Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:
Software developer Photon, whose product requires running a bunch
of Macs to connect to iMessage, discovered a pretty major
bug:
Every Mac has a hidden expiration date. After exactly 49 days, 17
hours, 2 minutes,...
“thenickdude”, on Reddit:
They’re using this to detect if you have Creative Cloud already
installed when you visit on their website.
When you visit https://www.adobe.com/home, they load this image
using...
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, speaking of the president of the United States in a totally normal way:
I love working for President Trump. It’s the greatest honor of a
lifetime. And if President Trump chooses to nominate somebody else
and asks...
Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team:
Earlier today we announced Claude Mythos Preview, a new
general-purpose language model. This model performs strongly
across the board, but it is strikingly capable at computer
security tasks. In response, we have...
Kottke:
This shot from Artemis II of the Moon eclipsing the Sun is one
of the most breathtaking astronomical photos I’ve ever seen.
Holy shit.
Follow NASA on Flickr for more.
Update: In a follow-up post, Kottke has assembled a slew of great iPhone...
Not sure why they think this comparison is reassuring rather than terrifying.
I also have to say that Altman’s claims, today, that OpenAI employees were obsessed with COVID weeks ahead of the rest of the world feels more than a little like Donald...
Om Malik:
“A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a
collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser.” — Vladimir Lenin
In 1902, Lenin argued that his revolution needed a newspaper of
its own, and that newspaper was...
Zed is a type system that was developed with one question in mind: what do readers actually need? Not what looks good in a type specimen, but what works for the widest possible range of readers. We tested Zed with visually impaired patients at a...
Samual Axon, reporting last week for Ars Technica:
Early this morning, Anthropic published version 2.1.88 of Claude
Code npm package — but it was quickly discovered that package
included a source map file, which could be used to access the
entirety...
Juli Clover, at MacRumors:
Apple has shared nine Little Finder Guy videos this week, and on
TikTok, the thumbnails for the videos come together to make a
Little Finder Guy mosaic on the Apple TikTok page.
I hope this doesn’t jinx the negotiations,...
Donald Trump, sitting president of the United States, on his blog:
Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in
one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’
Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in...
My thanks to Material Security for sponsoring this week at DF. Most security teams don’t have a talent problem, they have a noise problem. Manual phishing remediation, chasing risky OAuth permissions, and auditing file shares shouldn’t be a full-time...
Sponsorships have been selling briskly, of late. Knock on wood. As of yesterday, the next opening on the schedule wasn’t until the very end of July. However, due to some schedule rejiggering, next week is now open. After that, the next opening remains...
One more follow-up point after I spent two days using an iPhone 16 Pro running iOS 18.7.7 as my main phone. At some point late in the iOS 26 beta cycle last summer, it became obvious that Apple had sped up a bunch of system-level animations. Prime...
Ashley Belanger, reporting for Ars Technica:
Using developer tools, the lawsuit found that opening prompts are
always shared, as are any follow-up questions the search engine
asks that a user clicks on. Privacy concerns are seemingly worse
for...
Jason Snell:
Last December I complained that Apple was withholding iOS 18 security updates from iPhones capable of running iOS 26, leaving users who didn’t want to upgrade to Apple’s latest OS version yet in some security peril.
Well, I have good...
John Voorhees, at MacStories:
It’s a new month and you know what that means: time for a roundup of everything coming to Apple TV and Apple Arcade for April 2026.
What’s still not coming: Jessica Chastain’s political thriller The Savant, originally...
John Buck at The Verge (gift link), excerpted from his great book, Inventing the Future:
Steve Perlman: Almost everyone at Apple, and definitely
everywhere else, assumed that multimedia would always require
specialized hardware — and be expensive. A...
Great roundup of links from Stephen Hackett:
The crew is made up of Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina
Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
They are now on their way to the moon, set to return in 10 days.
Their rocket...
Katie Deighton, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (main link is a gift link; also on News+):
OpenAI bought TBPN to encourage constructive conversation around
the changes AI creates by helping the show grow, according to a
memo sent by Fidji Simo,...
StepSecurity:
If you have installed [email protected] or [email protected], assume your
system is compromised.
There are zero lines of malicious code inside axios itself, and
that’s exactly what makes this attack so dangerous. Both poisoned
releases inject a...
Back in March 1991, Saturday Night Live ran what I consider the best Apple parody ad ever made: “McIntosh Jr.” Siracusa and I talked about it on The Talk Show this week, celebrating Apple’s 50th anniversary, so I looked it up for the show notes. Alas,...
