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Text • John Gruber

★ Why Can’t We Screenshot Frames From DRM-Protected Video on Apple Devices?

This “feature” accomplishes nothing of value for anyone, including the streaming services, but imposes a massive (and for most people, confusing and frustrating) hindrance on honest people simply trying to easily capture high-quality (as opposed to, say, using their damn phone to take a photograph of their reflective laptop display) screenshots of the shows and movies they’re watching.

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Text • John Gruber

Matthew Green: ‘Dear Apple: Add “Disappearing Messages” to iMessage Right Now’

blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2025/03/01/dear-apple-add-disappearing-messages-to-imessage-right-now/

Matthew Green: If you install WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Snap or even Telegram(please don’t!) you’ll encounter a simple feature that addresses this problem. It’s usually called “disappearing messages”, but sometimes goes by other names. I’m almost embarrassed...

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One America Together

AOC asked for ideas of what to do for the SOTU.

I suggested we come up with a new slogan. Like this.

“One America Together”

Make hats, purple — enough for everyone, including the Repubs.

During applause, Dems rise and chant “One America Together.”

What do you think?

Wordle Kitty throwing out the first pitch of the baseball season.

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The tab key now switches between the main editor and title editor in WordLand. Still a little work to do there.

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These days I read Timothy Snyder's essays as soon as they come in.

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New month. Last month's source code archived. Onward! 😄

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Text • John Gruber

Meta Apologizes for Error That Flooded Instagram With a Bit of the Old Ultra-Violence

wsj.com/tech/meta-apologizes-for-error-that-flooded-instagram-with-violent-content-c207d5f5

Meghan Bobrowsky and Jeff Horwitz, reporting for The Wall Street Journal: Meta apologized Wednesday night for what it said was an “error” that led to graphic and violent videos flooding the feeds of a vast number of Instagram users, including minors. The videos, which we...

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Text • John Gruber

Microsoft to Retire Skype in May

microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2025/02/28/the-next-chapter-moving-from-skype-to-microsoft-teams/

Jeff Teper, president of collaborative apps and platforms at Microsoft: In order to streamline our free consumer communications offerings so we can more easily adapt to customer needs, we will be retiring Skype in May 2025 to focus on Microsoft Teams (free), our modern c...

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Text • John Gruber

Meta Fired ‘Roughly 20’ Employees for Leaking

theverge.com/labor/621059/meta-fires-20-employee-leakers

Alex Heath, reporting for The Verge: Meta has fired “roughly 20” employees who leaked “confidential information outside the company,” according to a spokesperson. “We tell employees when they join the company, and we offer periodic reminders, that it is against our poli...

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Framework Introduces New Laptops and First Desktop

frame.work/blog/highlights-from-the-framework-2nd-gen-event

Founder Nirav Patel, writing this week on Framework’s company blog: We went live this morning at the Framework (2nd Gen) Event with our biggest set of announcements yet: Framework Desktop, Framework Laptop 12, and the new Ryzen AI 300 Series Framework Laptop 13. You can ...

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Text • John Gruber

Trump Claims to Have Spoken With Starmer Regarding Apple Encryption Backdoor Demand

thespectator.com/topic/spectator-interview-president-donald-trump-full-transcript/

Ben Domenech interviewed President Trump yesterday in the Oval Office, after Trump’s meeting with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The Spectator has published the entire transcript, and I read it so you don’t have to, to get the part about Apple and the UK’s encryption backdo...

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What If, Indeed

cjr.org/public_editor/washington-post-public-editor-bezos-has-been-hands-off-what-if-that-changes.php

Hamilton Nolan, in a 2021 piece for The Columbia Journalism Review, under the headline “Bezos Has Been Hands-Off. What if That Changes?”: Bezos has given the paper the resources to be bigger and better, and, by most accounts, pretty much stayed out of the newsroom’s hair...

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Jeff Bezos Takes Control of the Washington Post’s Opinion Pages; Asserts Exclusive Focus ‘In Support and Defense of Two Pillars: Personal Liberties and Free Markets’

x.com/JeffBezos/status/1894757287052362088

Jeff Bezos, in a memo he shared publicly on X: I shared this note with the Washington Post team this morning: I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal li...

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Gene Hackman Dies at 95

nytimes.com/2025/02/27/movies/gene-hackman-unforgiven-bonnie-clyde.html

Loved this remembrance by Manohla Dargis in The New York Times: When Clint Eastwood needed a performer who could persuasively go boot-toe to boot-toe with him in his brutal 1992 western Unforgiven, he needed an actor who was his towering equal onscreen. Eastwood needed a...

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Nice to see Doc Searls using WordLand. He's been an early user of every writing tool I've written for the web going back to the mid-late 90s.

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Like many other people I love Severance, esp this season, and esp the most recent episode. And my favorite scene in the last episode took place at a Chinese restaurant. Anyway, I was just listening to the latest episode of the Severance podcast, about this episode, which you should definitely listen to if you like me love the show. They have an interview with Christopher Walken who plays Burt. Amazing stuff. But even more amazing is that I learned in the podcast that the restaurant mentioned earlier is actually a famous Kingston restaurant that just re-opened after a long hiatus, so I've not yet had a chance to eat there, but I want to, Eng's. This, after learning that the diner that's in two scenes, one in each season, is the Phoenicia Diner, one of my favorite local eating places.

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Me at 22 in Madison

Me as a grad student at UW-Madison in 1977 or so, programming on a Unix system, probably working on my first outliner.

Note that the terminal I was using had uppercase and lowercase letters. This was a big innovation!

I was using a PDP-11/45 to write in C.

See the comment thread from 2014 on Facebook.

I lived in a big house with 10 roommates. And as weird as it must seem from the point of view of 2025, I was the only one who used a computer. I would tell them all the time that we'd all use computers someday. They rolled their eyes and smiled. "There goes Dave again." The reason I was so sure was email and writing tools.

Me at 22 in Madison. My mother, Dr Eve Winer, took this picture.

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I'm also interested in social networks and RSS and have written a lot about that in the context of WordLand, because it generates RSS, it can connect to any app that understands RSS, basically because WordPress does. But don't get confused that WordLand is somehow a twitter-like silo. There are already too many of those. I want something much simpler and I believe more useful and less spammy and abusive -- a social network built around RSS.

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WordLand is simply an editor for writers who publish to WordPress.

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★ The iPhone 16e

The iPhone 16e is an iPhone for people who don’t want to think much about their phone. But they *do* want an iPhone, not just any “whatever” phone. A just plain iPhone, with a good screen, good enough (and simple) camera, and great battery life.