During the Asia-Pacific Grandmasters broad­cast over the week­end there was a com­pe­ti­tion rule vi­o­la­tion dur­ing a post-match in­ter­view, in­volv­ing Blitzchung and two cast­ers, which re­sulted in the re­moval of the match VOD re­play.

Upon fur­ther re­view we have found the ac­tion has vi­o­lated the 2019 Hearthstone Grandmasters Official Competition Rules sec­tion 6.1 (o) and is in­di­vid­ual be­hav­ior which does not rep­re­sent Blizzard or Hearthstone Esports. 6.1 (o) is found be­low.

Engaging in any act that, in Blizzard’s sole dis­cre­tion, brings you into pub­lic dis­re­pute, of­fends a por­tion or group of the pub­lic, or oth­er­wise dam­ages Blizzard im­age will re­sult in re­moval from Grandmasters and re­duc­tion of the play­er’s prize to­tal to $0 USD, in ad­di­tion to other reme­dies which may be pro­vided for un­der the Handbook and Blizzard’s Website Terms.

Grandmasters is the high­est tier of Hearthstone Esports and we take tour­na­ment rule vi­o­la­tions very se­ri­ously. After an in­ves­ti­ga­tion, we are tak­ing the nec­es­sary ac­tions to pre­vent sim­i­lar in­ci­dents from hap­pen­ing in the fu­ture.

Effective im­me­di­ately, Blitzchung is re­moved from Grandmasters and will re­ceive no priz­ing for Grandmasters Season 2. Additionally, Blitzchung is in­el­i­gi­ble to par­tic­i­pate in Hearthstone es­ports for 12 months be­gin­ning from Oct. 5th, 2019 and ex­tend­ing to Oct. 5th, 2020. We will also im­me­di­ately cease work­ing with both cast­ers.

We’d like to re-em­pha­size tour­na­ment and player con­duct within the Hearthstone es­ports com­mu­nity from both play­ers and tal­ent. While we stand by one’s right to ex­press in­di­vid­ual thoughts and opin­ions, play­ers and other par­tic­i­pants that elect to par­tic­i­pate in our es­ports com­pe­ti­tions must abide by the of­fi­cial com­pe­ti­tion rules.

Somewhere around 2014 I found an /etc/passwd file in some dumps of the BSD 3 source tree, con­tain­ing pass­words of all the old timers such as Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Brian W. Kernighan, Steve Bourne and Bill Joy.

Since the DES-based

crypt(3)

al­go­rithm used for these hashes is well known to be weak (and lim­ited to at most 8 char­ac­ters), I thought it would be an easy tar­get to just crack these pass­words for fun.

Well known tools for this are john

and hash­cat.

Quickly, I had cracked a fair deal of these pass­words, many of which were very weak. (Curiously, bwk used /.,/.,, which is easy to type on a QWERTY key­board.)

However, kens pass­word eluded my crack­ing en­deavor. Even an ex­haus­tive search over all lower-case let­ters and dig­its took sev­eral days (back in 2014) and yielded no re­sult. Since the al­go­rithm was de­vel­oped by Ken Thompson and Robert Morris, I won­dered what’s up there. I also re­al­ized, that, com­pared to other pass­word hash­ing schemes (such as NTLM), crypt(3) turns out to be quite a bit slower to crack (and per­haps was also less op­ti­mized).

Did he re­ally use up­per­case let­ters or even spe­cial chars? (A 7-bit ex­haus­tive search would still take over 2 years on a mod­ern GPU.)

The topic came up

again

ear­lier this month on The Unix Heritage Society

mail­ing list, and I shared my

re­sults and frus­tra­tion of not be­ing able to break kens pass­word.

Finally, to­day this se­cret was re­solved by Nigel Williams:

From: Nigel Williams

This is a chess move in de­scrip­tive

no­ta­tion, and the be­gin­ning of many com­mon open­ings. It fits very well to Ken Thompson’s back­ground in com­puter

chess.

