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.
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...
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.)
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.)
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 ...
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.
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 ...
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?
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.
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.
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...
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