Ashley Belanger, reporting for Ars Technica on new details from an authors group lawsuit alleging Meta trained its AI models on a trove of pirated books: Last month, Meta admitted to torrenting a controversial large dataset known as LibGen, which includes tens of million...

While there are several areas where Apple maintained consistent excellence in 2024, I can’t think of a single area where Apple levelled up. Not one. That feels like a problem.

Joe Rossignol, reporting for MacRumors: Last year, we reported that Apple sued its former software engineer Andrew Aude for providing journalists with confidential information about the company’s future plans, including details about the Journal app, Vision Pro headset, ...

I know how different storage is today — abundant, cheap, reliable — but I still have feelings about my data that are rooted in the distant past.

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, on X: Apple is being extremely disingenuous in attacking the European Union here. The iOS App Store hosts the Reddit app, which provides access to massive amounts of porn. Apple knows this, permits it, and gave Reddit a 17+ (!!!) rating and Editors ...

Apple, in its media statement re: Hot Tub (the you-have-to-admit-it’s-a-fun-name hardcore porn app now available in the AltStore PAL alternative app marketplace in the EU), closed its statement with the following: “The truth is that we are required by the European Commission...

So, no, Apple neither approves of Hot Tub in particular, nor the ability to distribute native porn apps in general. Everyone involved with both AltStore and Hot Tub knows this, but they also know that framing it as though notarization conveys approval is a good way to get headlines.

If you enjoy podcasts, you should subscribe to Dithering, the twice-weekly 15-minutes-on-the-button podcast I do with Ben Thompson. Dithering as a standalone subscription costs just $7/month or $70/year. (It’s also included in Ben’s excellent Stratechery Plus bundle.) People who try Dithering seem to love it, too — we have remarkably little churn.

If you’re on the fence, subscribe for a month and you’re only out $7 — but I bet you’ll stick around. Trust me. And thanks to everyone who’s already subscribed.

The LBJ Presidential Library, regarding a largely ad-libbed address Lyndon Johnson gave to a group of 150 non-incumbent Democratic candidates for Congress in 1966: He talked about the difference between Republicans and Democrats: “We’re for something, and they are agains...

Speaking of books, Simon & Schuster announced a new one: Apple isn’t just a brand; it’s the world’s most valuable company and creator of the twenty-first century’s defining product. The iPhone has revolutionized the way we live, work and connect. But Apple is now a v...

Speaking of cheating, my favorite book from Trump’s first term was Rick Reilly’s Commander in Cheat, which I linked to, with an excerpt still available at The Guardian, when it came out in 2019. I’ve been a fan of Reilly’s writing since I was a teenager and he was the back-page columnist for Sports Illustrated; this is the book Reilly was born to write. I just picked my copy off my shelf and started to re-read it, and got sucked right back in. Posting this link is my way of forcing myself to put it down until tonight.

(Main link here is an Amazon affiliate one, which will make me rich if you purchase through it. If you prefer not to buy books from Amazon, here’s a link to Bookshop.org.)

Drew Harwell, at The Washington Post (gift link, via Harwell himself on Bluesky — which seemingly uses a ludicrously long 397-character token in the URL): But after poring over his live-streamed gameplay, online sleuths recently made a shocking accusation: Musk had cheat...

Ezra Klein in an audio essay/transcribed column at The New York Times: That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hopi...

A delight, as usual.

(My one suggestion for 2025’s list: My Dad’s Chips. Holy hell are these good potato chips. I’ve got a particular weakness for the French Onion ones. Chef’s kiss. Distribution seems mostly limited to the northeast for now.)

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Interesting detail with the latest update to Apple’s app for learning and tinkering with Swift: it’s now named Playground, singular, not Playgrounds, plural. I’m not going to argue that much should be made of the name change, but I like it. The app is the playground — a place for playing with Swift — not a factory for making playgrounds.

Parker Ortolani: Mastodon clients have become the new UI playground in the same way that Twitter clients used to be. But what I can’t wrap my head around is the business decision of developers to lean into Mastodon clients versus Bluesky ones. Fortunately some progress s...

You can’t see the link or click on it as rendered in a browser, because there’s no content between the opening `` and closing `` tags, but whoever at the LA Times edited Reinhart’s column to pervert its meaning, did so sloppily, leaving behind at least this one acerbic vestigial link from his originally-submitted prose.

Alex Heath, writing at The Verge: Moments after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s all-hands comments to employees were widely leaked, a company executive warned in an internal memo that leakers will be fired. “We take leaks seriously and will take action,” Meta’s chief informa...

Annie Linskey and Rebecca Ballhaus, reporting for The Wall Street Journal: “It looks like a bribe and a signal to every company that corruption is the name of the game,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) said in a statement. “After Meta pays to play, what does Mark Zucke...

NBC News, “Meta Agrees to Pay $25 Million to Settle Trump Lawsuit”:

Meta said Wednesday it would pay $25 million to settle a four-year-old lawsuit from President Donald Trump over the social media company’s decision to suspend Trump’s accounts after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, filed a notice of the settlement in federal court in San Francisco, where the lawsuit was pending. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone separately confirmed the terms: a $25 million payment from the company, with $22 million going toward a fund for Trump’s presidential library and the balance dedicated to legal fees and other plaintiffs in the case.

I really can’t wait to see that Trump Presidential Library.

Via David Smith on Mastodon, who writes: The recent work I’ve been doing has required a lot of sharing files between testing devices (and my Mac). AirDrop should be the ideal tool for this but I’ve recently found it to be unreliable. Instead I’ve been using LocalSend wh...

Apple: Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2025 first quarter ended December 28, 2024. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $124.3 billion, up 4 percent year over year, and quarterly diluted earnings per share of $2.40, up 10 percent year over year....

A Monday report from Reuters, syndicated at The Guardian, “Microsoft Is in Talks to Acquire TikTok, Trump Claims”: Donald Trump has suggested that Microsoft is in talks to acquire TikTok and that he would like to see a bidding war over the app. When asked if Microsoft wa...

Fascinating thread — and an almost entirely civil discussion of what has become, for obvious reasons, an inflammatory topic. These are mapping and metadata nerds approaching the dilemma in the very nerdiest of ways. I found it rather soothing, and also quite informative — pa...

The whole tech world needs more projects that aren’t trying to become billion- (let alone trillion-) dollar ideas, but are happily shooting for success as million-dollar ideas (or less!).

David Pierce, writing at The Verge: Rather than buy another smartwatch, Migicovsky decided to try and get Pebble going again. He sold his most recent startup, a messaging app called Beeper, to Automattic last year and left the company in the fall. Since then, he’d though...

Even if the build of TikTok already installed on an American user’s phone continues to function, that user can’t reinstall TikTok (or any of ByteDance’s other apps) on a new or restored phone until those apps are back in the app stores.

Google, in an announcement on X: We’ve received a few questions about naming within Google Maps. We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources. For geographic features in the U.S., this is when Geogra...

Openvibe, which mashes together multiple accounts from mulitple networks into a single timeline, is interesting, but not for me — and I’m not really sure who it *is* for.