I’m very happy that this mys­tery has been solved now and I’m pleased of the an­swer.

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iPhone users in Hong Kong have no­ticed a change in the lat­est ver­sion of iOS: the 🇹🇼 Flag for Taiwan emoji is miss­ing.

Previously re­stricted on Chinese iOS de­vices, all other re­gions of the world have con­tin­ued to en­joy ac­cess to all flags in the iOS emoji font, un­til now.

The change, first dis­cov­ered by iOS Developer Hiraku Wang, means that users with an iOS de­vice re­gion set to Hong Kong will see one less flag on the emoji key­board than if the re­gion is set to any­where else in the world (other than China main­land, which also hides this flag).

Notably, the emoji 🇹🇼 Flag: Taiwan is still sup­ported by iOS in Hong Kong. As of iOS 13.1.2, re­leased last week, this is now hid­den from the emoji key­board but re­mains avail­able by other means.

Apple’s Hong Kong ap­proach dif­fers from the com­plete ban on the emoji in China.

Any iPhone pur­chased in China, or pur­chased else­where with the re­gion set to China main­land, re­places the flag of Taiwan with a miss­ing char­ac­ter tofu (☒) so it can­not be used or dis­played in any app, even via copy and paste.

In Hong Kong, this emoji still ap­pears when pre­sent in a doc­u­ment or mes­sage, and can be in­serted via copy and paste with no change to the dis­play. It also re­mains an auto-sug­gest op­tion when typ­ing the phrase Taiwan.

As for the most ob­vi­ous place to find it - the emoji key­board - that’s where this emoji has gone miss­ing.

This new re­stric­tion ap­plies to all iPhones pur­chased in Hong Kong, as well as in­ter­na­tional iPhones where the re­gion is set to Hong Kong.

Emojipedia can con­firm that this change also af­fects the built-in emoji picker in ma­cOS 10.15 Catalina. As with iOS, ma­cOS com­pletely bans the Taiwan Flag emoji when the re­gion is set to China, but only hides it from the emoji picker in Hong Kong.

Previous re­leases of ma­cOS had no re­stric­tion on this flag for Hong Kong users.

Note: While Taiwan is of­fi­cially named Republic of China (ROC), the name Taiwan is more com­mon in­ter­na­tion­ally, and re­flected in the cur­rent name of this emoji as: 🇹🇼 Flag: Taiwan (previously ‘Flag for Taiwan’).

For sim­plic­ity, this ar­ti­cle refers to Republic of China (ROC) as Taiwan; and People’s Republic of China (PRC) as China (or China main­land as used in iOS re­gion set­tings).

As with any Unicode char­ac­ter, ven­dors like Apple are free to hide or show any emoji on their plat­forms as they wish.

If a ven­dor chooses not to sup­port an emoji, they can sim­ply re­move it from any emoji font they cre­ate, or an al­ter­na­tive is to sup­port the emoji but hide it from ob­vi­ous in­put.

Microsoft hides the mid­dle fin­ger emoji from the emoji picker on Windows, but still sup­ports the emoji if you copy and paste it, or open a doc­u­ment in­clud­ing it. Apple sup­ports code points for many gen­der-neu­tral emo­jis, but hides them from in­put on the emoji key­board, as most of these du­pli­cate the ap­pear­ance of the woman or man vari­a­tion on iOS.

Hiding an emoji from the emoji key­board is some­what of a half-way step be­tween com­pletely ban­ning an emoji, and fully sup­port­ing it.

While all flags have po­ten­tial to unite or di­vide, un­til re­cently the emoji key­board has re­mained rel­a­tively sep­a­rate from such mat­ters.

In re­cent years China has stepped up ef­forts in pres­sur­ing global com­pa­nies in how they re­fer to Taiwan. Apple is­n’t alone here.

