Reuters: Italian tax authorities argue that free user registrations with X, LinkedIn and Meta platforms should be seen as taxable transactions as they imply the exchange of a membership account in return for a user’s personal data. The issue is especially sensitive give...

Ellen Nakashima, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Joseph Menn, reporting for The Washington Post: The U.S. government and partners in Canada and Australia are investigating the compromise of SharePoint servers, which provide a platform for sharing and managing documents. Tens ...

Brody Ford and Hannah Miller, reporting for Bloomberg:

Oracle Corp. is in discussions with Skydance Media LLC for a major software deal once the media company’s acquisition of Paramount Global is complete. The new arrangement is expected to be worth about $100 million per year, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named speaking about the private discussions. The agreement would see Paramount and its subsidiaries using Oracle’s cloud software, the people said.

Skydance was founded by David Ellison, the son of Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison.

Reminiscent of SpaceX’s $2 billion “investment” in xAI. (Via Peter Kafka.)

Link: bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-21/oracle-in-talks-for…

Mike Florio, NBC Sports: And while the Guardians stood up and responded to Trump, the Commanders are hiding under the bed. With the NFL right next to them. We’ve sent multiple emails to both the team and the league seeking comment on one of the biggest stories in all of...

Eliminate the friction of inbound security reviews. SafeBase helps you automate inbound requests, use AI to answer questionnaires, and share your security posture proactively — all through a centralized Trust Center.

Link: safebase.io/lp/why-safebase/?utm_source=daring_fireball&utm…

Letterman: “You can’t spell CBS without BS.”

Link: youtube.com/watch?v=7Rv36XkQojM

John Holmes for Human Rights Watch (via The Guardian): One woman described arriving at Krome — a facility that typically only holds men — late at night on January 28. Officers then confined her for days with dozens of other women without bedding or privacy, in a cell nor...

Reuters, with a headline that truly could have come from The Onion, “Trump Threatens Washington Stadium Deal Unless NFL Team Readopts Redskins Name”: U.S. President Donald Trump threatened on Sunday to interfere with a deal to build a new football stadium in Washington, ...

Cory Ondrejka joins in on the 40-year-old retro computing reminiscing: For being otherwise bright folks, it’s remarkable how completely wrong they all are. The Atari was the best computer to have. This whole friendly debate reminds me of the oft-cited adage that the be...

Joe Flint and John Jurgensen, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): But digital advertising revenue hasn’t made up for the fall in ad dollars going to traditional broadcast programming. Spending on linear advertising for the late-night segment on ABC, CBS an...

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF to promote their summer launch week. You may recall their previous launch week back in spring, when I emphasized that their launch week announcements were worth checking out just to admire the retro-modern design of the web page. Well, they’ve done it again, with all-new retro pixel-art design. It’s so fun and well done, with a bunch of UI elements that you can play with.

Amidst the fun of the presentation, they once again have a slew of great new features, including:

• Custom CSS for AuthKit.
• Feature Flags — “Assign flags, expose them in JWTs, and roll out features with targeted control.”
• Supabase Native Auth Integration.
• CLI Auth — “Log in from the command line with OAuth 2.0 device grant flow”.

Link: workos.com/launch-week/summer-2025

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF to promote their summer launch week. You may recall their previous launch week back in spring, when I emphasized that their launch week announcements were worth checking out just to admire the retro-modern design of the web page. Well, they’ve done it again, with all-new retro pixel-art design. It’s so fun and well done, with a bunch of UI elements that you can play with.

Amidst the fun of the presentation, they once again have a slew of great new features, including:

• Custom CSS for AuthKit.
• Feature Flags — “Assign flags, expose them in JWTs, and roll out features with targeted control.”
• Supabase Native Auth Integration.
• CLI Auth — “Log in from the command line with OAuth 2.0 device grant flow”.

Link: workos.com/launch-week/summer-2025

Matthew Belloni, writing at Puck (paywall-busting gift link) regarding the claim from anonymous CBS sources that The Late Show lost $40 million last year: Nobody can know for sure. All I can tell you is what I’m hearing. Several sources at both CBS and Skydance insist th...

Myke Hurley:

For this episode, I took a slightly different approach for the main section, following step-by-step how John writes and publishes an article. I think this is a template I want to follow with future guests, taking a detailed look at what they do from beginning to end.

I’m so pleased with how this interview turned out — I actually think it may be one of the best of my career. I’ve never had the chance to have a one-on-one podcast with John before, and I’m happy we waited until now to make it happen.

