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?

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

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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...

Sarah Krouse, Dustin Volz, Aruna Viswanatha, and Robert McMillan, reporting for The Wall Street Journal: For months or longer, the hackers might have held access to network infrastructure used to cooperate with lawful U.S. requests for communications data, according to p...

John Naughton, writing for The Guardian: Once the use of RSS feeds had become common, someone had the idea that audio files could be attached to them, and Dave implemented the idea with a nice geeky touch — attaching a song by the Grateful Dead. Initially the new technol...

Dave Winer: Today is the 30th anniversary of this blog. Hola! I did a roundup of thoughts when this blog turned 25. I stand by what I wrote then, but I’d add this. My blog started because I needed content to test a script I had written that sent emails on my Mac using E...

Aaron Vegh and Ben Rice McCarthy (of Obscura renown) have teamed up to create Croissant, a new app — currently iPhone-only — for cross-posting to Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky. 15 years ago I wrote “Twitter Clients Are a UI Design Playground” and that piece stands up, but i...

My thanks to WorkOS for, once again, sponsoring the 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.

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Another good overview of the Automattic/WP Engine saga, this one from Ari Levy at CNBC:

Mullenweg may be openly enthusiastic and grateful for the employees he still has on board, but the WordPress community is a mess. Many WP Engine customers are suffering, and Automattic is gearing up for a legal fight against a private equity firm with over $100 billion in assets.

Hard not to be reminded, somewhat, of the righteous indignation fueling Steve Jobs’s end of life crusade against Google for creating Android. Some big fundamental differences, of course. WordPress is GPL open source and iOS isn’t open at all. It’s the righteous fervor of the founder/leader of the company that’s reminiscent.

Emma Roth does the yeoman’s work of summarizing the complex and fast-moving legal feud between WordPress’s commercial arm and WP Engine, a major WordPress hosting provider: Over the past several weeks, WordPress cofounder Matt Mullenweg has made one thing exceedingly cle...

Taegan Goddard, writing at Political Wire: It’s worth recalling that a major reason Trump won in 2016 was that, just before the election, news broke about emails related to a closed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails being found on Anthony Weiner’s computer, the...

I missed this announcement from MLB a month ago: Major League Baseball today announced a new multi-year international partnership with European workwear leader STRAUSS that makes the German company the Official Workwear Partner of MLB. The partnership marks STRAUSS’ firs...

Victoria Gomelsky, reporting with absurd credulity for The New York Times: Hodinkee, the watch enthusiast website based in Manhattan that has helped spread the gospel of mechanical watchmaking since its founding in 2008, has a new owner. On Friday, the Watches of Switze...

An important follow-up to yesterday’s item about Russia demanding Apple remove VPN apps from the Russian App Store: you can use a VPN on iOS without an app. It just requires some futzing in Settings and a VPN provider that supports it. Presumably, this technique remains avai...

Chili Palmer, reporting for HighSpeedInternet:

Starlink announced on Oct. 2 it will offer one month of free internet in Hurricane Helene disaster areas. The free service will be available to new customers who order through the Starlink website and to customers who activate a kit they already have, whether it was donated or purchased at a retail store. Existing customers may also be eligible.

The announcement comes after more than 500 Starlink kits were distributed throughout the disaster area by private relief organizations.

It’s hard to overstate how differently Elon Musk would be perceived if he weren’t a whackjob on political and cultural issues.

Ryan Christoffel, writing for 9to5Mac: Hurricane Helene has caused massive damage and taken over 100 lives across several US states. Many thousands of people are without power and/or cell service. But in the wake of the storm, reports have surfaced about a key iOS 18 fea...

Cool Hunting:

We love getting into the nerdy details of design innovations and the iPhone 16‘s new Camera Control button presented a perfect opportunity to dig in. For this first podcast of our new Design Tangents series aptly named Nerdy Details we sit down with Johnnie Manzari from the Apple Human Interface team and Rich Dinh, Senior Director of Product Design, to talk about cameras and photography through the lens of the new control on “the world’s most popular camera.”

You don’t often get to hear Apple employees speak about their work. When you do, it’s often largely about trying to get the feel right.

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

iPhone users are being notified about an excessive heat weather event through Apple’s Weather app on iPhone. While the weather event is happening in the Santa Clara Valley region of California, the alert says that the occurrence is happening in an area nearby regardless of where you live.

Hall had a good theory — that the warnings were being to delivered to people who live nowhere near Santa Clara Valley because Apple includes Cupertino as a default location for the Weather app — but in an update acknowledges that the warning notification is being received by users who don’t have any saved locations near the heat wave. (I’ve gotten the notification on multiple devices, and don’t have Cupertino saved as a Weather location.)

What a weird bug.

The United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia: Haotian Sun, 34, and Pengfei Xue, 34, both Chinese nationals, were sentenced today for participating in a sophisticated scheme to defraud Apple Inc. out of millions of dollars’ worth of iPhones. U.S. Distr...

Novaya Gazeta Europe: Apple removed nearly 60 additional virtual private network (VPN) apps from its Russia App Store between July and September, significantly more than the 25 acknowledged by the Russian authorities, according to a report published on Tuesday by the App...

Christian Selig: For those not aware, a few months ago after reaching out to me, YouTube contacted the App Store stating that Juno does not adhere to YouTube guidelines and modifies the website in a way they don’t approve of, and alludes to their trademarks and iconograp...

The AP:

Technology reporter Taylor Lorenz said Tuesday that she is leaving The Washington Post, less than two months after the newspaper launched an internal review following her social media post about President Joe Biden.

Lorenz, a well-regarded expert on internet culture, wrote a book “Extremely Online” last year and said she is launching a newsletter, “User Mag,” on Substack.

Well-regarded by whom? Lorenz is a hack — a self-proclaimed social media expert done in by her own “private” Instagram post describing President Joe Biden as a “war criminal” that she subsequently lied about having posted. She didn’t “exit” the Post. She was obviously and rightfully fired.

This video from “MTT” warmed my heart. And that takes a lot. I learned Pascal on this keyboard. I absolutely loved this keyboard when I first encountered it. But, today, man, what a weird keyboard it is. I mean the arrow-key layout is one thing (up, down, left, right — arranged horizontally). But how about putting the backslash (\) key on the right of the space bar and the backtick (`) key on the left? I mean that’s just crazy. I recall absolutely loving the feel of this keyboard as a teenager but I’ve never bothered chasing one down in my adult life because I know today I could never bear the weird layout. But MTT didn’t just do the lazy thing (buy an ADB-USB adapter), he went the whole nine yards and designed and soldered his own custom parts to turn this 1986 gem into a modern day Bluetooth keyboard. Masterful.

Jason Snell returns to the show to discuss Apple’s September product announcements, and Meta’s Orion prototype AR glasses. Absolutely no baseball talk, almost.

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Allen Pike:

As I understand it, my first experience in a self-driving car was typical:

• Minute 1: “How safe is this? Will it notice that cyclist? What about those construction cones?”
• Minute 10: “This is wild. It’s driving so calmly and safely. I love it.”
• Minute 20: (Bored, checking my email in the back seat.)

It was like a firmware update to my brain.

Imagine how exhilarating subways must have been a century ago — zipping across cities in high-speed underground trains. All technology becomes mundane quickly. It’s kind of amazing when you notice it happening with yourself.