Jason Snell, writing at Macworld, regarding joining the staff at MacUser back in 1993:
But as amazing and revelatory as the Mac was for me as a writer
and editor of print and online publications, I rapidly discovered
that the Apple of the period was...
60 Minutes published a short clip of a 2003 Dan Rather interview with Steve Jobs, and it’s a good one. Seems apt both regarding Apple’s continued success after Jobs’s death, and a refutation of the personality cult in The White House.
★
David Pogue, on his new blog at Substack:
When the iPhone was about to go on sale in 2007, a thousand people
lined up around the block at New York City’s Apple Store.
I’d written a parody of “My Way,” with the crazy idea of filming a
music video with...
The New York Times (gift link):
Critics warn it still has many issues — its portico is too big,
its stairs lead nowhere, its columns will block views from inside
the ballroom.
And that’s just the portico.
This is a really good piece, with...
Kalley Huang, writing for The New York Times (gift link):
As that happened, Apple laid off staff “again and again and
again,” Mr. Espinosa said. His manager told him that he had been
spared because he had worked for the company for so long that...
Who better to join the show to commemorate Apple’s 50th anniversary than John Siracusa?
Sponsored by:
Sentry: A real-time error monitoring and tracing platform. Use code TALKSHOW for $80 in free credits.
Notion: The AI workspace where teams and AI...
Lex Friedman (with an embedded video to prove it):
If you reverse the new Apple video that plays in “rewind,” it’s
the Think Different ad music, pitched up.
Of course it is.
And, regarding that “◀︎◀︎ REW” button where the “REW” was set in bitmapped...
By far the dumbest Internet Jackass Day “joke” I’ve seen so far is this one from the official New Jersey state account on Twitter/X, claiming that effective immediately, they’re lifting the statewide ban on self-service gasoline. For those of you...
Ryan D’Agostino, writing at Esquire (News+ link, in case Esquire stiffs you with their paywall):
Cook was at Jobs’s house the day he died. As he drove back to the
office to announce it to the employees and, in so doing, to the
world, he felt a...
Jacob Krol, writing at TechRadar:
To understand exactly what that means five years on, TechRadar sat
down with Apple VP of Platform Architecture Tim Millet and
Director of Audio Product Marketing Eric Treski to unpack how
AirPods Max 2 is finally...
The AP:
Hershey said Wednesday it will use classic recipes for all Reese’s
products starting next year, a change that comes after the
grandson of Reese’s founder criticized the company for
shifting to cheaper ingredients.
Running to the press never...
The Apple.com homepage has a nice little animation showing sketches of the company’s most iconic products. The video file itself is hosted here, but I’m not sure how permanent that link is.
Tim Cook posted a different video on Twitter/X, a VHS-style...
Grace Kay, Ashley Stewart, and Pranav Dixit, writing for Business Insider (News+):
“Part of bringing me on, and giving me the responsibilities of a
CEO, was to make sure that I could really run that part of the
company with autonomy,” Simo, whose...
Hana Kiros, writing for The Atlantic:
Recently, a Costco in Florida instituted a new store policy. An
employee told me that he was asked to open up every desktop
computer displayed in the electronics section and remove the
memory chips. Otherwise,...
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, during an on-stage interview at The Hill & Valley Forum last week, was asked “What do you see as America’s unique advantages that other countries don’t have?”
His answer, after taking a moment to think, “America’s unique...
The White House:
The Council will be co-chaired by David Sacks and Michael
Kratsios. The following individuals have been appointed:
Marc Andreessen
Sergey Brin
Safra Catz
Michael Dell
Jacob DeWitte
Fred Ehrsam
Larry Ellison
David Friedberg...
Stop scaling headcount. Scale your workspace.
Most security teams don’t have a talent problem, they have a noise problem. Manual phishing remediation, chasing risky OAuth permissions, and auditing file shares shouldn’t be a full-time job.
Material...
Safari is no longer breaking my menu-item-icon despising heart on MacOS 26 Tahoe, but the best trick to block the Tahoe “upgrade” notice on MacOS 15 Sequoia no longer works.
If this worked to hide *all* of these cursed little turds smeared across the menu bar items of Apple’s system apps in Tahoe, this hidden preference would be a proverbial pitcher of ice water in hell. As it stands, alas, it’s more like half a glass of...
When something in your workflow is bugging you, you should figure out a way to address it. Why I didn’t write (and share) this script years ago is a mystery for the ages.