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Text • John Gruber

Mark Carney on the U.S. Under Trump: ‘Sometimes, Its Signature Is Written in Pencil’

nytimes.com/2026/08/22/world/canada/carney-tariffs-trade-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7VA.r3Ue.GTc_tOhX0qSn

Ian Austen, reporting for The New York Times (gift link): The morning after he pulled negotiators from trade talks in Washington and set off a new round of American tariffs, Prime Minister Mark Carney on Saturday explained to Canadians why he walked away, calling the U.S...

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WorkOS: Agents Can Now Sign Up for Your App

workos.com/auth-md?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=q32026

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring the Daring Fireball weekly newsletter this week to promote their Agent Registration. Agents are hitting your signup flow and they’re bouncing off a browser login that was designed for humans. Every one that gives up is a signup you never see.

WorkOS Agent Registration turns that traffic into signups. Enroll via the dashboard and AuthKit publishes an auth.md file that agents read to register for scoped, short-lived credentials you control.

Make your app agent-ready today.

Link: workos.com/auth-md?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium…

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Dutch Regulator Fines Uber $1 Billion for Suspending Dishonest Drivers

reuters.com/world/dutch-regulator-fines-uber-966-million-automating-driver-suspensions-document-2026-08-21/

Toby Sterling, reporting for Reuters: The Dutch Data Protection Authority has fined Uber €825 million ($966 million) for deactivating driver accounts through automated systems without adequately informing them, according to an August 17 decision reviewed by Reuters. The...

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The Fourth Horseman of the File-Format-Hegemony Apocalypse

techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/onedriveblog/introducing-markdown-support-in-sharepoint-and-onedrive/4512174

Microsoft’s iPhone app for OneDrive has long supported creating three new document types via a big “+” button right in its file viewer: Excel, Word, PowerPoint. It recently came to my attention that they’ve added a fourth document type, and they even gave it real Microsoft-style “they just have no taste” file icon. Just look at it. The whole world’s coming to an end, Mallory.

Link: techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/onedriveblog/introducing…

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Walmart Finally Caves, Will Soon Support Apple Pay

corporate.walmart.com/news/2026/08/21/more-ways-to-pay-tap-to-pay-is-coming-to-walmart-and-sams-club

Walmart:

When we think about convenience, we think about a lot of things, but making shopping feel simpler and more seamless from start to finish is a big part. And one of the moments where that matters most is at checkout.

We want customers and members to have choice in how they pay, so they can check out in the way that works best for them. Now, beginning Aug. 24, we will be adding Tap to Pay to our payment options at select Walmart stores and Sam’s Club locations, with plans to roll it out to all U.S. stores and clubs by the end of 2026 and to fuel stations by mid-2027.

When I think about convenience, I think about CurrentC, scanning stupid-ass QR codes, and waiting 12 years to adopt Apple Pay.

Link: corporate.walmart.com/news/2026/08/21/more-ways-to-pay-tap…

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★ When New DF Posts Drop in a Forest and No One Is There to Read Them

It occurred to me last night that I’d gotten less feedback regarding recent posts than usual. There were a few items I’d posted in recent days that I felt sure to hear from readers about, both yea and nay. But: nothing. Crickets chirping. I almost always hear from squeaky wh...

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Bluesky’s Active User Base Is Shrinking, and Remains Tiny Compared to Threads and Twitter/X

techcrunch.com/2026/08/11/blueskys-active-user-base-is-shrinking-as-its-focus-expands-beyond-the-app/

Sarah Perez, writing at TechCrunch last week: Decentralized social network Bluesky was one of the bigger beneficiaries of the exodus from Elon Musk’s X in November 2024, following the U.S. elections. But now, nearly two years later, the social network and would-be X comp...

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Text • John Gruber

Bluesky Is Full of Anti-AI Zealots

bsky.app/profile/masnick.com/post/3mtk7cuvbok2x

Mike Masnick, in a thread on Bluesky: Multiple people I know have told me that they love the idea of Bluesky, and want it to succeed, but have abandoned it for X because they use agentic tools in their work and find them incredibly useful, and feel that any mention of th...

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How Bluesky and Threads Sneak Their Logos Into iOS Screenshots

timmarinin.net/2026/bluesky-screenshots/

Bluesky and Threads both pull the same trick: When you take a screenshot on iOS of an individual tweet, they replace the “Follow” button in their user interface with their logo. Tim Marinin noticed this in the Bluesky app, got curious, and because they publish the app’s sour...

