“boat-botany”: Old Reddit’s logged-out experience is a significant source of abusive scraping and automated traffic on the platform. It’s also an important interface for many long-time mods and redditors. To strike the right balance between preserving your access to Old Reddit while preventing abusive scraping and automated traffic, over the next month we will start […]⌥ Permalink

The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority: ‘Steering’ – the ability for developers to engage with customers about off‑platform options – is currently banned by Apple and restricted by Google in the UK. Lifting these constraints would allow developers to bypass mandatory fees set by platforms. The CMA’s consultation includes principles to ensure that the fees […]⌥ Permalink

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission: Between November 2023 and August 2025, Amazon AU’s Prime contracts with more than one million annual subscribers contained what the ACCC alleges were five unfair contract terms that allowed it to unilaterally make negative changes during the contract period without offering subscribers a remedy. It is also alleged that […]⌥ Permalink

Byron Kaye, Reuters: Australia’s prime minister vowed on Friday to bullet-proof laws supporting a social ​media ban for under-16s as the government prepares legal action against platforms amid a steady stream of evidence that the ban has had little impact on teen use. […] He did not give further details about what steps the government […]⌥ Permalink

Kyle Chayka, the New Yorker: As Claude Design catches on among Anthropic users, a generic-design aesthetic is emerging that’s as noticeable as text-based A.I. tics such as overenthusiastic em-dash usage or “not X … but Y” constructions. In slide decks and on website interfaces, there’s a predominance of beige- and cream-colored backgrounds, rusty orange-hued accents, […]⌥ Permalink

Josh Marinacci, building on top of my metaverse rundown: Let’s get to one of the big points of the article I started this rant with, that if VR couldn’t be popular during a global lockdown when everyone had lots of free time and was trapped inside, then it would never be popular. While that might […]⌥ Permalink

Terrence O’Brien, the Verge: But this isn’t some fluke, or temporary supply chain problem. Companies are choosing data center clients over ordinary buyers because “the same chip earns far more inside an AI server than inside a consumer device,” according to Srikanth Jagabathula, professor of technology, operations, and statistics at the NYU Stern School of […]⌥ Permalink

Max Read: But times change, and so too does a man’s fashion. Zuck still shows up in photos in his boxy heavyweight tees, but he’s begun to rotate in—and even favor—soft, textured, lifelessly tasteful polos like the heather gray number above, or the long-sleeve taupe Prada joint he wore buttoned to the top at the […]⌥ Permalink

Jason Snell, Macworld: A new pivot point for Apple? Seems like a good time for a new pivot for me, too. This year has been full of milestones for me, from appearing on “Jeopardy!” to reviewing David Pogue’s book about Apple for The Wall Street Journal, to crowdfunding a new podcast about Apple history. Along […]⌥ Permalink

Jeff Carlson, CNet: Apple’s Certified Refurbished store has been a sanctuary for people who balk at the prices of new Apple products, but it provided little shelter from today’s increases across many of its lines. Reconditioned items are also more expensive. These increases seem to be driven less by the current refurbished lineup and more […]⌥ Permalink

Terrible news: Om Malik passed away on June 24, 2026, at Stanford Hospital after a long health journey with his heart. He was surrounded by family and friends. I will miss Malik’s writing, of course. I will also miss his photography, where he had found a distinctive and recognizable style that was very often breathtaking. […]⌥ Permalink

Here is a little marketing pop quiz for you: the company you work for wants to increase the prices of its products across the board urgently — and by a significant amount — because key components are suddenly more expensive. Which strategy do you choose? Wait until there is a good time, like the next […]⌥ Permalink

Paresh Dave and Lauren Goode, Wired: Meta left potentially sensitive information collected from employee laptops accessible to anyone inside the company, according to an internal security notice seen by WIRED and three current employees familiar with the issue. The data, which was collected as part of a divisive initiative to train artificial intelligence models, is […]⌥ Permalink

Cynthia Khoo, writing for the Institute for Research on Public Policy’s Policy Options: If Bill C-22 passes as is, it could put in place one piece of a bigger cross-border law enforcement data-sharing system, as envisioned in the CLOUD Act and other international data-sharing treaties. Once completed, this system could further expose Canadian residents and […]⌥ Permalink

While I am criticizing the New York Times’ odd framing choices, here is a more substantial critique from Alejandra Caraballo: Over the last several years it has become readily apparent that there has been a shift in the editorial framing and focus of the New York Times when it regards issues relating to transgender people. […]⌥ Permalink

