Aditya Kalra and Munsif Vengattil, reporting for Reuters: Apple does not plan to comply with a mandate to preload its smartphones with a state-owned cyber safety app and will convey its concerns to New Delhi, three sources said, after the government’s move sparked survei...

Speaking of Apple executive HR news, in his Power On Bloomberg column last weekend, Mark Gurman pooh-poohed the Financial Times’s recent report that Tim Cook was likely to retire early next year (paywalled, alas, but summarized by MacRumors): In October, I wrote that the...

Does your app get fake signups, throwaway emails, or users abusing your free tier? Or worse, bot attacks and brute force attempts?

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A user-hostile “lose your phone, lose your account history” architecture may well be “secure” in a technical sense, but it’s the sort of brittleness that’s kept Signal from achieving more mainstream use.

Apple Newsroom, “John Giannandrea to Retire From Apple”: Apple today announced John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president for Machine Learning and AI Strategy, is stepping down from his position and will serve as an advisor to the company before retiring in the spri...

Special guest: Tyler Hayes. Topics include how to get a small phone today, which way foldables should fold, the state of Apple TV (including its new “sonic logo”), and some holiday gift gadget recommendations.

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Last year developer Simon Støvring launched a fun new app for the Mac called Festivitas, which let you decorate your menu bar and Dock with animated holiday lights and falling snow. This year he’s added an iOS version for iPhone and iPad that lets you create widgets to decorate your home screens with holidays lights and festive photo frames. Pure fun.

See also: Jason Snell on using Festivitas’s Shortcuts support to create an automation that gives a 10 percent chance of snow every 20 minutes. Støvring’s own Shortcuts examples (available in the app’s Settings window) include things like turning on the lights when music starts playing. With support for Shortcuts, users can create their own fun.

My thanks to Dekáf for sponsoring Daring Fireball this week. They’ve just launched a nice lineup of holiday gift bundles — curated sets of their most-loved coffees that make gift-buying easy.

Nine single origins. Six signature blends. Four Mizudashi cold brews. All micro-lot and top-rated coffees are shipped within 24 hours of roasting. No shortcuts. No crash. Dekáf is coffee at its most refined, just without the caffeine. I’ve gone through a few bags, and each one tasted great — like high quality regular coffee.

And, there’s a special offer just for DF readers: get 20% off with code DF.

Delightful, and there’s an equally delightful behind-the-scenes video.

A masterpiece from Randall Munroe, perfect for Thanksgiving.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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...

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.

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.

The bottom line is that users setting up new Apple Watches in the EU will now get a somewhat slightly worse experience in the name of parity with accessories made by third-party companies. It remains to be seen whether users of third-party iPhone accessories and peripherals in the EU will see any benefit at all.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.