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Morning coffee notes

BTW, I'm intermittently locked out of my Threads account. They say it has to do with automated stuff they don't explain. I don't have any apps that do anything with Instagram or Threads. I tried changing the password. Anyway, I was just starting to like the network, it has i...

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The show notes for today's Podcast0 episode.

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This blog 20 years ago today.

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Text • John Gruber

AT&T Only Learned of Massive 2022 Data Breach This April; Delayed Revealing It at the Request of U.S. Law Enforcement

krebsonsecurity.com/2024/07/hackers-steal-phone-sms-records-for-nearly-all-att-customers/

Brian Krebs: In a written statement shared with KrebsOnSecurity, the FBI confirmed that it asked AT&T to delay notifying affected customers. “Shortly after identifying a potential breach to customer data and before making its materiality decision, AT&T contacted...

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Text • John Gruber

Google Chrome, Along With Other Popular Chromium Browsers, Grants System Monitoring Privileges to *.google.com Domains

x.com/lcasdev/status/1810696257137959018

Luca Casonato: So, Google Chrome gives all *.google.com sites full access to system / tab CPU usage, GPU usage, and memory usage. It also gives access to detailed processor information, and provides a logging backchannel. This API is not exposed to other sites - only to...

Jason Fried Valid
Text • Jason Fried

Achieving optionality

It took me a while to fully realize the value of something my company achieved years ago, and continues to savor today. It’s one of our greatest quiet advantages, full stop.It’s not something you hear much about in business circles. In fact, I can’t remember the last time ...

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Text • John Gruber

Massive Data Breach at AT&T Exposed Six Months of Call and SMS Records of Nearly All Customers

cnn.com/2024/07/12/business/att-customers-massive-breach/index.html

Matt Egan and Sean Lyngaas, reporting for CNN: The call and text message records from mid-to-late 2022 of tens of millions of AT&T cellphone customers and many non-AT&T customers were exposed in a massive data breach, the telecom company revealed Friday. AT&T...

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Text • John Gruber

Hermès’s H08 Watch, the Other Source for Samsung’s Ultra Rip-Off

hermes.com/us/en/product/hermes-h08-watch-42mm-W402992WW00/

I’ve seen a few people arguing that Samsung’s Galaxy Watch Ultra, though clearly inspired by Apple Watch Ultra, isn’t a rip-off, per se, because it’s not an exact clone. Ben Thompson even tried to argue such with me on Dithering this week. Here, for example, is a literal cl...

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Text • John Gruber

European Commission Charges X With Breach of DSA

ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_24_3761

I guess the European Commission hasn’t taken off for their months-long summer vacation quite yet: [T]he Commission has issued preliminary findings of non-compliance on three grievances: First, X designs and operates its interface for the “verified accounts” with the...

Jason Fried Valid
Text • Jason Fried

Directional decisions

In the course of building products, you’ll make a thousand common decisions, but only a handful of directional decisions.While a common decision may alter a specific feature, design, or implementation, a directional decision remaps the fundamental trajectory of the entire ...

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Text • John Gruber

Amid Antitrust Scrutiny, Microsoft Drops OpenAI Board Observer Seat, and Apple, Reversing Course, Will Not Take One

ft.com/content/ecfa69df-5d1c-4177-9b14-a3a73072db12

Camilla Hodgson and George Hammond, reporting for The Financial Times: Microsoft has given up its seat as an observer on the board of OpenAI while Apple will not take up a similar position, amid growing scrutiny by global regulators of Big Tech’s investments in AI start-...

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Text • John Gruber

M1 MacBook Air Drops from $700 to $650 at Walmart

macrumors.com/2024/07/08/walmart-m1-macbook-air-for-649/

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors: Walmart+ members have early access to the deal as of 12 p.m. Eastern Time today, and it will be available to all Walmart customers starting at 6 p.m. Eastern Time today. Walmart first began selling the MacBook Air with the M1 chip for $699 in M...

