Sam Roberts, reporting for The New York Times:

David Lerner, a high school dropout and self-taught computer geek whose funky foothold in New York’s Flatiron district, Tekserve, was for decades a beloved discount mecca for Apple customers desperate to retrieve lost data and repair frozen hard drives, died on Nov. 12 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 72. [...]

Tekserve specialized in finding the cures for sick computers — including insect infestations — and recovering first novels and other priceless data, which the company said it was able to do about 85 percent of the time.

“We only charged for success,” Mr. Lerner said.

There were many great independent Apple resellers from the pre-Apple-Store era. There was only one that was legendary: Tekserve.

Link: nytimes.com/2025/11/26/technology/personaltech/david-lerner…

Regarding my earlier post on similarities between the 2010 App Store Guidelines and today’s: Notably absent from the current guidelines (I think for a very long time) is the specious but very Jobsian claim that “If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps.” Getting the press on your side is one of the best ways for a developer to get an unjust App Store review decision overturned. Apple loathes negative publicity.

Link: daringfireball.net/linked/2025/11/26/november-update-to-the…

Here’s the updated full guideline for section 4.1: 4.1 Copycats (a) Come up with your own ideas. We know you have them, so make yours come to life. Don’t simply copy the latest popular app on the App Store, or make some minor changes to another app’s name or...

Meet our new Holiday Gift Bundles, curated sets of our most loved coffees designed for effortless gifting.

Nine single origins. Six signature blends. Four Mizudashi cold brews. All micro-lot and top-rated coffees shipped within 24 hours of roasting. No shortcuts. No crash. This is coffee at its most refined, just without the caffeine.

DF readers get 20% off with code DF at dekaf.com/s/df.

We’re betting you’ll never look at decaf the same way again. But that’s kind of the point.

Link: dekaf.com/s/df

Dave Winer:

The new Amazon Alexa with AI has the same basic problem of all AI bots, it acts as if it’s human, with a level of intimacy that you really don’t want to think about, because Alexa is in your house, with you, listening, all the time. Calling attention to an idea that there’s a pseudo-human spying on you is bad. Alexa depends on the opposite impression, that it’s just a computer. I think AI’s should give up the pretense that they’re human, and this one should be first.

Amen.

Link: scripting.com/2025/11/20.html#a143930

Charlie Warzel, writing for The Atlantic: X’s decision to show where accounts are based is, theoretically, a positive step in the direction of transparency for the platform, which has let troll and spam accounts proliferate since Musk’s purchase, in late 2022. And yet th...

The New York Times: Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation, began a new campaign on Wednesday that he called “The Golden Age of Travel Starts With You,” complete with a 1960s-style public service announcement that spliced together scenes of the country’s first air t...

Dave Nanian and Bruce Lacey, at Shirt Pocket:

Mistakes are a part of life.

They’re not a great part, but when viewed “correctly”, they’re an opportunity.

Well, we have three opportunities, brought to our attention by a security researcher. They’re security vulnerabilities that have been in SuperDuper! since the very first version, released almost 22 years ago.

Today, we’re releasing fixes for the current release (the SuperDuper! v3.20 Beta is already fixed), a discussion of the problems, and the steps users can take to mitigate the issues if they cannot install the update.

We don’t know of any bad actors making use of these exploits as of this post.

Another good postmortem, with technical details and an apology.

Link: shirt-pocket.com/blog/index.php/shadedgrey/comments…

There have been several new features that have been delayed in the EU while Apple tried to make them compliant with the DMA. iPhone Mirroring debuted over a year ago with iOS 18 and MacOS 15 Sequoia, but still remains unavailable today in the EU. Apple Intelligence was delay...

My thanks to Clerk for sponsoring last week at DF. Clerk makes authentication for iOS apps effortless — just drop in pre-built SwiftUI components for sign-in, MFA, and profile management. Fully customizable, always in sync with Apple’s design system, and packed with features developers love: social sign-in, user roles, and organization management.

Launch faster, stay secure, and scale confidently, whether you’re building the next big thing or a startup MVP. See how Clerk makes complete user management easy for modern iOS teams.

Link: go.clerk.com/QO9JV9f

For your weekend listening enjoyment: a new episode of America’s favorite 3-star podcast, with special guest Stephen Robles. Topics include indie media and YouTube, Shortcuts and automation, and the state of podcasting.

Sponsored by:

• Uncommon Goods: Out of the ordinary gifts, great for the holidays. Save 15% off your next purchase after following that link.

Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2025/11/21/ep-435

Luke Igel and Riley Walz made a phony Gmail interface that, rather than showing you your email, shows you Jeffrey Epstein’s emails:

You’re logged in as Jeffrey Epstein. We compiled these Epstein estate emails from the House Oversight release by converting the PDFs to structured text with an LLM.

Brilliant.

Link: jmail.world/

Apple Store: The Hikawa Phone Grip & Stand is a MagSafe compatible adaptive accessory for iPhone designed by Bailey Hikawa to celebrate the 40th anniversary of accessibility at Apple. Designed with direct input from individuals with disabilities affecting muscle stre...

Adi Robertson, The Verge:

As a number of people have pointed out on social media over the past day, Grok’s public-facing chatbot is currently prone to insisting on Musk’s prowess at absolutely anything, no matter how unlikely — or conversely, embarrassing — a given feat is.

Grok claims Musk is fitter than LeBron James, funnier than Jerry Seinfeld, and would likely figure out a way to resurrect himself from the dead faster than Jesus.

But it’s a trustworthy source to author an encyclopedia, sure.

