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A New 'Interstellar Visitor' Has Entered the Solar System

1 week 5 days ago
Astronomers have detected a mysterious "interstellar object," dubbed A11pl3Z, speeding through the solar system at 152,000 mph. If confirmed, it would be just the third known interstellar visitor, following 'Oumuamua and Comet Borisov. The visiting space object will pass near Mars and the Sun later this year before leaving the solar system forever. Live Science reports: The newly discovered object, currently dubbed A11pl3Z, was first spotted in data collected between June 25 and June 29 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), which automatically scans the night sky using telescopes in Hawaii and South Africa. The mystery object was confirmed by both NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies and the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center on Tuesday (July 1), according to EarthSky.org. A11pl3Z is most likely a large asteroid, or maybe a comet, potentially spanning up to 12 miles (20 kilometers). It is traveling toward the inner solar system at around 152,000 mph (245,000 km/h) and is approaching us from the part of the night sky where the bar of the Milky Way is located. Based on A11pl3Z's speed and trajectory, experts think it originated from beyond the sun's gravitational influence and has enough momentum to shoot straight through our cosmic neighborhood without slowing down. However, more observations are needed to tell for sure.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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CodeSOD: The Last Last Name

1 week 5 days ago

Sometimes, you see some code which is perfectly harmless, but illustrates an incredibly dangerous person behind them. The code isn't good, but it isn't bad in any meaningful way, but it was written by a cocaine addled Pomeranian behind the controls of a bulldozer: it's full of energy, doesn't know exactly what's going on, and at some point, it's going to hit something important.

Such is the code which Román sends us.

public static function registerUser($name, $lastName, $username, ...) { // 100% unmodified first lines, some comments removed $tsCreation = new DateTime(); $user = new User(); $name = $name; $lastname = $lastName; $username = $username; $user->setUsername($username); $user->setLastname($lastname); $user->setName($name); // And so on. }

This creates a user object and populates its fields. It doesn't use a meaningful constructor, which is its own problem, but that's not why we're here. We're here because for some reason the developer behind this function assigns some of the parameters to themselves. Why? I don't know, but it's clearly the result of some underlying misunderstanding of how things work.

But the real landmine is the $lastname variable- which is an entirely new variable which has slightly different capitalization from $lastName.

And you've all heard this song many times, so sing along with the chorus: "this particular pattern shows up all through the codebase," complete with inconsistent capitalization.

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Remy Porter