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Text • John Gruber

★ Apple and European Commission Reach Agreement on App Payment Terms Under DMA, With Apple Conceding Very Little

Apple Newsroom, on Tuesday: Apple today announced changes to its business terms for apps in the European Union, following close collaboration with the European Commission. These changes resolve Apple’s disagreements with the Commission over business terms and alternative...

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Gurman Says No Camera-Equipped AirPods Until 2027

bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-19/apple-s-camera-equipped-ai-airpods-remain-on-track-for-2027-despite-video-leak

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Earlier this week, a developer version of a Mac computer software update accidentally included references to several upcoming Apple products, including a video of the AirPods with cameras in action. [...]

But the product challenges are still being resolved, and the camera AirPods remain off the company’s 2026 release schedule. Apple continues to believe the earbuds will launch in 2027, said the people, who asked not to be identified when discussing unannounced products.

If true, it makes that video even stranger. If not, we can file this along the flat-sided Series 7 Apple Watch.

Link: bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-19/apple-s-camera…

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★ Apple Screwed Up the TestFlight App’s Sort Order a Month Ago, and It’s Still Screwed Up, but the More I Think About It, the More Clear It Is They Started Screwing This Up 15 Years Ago

Zac Hall at 9to5Mac, a month ago: Sometimes a small change can make a big impact. That’s especially true for Apple’s latest TestFlight update for users with a lot of pre-release software. Apple just updated TestFlight for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and more. The new version, 4....

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NBC News Strikes Ad Sales Deal With Taboola for Programmatic Display Ads

axios.com/2026/08/18/nbc-news-taboola-programmatic-display-ads

Sara Fischer, Axios:

Ad tech giant Taboola has struck a deal with NBC News to exclusively power all of its programmatic, or automated, display advertising sales, CEO Adam Singolda tells Axios.

Worked out great for Apple with Apple News. They struck a deal with Taboola two years ago and the ads in Apple News today are super premium and something the company can be really proud of.

Link: axios.com/2026/08/18/nbc-news-taboola-programmatic-display…

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[Sponsor] WorkOS: Agents Can Now Sign Up for Your App

workos.com/auth-md?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=q32026

Agents are hitting your signup flow and bouncing off a browser login built for humans. Every one that gives up is a signup you never see.

WorkOS Agent Registration turns that traffic into signups. Enroll via the dashboard and AuthKit publishes an auth.md file agents read to register for scoped, short-lived credentials you control.

Make your app agent-ready →

Link: workos.com/auth-md?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium…

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Text • John Gruber

Disney’s ABC Sues Trump’s FCC Over Challenge to Its Broadcast License

wsj.com/business/media/disneys-abc-sues-fcc-over-challenge-to-its-broadcast-licenses-64e8f794?st=XTL4tA

Joe Flint, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): Walt Disney’s ABC has sued the Federal Communications Commission alleging the agency’s efforts to challenge its broadcast licenses and regulate its talk show “The View” are illegal and an effort to quash speec...

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Apple Gives Legal Middle Finger to DOJ Challenge on Apple’s July Discovery Win

9to5mac.com/2026/08/17/apple-dojs-latest-challenge-in-antitrust-case-fails-at-every-level/

Marcus Mendes at 9to5Mac has a fun update on U.S. v. Apple, the ill-considered antitrust case started by the Biden administration. A bunch of what the DOJ argues are anticompetitive features in Apple’s platforms, Apple argues are in fact privacy and security related. Back i...

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Organized Thieves Are Targeting AI Server Chips With Violent Highway Hijackings

wired.com/story/the-worst-ive-ever-seen-cargo-thieves-are-turning-violent-in-pursuit-of-ai-hardware/

Paresh Dave and Aarian Marshall, reporting for Wired (News+ link in case Wired hits you with their paywall): The incidents involved two different shipments of high-value technology traveling from Silicon Valley to Southern California, according to Pachuca, who says he le...

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‘Dickover’ Makes It Into The Guardian

theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/18/dickovers-baggravation-botiquette-18-new-words-tech-hellscape

Stuart Heritage, writing for The Guardian, under the splendid headline “Dickovers, Baggravation and Botiquette: 18 New Words to Describe Our Tech Hellscape”: The “dickover” is the scourge of the modern age. Coined in May by John Gruber, a tech writer, it is defined as “a...

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OpenAI Pot Complains That Google Kettle Is Black

x.com/thsottiaux/status/2083373529081291076?s=12

Thibault Sottiaux, the OpenAI genius in charge of Codex and the new ChatGPT Homer Simpson car, on Twitter/X: I don’t come often to GMail [sic] (OpenAI is a Slack company), but I swear, every time I do open it, there is a new button somewhere around the top right corner. ...

