Kylie Robison, reporting for The Verge: Between May and August, more AI Pins were returned than purchased, according to internal sales data obtained by The Verge. By June, only around 8,000 units hadn’t been returned, a source with direct knowledge of sales and return da...

Big new update to the amazing flight-tracking app, with a particular focus on flight delays — both predicting them, and explaining them. I was using Flighty 4 in beta over the weekend, when my wife and I were in Montreal for a wedding. Our flight home Sunday was delayed by thunderstorms — both in Montreal and Philadelphia — and the information from American Airlines at the airport was all over the place. The information from Flighty was consistent, and spot-on. Wound up being about a 40-minute delay, no big deal — exactly as Flighty presented.

Flighty costs $48/year for an annual subscription, but has a super clever $4/week option for infrequent travellers. And if you don’t like subscriptions, Flighty offers fairly-priced lifetime purchases.

Link: apps.apple.com/app/id1358823008

On the whole I continue to think it’s a tremendous advantage for Kamala Harris to drop into the race as a fresh candidate just three months ahead of the election, but I think this branding effort is one area that shows signs of being rushed. It’s not horrible but it’s not go...

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 FGA. The APIs are modular and easy-to-use, allowing integrations to be completed in minutes instead of months.

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

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.

Link: workos.com/?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=display…

Taegan Goddard, writing at Political Wire:

In many ways, Tim Walz is the person J.D. Vance pretends to be. He’s an authentic, decent and normal guy.

Link: politicalwire.com/2024/08/06/initial-thoughts-on-tim-walz/

Nate Silver: This was a choice designed to maintain the social fabric of the Democratic Party, and avoid news cycles about a disappointed left and Democrats’ internal squabbling over the War in Gaza. Or at least, that’s what I think it was: we’ll need to learn more about...

CNN:

During recent remarks at a “White Dudes for Harris” fundraiser, Walz made a rough-and-ready case for [Harris] before would-be small-dollar donors.

“How often in 100 days do you get to change the trajectory of the world? How often in 100 days do you get to do something that’s going to impact generations to come?” Walz asked. “And how often in the world do you make that bastard wake up afterwards and know that a Black woman kicked his ass, sent him on the road?”

I was hoping for Buttigieg or Shapiro, but that quote alone makes me like the cut of Walz’s jib. Also, Walz is the guy who got the whole “they’re weird” thing going.

Link: cnn.com/politics/live-news/kamala-harris-trump-election-08…

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

David McCabe, reporting for The New York Times: Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search, a federal judge ruled on Monday, a landmark decision that strikes at the power of tech giants in the modern internet era and that may fundamentally alter the w...

Jason Snell, “Existential Thoughts About Apple’s Reliance on Services Revenue”: The intersection of hardware and software has been Apple’s home address since the 1970s. And yet, a few years ago, Apple updated its marketing language and began to refer to Apple’s secret sa...

Charlotte Klein, who wrote the New York Magazine piece over the weekend reporting on how Bloomberg shit the bed by publishing news of Evan Gershkovich’s release in a prisoner swap before he was actually released from Russian custody: Jennifer Jacobs — one of the two Bloo...

I knew RFK Jr. was nuts but I had no idea this nuts. You really ought to watch Kennedy’s own video, which, I swear, costars Roseanne Barr. That’s his side of the story, for chrissake. Jiminy.

But. This whole thing — to wit, that it was this shithead RFK Jr. who did this a decade ago, and that it’s coming out 93 days before an election in which he’s a possible Nader-esque siphon-off-some-votes-from-the-fellow-nutjobs spoiler — might be the funniest story ever.

Link: nytimes.com/2024/08/04/us/politics/robert-f-kennedy-jr-bear…

Jason Snell, at Six Colors on Thursday:

On Thursday, Apple announced results for its financial third quarter. Total company revenue was $85.8 billion, a record for its fiscal third quarter, which is traditionally the company’s quietest quarter. Services revenue reached an all-time revenue high of $24.2 billion.

iPhone revenue was down 1%, iPad revenue spiked 24% after major new product releases, and Mac revenue ticked up 2%.