We spoke for a long time, and at some point like halfway through, it really hit me that Hurley was asking really good questions. If you’re interested in how I work and the tools I use, you should enjoy listening to this interview as much as I enjoyed participating in it.

Link: theenthusiast.net/john-gruber-state-of-the-workflow/

OpenAI: You can now ask ChatGPT to handle requests like “look at my calendar and brief me on upcoming client meetings based on recent news,” “plan and buy ingredients to make Japanese breakfast for four,” and “analyze three competitors and create a slide deck.” ChatGPT w...

Real athletes get 30 For 30 documentaries; fake athletes get fake ones. Not sure which are more enjoyable.

Link: youtube.com/shorts/L7NqTpnSQWo

Why CBS’s Cancellation of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” Stinks to High Hell Even back in the now-comparatively-sane Trump 1.0 administration, it seemed palpably true to me that the best check against Trump’s authoritarian instincts wasn’t legal or Constitutional, but...

Eric Slivka, reporting last night for MacRumors: While the Camera app redesign didn’t exactly match what Apple unveiled for iOS 26, the general idea was correct and much of what else Prosser showed was pretty close to spot on, and Apple clearly took notice as the company...

The above links to an Instagram reel with Colbert breaking the news at the start of his show airing tonight. Here’s the same clip on X, if you prefer. He, apparently, was as surprised as anyone. Here’s Jed Rosenzweig’s story at (the excellent) LateNighter: “The Late Sho...

Spencer Kimball, reporting for CNBC one week ago: The Defense Department will become the largest shareholder in rare earth miner MP Materials after agreeing to buy $400 million of its preferred stock, the company said Thursday. MP Materials owns the only operational rar...

Jason Snell: If you find yourself walking down the street in the 1980s and you see someone coming who prefers the VIC-20 to the Apple II, cross to the other side of the street. (That said, the VIC-20 really was revolutionary. It was by far the most affordable home comput...

Drew Saur, pushing back on my post slagging on the Commodore 64: I cannot argue with your nostalgia. It is uniquely yours. That said: The Commodore 64 as cheap-feeling and inelegant! Oh my. I was fourteen when the Commodore 64 came out, and I want to convey — in as bri...

With WorkOS you can start selling to enterprises with just a few lines of code. It provides a complete User Management solution along with SSO, SCIM, and FGA. The APIs are modular and easy-to-use, allowing integrations to be completed in minutes instead of months.

Today, some of the fastest growing startups are already powered by WorkOS, including Perplexity, Vercel, and Webflow.

For SaaS apps that care deeply about design and user experience, WorkOS is the perfect fit. From high-quality documentation to self-serve onboarding for your customers, it removes all the unnecessary complexity for your engineering team.

Check out our Summer Launch Week announcements to see our latest.

Link: workos.com/?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=RSS&utm…

David A. Graham, writing at The Atlantic: Not that long ago, believe it or not, Donald Trump ran for president as the candidate who would defend the First Amendment. He warned that a “sinister group of Deep State bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists,...

Nick Heer, Pixel Envy on the news that SpaceX “invested” $2 billion in the xAI money pit: This comes just a few months after xAI acquired X, one year after Musk shifted a bunch of Tesla-bound Nvidia GPUs to xAI, and just a few years after he used staff from Tesla to work...

Steve Berman, The Athletic: Lee Elia, who managed the Philadelphia Phillies and Chicago Cubs for two seasons apiece but is perhaps best known for a profane postgame rant critical of Chicago fans, died on Wednesday. He was 87. The Phillies announced his death in a stateme...

Jason Kottke:

Large media companies, and the NY Times in particular these days, like to use the phrase “experts said” instead of simply stating facts. The thing is, many other statements of plain truth in that brief Times post lack the confirmation of expertise. To aid the paper in steering their readers away from notions of objective truth, here’s a suggested rewrite of that Bluesky post.

Link: kottke.org/25/07/journalisms-experts-said-conclusion

Anthony Lane, in a crackerjack piece for The New Yorker on the writing and work of Elmore Leonard: So, when does Leonard become himself? Is it possible to specify the moment, or the season, when he crosses the border? I would nominate “The Big Bounce,” from 1969 — which,...

Last year, retro computing YouTuber Christian “Peri Fractic” Simpson bought licensed the branding rights and some of the IP belonging to Commodore (which rights have been transferred five times since the original company went bankrupt in 1994). Last week they launched their ...

Classic Web is a fun account to follow on Mastodon. Curator Richard MacManus posts half a dozen or so screenshots per day of, well, classic websites from the late 1990s and 2000s. Makes me feel old and young at the same time.

Link: indieweb.social/@classicweb