Samantha Cole, reporting for 404 Media: In July, before the latest WP Engine blowup, an Automattic employee wrote in Slack that they received a direct message from Mullenweg sending them an identification code for Blind, an anonymous workplace discussion platform, which ...

Maureen Farrell, writing for The New York Times: In May 2022, the chief financial officer of Boar’s Head, the processed meat company, was asked a simple question under oath. “Who is the C.E.O. of Boar’s Head?” “I’m not sure,” he replied. “Who do you believe to be the ...

With hundreds of weather apps on the App Store, including a solid one from Apple, why pay for another? Glad you asked… Information Design: If all you care about is the current temperature, any app will do. But for a clutter-free, information dense view of the weather over ...

Apple Newsroom: Apple today introduced the new iPad mini, supercharged by the A17 Pro chip and Apple Intelligence, the easy-to-use personal intelligence system that understands personal context to deliver intelligence that is helpful and relevant while protecting user pr...

After being sold out for months, the upcoming sponsorship schedule at DF is unusually open at the moment — including this upcoming week. Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succe...

My thanks to 1Password — which, earlier this year, acquired longtime DF sponsor Kolide — for sponsoring last week at DF. In a 2023 survey of IT and security professionals, 50 percent of respondents said that their organization’s vulnerability management program had support from leadership to “a large/great extent”. That’s good for them. But it also leaves a full half of respondents without enough support from leadership.

If you’re trying to get buy-in at your own organization, come equipped with the facts about the risks you’re facing, and come with a clear plan to remediate them. To learn more about how vulnerability management is changing, read 1Password’s blog post, and come prepared.

Link: 1password.com/daringfireball

The less you know about this talk, the more you’ll enjoy watching it unfold. Just remarkably good. Trust me, watch it now, before anything about it is spoiled for you.

Link: youtube.com/watch?v=Df_K7pIsfvg

Jamie Zawinski: For those of you who are unaware of these finer details, 0.9 was the first release of the Netscape browser (which begat Firefox) available to the general public. This beta release was an unannounced surprise. Prior to this, everyone assumed that what we w...

Jonathan Gitlin, automotive editor at Ars Technica, on Tesla’s vaporware event last night: Over time, Musk claimed the operating costs of his Cybercab would be 20 cents per mile, “and yes you’ll be able to buy one,” he told the crowd to excited shrieks. “We expect the co...

Donald F. Trump, yesterday in Detroit: “Do you like autonomous? Does anybody like an autonomous vehicle? Know what that is? Right? When you see a car driving along? Some people do, I don’t know. A little concerning to me, but the autonomous vehicles we’re going to stop f...

Abhirup Roy and Akash Sriram, reporting for Reuters: CEO Elon Musk showcased on Thursday a long-awaited robotaxi with two gull-wing doors and no steering wheel or pedals and surprised with robovan, betting on a shift in focus from low-priced mass-market cars to robotic v...

Kevin Roose wrote a column for The New York Times last week under the headline “Did Apple Just Kill Social Apps?”, about which Jason Snell quipped, “It’s rare that a story is worse than its provocative headline, but this one manages it.” The gist of it is Roose positing that...

Given that Calvin and Hobbes is almost certainly the best (and almost more certainly, the most beloved) comic strip ever, it’s devilishly hard to pick a favorite. But this might be mine. I thought about it often as I raised my own son.

Update: I sent this one to my son, and he sent me this one back. My boy gets me.

Link: gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2024/10/06

Lawrence Abrams, reporting for Bleeping Computer: Internet Archive’s “The Wayback Machine” has suffered a data breach after a threat actor compromised the website and stole a user authentication database containing 31 million unique records. News of the breach began circ...

Bethany Bongiorno, on X:

• insane battery life (17 hours with profiled usage)
• calendar recall
• speak in over 50 languages — in your own voice
• vision gesture for quick multi-modal questions
• playlist support
• timers, alarms, world clock
• touchcode gesture unlock
• pinpoint — locate your pin!

Sometimes all you can do is put your nose to the grindstone and keep plugging. But man, I don’t even hear jokes about the AI Pin any more. (Full change log.)

