Sign up

Michael Tsai

Not verified No WebSub updates No webmention support Not yet validated

Generator
https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.3
Public lists
Manton Reece - Blogroll
Fetched

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Artemis II Desktop Pictures

Nick Heer: NASA has put a few hundred photos on Flickr with some awesome views — and I must emphasize how the word “awesome” undersells these images. I am using this one as the wallpaper on my iMac right now, and it feels like a pretty good use of a big, high-resolution display. Previously: Default […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer

Logan Kugler (via Hacker News): To ensure those wrong answers never reach the spacecraft’s thrusters, NASA moved beyond the triple redundancy of traditional systems. Orion utilizes two Vehicle Management Computers, each containing two Flight Control Modules, for a total of four FCMs. But the redundancy goes even deeper: each FCM consists of a self-checking pair […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Privacy & Security Settings Don’t Show Intent-Based Access

Howard Oakley (Hacker News): Thus, access to a protected folder by user intent, such as through the Open and Save Panel, changes the sandboxing applied to the caller by removing its constraint to that specific protected folder. As the sandboxing isn’t controlled by or reflected in Privacy & Security settings, that allows TCC, in Files […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Notifications Privacy

Joseph Cox: The FBI was able to forensically extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone, even after the app was deleted, because copies of the content were saved in the device’s push notification database, multiple people present for FBI testimony in a recent trial told 404 Media. Rosyna Keller: Push Notifications can […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Mythos and Glasswing

Rich Mogull: Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI chatbot, made two security announcements that were shocking for many but seen as inevitable by those of us working in AI security. First, it announced Mythos Preview, a new, non-public AI model that turns out to be startlingly good at finding security flaws in software. The […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

macOS 26.4.1

Juli Clover (no release notes, no security, enterprise, no developer, full installer, IPSW): macOS Tahoe 26.4.1 addresses an issue that could cause the M5 MacBook Air and M5 Pro/Max MacBook Pro models to fail to join 802.1X Wi-Fi networks when using content filter extensions. See also Mr. Macintosh and Howard Oakley. Previously: macOS 26.4 MacBook […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

iOS 26.4.1 and iPadOS 26.4.1

Juli Clover (iOS/iPadOS release notes, no security, enterprise, no developer): According to Apple’s release notes, the software updates contain unspecified “bug fixes.” Benjamin Mayo: While the official release notes were vague, a thread on the developer forums indicates it actually fixes a significant bug related to iCloud data syncing. Developers had noticed that iPhones running […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

ClickFix Now Uses Script Editor Instead of Terminal

Thijs Xhaflaire (via Andrew Orr): Unlike traditional ClickFix campaigns that instruct users to paste commands directly into Terminal, the discovered variant uses a browser-triggered workflow to launch Script Editor. […] The page leverages an applescript:// URL scheme Clicking the “Execute” button invokes this URL scheme from the browser The browser prompts the user to allow […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Adobe Modifies Your Hosts File for Their Analytics

Thom Holwerda (via Hacker News): If you’re using Windows or macOS and have Adobe Creative Cloud installed, you may want to take a peek at your hosts file. It turns out Adobe adds a bunch of entries into the hosts file, for a very stupid reason. […] If the DNS entry in your hosts file […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Apple Scraping YouTube for AI Training Data

Joe Rossignol: Three established YouTube channels have sued Apple, alleging that the company violated the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by unlawfully accessing and scraping millions of copyrighted videos from YouTube to train its AI models. […] Apple “deliberately circumvented” YouTube’s protections against video scraping and “profited substantially” by doing so. Apple’s research papers […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Perplexity Privacy Lawsuit

Ashley Belanger (via John Gruber): Perplexity’s AI search engine encourages users to go deeper with their prompts by engaging in chat sessions that a lawsuit has alleged are often shared in their entirety with Google and Meta without users’ knowledge or consent. “This happened to every user regardless of whether or not they signed up […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Apple Granted Stay Over External Purchase Fee

Sarah Perez: Apple is preparing to take its App Store fight with Epic Games back to the Supreme Court. In a new filing, the iPhone maker said it plans to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review another aspect of this long-running case over App Store fees. In the meantime, Apple sought to pause the […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Dynamic Notarization Checks?

Tyler Hall: I submitted a new build of one of my Mac apps to Apple’s Notary service - like every new release. Normally, the notarization goes through in just a few minutes. Today, multiple builds have been pending for 2+ hours. And, weirdly, my API server is getting traffic from those two builds I submitted […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Tahoe TCP Overflow Bug

Photon (Hacker News): After exactly 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47 seconds of continuous uptime, a 32-bit unsigned integer overflow in Apple’s XNU kernel freezes the internal TCP timestamp clock. Once frozen, TIME_WAIT connections never expire, ephemeral ports slowly exhaust, and eventually no new TCP connections can be established at all. ICMP (ping) […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Challenges With Ancient Dates in Apple SDKs

Aaron Trickey: Foundation’s date-handling code has an effective lower bound around January 1, 4713 BC on the Julian calendar. You can create a Date value representing an instant in time below that limit, but many Calendar methods will return unexpected values when you try to do anything with it. […] And NSDatePicker does okay with […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

