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Sarah Perez, writing at TechCrunch last week: Decentralized social network Bluesky was one of the bigger beneficiaries of the exodus from Elon Musk’s X in November 2024, following the U.S. elections. But now, nearly two years later, the social network and would-be X comp...

Mike Masnick, in a thread on Bluesky: Multiple people I know have told me that they love the idea of Bluesky, and want it to succeed, but have abandoned it for X because they use agentic tools in their work and find them incredibly useful, and feel that any mention of th...

Bluesky and Threads both pull the same trick: When you take a screenshot on iOS of an individual tweet, they replace the “Follow” button in their user interface with their logo. Tim Marinin noticed this in the Bluesky app, got curious, and because they publish the app’s sour...

Thanks to the DMA’s sprawling scope, complexity, and overreach, Apple came out of this conceding only 4 percent of the App Store’s 30 percent commission, and no reduction at all to the 15 percent for subscriptions after the first year.

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Earlier this week, a developer version of a Mac computer software update accidentally included references to several upcoming Apple products, including a video of the AirPods with cameras in action. [...]

But the product challenges are still being resolved, and the camera AirPods remain off the company’s 2026 release schedule. Apple continues to believe the earbuds will launch in 2027, said the people, who asked not to be identified when discussing unannounced products.

If true, it makes that video even stranger. If not, we can file this along the flat-sided Series 7 Apple Watch.

It’s 2026 and an important, much-used app from Apple doesn’t offer basic list sorting controls that would have been a glaring omission 40 years ago. This was a completely solved problem decades ago, when computer RAM was measured in *kilo*bytes.

Sara Fischer, Axios:

Ad tech giant Taboola has struck a deal with NBC News to exclusively power all of its programmatic, or automated, display advertising sales, CEO Adam Singolda tells Axios.

Worked out great for Apple with Apple News. They struck a deal with Taboola two years ago and the ads in Apple News today are super premium and something the company can be really proud of.

Agents are hitting your signup flow and bouncing off a browser login built for humans. Every one that gives up is a signup you never see.

WorkOS Agent Registration turns that traffic into signups. Enroll via the dashboard and AuthKit publishes an auth.md file agents read to register for scoped, short-lived credentials you control.

Make your app agent-ready →

Joe Flint, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): Walt Disney’s ABC has sued the Federal Communications Commission alleging the agency’s efforts to challenge its broadcast licenses and regulate its talk show “The View” are illegal and an effort to quash speec...

Marcus Mendes at 9to5Mac has a fun update on U.S. v. Apple, the ill-considered antitrust case started by the Biden administration. A bunch of what the DOJ argues are anticompetitive features in Apple’s platforms, Apple argues are in fact privacy and security related. Back i...

Paresh Dave and Aarian Marshall, reporting for Wired (News+ link in case Wired hits you with their paywall): The incidents involved two different shipments of high-value technology traveling from Silicon Valley to Southern California, according to Pachuca, who says he le...

Stuart Heritage, writing for The Guardian, under the splendid headline “Dickovers, Baggravation and Botiquette: 18 New Words to Describe Our Tech Hellscape”: The “dickover” is the scourge of the modern age. Coined in May by John Gruber, a tech writer, it is defined as “a...

Thibault Sottiaux, the OpenAI genius in charge of Codex and the new ChatGPT Homer Simpson car, on Twitter/X: I don’t come often to GMail [sic] (OpenAI is a Slack company), but I swear, every time I do open it, there is a new button somewhere around the top right corner. ...

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

macOS 27 Golden Gate beta 6 introduces redesigned traffic light window controls. The new look resembles older Mac OS X systems with more detail in each button.

Nice. But these changes can’t improve fast enough for me — I am impatient. The MacOS user interface had been in a slow, steady, sad, no-fun decline for years, and then, a year ago, the bottom fell out with the disaster of 26 Tahoe.

But all the changes in 27 Golden Gate are in the right direction. Golden Gate is not a mixed bag. Designers with taste and talent are clearly back at the helm. And I love that they’re still pushing UI and icon changes in mid-August, entering the home stretch of the .0 beta cycle.

