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.

Link: highspeedinternet.com/resources/starlink-offers-free…

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.

Link: coolhunting.com/tech/nerdy-details-the-apple-iphone-16s…

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.

Link: 9to5mac.com/2024/09/30/excessive-heat-warning-alert-on…

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.

Link: apnews.com/article/taylor-lorenz-tech-journalism-washington…

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.

Link: youtube.com/watch?v=NW_LLVD3R3c

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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Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2024/09/30/ep-410

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.

Link: allenpike.com/2024/distribution-of-the-future

Om Malik, after Apple’s September 9 “It’s Glowtime” event at Steve Jobs Theater: I decided to become a fly on the wall and chronicle the spectacle unfolding in front of me. I focused on those who were there to create content about the devices, not the devices themselves....

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…

The Cincinnati Enquirer: Pete Rose, the Cincinnati native who became baseball’s all-time hits leader as well as one of the most divisive figures in the sport’s history, died Monday, according to a TMZ report, which was confirmed by his agent, Ryan Fiterman. He was 83. A...

Simon Willison: Audio Overview is a fun new feature of Google’s NotebookLM which is getting a lot of attention right now. It generates a one-off custom podcast against content you provide, where two AI hosts start up a “deep dive” discussion about the collected content. ...

My thanks to Method Financial for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. Method Financial’s authentication technology allows instant access to a consumer’s full liability portfolio using just personal information and consent, eliminating the need for usernames and passwords.

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Method has helped 3 million consumers connect over 24 million liability accounts at companies like Aven, SoFi, Figure, and Happy Money, saving borrowers millions in interest and providing access to billions of dollars in personalized loans.

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Jason Snell, Six Colors: These are companies playing the same game, but in different ways. Who’s ahead? I would argue that it’s impossible to tell, because if Apple had a product like Orion we would never see it. We can argue about whether Apple’s compulsion to never, ev...

Every September, the whole extended family at Relay FM raises money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, one of the most amazing institutions in the world. St. Jude is dedicated to curing childhood cancer and helping families affected by it. Since 2019 Relay has raised over $3 million, and their best-ever single month was just north of $775,000.

This year they’re already at $925,000, within earshot of a cool million, with three days to go in the month. Let’s make that happen.

Update, 30 September: And, boom, they hit it: $1,041,913.31 and still counting.

Link: relay.experience.stjude.org/

In the midst of recording last week’s episode of The Talk Show with Nilay Patel, I offhandedly mentioned the age-old trick of holding down the Shift key while minimizing a window (clicking the yellow button) to see the genie effect in slow motion. Nilay was like “Wait, what?...

Tom Pritchard, writing at Tom’s Guide:

We put the iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro and the iPhone 16 Pro Max through the Tom’s Guide battery test, which involves surfing the web over 5G at 150 nits of screen brightness. The iPhone 16 Pro Max and iPhone 16 Plus have risen to the top with some incredibly impressive results — making our best phone battery life list in the process. Here’s how the new iPhone 16 models’ battery life stacks up against their iPhone 15 counterparts, and rival flagships.

Link: tomsguide.com/phones/iphones/iphone-16-battery-life-results…

Tom Dotan and Berber Jin, reporting late last night for The Wall Street Journal (News+): Apple is no longer in talks to participate in an OpenAI funding round expected to raise as much as $6.5 billion, an 11th hour end to what would have been a rare investment by the iPh...

iA, which has been shipping a version of iA Writer for Android for 7 years: By September, we thought we had honored our side of the new agreement. But on the very day we expected to get our access back, Google altered the deal. We were told that read-only access to Goog...

Elizabeth Lopatto, reporting for The Verge:

X is preventing users from posting links to a newsletter containing a hacked document that’s alleged to be the Trump campaign’s research into vice presidential candidate JD Vance. The journalist who wrote the newsletter, Ken Klippenstein, has been suspended from the platform. Searches for posts containing a link to the newsletter turn up nothing.

Posting this just in case there remained an iota of a thought in your head that Elon Musk is actually a radical “free speech” absolutist and not just someone who blew $44 billion buying Twitter to warp the entire platform in the direction of his own weird un-American political agenda.

Link: theverge.com/2024/9/26/24255298/elon-musk-x-blocks-jd-vance…

Nilay Patel returns to the show to consider the iPhones 16.

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Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2024/09/26/ep-409

Deepa Seetharaman, Berber Jin, and Tom Dotan, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+): OpenAI is planning to convert from a nonprofit organization to a for-profit company at the same time it is undergoing major personnel shifts including the abrupt resignation Wedn...

Rasmus Larsen, writing for FlatpanelsHD: While reviewing LG’s latest high-end G4 OLED TV (review here), FlatpanelsHD discovered that it now shows full-screen screensaver ads. The ad appeared before the conventional screensaver kicks in, as shown below, and was localized ...

Gerald Lynch, editor-in-chief:

Dig out your old iPod and fire up your ‘Songs to cry to’ playlist, I come bearing sad news. After more than 15 years covering everything Apple, it’s with a heavy heart I announce that we will no longer be publishing new content on iMore.

I want to kick off by thanking you all for your support over the many years and incarnations of the site. Whether you were a day-one early adopter in the ‘PhoneDifferent’ days, came on board with ‘The iPhone Blog,’ or recently started reading to find out what the hell Apple Vision Pro is, it’s been a privilege to serve you a daily slice of Apple pie.

So it goes. Nice remembrances from Rene Ritchie (now at YouTube) and Serenity Caldwell (now at Apple).

Link: imore.com/apple/one-more-thing-goodbye-from-imore

Just appended the following to my piece from yesterday on Meta’s Orion AR glasses prototype: Facebook ships VR headsets and a software platform with an emphasis so strong on “the metaverse” that they rename the company Meta. Apple announces, and then 7 months later ship...

I’ll link first to The Verge’s “Everything Announced at Meta Connect 2024” roundup because Meta still hasn’t posted today’s keynote address on YouTube; best I’ve found is this recording of the livestream, starting around the 43m:20s mark. I watched most of the keynote live a...