PayPal shows a generic globe in­stead of the Taiwan flag in its re­gion picker. No other coun­try gets that treat­ment.

Airlines have been in­structed to re­fer to Taiwan as “Taiwan China” if they wish to keep do­ing busi­ness in China. Some air­lines thought they might get around this by listed cities only with­out ref­er­ence to the coun­try, but this was­n’t deemed suf­fi­cient by China.

With protests on­go­ing in Hong Kong to up­hold the free­doms granted un­der “one coun­try, two sys­tems”, the grad­ual re-align­ing of Hong Kong and China con­tin­ues.

And so the next bat­tle ap­pears to be on the emoji key­board.

We all have choices to make in this world, both as in­di­vid­u­als, and in­di­vid­u­als within larger com­pa­nies.

What’s dif­fi­cult when it comes to global pol­i­tics and a su­per­power like China is that the choices don’t look great - no mat­ter which way you look at them. While Apple has not made com­ment on this change, it seems en­tirely con­sis­tent that a de­ci­sion such as this would­n’t have been made lightly.

Is this half-way step of hid­ing, but not re­mov­ing, the flag of Taiwan in Hong Kong a com­pro­mise that is bet­ter than ban­ning the emoji al­to­gether? I’d say so.

What this means for the fu­ture of Hong Kong as a dis­tinct re­gion of China with its own laws is less cer­tain, and a topic much larger than the emoji key­board. Perhaps Microsoft was onto some­thing when they de­cided not to sup­port any coun­try flags in Windows.

Using the emoji 🇹🇼 Flag: Taiwan re­mains pos­si­ble on Hong Kong-model iPhones via the fol­low­ing meth­ods:

* Type “Taiwan” and choose 🇹🇼 from the auto-sug­gest list of op­tions

* Copy and paste 🇹🇼 from the web

* Install a third party key­board such as Gboard

This is­n’t the blog post in­tended to write. In fact, last night I drafted up one about my prob­lems send­ing back­ground push no­ti­fi­ca­tions with Amazon SNS (coming soon!). And af­ter the ridicu­lously over-the-top shit-storm that blew up over my dumb tweet ear­lier this week, the last thing I wanted to do was step back in that arena. But this needs to be said. But, first…

I’m an Apple de­vel­oper. It’s the spe­cific nerd sub-cul­ture that I iden­tify with the strongest. I’ve been writ­ing and sell­ing my own soft­ware for ma­cOS since 2003 — back when it was still Mac OS X — back when apps were called soft­ware. And I had apps in the iOS and Mac App Stores on day one of their re­spec­tive open­ings. I’m not rich from it, and I don’t claim to even be that suc­cess­ful. But for a few won­der­ful years my own apps were my full time in­come. I’m not part of the old guard of Mac de­vel­op­ers, but I’ve been around the block and do­ing this for over a decade and a half. I hope I’ve earned the right to spout off my stu­pid opin­ions on the in­ter­net oc­ca­sion­ally.

And as an Apple soft­ware de­vel­oper, I live through the Summer beta pe­ri­ods. On my sec­ondary ma­chine. And, in re­cent years, within vir­tual ma­chines that al­low me to do more in­tri­cate test­ing. I’ve seen easy-go­ing mostly spit and pol­ish re­leases as well more sub­stan­tial user-fac­ing and un­der-the-hood ones.

But Catalina has been dif­fer­ent in two par­tic­u­larly grue­some ways that get even worse when com­bined.

The first, is purely from a sta­bil­ity and func­tional stand­point. The early be­tas of Catalina were re­ally, re­ally bro­ken. But that’s OK! That’s what be­tas are for. And while I can only speak for my­self, I think most de­vel­op­ers are more than happy to of­fer in­put to Apple and re­port bugs. So I’m to­tally fine us­ing a wonky OS for a few months on a spare ma­chine while I test my own soft­ware in ad­di­tion to Apple’s.

