http://feedland.org/?river=https%3A%2F%2Fmoritzfuerst.net%2Ffeed%2Fmicro%2Frss

[scripting]

Just got an email saying that Electric Drummer on the download page is infected with some malware.

I've temporarily removed the download file. I know at least one person in this group downloaded the latest version, so be aware. I'm going to investigate this tomorrow morning first thing. If you figure out how to remove nukespeed.gen, please share the info here. Thanks.

[scripting]

Adding one note on the nukespeed.gen thing -- this is an Electron app? How do you analyze an Electron app for malware?

Need to do some searches about this. I'm not sure what to make of it. I've been emailing with people for ideas.

[gwthompson]

I have been out all day and when I got home I saw these messages about nukespeed.gen. I had downloaded the latest version of Electric Drummer as soon as the new Twitter verb was added. Surprisingly I have Bitdefender installed and it had not detected the malware. I Installed Intego VirusBarrier and scanned E/D and it did indeed find and remove the malware crippling E/D. I then scanned my entire Mac with Intego and found it in the E/D zip file as well. Having never built an Electron app I'm not much help with tracking down the issue.

[scotthansonde]

This morning I installed Intego VirusBarrier on my MacBook. I did a scan of my disk and turned on real-time scanning. My results:

• The scan marked my installed Electric Drummer app (specifically the Contents/MacOS/Electric Drummer file inside the app bundle) as infected with OSX/NukeSpeed.gen. My installed Public Folder app was also marked as infected.
• I then scanned my downloads with several old versions of the Electric Drummer zip file. They were all marked as infected.
• I built my development copy of Electric Drummer. During the build the generated Electric Drummer.app was marked in real time as infected
• I download the electron quick start project and built it with electron-builder. The generated app was also marked in real time as infected.
• I built a development version of Electric Drummer on my Chromebook and copied it to my Mac. It was marked as infected.

I'm not a security expert, so I can't draw any conclusions from this. But it smells like a false positive.

[scotthansonde]

Postscript: all of my tests were built with Electron 7.1.10, the same version used for Electric Drummer. I then rebuilt electron quick start with the current Electron 20.0.0, and it was not marked as infected. 🤔

[scotthansonde]

Final note: It turns out that the actual Electron v.7.1.10 app at https://github.com/electron/electron/releases/tag/v7.1.10 (electron-v7.1.10-darwin-x64.zip) is also marked as infected, as well as some other 7.x.x versions I randomly tried out. The next major version v8.0.0 is marked as clean. I've submitted the Electron 7.1.10 app to Intego as a possible false positive so they can correct their virus definitions.

[scripting]

@scotthansonde & @gwthompson -- thank you! 💥

I'm thinking of posting the notes from this thread somewhere outside the private zone here, so I can point to it from my blog.

I'm also going to put the copy of Electric Drummer back in place, because (we believe) this is a false positive on the part of Intego.

Is this ok with you all?

[gwthompson]

@scripting -- I'm alright with it since my main antivirus software (Bitdefender) never detected it.

[scripting]

This raises another question for me.

I guess I should be running antivirus software on my Macs?

I haven't been. I just assumed that Macs were pretty impervious to malware.

And I don't install binaries casually. I've only installed one in the last year, LogSeq. I trust those guys, I guess.

[gwthompson]

I installed Bitdefender last year when I was working with another developer on a Mac app and wanted to be safe. Up until then I hadn't had any antivirus software in use since the early Mac days.

[gwthompson]

@scotthansonde -- I didn't realize you could build Electron apps on Chromebook. I have been looking for a reason to purchase a Chromebook and this may be the one! 😀

[scripting]

I'm moving on from the Feed Viewer page. It's has been carefully reviewed, has been tuned up, should be quite a bit faster.

It's important because it's the only place you can see who else is subscribed to a feed.

This is how you get to it:

1. Click on the green info icon in the right margin of the subs page.

2. When you subscribe to a feed, it's the confirmation page. So you can see that you subscribed and can quickly unsub if it was a mistake. You can also see who else is subscribed.

3. It's one of the views in the View menu (the others are mailbox and river).

[scripting]

Note: I removed the expandable items list. It was one-off code, and was written before the river code had been written. If the feature is needed here, I would redo it as a mini-river. But honestly I think the other ways to view the items in a feed are better and we don't need a third.

[scotthansonde]

Final note: It turns out that the actual Electron v.7.1.10 app at https://github.com/electron/electron/releases/tag/v7.1.10 (electron-v7.1.10-darwin-x64.zip) is also marked as infected…

Intego issued new virus definitions today, and now neither Electron 7.1.10 nor Electric Drummer is marked as infected by VirusBarrier.