Heather Burns: I cannot tell you how much it disgusts me that so much of the archival footage from September 11 has now been age-gated and restricted as “mature” or “sensitive or adult” content, as in this example from this Reddit film archive. It’s history. It’s archival footage of history. It’s a thing that happened. […]⌥ Permalink

Aaron Vegh and Ben Rice McCarthy have been steadily updating Indigo since they launched it in May. In the latest version, you can now swipe between different filtered timelines, the scroll position is synced between devices, and there is a new lower price point if you use it exclusively for a single network. As for […]⌥ Permalink

Brian Krebs: A new identity theft service launched on the dark web this week is selling digital scans of more than 153 million drivers licenses from people in the United States and Canada. Based on interviews with individuals whose licenses are available for purchase on this service, it appears to be siphoning images collected by […]⌥ Permalink

Dan Luu, after finding one wrong prediction after another made by Ed Zitron, comparing him to mediocre futurists, and exploring his writing style: That last sentence really sums up Zitron’s position. “There are so many guys to be mad at the moment”. In this talk, he throws in this jab at Andreesen and blames Andreesen […]⌥ Permalink

William Bishop of Pew Research: Between scrolling, notifications, and messages, smartphones can be hard to put down. Just over half of U.S. adults say they spend too much time on their smartphone, according to a Pew Research Center survey from May and June 2026. About a third of adults say their smartphone use is about […]⌥ Permalink

Kalley Huang, New York Times (gift link) John Ternus became Apple’s chief executive on Tuesday, succeeding Tim Cook, the company’s leader for the last 15 years. The long-anticipated handoff, Mr. Cook has said, will be “perfectly smooth.” […] This summer, Apple hired Nate Gatten from American Airlines to lead government affairs, replacing Kate Adams, who […]⌥ Permalink

Joel Dryden, in a CBC News article with the headline “On the Road With Pro-Independence Albertans, One Small Town at a Time”: The restaurant owner, who gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic, has hit the road this summer to talk independence, travelling with a group of people who also support the idea of Alberta becoming […]⌥ Permalink

Here is a list of headlines; perhaps you will spot a theme: “Six new Apple products will launch early this year, here’s what’s coming” “Apple has five all-new products launching this year, here’s what’s coming” “Apple will launch 20+ new products this year, here’s what’s coming” “Apple has rare updates coming soon for these three […]⌥ Permalink

Alex Skopic, at Current Affairs, wrote about the functional use and abuse of stimulants by people who are overworked. I stumbled upon it by way of the latest issue of Web Curios, and I think the general thrust of the article is something I find noteworthy enough to link to it. Alas, it is sloppy […]⌥ Permalink

An un-bylined Canadian Press report: U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to change the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” as tensions with Canada worsen. Elect stupid people and get stupid policies. This report contains a good explanation of the name’s history, and also has a deliciously petty map illustrating […]⌥ Permalink

Apple, after previously saying it would move Hide My Email to the private.icloud.com subdomain: After further consideration and reviewing community feedback, iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com. The whole point of an email address like this is that it can be used anywhere someone does not want to provide an address that can be tied […]⌥ Permalink

In September, the European Commission began pondering how to correct its 2009 privacy law that resulted in cookie permission banners littering the web, with the resulting proposal announced in November. Jennifer Rankin, the Guardian: EU officials said users would remain in control of their data on the internet, but new rules on cookies — the […]⌥ Permalink

Felix Kent, Defector (gift link): […] I believed then and still believe that operating a car is too difficult for human beings. This is obviously not true at the level of making a car move. Making a car move is easy. A rat can make a car move. But the level of skill involved in […]⌥ Permalink

“zedeus”: On 24 August 2026 cease and desist letters have been sent by X Corp. demanding a permanent takedown of Nitter instances and the project’s repository. Nitter mirrors X; it powers websites like XCancel which remains online and functional as of writing. This is not surprising but it is very stupid. Companies like X and […]⌥ Permalink

Jeffrey Kopp, of CNBC, wrote a short profile of Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, whose name you may have heard even if you do not live in her district of Northern California. That is because her district covers such areas as San Francisco and Silicon Valley, so her rulings on the many cases heard there have […]⌥ Permalink