Apple is be­com­ing (already is?) a ser­vices com­pany. And, let’s face it. Apple has never been good at any­thing in­volv­ing the in­ter­net. I feel like they could have all the money and en­gi­neers in the world (which they ba­si­cally al­ready do) and still never com­pletely get their ser­vices right be­cause it’s just not in their DNA. Applications are. Hardware is. But put a net­work layer in there and they crap them­selves. (Ok, not in every case. I’m ob­vi­ously ex­ag­ger­at­ing to make a point. But the over­all track record is iffy at best.)

And so when they de­cide to over­haul how CloudKit and iCloud Drive work and then merge those changes into an al­ready bug­gier-than-usual beta OS, dis­as­ter can en­sue. Because now those bugs — file cor­rup­tions, miss­ing data, bro­ken APIs and fun­da­men­tal things that sim­ply stop sync­ing — can spill over and in­fect your other Macs run­ning a sta­ble OS.

It’s my own fault for not know­ing any bet­ter and sign­ing into my Catalina ma­chine with my per­sonal Apple ID, but I needed to do some iCloud de­vel­op­ment this Summer and us­ing my own ID just made things sim­pler. But af­ter I ended up with (not jok­ing) two-hun­dred du­pli­cated ~/Documents di­rec­to­ries — each with a ran­dom as­sort­ment of du­pli­cated files of dif­fer­ent re­vi­sions — I swore off deal­ing with Catalina and iCloud for the rest of the Summer. I put all of those new fea­tures on hold and planned to pick them back up af­ter the GM when every­thing sta­bi­lized. I signed out of iCloud on every Catalina ma­chine and VM and as­sumed Apple would get their prob­lems sorted by Fall.

And I was­n’t alone in that as­sess­ment and strat­egy. Just google around for de­vel­oper blog posts and tweets from the beta 3-ish time pe­riod. And that’s the puz­zling and quite scary thing about all of this and the ul­ti­mate point I want to make. We (developers) were mak­ing it loud and clear that this stuff was very, very bro­ken. And, some­how, some­one at Apple made the call that it was OK to re­lease a Public beta onto the world. A buggy, bro­ken OS is one thing. Users in­stalling it should know to be­ware. But a buggy, bro­ken OS that also puts their data in jeop­ardy both on that ma­chine and all their oth­ers linked by an Apple ID is un­con­scionable.

And still the be­tas marched on. And even­tu­ally it seemed like Apple re­al­ized what they were up against and threw in the towel and re­verted the OS-level iCloud changes — much like dis­cov­eryd a num­ber of years ago.

Again, I just read and heard about all of this. I was com­pletely off iCloud on Catalina at this point and as­sumed the mas­sive roll­back would fix things.

So when Apple of­fi­cially re­leased Catalina to the pub­lic this week with­out so much as a press re­lease or heads-up to de­vel­op­ers (yes, there had been a GM build, but still, would an email to de­vel­op­ers ahead of time have been so dif­fi­cult?), I was ready to up­grade and go all-in.

Perhaps I was be­ing naive, but I truly care about the ex­pe­ri­ence my soft­ware cus­tomers have. And that means I have to live with the same sys­tem they do — even if that means deal­ing with OS bugs that just could­n’t be fixed in time for the .0 re­lease.

