My thanks to WorkOS for their continuing support of DF with another sponsorship week. With WorkOS you can start selling to enterprises with just a few lines of code. WorkOS provides a complete user management solution along with SSO, SCIM, and RBAC. The APIs are modular and easy-to-use, allowing integrations to be completed in minutes instead of months. WorkOS simplifies MCP authorization with a single API built on five OAuth standards.

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

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.

Katie Notopoulos, writing at Business Insider: There are really two separate issues at hand: Should users be allowed to make fetish content of any woman who is stupid enough (like me) to allow anyone to make cameos of her? And how do you stop people from making fetish co...

Eric Hal Schwarz, reporting for TechRadar: Meta is closing the door on third-party AI assistants inside WhatsApp. Starting January 15, 2026, no general-purpose AI chatbot, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others, will be allowed to operate on the platform. The change i...

At the bottom of their “Use Cases” page, SerpApi lists the following companies and organizations as customers (“They trust us. You are in good company. Join them.”):

• Airbnb
• Nvidia
• Meta
• Shopify
• Perplexity
• KPMG
• Ahrefs
• Grubhub
• Samsung
• AI21labs
• United Nations (!)
• Thomson Reuters
• BrightLocal
• Experian

From an August 21, 2025 report in The Information (paywalled up the wazoo, alas), however:

OpenAI also isn’t the only Google rival to use SerpApi data. SerpApi’s website previously listed Apple as a customer. In addition to partnering with Google on search, the iPhone maker develops technology to power searches in Safari — a lucrative deal that the judge overseeing the DOJ case could also nix.

Was Apple removed from the list because they’re no longer (or never were?) a customer, or because they remain a customer but don’t want to be listed?

Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times: Eight years ago, SerpApi, a start-up in Austin, Texas, dived headlong into the byzantine world of using robots to “scrape” Google’s search algorithms, so it could collect information to help customers appear higher in search ...

Tony Maglio, The Hollywood Reporter: The Savant, which originally had a Sept. 26 premiere date, was yanked in the weeks following the Sept. 10 assassination of conservative political pundit Charlie Kirk. Language on the landing page for the series has since vacillated fr...

MacRumors:

Apple’s upcoming wave of new smart home devices, including a smart home display, indoor security camera, and tabletop robot, will also be made in Vietnam, according to Bloomberg.

Nick Statt, The Verge:

GM plans to drop support for phone projection on all new vehicles in the near future, and not just its electric car lineup, according to GM CEO Mary Barra.

In a Decoder interview with The Verge’s Nilay Patel, published Wednesday, Barra confirmed GM will eventually end support of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto on both gas-powered and electric cars. The timing is unclear, but Barra pointed to a major rollout of what the company is calling a new centralized computing platform, set to launch in 2028, that will involve eventually transitioning its entire lineup to a unified in-car experience.

Someone should investigate whether Mary Barra is a mole planted at GM by Ford. (Previously.)

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch: Reached for comment, Apple confirmed the apps’ removal, saying it removed Tea Dating Advice and TeaOnHer from the App Store because they failed to meet Apple’s requirements around content moderation and user privacy. The company also said it saw ...

Graeme Connell and Rolfe Schmidt, writing earlier this month on the Signal blog: We are excited to announce a significant advancement in the security of the Signal Protocol: the introduction of the Sparse Post Quantum Ratchet (SPQR). This new ratchet enhances the Signal ...

Jake Coyle, reporting for the AP: Driver says he took a concept to Soderbergh for a film that would take place after 2019’s “The Rise of Skywalker.” That movie culminated in Ren’s redemption and apparent death. Driver had undertaken the trilogy with an arc in mind for Re...

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg last week: The executive, Ke Yang, is leaving for Meta Platforms Inc., according to people with knowledge of the matter. Just weeks ago, he was appointed head of a team called Answers, Knowledge and Information, or AKI. The group is d...

Lauly Li and Cheng Ting-Fang, reporting for Nikkei Asia: Production orders for the iPhone Air have been cut nearly to “end of production” levels, despite it only becoming available in China last week, due to weak demand in other markets, multiple sources briefed on the m...

Reason enough to be rooting for the Blue Jays. Put this man in the Hall of Fame already. For chrissake his name is Donnie Baseball.

Devlin Barrett and Tyler Pager, reporting for The New York Times: President Trump is demanding that the Justice Department pay him about $230 million in compensation for the federal investigations into him, according to people familiar with the matter, who added that any...