Now that it has been a couple of years since Apple began requiring administrators to sign in to the News Publisher dashboard or risk their accounts losing their role, there are a few things we have learned: These notifications arrive on an approximately five-month schedule, perhaps a couple of weeks longer. News Publisher has little […]⌥ Permalink

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac: The new Meta AI desktop app is version 1.0 beta at launch and weighs just 16MB once installed. Based on initial inspection, it runs natively on Apple silicon Macs with macOS 15 or later, using an AppKit and SwiftUI shell with WebKit for richer chat content. In other words, this is not an […]⌥ Permalink

Maggie Harrison Dupré, in a Guardian article about Meta Glasses: […] Smartglasses bring the functionality of smartphones, cameras included, into every moment. Several people I spoke to said that even when the LED is functioning as intended it can be subtle and difficult to spot from far away, especially if you aren’t aware of how […]⌥ Permalink

Karl Bode: So prepare for a year of breathless and evidence-optional claims that Chinese AI is a dire threat to U.S. consumer privacy and national security, followed by an elaborate bipartisan train of bad policy and shitty new laws crafted by a clumsy coalition of technofascists, extremists, and competition-averse chickenshits. A bit rant-ish for my […]⌥ Permalink

From the Bundeskartellamt’s press release: Under the commitments that have now been declared binding, Apple will align the consent prompts for its own offerings and for third-party apps much more closely. This involves removing possibly discouraging symbols and wording in Apple’s predefined requests for third-party providers. The design of the consent prompts will be neutral […]⌥ Permalink

Here is a thought that must have occurred to someone on the MacOS user interface team: if Liquid Glass supports colour, why not use it to give more dimension to window controls? So Apple did just that in the latest Golden Gate beta, and it looks good. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink

Natasha of “Team YouTube: Last year, we updated how we count public views for Shorts to better capture how viewers watch on YouTube. Now, we’re aligning all other video formats to this same standard for consistency across the platform. Beginning on 8/24/2026, a view will be counted the moment a video begins to play—from the […]⌥ Permalink

Mark Zuckerberg, in a (much) longer version of an essay originally published last month in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal: The defining questions of our age are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it towards. Will it be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or will […]

Vass Bednar, the Walrus: […] the point has been made: looking after the information economy can no longer be a side project for underfunded institutions. Wikipedia is as miraculous as the Wayback Machine is indispensable. Still, we need to stop pretending volunteerism alone can hold up the public internet. We understand this duty more clearly […]⌥ Permalink

Sarah Perez, in a TechCrunch story about monthly active user numbers for Bluesky, Threads, and X, using data provided by Similarweb: Instead, the data shows that X’s worldwide monthly active users on mobile were down around 3% year-over-year in June, and X’s mobile daily active users dropped 7% in July to 123.7 million. (Of course, […]⌥ Permalink

Katie Baker, the Ringer: Look, there’s maybe nothing less cool than waxing nostalgic about Google of all things. It’s like mourning the Astor Place Starbucks (or getting sentimental about any Blockbuster Video — although most people aren’t ready for that conversation). But I don’t think I’m really missing Google Search as much as I’m missing […]⌥ Permalink

Phaedra Haywood, the Santa Fe New Mexican: A state district judge in Santa Fe on Thursday ordered social media giant Meta Platforms Inc. to pay $567 million into an abatement fund to address public harm to New Mexico children and teens. Judge Bryan Biedscheid’s ruling resolves the second of a two-part civil proceeding in a […]⌥ Permalink

Mia Sato, the Verge: When web traffic is funneled through LLMs instead of a traditional search results page, as Google has been doing, being cited by a chatbot becomes ever more important. Now, a whole host of startups, brands, and agencies are coming to Reddit to try to promote their companies in hopes that they […]⌥ Permalink

Sally Sax, writing for the Association of Research Libraries: Twenty-five years after the US copyright office’s first DMCA review, libraries operate in an increasingly non-competitive digital information environment. A lack of digital ownership rights remains a critical barrier to libraries serving their missions as memory institutions. The closest libraries can get to ownership of commercial […]⌥ Permalink

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai and Zack Whittaker, TechCrunch: Under current U.S. hacking laws, a human can face criminal charges for breaking into someone else’s computer without permission. But when an AI agent autonomously hacks into a company’s computers, determining who is liable is much murkier. The surprise admissions by OpenAI and Anthropic that their unreleased AI models […]⌥ Permalink