I’ll go through some of the high­lights (lowlights?) I’ve run into be­low, but I guess this is my the­sis: The fi­nal (well, first) Catalina re­lease along with the out­right aw­ful pub­lic beta makes me think one thing. And that is Apple’s in­sis­tence on their an­nual, big-splash re­lease cy­cle is fun­da­men­tally break­ing en­gi­neer­ing. I know I’m not privy to their in­ter­nal de­ci­sion mak­ing and that soft­ware fea­tures that de­pend on hard­ware re­leases and vice-versa are planned and timed years (if not half-decades) in ad­vance, but I can think of no other ex­pla­na­tion than that Marketing alone is purely in charge of when things ship. Why else would stuff so com­pletely bro­ken and lack­ing the at­ten­tion to de­tail that Apple is known for and (ahem) mar­kets them­selves on have shipped if not than to meet an ar­bi­trary dead­line? Apple has so many balls in the air — and this metaphor does­n’t re­ally make any sense now that I’m typ­ing it — but they’re all in­ter­con­nected now that Apple is a ser­vices com­pany. And as a ser­vices com­pany they must find a way to ship fea­tures, fixes, and up­dates out­side of the run-up to the hol­i­day sea­son. They need to be more (and, oh god, this word makes me want to vomit) ag­ile.

Let’s start with my now in­fa­mous tweet from the other day. (I’m an in­flu­encer!) This screen­shot has ab­solutely been ma­nip­u­lated to make a point, but every­thing in it is real. It’s all of the se­cu­rity warn­ings and per­mis­sion di­alogs that I ran into (and screen­shot­ted and arranged for max­i­mum ef­fect) dur­ing my iMac’s first startup af­ter in­stalling Catalina as well as about ten min­utes of pok­ing around and launch­ing a few apps.

The point I was hop­ing (but prob­a­bly failed) to make, is that there are many thou­sands of way smarter peo­ple in­side Apple than me, and a fright­en­ing, pop-up frenzy that will ab­solutely con­di­tion non-tech­ni­cal users to blindly click “Allow” is the best so­lu­tion they could ar­rive at or ship in time?

Maybe they did count­less user stud­ies and de­ter­mined this re­ally is the safest and best ap­proach. But I doubt it. I think it was a com­bi­na­tion of poor man­age­ment, hard dead­lines, and prob­a­bly a cav­al­cade of up­per man­age­ment and C-level ex­ec­u­tives who only use iOS as their daily dri­ver and sim­ply lack the imag­i­na­tion, ex­pe­ri­ence, and tech­ni­cal vi­sion to re­al­ize a modal pop-up flow that (kind of) works on a touch de­vice does not scale to an over­lap­ping, mul­ti­ple-win­dow, key­board and cur­sor dri­ven in­ter­face, i.e., the desk­top com­puter.

Let me go ahead and si­lence the Hacker News crowd and openly ad­mit that, yes, I’m a geek, a de­vel­oper, a tech­ni­cal per­son, and most def­i­nitely not a nor­mal user.

That said, there needs to be an I’m-Not-A-Dummy switch in System Preferences be­cause all my shit’s bro­ken and I can find zero guid­ance from Apple on how to fix it.

I have a num­ber of back­ground jobs and processes on my iMac, which I ba­si­cally treat as an al­ways-on, home server. Some are run via cron, oth­ers by launchd. Some are run un­der my user ac­count, oth­ers as root. A few ex­am­ples:

I have an AppleScript that runs every ten min­utes and down­loads pho­tos from a server and im­ports them into Photos.app. After up­grad­ing to Catalina, it failed every time. I stopped cron so I could de­bug and run it man­u­ally. The first time I ex­e­cute it, Terminal.app asks for per­mis­sion to ac­cess my ~/Photos di­rec­tory. OK. Then it prompts to al­low Terminal.app to con­trol Photos.app. OK. And, fi­nally, and I’m not sure why given I al­ready granted per­mis­sion for the ~/Photos di­rec­tory, it asks for per­mis­sion to con­trol Finder.

With all those per­mis­sions granted, I add a few log state­ments and turn cron back on. The job runs. And fails. Again. Because even though I granted per­mis­sion mo­ments ago, now that it’s be­ing run in a slightly dif­fer­ent way, Catalina de­cides to lock it down again. How is this de­cided by ma­cOS and how do I fix it? My googling has failed me so far.

Next. Because I’m an id­iot with rea­sons, I have a python dae­mon that launches as root via launchd and re­mains run­ning in the back­ground. It is now silently fail­ing be­cause it is­n’t al­lowed to ac­cess an ex­ter­nal USB drive.

