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Michael Tsai

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Michael Tsai
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Codex for Almost Everything

OpenAI (Hacker News): Codex can now operate your computer alongside you, work with more of the tools and apps you use everyday, generate images, remember your preferences, learn from previous actions, and take on ongoing and repeatable work. The Codex app also now includes deeper support for developer workflows, like reviewing PRs, viewing multiple files […]

Michael Tsai
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Perplexity Personal Computer

Perplexity: Personal Computer brings the multi-model orchestration of Computer to your machine. It can work across your local files, native applications, connectors, and the web to complete complex and even continuous workflows. Personal Computer makes Perplexity Computer a more personal orchestrator, elegantly hybridizing the local and server environments for maximum security and productivity. Juli Clover: […]

Michael Tsai
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Xcode 26.4.1

Apple (xip, downloads): Fixed crash for MetricKit apps built with Xcode 26.4 due to missing symbols when running on iOS, macOS, and visionOS versions below 26.4. […] Fixed stack-allocation bugs in async functions that caused “freed pointer was not the last allocation” crashes, particularly in swift_asyncLet_finish. These long-standing issues became more frequent in Swift 6.2 […]

Michael Tsai
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Gemini App for Mac

Michael Friedman (via Abner Li): Today, we’re bringing the Gemini app to macOS as a native desktop experience, designed to live right where you work. It’s always just a keyboard shortcut away, so you can quickly get the help you need without losing your focus. […] With our new native desktop experience, you can share […]

Michael Tsai
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The App Store Scammer Strikes Back

Jeff Johnson: First, Virus Protection for Phone is back in the App Store! The App Store URL is the same, and the developer is the same, Virtual Advisors Limited. The app version history shows a large gap, with version 1.8 released in February 2025, before my blog post, and version 1.9 released just a few […]

Michael Tsai
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macOS Post–MacBook Neo

Nicolas Magand: I wonder what will happen with millions of extra Mac users. Will the Neo help the Mac become a proper gaming platform? […] Will the popularity of the MacBook Neo be an opportunity for Apple to mobilise more third-party developers to build apps for MacOS, now that the potential user base can be […]

Michael Tsai
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Dictating Literal Reminders to My Apple Watch

Reading about the Pebble Index motivated to keep looking for a better way to dictate reminders using my Apple Watch. Ideally, I would press a button, immediately begin speaking, and the literal text of what I said would appear in OmniFocus. This should work when offline. My watch doesn’t have an action button, so the […]

Michael Tsai
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iPadOS Post–MacBook Neo

Matt Birchler (pre-Neo): I think Apple is going to discontinue iPadOS. I know, I know, it’s a big swing, but put the pitchforks away and hear me out. iPadOS, as it exists now, is being stretched too thin. The idea of having one operating system, with the same features, that spans from a small, 8" […]

Michael Tsai
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An Ultralight MacBook and Other Apple Silicon Roads Not Taken

John Gruber: If I had my druthers, Apple would make a new svelte ultralight MacBook. Not instead of the Neo, but in addition to the Neo. Apple’s inconsistent use of the name “Air” makes this complicated, but the MacBook Neo is obviously akin to the iPhone 17e; the MacBook Air is akin to the iPhone […]

Michael Tsai
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Modern FatBits Mode

Marcin Wichary: Go to Settings > Accessibility > Zoom, and then turn on “Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom.” […] I’d also recommend turning off “Smooth images” under “Advanced…” so you see individual pixels better[…] Over the years, I found this feature very useful to inspect various misalignments, to check visual details, and […]

Michael Tsai
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Only Time Will Tell

Marcin Wichary: Why is there a short wait if you press a button on your headphone remote or your AirPods to pause the music? Because the interface has to let a bit of time pass to figure out if you’re going to press the button again, making it a double press (advance to next track) […]

Michael Tsai
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SpamSieve 3.3

SpamSieve 3.3 is an update of my Mac e-mail spam filter that includes lots of changes to improve the filtering accuracy: Much of this is automatic: SpamSieve is better at analyzing the message structure, HTML, and URLs within messages. The other part is helping customers help themselves. If SpamSieve is continually letting spam messages through, […]

Michael Tsai
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Artemis II Desktop Pictures

Nick Heer: NASA has put a few hundred photos on Flickr with some awesome views — and I must emphasize how the word “awesome” undersells these images. I am using this one as the wallpaper on my iMac right now, and it feels like a pretty good use of a big, high-resolution display. Previously: Default […]

Michael Tsai
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Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer

Logan Kugler (via Hacker News): To ensure those wrong answers never reach the spacecraft’s thrusters, NASA moved beyond the triple redundancy of traditional systems. Orion utilizes two Vehicle Management Computers, each containing two Flight Control Modules, for a total of four FCMs. But the redundancy goes even deeper: each FCM consists of a self-checking pair […]

Michael Tsai
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Privacy & Security Settings Don’t Show Intent-Based Access

Howard Oakley (Hacker News): Thus, access to a protected folder by user intent, such as through the Open and Save Panel, changes the sandboxing applied to the caller by removing its constraint to that specific protected folder. As the sandboxing isn’t controlled by or reflected in Privacy & Security settings, that allows TCC, in Files […]

Michael Tsai
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Notifications Privacy

