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Joseph Menn, reporting for The Washington Post: The U.S. Justice Department told Congress in November there were no major disputes with the United Kingdom over how the two allies seek data from each other’s communication companies. But at that time, officials knew Briti...

Zac Hall, reporting for 9to5Mac: According to a letter seen by 9to5Mac, the Trump Administration is investigating whether the UK may have broken a bilateral agreement when secretly demanding that Apple build a global backdoor into iCloud. Trump’s Director of National In...

I referenced Downie twice earlier today — once in my item linking to Charlie Monroe (developer of Downie) writing about the indie app business, and earlier in my post about using Downie to download the MP3 from Jony Ive’s interview on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs. I someho...

Charlie Monroe, developer of excellent apps such as Downie and Permute: But also don’t do this alone. I work 365 days a year. Last year, I worked 366 days (2024 was leap year). I’m not saying that I work 8 hours each day, but even during weekends, holidays, vacation, I n...

Alex Heath, writing for The Verge: Just a few weeks after everyone freaked out about DeepSeek, Elon Musk’s Grok-3 has again shaken up the fast-moving AI race. The new model is ending the week at the top of the Chatbot Arena leaderboard, while the Grok iOS app is at the t...

Chris Welch, writing at The Verge: Apple has acknowledged a peculiar bug with the iPhone’s dictation feature that briefly displays “Trump” when someone says the word “racist.” The Verge has been unable to reproduce the issue, but it picked up attention on Tuesday after a...

Desert Island Discs is a remarkably long-running BBC Radio interview program now hosted (or presented, if you will) by Lauren Laverne. The gimmick is that guests are asked to name eight songs, a book, and a “luxury item” they’d take with them if stranded on a desert island, ...

I'm interested in knowing what browsers people who use WordLand are using, so I asked ChatGPT to write code that makes sense of them in some human-readable way. This is what it came up with. Interested in knowing what people think? I imagine there are packages that do this but I haven't looked yet.

Michael Liedtke, reporting for the AP: Apple shareholders rebuffed an attempt to pressure the technology trendsetter into joining President Donald Trump’s push to scrub corporate programs designed to diversify its workforce. The proposal drafted by the National Center f...

An email arrived from the Social Security Administration entitled Help Us Slam the Scam. Explains how not to get scammed by people who want our checks. Wonder if they realized it applies equally to Elon Musk, richest man in the world, who wants to eat old people's cupcakes because, well I can't explain it.

People give Matt Mullenweg a lot of shit, but do they realize how hopeless the open web would be if he and his friends hadn’t kept it going for 20+ years. I wrote the other day that I feel like a time traveler, discovering WordPress 20 years after I left UserLand. I care that it's open source, but I care much more that it's open web esp after we've been so thoroughly dominated by feature-limited silos such as Twitter, Facebook and yes -- even Mastodon and Bluesky. Even if there's a theoretical way to do it, practically speaking we have to wait for their developers to implement the features we want. Open source doesn't help there, but open web does. Matt puts the emphasis on the open source part, that's why it wasn't until very recently that I realized that open web is more important, to me at least.

I asked ChatGPT to draw a picture of a death panel as described by Republican lawmakers as they fought the Affordable Care Act. I was surprised it was willing to do it.

According to the bot: "The concept of 'death panels' was a widely debunked political talking point used by opponents of the Affordable Care Act. It falsely suggested that government-run committees would decide whether individuals—especially the elderly or disabled—would receive life-saving care.

"I can generate an image depicting a grim, dystopian bureaucratic setting where a group of shadowy officials in suits are sitting at a long, dark table, stamping papers while an elderly patient looks on with concern. The room would have a cold, sterile look, with a looming clock symbolizing bureaucratic power over life and death."

The advantage to having me on Rene’s show, rather than vice versa, is that he’ll push us through talking about a new iPhone model in 30 minutes. If I were hosting it’d be two hours. But the first hour would be about the whole James Bond film rights thing.

For all kinds of marketing materials..

This is what the page looks like when published.

I posted something sad on Bluesky last night. It was short, but the thinking behind it wasn't. Here's the quote: It might be the last minute but we can still legally remove Trump, and objectively it’s the only thing that makes any sense. I got two responses from Karoli Kun...

Special guest: Paul Kafasis. Special topics: Siri/Super Bowl nonsense, “Gulf of Mexico/America” nonsense, the iPhone 16e gets announced, and a veritable Bond villain buys the rights to the James Bond movie franchise.

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WordLand user: "Does it make a difference if I can just dash off a short note without all the other bullshit that goes with publishing online." Yes, it should be as easy to take a note in WordPress as it is in Bluesky. I didn't buy that assumption that WordPress has to be heavy machinery for writers. What if I just want to write something quickly and get back to the other thing I was working on. Also the edit box in WordLand starts out the size of a tiny little text box, but grows as you add more words. You are allowed to keep going. No character limit.

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Just saw a report that styling isn't working in WordLand in latest versions of Safari. We're using MediumEditor to do the editing. Did a quick query in Claude.ai and there do appear to be some compatibility issues with Safari. A request that people actually report these problems in the repo, via the Support link in the main menu, otherwise it's hit or miss. Thanks.

Mike Allen, writing for Axios, under the headline “Trump Manufacturing Win: Apple to Spend $500 Billion in U.S., Hire 20,000”: Trump met with Cook on Thursday in the Oval Office. Then Trump got so excited that he revealed the plans prematurely, saying on-camera while mee...