John Martellaro, RIP

Bryan Chaffin: He rose to the rank of Captain in the U.S. Air Force, and he was a NASA scientist. He worked for years at Apple, and most importantly to me, he was a columnist and the voice of reason and humanity at The Mac Observer. He wrote SciFi and a variety of tech columns […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Phantom App Updates, Part 3

digidude23: Is Apple creating updates for 3rd party apps now? This update from Apple will improve the functionality of this app. No new features are included. iSan4eZ: Apple inserted this text into my app and issued an update with the same version. I’m sure about it as I update the app on my phone as […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Notes From Setting Up New Apple Devices

This weekend, I helped my non-techie father migrate to a new iPhone 17e and MacBook Air: Device Transfer initially couldn’t find the old iPhone SE. It turns out that years ago he’d read some article that said Bluetooth was unsafe and so he’d turned it off. The setup assistant repeated the new age verification question […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Apple Creating All the Apps

John Gruber: Pogue interviewed Scott Forstall and got this story, about just how far Steve Jobs thought Apple could go to expand the iPhone’s software library while not opening it to third-party developers: “I want you to make a list of every app any customer would ever want to use,” he told Forstall. “And then […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

macOS 26.4 Paste Protection

Adam Codega: Apple does not inspect or analyze the contents of what you paste. Even harmless text like "hello world" will trigger the warning under the right conditions. Instead, Terminal checks where the clipboard content came from. It does this by calling a private API _sourceSigningIdentifier on the NSPasteboard, which reveals the code-signing identity of […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

A Letter to John Ternus

Marco Arment (Mastodon): I urge you, on behalf of everyone who loves computers as much as we do, to protect and cultivate this spirit of Apple’s founders as the company’s top priority: We love computers. We don’t hide that — we celebrate it! We use computers to enhance our minds, lives, and abilities — not […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Small Ways the App Store Could Be Improved for Developers

Jeff Johnson (Mastodon): There are countless small, practical, mostly uncontroversial ways in which Apple could improve the App Store for developers, yet the App Store has changed relatively little in the 18 years since it was hastily cloned from the iTunes Music Store. […] These changes to the App Store would not require a huge […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

iOS 18.7.7 and iPadOS 18.7.7

Jason Snell: Last December I complained that Apple was withholding iOS 18 security updates from iPhones capable of running iOS 26, leaving users who didn’t want to upgrade to Apple’s latest OS version yet in some security peril. […] The good news: As of Wednesday April 1, Apple is pushing out iOS 18.7.7 to all […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Russia Gets Apple to Turn Off App Store Payments

MacRumors (9to5Mac): In a new support document, Apple said new purchases, in-app purchases, and subscription renewals are no longer available in Russia unless a user already has funds in their Apple Account balance, which can continue to be used. […] Apple reportedly took this action in response to an order from the Russian government, which […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Mobile Web Browsing Benchmarks 2026

Eric Seckler (MacRumors): Today, we are proud to celebrate a major milestone: Android is now the fastest mobile platform for web browsing. Through deep vertical integration across hardware, the Android OS, and the Chrome engine, the latest flagship Android devices are setting new performance records, outperforming all other mobile competitors in the key web performance […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

CloudKit Problems With iOS 26.4

Lukas Kubanek: Looks like Apple broke CloudKit sync in OS 26.4. Remote notifications don’t seem to arrive, so no updates unless the app is relaunched. Sean Heber: There are so many annoying limits and throttles when dealing with iCloud/CloudKit. Now I ran into one where the subscriptions that let you know when content changed are […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

CKSyncEngine

WWDC 2023: Discover how CKSyncEngine can help you sync people’s CloudKit data to iCloud. Learn how you can reduce the amount of code in your app when you let the system handle scheduling for your sync operations. We’ll share how you can automatically benefit from enhanced performance as CloudKit evolves, explore testing for your sync […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

axios Compromised on NPM

Ashish Kurmi (Hacker News): axios is the most popular JavaScript HTTP client library with over 100 million weekly downloads. On March 30, 2026, StepSecurity identified two malicious versions of the widely used axios HTTP client library published to npm: axios@1.14.1 and axios@0.30.4. The malicious versions inject a new dependency, plain-crypto-js@4.2.1, which is never imported anywhere […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Parachute Backup Acquired

Florian Albrecht (Reddit, Mac Power Users): The team of Leitmotif is pleased to announce that, as of March 25, 2026, Parachute Backup is part of Leitmotif GmbH. Offloader and Outpost Launcher remain with Eric Mann. Parachute Backup 1.5.0 is the first version released by Leitmotif GmbH. Parachute Backup remains a one-time purchase, and its privacy-first […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

MacBook Neo Sales

Tim Cook: Mac just had its best launch week ever for first-time Mac customers. We love seeing the enthusiasm! Joe Rossignol (Hacker News): Apple also released MacBook Air models with the M5 chip and MacBook Pro models with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips last week, so it was a big week for new Macs, […]