Joseph Cox: The FBI was able to forensically extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone, even after the app was deleted, because copies of the content were saved in the device’s push notification database, multiple people present for FBI testimony in a recent trial told 404 Media. Rosyna Keller: Push Notifications can […]

Michael Tsai
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Mythos and Glasswing

Rich Mogull: Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI chatbot, made two security announcements that were shocking for many but seen as inevitable by those of us working in AI security. First, it announced Mythos Preview, a new, non-public AI model that turns out to be startlingly good at finding security flaws in software. The […]

Michael Tsai
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macOS 26.4.1

Juli Clover (no release notes, no security, enterprise, no developer, full installer, IPSW): macOS Tahoe 26.4.1 addresses an issue that could cause the M5 MacBook Air and M5 Pro/Max MacBook Pro models to fail to join 802.1X Wi-Fi networks when using content filter extensions. See also Mr. Macintosh and Howard Oakley. Previously: macOS 26.4 MacBook […]

Michael Tsai
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iOS 26.4.1 and iPadOS 26.4.1

Juli Clover (iOS/iPadOS release notes, no security, enterprise, no developer): According to Apple’s release notes, the software updates contain unspecified “bug fixes.” Benjamin Mayo: While the official release notes were vague, a thread on the developer forums indicates it actually fixes a significant bug related to iCloud data syncing. Developers had noticed that iPhones running […]

Michael Tsai
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ClickFix Now Uses Script Editor Instead of Terminal

Thijs Xhaflaire (via Andrew Orr): Unlike traditional ClickFix campaigns that instruct users to paste commands directly into Terminal, the discovered variant uses a browser-triggered workflow to launch Script Editor. […] The page leverages an applescript:// URL scheme Clicking the “Execute” button invokes this URL scheme from the browser The browser prompts the user to allow […]

Michael Tsai
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Adobe Modifies Your Hosts File for Their Analytics

Thom Holwerda (via Hacker News): If you’re using Windows or macOS and have Adobe Creative Cloud installed, you may want to take a peek at your hosts file. It turns out Adobe adds a bunch of entries into the hosts file, for a very stupid reason. […] If the DNS entry in your hosts file […]

Michael Tsai
Text • Michael Tsai

Apple Scraping YouTube for AI Training Data

Joe Rossignol: Three established YouTube channels have sued Apple, alleging that the company violated the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by unlawfully accessing and scraping millions of copyrighted videos from YouTube to train its AI models. […] Apple “deliberately circumvented” YouTube’s protections against video scraping and “profited substantially” by doing so. Apple’s research papers […]

Michael Tsai
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Perplexity Privacy Lawsuit

Ashley Belanger (via John Gruber): Perplexity’s AI search engine encourages users to go deeper with their prompts by engaging in chat sessions that a lawsuit has alleged are often shared in their entirety with Google and Meta without users’ knowledge or consent. “This happened to every user regardless of whether or not they signed up […]

Michael Tsai
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Apple Granted Stay Over External Purchase Fee

Sarah Perez: Apple is preparing to take its App Store fight with Epic Games back to the Supreme Court. In a new filing, the iPhone maker said it plans to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review another aspect of this long-running case over App Store fees. In the meantime, Apple sought to pause the […]

Michael Tsai
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Dynamic Notarization Checks?

Tyler Hall: I submitted a new build of one of my Mac apps to Apple’s Notary service - like every new release. Normally, the notarization goes through in just a few minutes. Today, multiple builds have been pending for 2+ hours. And, weirdly, my API server is getting traffic from those two builds I submitted […]

Michael Tsai
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Tahoe TCP Overflow Bug

Photon (Hacker News): After exactly 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47 seconds of continuous uptime, a 32-bit unsigned integer overflow in Apple’s XNU kernel freezes the internal TCP timestamp clock. Once frozen, TIME_WAIT connections never expire, ephemeral ports slowly exhaust, and eventually no new TCP connections can be established at all. ICMP (ping) […]

Michael Tsai
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Challenges With Ancient Dates in Apple SDKs

Aaron Trickey: Foundation’s date-handling code has an effective lower bound around January 1, 4713 BC on the Julian calendar. You can create a Date value representing an instant in time below that limit, but many Calendar methods will return unexpected values when you try to do anything with it. […] And NSDatePicker does okay with […]

Michael Tsai
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John Martellaro, RIP

Bryan Chaffin: He rose to the rank of Captain in the U.S. Air Force, and he was a NASA scientist. He worked for years at Apple, and most importantly to me, he was a columnist and the voice of reason and humanity at The Mac Observer. He wrote SciFi and a variety of tech columns […]

Michael Tsai
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Phantom App Updates, Part 3

digidude23: Is Apple creating updates for 3rd party apps now? This update from Apple will improve the functionality of this app. No new features are included. iSan4eZ: Apple inserted this text into my app and issued an update with the same version. I’m sure about it as I update the app on my phone as […]

Michael Tsai
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Notes From Setting Up New Apple Devices

This weekend, I helped my non-techie father migrate to a new iPhone 17e and MacBook Air: Device Transfer initially couldn’t find the old iPhone SE. It turns out that years ago he’d read some article that said Bluetooth was unsafe and so he’d turned it off. The setup assistant repeated the new age verification question […]