Link: theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/825675/groks-elon…

“Carol Sturka”, actress Rhea Seehorn’s fictional protagonist of the new Apple TV series Pluribus, is on Reddit right now — at 12n ET / 9am PT — doing an AMA in character. Sturka is a fantasy novelist, and Apple Books has an 11-page excerpt of her “new” novel Bloodsong of Wycaro. Unclear whether it’s Seehorn writing the in-character responses, but it’s definitely Seehorn in the confirmation photo. Reminiscent of some of the promotional fun Apple has had for Severance.

Both my wife and I are loving Pluribus so far. I highly recommend watching the first episode without even knowing the premise, if you can.

Link: reddit.com/r/tvPlus/comments/1p1lnf4/im_carol_sturka_author…

OpenAI:

Early feedback from the pilot has been positive, so we’re expanding group chats to all logged-in users on ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus and Pro plans globally over the coming days. We will continue refining the experience as more people start using it.

That didn’t take long — the initial rollout limited to Japan, New Zealand, Korea, and Taiwan started just three days ago.

Link: openai.com/index/group-chats-in-chatgpt/

The Steve Jobs Archive: To mark Toy Story’s 30th anniversary, we’re sharing a never-before-seen interview with Steve from November 22, 1996 — exactly one year after the film debuted in theaters. Toy Story was the world’s first entirely computer-animated feature-length f...

Anthony Castrovince, reporting for MLB.com on the new broadcast rights agreement that will cover the next three seasons of baseball: Sunday Night Baseball will shift from ESPN, where it aired since 1990, to NBCUniversal, which also secured the rights to Sunday Leadoff an...

Miguel Arroz, on Mastodon: Unpopular opinion, apparently: companies like Cloudflare and Amazon provide very high quality services people and enterprises actually need, with a level of uptime and security vastly superior to what most of their customers would achieve on th...

Apple Newsroom:

Finalists in the Mac App of the Year category provided users with powerful tools to confidently take on new projects:

• Acorn, for being the go-to tool for pro-level photo edits.
• Essayist, for taking the stress out of sourcing and formatting academic papers.
• Under My Roof, for keeping homeowners organized and prepared.

Nice to see Flying Meat’s Acorn — one of my own favorite and most-used apps since 2007, before it even shipped — getting this sort of recognition from Apple. Back in June, Apple featured Acorn in the WWDC keynote, during the preview of Liquid Glass.

Link: apple.com/newsroom/2025/11/apple-announces-finalists-for…

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince: The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind. Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database systems’ permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries in...

The New York Times: The world’s richest man. One of the world’s most famous soccer players. The president of soccer’s governing body. Dozens of executives from the finance, tech and energy sectors. These are some of the guests who attended President Trump’s black-tie din...

Special guest Dan Frommer returns to the show. Topics include the indie media business, the iPhone Pocket, the iPhone Air (including rumors about the second generation model), AI “personalities”, and five years of Apple Silicon Macs. Also, six years of Dan’s site, The New Consumer.

Sponsored by:

• Factor: Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off your first box, plus free breakfast for 1 year, with code talkshow50off.
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Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2025/11/18/ep-434

Jonathan V. Last, writing for The Bulwark: The president of the United States gave a speech yesterday before a group of McDonald’s corporate workers and franchise owners. I’m going to quote a few sections of his remarks at great length, because if you have not listened t...

President Donald Trump, today in the Oval Office alongside his “very good friend” Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, after ABC News reporter Mary Bruce had the temerity to pose a question regarding Mohammed having ordered the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist J...

Mark Gurman, in his (paywalled, alas) Power On column for Bloomberg over the weekend: The next major update didn’t arrive until 2023, when Apple finally transitioned the desktop to in-house chips with the M2 Ultra Mac Pro. Two years later, that model remains largely unch...

Cloudflare suffered an hours-long global outage, starting around 12pm UTC / 7am ET, which brought down an enormous chunk of the Internet. This included, humorously, Down Detector. It also included (not so humorously to me) Daring Fireball, which has been routed through Cloudflare since 2018. My apologies if you tried to reach the site while it was down. (DF was back up by the time I woke up this morning.) As of this writing, Cloudflare still hasn’t determined exactly what happened, but they’ve been updating their status report for the incident a few times per hour. The most recent update:

We continue to monitor the system through recovery and we are seeing errors and latency return to normal levels. A full post-incident investigation and details about the incident will be made available asap.

Link: theguardian.com/technology/live/2025/nov/18/cloudflare-down…

London Centric: Sam was walking past a Royal Mail depot in south London in January when his path was blocked by a group of eight men. “I tried to move to let them pass, but the last guy blocked the path,” the 32-year-old told London Centric. “They started pushing me and...

Apple Newsroom, last week: Apple today announced the launch of Digital ID, a new way for users to create an ID in Apple Wallet using information from their U.S. passport, and present it with the security and privacy of iPhone or Apple Watch. At launch, Digital ID accepta...

Ryan Christoffel, reporting for 9to5Mac a month ago:

Meta has published a support doc that states its Messenger app for Mac is being discontinued. New users won’t be able to download the app at all, and existing users have about 60 more days of use before it stops working altogether. Why the change? Unfortunately, no reason has been given. But users are being pushed to the Facebook website for all their Messenger needs instead.

There’s a nearly identical support document for the native Messenger app for Windows too. They’re not even replacing them with web-app wrappers, like they just did with the Windows WhatsApp client. Just telling users to use the website.

Link: 9to5mac.com/2025/10/16/meta-is-killing-off-messengers-mac…