Oh, and while de­bug­ging the AppleScript ex­am­ple from a para­graph above, every time I saved my cron changes in vim, the sys­tem would throw up a di­a­log ask­ing for my per­mis­sion to al­low Terminal to mod­ify, you know, my own per­sonal crontab that I ex­plic­itly in­voked an edit­ing ses­sion of. (Although I’m pretty sure this was also a thing in Mojave. But the point still stands.)

I guess Apple is try­ing to pro­tect less-tech­ni­cal cus­tomers who might in­ad­ver­tently in­stall a ma­li­cious re­cur­ring back­ground process as root? Or ac­ci­den­tally read a file from an ex­ter­nal vol­ume while run­ning a shell script that this non-tech­ni­cal user opened up a Terminal, edited, made ex­e­cutable, and in­voked them­selves? I sup­pose there’s an at­tack vec­tor there.

After up­grad­ing to Catalina, like ba­si­cally every other re­cent ma­cOS re­lease, I found my­self logged out of iCloud. Facebook and Gmail have never once in my life ex­pired my ses­sion on pur­pose. But since my iCloud data is stored on an en­crypted, non-re­mov­able hard drive, pro­tected by a T2 chip and bio­met­ric se­cu­rity, I can see why it’s best if Apple logs me out every time I in­stall a soft­ware up­date.

OK. Fine. I’ll log back in, but of course iCloud re­jects my pass­word in System Preferences so many times that they even­tu­ally lock me out and force me through a for­got pass­word flow just so I can change my pass­word back to what it al­ways was.

That done and fi­nally logged back in, all of my iOS de­vices start beep­ing and I find this:

To be ex­pected given that I just logged in on a new(?) de­vice. But, why is my iMac’s host­name now du­pli­cated “(2)”? Reasons, I’m sure.

After the Catalina up­grade and spend­ing some time get­ting my apps, set­tings, etc. kind of back to nor­mal, my wife tried to lo­gin to her ac­count on that iMac.

Everything went fine, and we got some of her soft­ware up­dated, too.

But then the Mac went to sleep.

Her lo­cal Mac ac­count pass­word is a sim­ple, all-low­er­case English word with­out spaces or num­bers or spe­cial char­ac­ters. ma­cOS would­n’t ac­cept it when she tried to lo­gin again.

It would­n’t ac­cept it when I typed it in. Nor when I de­cided the key­board must have some­how mal­func­tioned dur­ing the last half hour and I thought I was ex­tremely clever by try­ing to lo­gin as her via a re­mote screen shar­ing ses­sion and it failed as well.

That was about 36 hours ago and the prob­lem per­sists through mul­ti­ple restarts. I don’t have it in me right now to try and de­bug this. But I’m not wor­ried. All of her data is backed up. I’m ready to blow away her ac­count and cre­ate a new one. But,…Apple?

It took around eight hours for Photos.app to up­grade my 200GB iCloud Photos li­brary the first time I opened it on Catalina. Since then, across mul­ti­ple re­boots, it sim­ply re­fuses to up­date with new pho­tos added to iCloud from other de­vices. Or up­load new pho­tos to iCloud that I im­ported di­rectly on that ma­chine. It just says “Updating…”, for­ever.

I found ear­lier to­day that I could­n’t restart my Mac be­cause an ap­pli­ca­tion was still run­ning. The only thing open (but idle) was Xcode. I did a quick ⌥⌘⎋ and dis­cov­ered this:

I had no idea System Preferences was even run­ning. It was­n’t vis­i­ble in the Dock?