Michael H. Keller, Eli Murray, Danielle Ivory, and Irineo Cabreros, New York Times (gift link): The surge in pedestrian deaths has baffled researchers. Most other wealthy countries haven’t seen similar increases, suggesting that possible culprits like smartphones don’t tell the whole story. Other likely causes of deadly crashes, such as drunken and distracted driving, have […]⌥ Permalink

Gergely Orosz: Meta has a booming business, and is already a beneficiary of AI via increased ads revenue. Meanwhile, my Facebook feed is filled with fake, AI-generated videos, with hundreds of comments from bots and people who seemingly don’t realize it’s AI. It all seems like just more content for Meta to show ads next […]⌥ Permalink

Apple announced this week it would be implementing its “alternative app marketplaces” and “alternative app payments” schemes to residents of Brazil after a settlement with the country’s antitrust authority. Michael Tsai has a good roundup of the history of this settlement and reactions from developers. The people living in places where Apple’s standard App Store […]⌥ Permalink

Rolfe Winkler, Wall Street Journal: Apple plans to raise prices on its products to offset the surging costs of memory and storage chips, Chief Executive Tim Cook said in an exclusive interview with The Wall Street Journal. “Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” he said. “We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are […]⌥ Permalink

Nikita Prokopov: The rule of thumb is: If I take a screenshot of your app at any moment, you should be able to explain what I see. Why care about every frame? It builds trust. Users can’t see the code, so UI is the only way for them to judge the quality of the app. […]⌥ Permalink

Apple on its Developer site (via Arseniy Shestakov): Later this summer, Apple will unify the email domains used by Sign in with Apple and iCloud+ Hide My Email under a single, shared domain: private.icloud.com. New addresses generated for both features will be issued on the new domain. […] Previously, Hide My Email addresses were generated […]⌥ Permalink

I have previously noted I am not a fan of Ed Zitron’s writing on A.I., which I think is driven more often by adherence to narrative than by genuine skepticism. Even so, his newsletter is extremely popular, and occasionally that pays off with honest-to-goodness scoops. Yesterday, he got a big one — a smattering of […]

Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica: What’s striking about the Intel Mac era is that Apple switched to and away from Intel chips for basically the same reason: It was looking for a more compelling processor roadmap and the best possible performance-per-Watt for its chips. When Intel was executing well—and during the decade between the mid-00s and […]⌥ Permalink

Apple’s WebKit team has lots of news about what to expect in Safari 27, and maybe the best is customizable Select: Customizable select is coming to Safari 27. With this technology, developers can fully control the appearance of <select> elements — custom arrows, option layouts, color swatches, icons, full visual styling — without the need […]⌥ Permalink

Paris Marx, with a thoughtful take on the recently announced Bill C-34, the “Safe Social Media Act”: The media focused on the higher age limit — it’s been happening in other parts of the world and is easier for people not well-versed in tech policy to understand, including many journalists — but it was not […]⌥ Permalink

Catharine Tunney, CBC News: Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, would force social media services — defined as traditional social media platforms, live-streaming services and adult content services focused on user-shared content — to restrict accounts for children under 16 years old. However, services could seek an exemption if they implement what officials briefing […]⌥ Permalink

Do you want to block all YouTube ads in Safari on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac? Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you. As an efficient, high performance and native Safari ad blocker, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers, and annoyances – delivering a faster, cleaner, and more secure […]⌥ Permalink

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada: An investigation by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has found that Grok’s AI image-generation tool was launched without proper safeguards or sufficient consideration of potential privacy harms. This lack of protections allowed users around the globe to create and share non-consensual, sexualized deepfakes, many targeting women and […]⌥ Permalink

Iain Gray, News Letter: Tech mogul Elon Musk encouraged “repeated and loud” protests ahead of Northern Ireland’s immigration demonstrations, some of which flared into violence. The owner of X, formerly Twitter, went on to comment that “only Restore Britain can save Britain” over the course of comments on a horrific knife attack carried out by […]⌥ Permalink

In March 2018, I compared the original 2010 demo of Siri against the then-current shipping version. That was eight years ago — closer, in fact, to the launch of the iPhone 4S and Apple’s version of Siri than to today. Not much changed after I did that little experiment until Monday, when Apple announced a […]