Here’s an update I just posted to yesterday’s piece on organized phone theft rings in London:

I forgot to apply one of the core tenets of Brian Kernighan’s wonderful book Millions, Billions, Zillions ($19 in hardcover from Amazon; BookShop.org link to indie booksellers): always do some back-of-the-envelope double-checking of the math in news stories. 1.5 miles of aluminum (or even aluminium) foil from Costco is just 12 rolls at 200 meters each. I wouldn’t blink my eyes at someone with a dozen rolls of foil in the cart at Costco.

Yours truly, yesterday: The problem I see with the MacBook power adapter situation in Europe is that while power users — like the sort of people who read Daring Fireball and Pixel Envy — will have no problem buying exactly the sort of power adapter they want, or simply r...

Two new(ish) iPhone camera apps that take decidedly different approaches to distinguish themselves from Apple’s built-in Camera app.

Jonathan Hoefler: The objects in the Apocryphal Inventions series are technical chimeras, intentional misdirections coaxed from the generative AI platform Midjourney. Instead of iterating on the system’s early drafts to create ever more accurate renderings of real-world ...

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac: Not a fan of that design? Well, iOS 26.1 beta 4 is now available, and it introduces a new option to choose a more opaque look for Liquid Glass. The same option is also available on Mac and iPad. You can find the new option on iPhone and iPad by g...

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 RBAC. The APIs are modular and easy-to-use, allowing integrations to be completed in minutes instead of months. WorkOS simplifies MCP authorization with a single API built on five OAuth standards.

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

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.

Michael Tsai, back on September 30, compiled a roundup of links regarding Electron apps causing systemwide lag on MacOS 26 Tahoe. The reason, seemingly, is that the Electron framework was overriding a private AppKit API. Of course.

Tomas Kafka wrote a shell script to find un-updated Electron apps on your system. Craig Hockenberry took Kafka’s shell script and turned it into an easy-to-use AppleScript application.

So, yes, Theo Browne, “software dev nerd”, Electron really is “that bad”. It’s actually, if anything, worse.

SATCOM Security — a team of researchers from UC San Diego and the University of Maryland: We pointed a commercial-off-the-shelf satellite dish at the sky and carried out the most comprehensive public study to date of geostationary satellite communication. A shockingly la...

Jason Fried:

So what’s the net effect of this tiny little design detail that the owner may not even understand? Well, it looks like the watch is already half-way out of power after the first day, so it encourages the owner to wind the watch more frequently. To keep it closer to topped off, even when it’s not necessary. This helps prevent the watch from running out of power, losing time, and, ultimately, stopping. A stopped watch may be right twice a day, but it’s rarely at the times you want.

Small detail, material behavior change. Well considered, well executed, well done.

Nick Heer, at Pixel Envy: First of all, the dollar is not the currency in any of these countries. Second, the charger in European countries is €65, which is more like $76 right now. Third, Apple is allowed to bundle an A.C. adapter, it just needs to offer an option to no...

While poking fun at EU regulations leading Apple not to include a power adapter with the new M5 MacBook Pro across Europe, I wondered why the U.K. — which left the EU five years ago — was affected. DF reader C.A. wrote, via email: We did indeed leave the EU, but remain a...

Ben Zotto: Name every pioneering personal computer you can think of from the 1970s. The MITS Altair 8800. The Apple-1. The IMSAI 8080. You may even know about the SWTPC 6800 or Processor Technology Sol-20. There’s a computer missing from that list, and it’s an important...

CNBC:

Apple shares rose 4% on Monday as a new report showed iPhone 17 sales off to a strong start in the U.S. and China.

The iPhone 17 series, which dropped in September, has outsold the iPhone 16 series by 14% in the U.S. and China within its first 10 days of availability, according to data from Counterpoint Research.

Just because a research firm claims iPhone 17 sales are up 14 percent doesn’t mean they are up 14 percent. These are estimates, not hard numbers from Apple — and Apple doesn’t share actual sales numbers with anyone. Some headlines get this right, but most don’t.

Apple Newsroom: Apple and NBCUniversal today announced the launch of the Apple TV and Peacock Bundle, available beginning October 20. The first-of-its-kind bundle offers the services’ complementary array of award-winning originals, marquee live events and sports, beloved...

Lizzie Dearden and Amelia Nierenberg, reporting for The New York Times (gift link): For years, London’s police assumed most of the phone thefts were the work of small-time thieves looking to make some quick cash. But last December, they got an intriguing lead from a woma...