As I men­tioned ear­lier, I had to sign in to iCloud again (a few times) af­ter up­grad­ing. A day later, this popped up while I was us­ing TextMate:

After up­grad­ing to Catalina, ma­cOS made me reau­tho­rize every app that wanted to send me no­ti­fi­ca­tions. Ironically, the fol­low­ing alert ap­pears every time I re­boot de­spite al­ways dis­miss­ing it us­ing the most de­fin­i­tive op­tion Apple pro­vides and never giv­ing what­ever-process-is-show­ing-it per­mis­sion to no­tify me of any­thing in the first place:

I love the Mac and every­thing its soft­ware and hard­ware stand for. The iMac Pro and new Mac mini are phe­nom­e­nal. The re­vamped Mac Pro (six years? re­ally?) is a damn beast. And, hon­estly, I don’t even mind USB-C.

But the key­boards, the lit­er­ally hun­dreds if not thou­sands of preda­tory scams on the Mac App Store, what­ever the fuck is go­ing on with Messages.app on ma­cOS, iCloud Drive, the bone­headed, ar­ro­gant, lit­er­ally-put-on-the-con­sumer-fac­ing-mar­ket­ing-web­site claim that iPad-to-Mac with Catalyst was merely a check­box, all the dumb, stu­pid lit­tle bugs I men­tioned above, and the truck­load of other pa­per-cuts I’m sure to run into once I’m on Catalina for more than 48 hours…

It is ab­solutely clear that the Mac is far out­side of what the up­per-ranks of Apple is fo­cus­ing on.

I’m not try­ing to throw Engineering un­der the bus. I’m friends with many won­der­ful, tal­ented, hard-work­ing, and car­ing Apple de­vel­op­ers who want the Mac to fuck­ing thrive. What I am do­ing is ex­plic­itly shit­ting on man­age­ment and blam­ing the ex­ec­u­tive team for al­low­ing all of the above to ship.

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Princeton prof. I use Twitter to share my re­search & com­men­tary on sur­veil­lance cap­i­tal­ism, in­fosec, cryp­tocur­ren­cies, AI ethics, tech pol­icy, & aca­d­e­mic life.

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My uni­ver­sity just an­nounced that it’s dump­ing Blackboard, and there was much re­joic­ing. Why is Blackboard uni­ver­sally re­viled? There’s a stan­dard story of why “enterprise soft­ware” sucks. If you’ll bear with me, I think this is best ap­pre­ci­ated by talk­ing about… baby clothes!

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Oct 2019

Bel is a spec for a new di­alect of Lisp, writ­ten in it­self. This should sound fa­mil­iar to peo­ple fa­mil­iar with Lisp’s ori­gins, be­cause it’s .

It con­sists of two text files meant to be read in par­al­lel: a , and the .

For those who just want to see some code ex­am­ples, there’s also a . But of course the Bel source is also a code ex­am­ple, since it’s writ­ten in it­self.

Considering the rate at which I was dis­cov­er­ing bugs be­fore pub­lish­ing Bel, there are bound to be more re­main­ing. So this first ver­sion is ver­sion C, af­ter Cunningham’s Law.

Oct 2019

Bel is a spec for a new di­alect of Lisp, writ­ten in it­self. This should sound fa­mil­iar to peo­ple who know about Lisp’s ori­gins, be­cause it’s .

It con­sists of two text files meant to be read in par­al­lel: a , and the .

For those who just want to see some code ex­am­ples, there’s a . But of course the Bel source is also a code ex­am­ple, since it’s writ­ten in it­self.

Considering the rate at which I was dis­cov­er­ing bugs be­fore pub­lish­ing Bel, there are bound to be more re­main­ing. So this first ver­sion is ver­sion C, af­ter Cunningham’s Law.

Visa, Mastercard, eBay, Stripe, and Mercado Pago have all with­drawn from the Libra Association, deal­ing a ma­jor blow to Facebook’s plans for a dis­trib­uted, global cryp­tocur­rency. The with­drawals were first re­ported by the Financial Times and Bloomberg.