Link: x.com/bella_bongiorno/status/1843705512808067296?s=12&t…

Kind of crazy to create an alarm clock in this era of bedside phones, but like just about everything from Nintendo, it does seem fun. (Would seem a bit more appealing if it could serve as a Bluetooth audio speaker.)

Link: theverge.com/24266272/nintendo-alarmo-sound-clock-hands-on

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg: Apple Inc.’s Dan Riccio, who oversaw the company’s push into mixed-reality headsets and previously served as its hardware engineering chief, is retiring. The veteran executive, a vice president who reports to Chief Executive Officer...

A new website/newsletter from Om Malik and Fred Vogelstein: Both of us together have followed Silicon Valley’s innovation engine for more than 50 years. We’ve seen a lot. But one observation stands out: The best ideas — the ones that launch meaningful companies — need to...

Many Tricks: Moom 4 is only available directly from Many Tricks; it is not available on the Mac App Store. If it were our choice, it would also be in the Mac App Store, but it’s not our choice. Why isn’t it in the Mac App Store? Because the Mac App Store does not allow ...

Zac Bowden, writing for Windows Central:

The Surface Duo 2 has just received its likely final security update, marking an end to Microsoft’s brief return to the smartphone market. The company originally launched Surface Duo 2 in October 2021, and promised to support the product with software updates for three years. Microsoft was only able to deliver one major Android version update in that time, a pitiful number for a $1,500 device.

It wasn’t that Microsoft was only able to deliver one major Android version update in 3 years. They’re Microsoft, for chrissakes. It’s that they could only be bothered to deliver one major upgrade. Commitment is vastly underestimated in the hardware game.

Link: windowscentral.com/phones/the-surface-duo-is-dead-microsoft…

Fun Halloween-themed teaser.

Link: sophiestication.com/NightOfTheLivingApp/

Chance Miller, writing for 9to5Mac: According to multiple 9to5Mac readers and reports across social media, Home Depot has also recently started rolling out Apple Pay support. Home Depot has been a major Apple Pay holdout, resisting pressure from its customers to add supp...

Todd Heberlein: Cozy mysteries are a genre of crime fiction where the stories take place in small, socially intimate communities, and any violence is limited or happens offscreen. Yesterday, I experienced a “Cozy WWDC,” and it was wonderful! The event took place in an i...

Panic: Well, Google has a new set of policies that require apps that connect to Google Drive to go through expensive, time-consuming annual reviews, and this has made it extremely difficult for us to reasonably maintain Google Drive access. You may have seen iA Writer’s ...

Peter Baker and Dylan Freedman, reporting for The New York Times, with the conspicuous absence of Maggie Haberman from that shared byline: Former President Donald J. Trump vividly recounted how the audience at his climactic debate with Vice President Kamala Harris was on...

Joe Rossignol, writing for MacRumors: The latest video of what could be a next-generation MacBook Pro was shared on YouTube Shorts today by Russian channel Romancev768, just one day after another Russian channel shared a similar video. The clip shows a box for a 14-inch ...

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

In the release notes for the sixth beta of the macOS Sequoia 15.1 update, Apple says that users aren’t going to see as many popups for apps they regularly use.

Applications using our deprecated content capture technologies now have enhanced user awareness policies. Users will see fewer dialogs if they regularly use apps in which they have already acknowledged and accepted the risks.

Why in the world didn’t Apple take regular use of a screen-recording app into account all along?

Link: macrumors.com/2024/10/07/apple-screen-recording-popup…

Tyler Stalman joins the show to discuss the iPhone 16 lineup’s cameras, and the state of iPhone photography.

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Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2024/10/07/ep-411

Sean Hollister, writing for The Verge: Google’s Android app store is an illegal monopoly — and now it will have to change. Today, Judge James Donato issued his final ruling in Epic v. Google, ordering Google to effectively open up the Google Play app store to competition...

There’s a line in Titanic that any IT or security professional can relate to. The ship’s architect explains that he wanted to include enough lifeboats for all the passengers, “but it was felt the deck would look too cluttered.” That decision takes on a tragic significance i...