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Text • John Gruber

Pennsylvania Is, Finally, Getting Beautiful License Plates

x.com/governorshapiro/status/1810662109073588268

I’ve been a big fan of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro since his term as our attorney general. He was absolutely fantastic in the aftermath of the 2020 election, when Trump attempted to steal Pennsylvania.

But as of this week he might be my favorite politician in the entire country. He accomplished what I had long ago given up hope of ever seeing: replacing PA’s fugly-as-sin license plates with a new design that’s among the best I’ve ever seen. Good typography, great colors, and a new slogan and icon that exemplify Pennsylvania’s role as the birthplace of the longest-standing democracy the world has ever seen: the Liberty Bell.

Bravo.

(Next job: Apply this same design language to our god-awful driver’s licenses.)

Update: Design credit for both the new plates and welcome signage goes to Robyn Kanner.

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Text • John Gruber

Samsung Rips Off Apple Watch Ultra, Right Down to the Name

x.com/snazzylabs/status/1811061102072967177?s=42

Quinn Nelson on X: Watch Ultra is the most shameless copy of an Apple product in ages — and it’s hideous Wait, it gets more shameless — Buds3 and Buds3 Pro are clones of AirPods It’s sad to see Samsung — who once was a leader in design and innovation — start knocking ...

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Text • John Gruber

Flight Tracking in Messages (and Anywhere Data Detectors Work)

cnet.com/tech/mobile/you-can-track-any-flight-directly-from-your-iphones-text-messages/

Nelson Aguilar and Blake Stimac, writing for CNet: That’s right. There’s a hidden flight tracker built right into iMessage that you probably would have never noticed unless you threw in the right combination of details within a message. [...] Although the airline name/f...

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Text • John Gruber

Windows Notepad Finally Gets Spellcheck and Autocorrect

blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2024/03/21/spellcheck-in-notepad-begins-rolling-out-to-windows-insiders/

Dave Grochocki, writing for Microsoft’s Windows Insider Blog: With this update, Notepad will now highlight misspelled words and provide suggestions so that you can easily identify and correct mistakes. We are also introducing autocorrect which seamlessly fixes common typ...

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Text • John Gruber

New Cars in the EU Now Equipped With Nagging Speed Limiters

lbc.co.uk/news/new-cars-fitted-automatic-speed-limiters-this-week/

Kieran Kelly, reporting for LBC: New cars that are sold in Europe from this week will host automatically-installed speed limiters, following the introduction of a new EU law. Even though the rule to install the technology does not apply in the UK, many of the cars will ...

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Text • Daring Fireball Department of Commerce

[Sponsor] Dabba

dabba.com/daringfireball

Imagine you could go back in time when Alex Bell started his phone company. Imagine for a moment that you could have owned a piece of his network. Well, you can’t. Until someone invents a time machine. Which they haven’t. What you can do however is own a piece of the next telecom juggernaut. Dabba is a low cost broadband internet service provider in India owned and powered by FAANG engineers and startup founders from around the world. Check it out, it’s the time machine you wish you had.

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Text • John Gruber

Gurman: Apple Intelligence Powered Siri Won’t Arrive Until iOS 18.4

bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-07/apple-watch-series-10-ultra-3-details-bigger-screens-blood-pressure-challenge-lybjqp0q

Mark Gurman, in his Power On column for Bloomberg: For the first time, the digital assistant will have precise control over actions inside of Apple’s apps. That means you can ask Siri to, say, edit a photo and then ship it off to a friend. It also will have the ability t...

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Text • John Gruber

BriefLook

brieflook.app/?dfrss

My thanks to BriefLook for sponsoring last week at DF. BriefLook is a clever iPhone app that does one thing and does it well: it summarizes your postal (paper) mail. Just point your iPhone camera at a letter, and boom, a few moments later you get an AI-generated summary. Who it’s from, what it’s about, and what you’re expected to do about it. That’s useful for summarizing long letters in your own native language, but BriefLook can read and translate between dozens of languages. Truly an amazing use case for AI. Not too long ago a “universal mail translator / summarizer” was the stuff of science fiction. Now you can carry one in your pocket.

Download BriefLook and try it free of charge. Super useful, yet so utterly simple.

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