A Visa spokesper­son told The Verge. “Visa has de­cided not to join the Libra Association at this time,” the spokesper­son said. “We will con­tinue to eval­u­ate and our ul­ti­mate de­ci­sion will be de­ter­mined by a num­ber of fac­tors, in­clud­ing the Association’s abil­ity to fully sat­isfy all req­ui­site reg­u­la­tory ex­pec­ta­tions.”

The with­drawals leave Libra with no ma­jor US pay­ment proces­sor, a se­ri­ous is­sue for the fledg­ling pro­ject. They also come just one week af­ter PayPal (eBay’s for­mer sub­sidiary) with­drew from the as­so­ci­a­tion.

The first of­fi­cial meet­ing of the Libra Council is in just three days, sched­uled for October 14th in Geneva. That meet­ing will likely re­sult in more spe­cific com­mit­ments from all the mem­bers in­volved, which may have in­spired some of the re­cent de­fec­tions. Still, the de­par­tures leave the pro­ject in a pre­car­i­ous place as Libra hopes to move be­yond ini­tial crit­i­cisms of the pro­ject.

“We highly re­spect the vi­sion of the Libra Association,” eBay said in a state­ment. “However, eBay has made the de­ci­sion to not move for­ward as a found­ing mem­ber. At this time, we are fo­cused on rolling out eBay’s man­aged pay­ments ex­pe­ri­ence for our cus­tomers.”

Stripe gave a sim­i­lar ex­pla­na­tion for its with­drawal. “Stripe is sup­port­ive of pro­jects that aim to make on­line com­merce more ac­ces­si­ble for peo­ple around the world,” the com­pany said. “Libra has this po­ten­tial. We will fol­low its progress closely and re­main open to work­ing with the Libra Association at a later stage.” Mastercard did not im­me­di­ately re­spond to a re­quest for com­ment.

In re­sponse, Libra Association pol­icy chief Dante Disparte thanked the com­pa­nies for their on­go­ing sup­port of the or­ga­ni­za­tion’s mis­sion.

“We are fo­cused on mov­ing for­ward and con­tin­u­ing to build a strong as­so­ci­a­tion of some of the world’s lead­ing en­ter­prises, so­cial im­pact or­ga­ni­za­tions and other stake­hold­ers,” Disparte said. “We look for­ward to the in­au­gural Libra Association Council meet­ing in just 3 days and an­nounc­ing the ini­tial mem­bers of the Libra Association.”

The re­main­ing Libra mem­bers are fac­ing grow­ing pres­sure from gov­ern­ments and reg­u­la­tors, many of whom see the pro­ject as a threat to the ex­ist­ing fi­nan­cial sys­tem. On Wednesday, two Democratic sen­a­tors urged Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe to re­con­sider their in­volve­ment with Libra, say­ing it could have sig­nif­i­cant reg­u­la­tory con­se­quences for any pay­ment proces­sor in­volved.

“If you take this on,” the let­ters read, “you can ex­pect a high level of scrutiny from reg­u­la­tors not only on Libra-related ac­tiv­i­ties, but on all pay­ment ac­tiv­i­ties.”

In re­sponse to the news, Libra chief David Marcus, a for­mer pres­i­dent of for­mer Libra Association, PayPal, con­ceded the news was not “great in the short term,” but “liberating” to “know that you’re on to some­thing when so much pres­sure builds up.” Marcus also casts the news of Mastercard and Visa’s with­drawal from the pro­ject as the two pay­ment gi­ants sim­ply wait­ing un­til there’s proper “regulatory clar­ity” on Libra.

Update, October 11, 4:14PM ET: Updated with com­ment from the Libra Association.

Update, October 11, 4:34PM ET: Updated with com­ment from Visa.

Update, October 11, 5:13PM ET: Updated with news that Mercado Pago is also leav­ing the as­so­ci­a­tion.

Update, October 11, 6:20PM ET: Updated with com­ment from Libra chief David Marcus.

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