Check out our transcript of Apple’s quarterly conference call with analysts and our video recap of the results.

Link: sixcolors.com/post/2024/08/apple-results-quarterly-record…

Charlotte Klein, reporting for New York Magazine: According to multiple sources at the Journal and other major outlets, the Bloomberg scoop left journalists and government officials fuming. With a prisoner swap, you don’t know if it’s going to happen until it happens. (A...

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...

Christina Warren (a.k.a. “Mary Brown”) returns to the show. Topics include Apple’s new iOS 18.1 and MacOS 15.1 betas (featuring Apple Intelligence), a little reminiscing about Gil Amelio and Steve Jobs, and the bizarre saga of TUAW, resurrected as a zombie AI slopsite.

Sponsored by:

• Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.

Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2024/07/31/ep-406

Look closely.

Link: threads.net/@vjeranp/post/C9-KZC8sPdl/

Tim Sweeney on X, with what can only be described as a weird take on Find My: This feature is super creepy surveillance tech and shouldn’t exist. Years ago, a kid stole a Mac laptop out of my car. Years later, I was checking out Find My and it showed a map with the house...

Interesting new site, offering AI-powered answers to WWDC-related developer questions. Ask a question, it tries to answer (some answers seem great, some not), and offers links to relevant WWDC sessions.

The small print at the bottom of the page disclaims “Ask WWDC is not affiliated with Apple Inc.” Instead it’s the work of developer Matt Spear, using a new tool he’s building that aims to allow anyone to build a similar “ask site”.

Link: askwwdc.com/

Dan Moren, writing at Six Colors: Not all features, as I said, will be available to try out in this release. Among those included are the systemwide Writing Tools features to help proofread and rewrite text; inbox prioritization, summaries, and smart reply in Mail; the n...

My thanks to 1Password — which, earlier this year, acquired longtime DF sponsor Kolide — for sponsoring last week at DF. When the EU enacted GDPR in 2018, executives and security professionals waited anxiously to see how the law would be enforced. And then they kept waiting ...

Apple Newsroom, last week: Today, Apple Maps on the web is available in public beta, allowing users around the world to access Maps directly from their browser. Now, users can get driving and walking directions; find great places and useful information including photos,...

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, writing for TechCrunch: CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that crashed millions of computers with a botched update all over the world last week, is offering its partners a $10 Uber Eats gift card as an apology, according to several people...

Mark Zuckerberg, in an essay extolling the virtues of Meta’s open source approach to AI development: People often ask if I’m worried about giving up a technical advantage by open sourcing Llama, but I think this misses the big picture for a few reasons: First, to ensure...

Emanuel Maiberg, reporting for 404 Media: If you use Bing, DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, Qwant or any other alternative search engine that doesn’t rely on Google’s indexing and search Reddit by using “site:reddit.com,” you will not see any results from the last week. DuckDuckGo is...

When the EU enacted GDPR in 2018, executives and security professionals waited anxiously to see how the law would be enforced. And then they kept waiting ... and waiting ... but the Great European Privacy Crackdown never came. For a while it seemed like the only way you’d ge...

Marco Arment, introducing the 10th-anniversary re-write of Overcast: Most of Overcast’s core code was 10 years old, which made it cumbersome or impossible to easily move with the times, adopt new iOS functionality, or add new features, especially as one person. That’s w...

Margi Murphy and Katrina Manson, reporting for Bloomberg: The local FBI bureau in Pittsburgh held a license for Cellebrite software, which lets law enforcement identify or bypass a phone’s passcode. But it didn’t work with Crooks’ device, according to the people, who sai...

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. WorkOS is a modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. Start selling to enterprise customers with just a few lines of code. Ship complex features like SSO and SCIM (pronounced skim) provisioning in minutes instead of months.

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

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.

Link: workos.com/?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=display…

Joe Biden, in a letter to the nation (same post, on Instagram): It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President. And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand d...