Oops.

I want the answers that I read to be cogent, lucid, accurate, blessedly terse — and ideally to strike a consistent tone that is pleasant to my reading ear. The genie is not going back in the bottle.

The Savant is a political thriller series starring Jessica Chastain that was supposed to debut a year ago. Apple “postponed” it, apparently out of fear of upsetting extremist right-wing nut jobs because the show is about an undercover investigator (Chastain) hunting down extremist right-wing nut jobs. Chastain was not happy about the show being delayed.

Last we heard about the show was back in April, when Marc Malkin reported this for Variety:

“Before it was like, ‘I don’t know if we’re going to see it,’ but now I can say, ‘We’re going to see it,’” Chastain told me exclusively on Saturday at the Breakthrough Prize ceremony in Santa Monica.

As for when, sources tell me that Apple is planning for a July release.

Given that it’s now the middle of August, I think that a July release is looking less and less likely by the day.

The Financial Times, back on July 1, with the transcontinental byline “Michael Acton in San Francisco and Barbara Moens in Brussels” (non-paywalled summaries from 9to5Mac and MacRumors): Apple chief executive Tim Cook and EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen held “constructive”...

It’s unacceptable for a tool to sacrifice an iota of clarity, coherence, meaning, quality, etc. for the purpose of embedding hidden clues within the text to suggest its provenance. The idea that anything other than *my* needs should factor into the generation of text *for me* is patently offensive.

Cory Weinberg, Jemima McEvoy, Jessica E. Lessin, and Stephanie Palazzolo, writing for the paywalled-without-gift-links The Information: As Amodei has hopscotched the globe to preach about the potential and risks of AI — from New Delhi to Davos to Sun Valley — Clark has a...

James Padolsey, on the Claude-text-watermarking-to-comply-with-an-EU-regulation imbroglio: The same thought that led to this law could have applied to calculators at the time of their inception, had their outputs revealed themselves through artefacts. Thankfully, a sum b...

The Wall Street Journal (gift link): To help alleviate the supply crunch, Apple is looking to Chinese manufacturers. “The Trump administration is not in favor of that,” Lutnick said in an interview after touring an Apple manufacturing facility in Houston. There have to ...

XCancel: XCancel is an instance of Nitter. Nitter is a free and open source alternative Twitter front-end focused on privacy and performance. The source is available on GitHub at https://github.com/zedeus/nitter [...] Using an instance of Nitter (hosted on a VPS for ex...

My thanks to Drata for sponsoring last week at DF. Their message is short and sweet: Leverage autonomous AI agents to automate compliance, manage internal and third-party risk, and continuously prove your security posture.

The exposed lens covers are made of sapphire, not glass, and are thus incredibly scratch resistant. And even if, somehow, do you pick up a scratch on a lens cover, it almost certainly won’t affect image quality at all.

This page from Google Design on their “Material 3” UI language came to my attention after my snarky post about the ungainly new to-do app they bizarrely bragged about on Twitter/X this week. I don’t think this “Material 3” page is new — I think it’s a few years old — but I’d...

Philip Michaels, writing last September for Tom’s Guide: iPhone 17 torture test videos done by JerryRigEverything indicate that Ceramic Shield 2 certainly resists scratching, with scratch testing leaving only light scratches at level 7 on the Mohs scale of hardness. Scra...

A few years ago I’d have looked at this post and maybe leaned toward the idea that a precocious 8th grader somewhere hacked into the @GoogleDesign Twitter account and tried to pass off their little to-do app as having come from Google’s design team. But this is apparently real. I almost hope it’s AI slop and that there aren’t any human designers there who think anything in this app has appropriate proportions or is aesthetically pleasing.

(Here’s an XCancel link for the x.com averse. You can just change any x.com/* URL to xcancel.com/*. But, alas, the XCancel mirror of the original tweet loses the animation showing the UI in motion — for some, but not all, users.)

Joanna Stern, writing at The New Things (gift link): I used to love the blinking notification light on my BlackBerry, and later my Droid 2. It was a simple way to know I had a message without actually looking at my messages. Then BlackBerry let you customize the color, a...