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Nature Is Healing: MacOS 27 Golden Gate Beta 6 Adds Redesigned Traffic Light Window Controls

9to5mac.com/2026/08/17/macos-27-golden-gate-beta-6-features-redesigned-traffic-light-window-controls/

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

macOS 27 Golden Gate beta 6 introduces redesigned traffic light window controls. The new look resembles older Mac OS X systems with more detail in each button.

Nice. But these changes can’t improve fast enough for me — I am impatient. The MacOS user interface had been in a slow, steady, sad, no-fun decline for years, and then, a year ago, the bottom fell out with the disaster of 26 Tahoe.

But all the changes in 27 Golden Gate are in the right direction. Golden Gate is not a mixed bag. Designers with taste and talent are clearly back at the helm. And I love that they’re still pushing UI and icon changes in mid-August, entering the home stretch of the .0 beta cycle.

Link: 9to5mac.com/2026/08/17/macos-27-golden-gate-beta-6-features…

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MacOS 26.7 Tahoe Release Candidate Contains a Video Demonstrating Camera-Equipped AirPods in Action

macrumors.com/2026/08/17/camera-equipped-airpods-macos-26-7/

Oops.

Link: macrumors.com/2026/08/17/camera-equipped-airpods-macos-26-7…

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★ Follow-Up Thoughts on Watermarking Schemes for AI-Generated Text

Some follow-up to this weekend’s stemwinder “Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing”: Temperature Contra a bunch of idiots at Hacker News and elsewhere, I understand that popular LLMs do not just pick the “best” token (word) at each ...

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Text • John Gruber

Apple TV Still Has No Start Date for ‘The Savant’

daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/19/chastain-says-the-savant-will-be-released

The Savant is a political thriller series starring Jessica Chastain that was supposed to debut a year ago. Apple “postponed” it, apparently out of fear of upsetting extremist right-wing nut jobs because the show is about an undercover investigator (Chastain) hunting down ext...

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No Update Since Early July Regarding Siri AI Coming to the EU, Ever

ft.com/content/807d25c3-f4ac-4402-b815-3aa91018237d

The Financial Times, back on July 1, with the transcontinental byline “Michael Acton in San Francisco and Barbara Moens in Brussels” (non-paywalled summaries from 9to5Mac and MacRumors): Apple chief executive Tim Cook and EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen held “constructive”...

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★ Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing

When I wrote this week about Anthropic’s announcement that all Claude models, worldwide, would soon begin “watermarking” everything they generate, including text, to comply with this EU regulation, we were left to speculate how this was going to work, because Anthropic offer...

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The Information Profiles Cami Clark — Dario Amodei’s Wife, Ivanka Trump’s Friend, One-Time Would-Be Pornographer, and Anthropic’s ‘First Lady’

theinformation.com/articles/anthropics-first-lady-took-winding-road-top?rc=jfy0lk

Cory Weinberg, Jemima McEvoy, Jessica E. Lessin, and Stephanie Palazzolo, writing for the paywalled-without-gift-links The Information: As Amodei has hopscotched the globe to preach about the potential and risks of AI — from New Delhi to Davos to Sun Valley — Clark has a...

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‘Anthropic’s Weak Watermarks Appease a Weak Law’

blog.j11y.io/2026-08-12_Anthropics-weak-watermarks-appease-a-weak-law/

James Padolsey, on the Claude-text-watermarking-to-comply-with-an-EU-regulation imbroglio: The same thought that led to this law could have applied to calculators at the time of their inception, had their outputs revealed themselves through artefacts. Thankfully, a sum b...

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Trump Administration ‘Not in Favor’ of Apple Using Chinese RAM

wsj.com/tech/apple-china-memory-chip-plan-57773a83?st=vfe1SA

The Wall Street Journal (gift link): To help alleviate the supply crunch, Apple is looking to Chinese manufacturers. “The Trump administration is not in favor of that,” Lutnick said in an interview after touring an Apple manufacturing facility in Houston. There have to ...

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XCancel — An Unofficial Twitter/X Mirror

xcancel.com/about

XCancel: XCancel is an instance of Nitter. Nitter is a free and open source alternative Twitter front-end focused on privacy and performance. The source is available on GitHub at https://github.com/zedeus/nitter [...] Using an instance of Nitter (hosted on a VPS for ex...

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Drata

drata.com/daring

My thanks to Drata for sponsoring last week at DF. Their message is short and sweet: Leverage autonomous AI agents to automate compliance, manage internal and third-party risk, and continuously prove your security posture.

Link: drata.com/daring