Sign up

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

Apple Seeks Preliminary Injunction Against OpenAI in Trade Secrets Case

reuters.com/legal/litigation/apple-seeks-preliminary-injunction-against-openai-trade-secrets-case-2026-08-04/

Reuters: Apple on Monday asked a U.S. judge for a preliminary injunction barring two former employees ​and OpenAI from accessing, acquiring, using or disclosing alleged confidential information as it moves ahead with its trade secrets case. [...] The iPhone maker also f...

Alan Jacobs Supports Webmention Valid

This morning I had a difficult conversation with Claude

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

Bending Spoons to Buy Airtable for $1.3 Billion

techcrunch.com/2026/08/04/bending-spoons-to-buy-airtable-for-1-28b/

Ivan Mehta, reporting for TechCrunch: In its first acquisition since going public last month, Bending Spoons on Tuesday said that it has agreed to buy spreadsheet and database startup Airtable for $1.28 billion in cash. Founded in 2013, Airtable has so far raised over $...

Alan Jacobs Supports Webmention Valid

Looks like this could be a complicated story 

Scripting News Valid

How to create a standard, 2026 addition

TL;DR: What developers need. Enough examples, a validator, and decent docs that value explaining over mathematical elegance. We assume developers can read and think, and if there's doubt look to the examples for guidance. It's worth noting we did not take the RSS.chat proje...

Scripting News Valid

Last week along with a lot of other stuff, we shipped a validator for lists and feeds that want to be compatible with RSS.chat. It works best for standards to stay strong and a validator helps that. So here are a few examples, validating one user's feed, validating the everyone feed for RSS.chat, which is interesting because this feed starts a lot of threads, so we navigate through that tree and check those feeds too. And validating the user list on RSS.chat, which is an OPML file. And a simple feed with a few interop isses.

Alan Jacobs Supports Webmention Valid

Finished reading: The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. I haven’t read this in many years, and it’s just fabulous. The mastery with which Collins organizes and deploys his many threads of plot is something to behold. I’m tempted to to start over! 📚

Interdependent Thoughts Updates instantly via WebSub Valid
• Ton Zijlstra

Thessaly / Philosopher Kings Trilogy by Jo Walton

I came across a recommendation by Cory Doctorow of Jo Walton‘s work, on July 1st. I bought a range of her works then, and in the past month read what I bought. Among them the Thessaly trilogy which I read in the last 2 weeks, consisting of three books, The Just City, The Philosopher Kings […]

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

TerminalWidget 1.0

terminalwidget.app/

New app from Brett Terpstra:

TerminalWidget lets you send output from commands, scripts, APIs, and Shortcuts directly to widgets across macOS, iOS, and iPadOS with rich formatting, progress bars, sparklines, and image support. It is available as a universal app on the App Store for $19.99.

I don’t know what I’m going to use this for, but I know I want to use it.

 ★ 

Pixel Envy Valid
• Nick Heer

F.T.: Apple Filed a Legal Complaint in the U.K. Over Revised iCloud Backdoor Demand

Tim Bradshaw, Financial Times: Apple has launched a new legal challenge against the UK’s latest attempt to create a “backdoor” to access encrypted customer data, a year after the Home Office agreed to drop a previous order after a row with Washington. As a reminder, this is different from the order made in February last […]⌥ Permalink

Daring Fireball Valid
• Daring Fireball Department of Commerce

[Sponsor] MCP vs. REST: The Right Way to Connect Agents to Your API

workos.com/blog/mcp-vs-rest?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=q32026

REST serves the developers building against your API. MCP serves the agents now trying to use it. Most teams treat these as competing standards and have to pick one.

They’re not rivals, they’re layers: most MCP servers just call REST internally to do the real work. The best ones don’t convert every endpoint into a tool, they design around what the agent’s trying to accomplish.

Shipping that server also means shipping OAuth 2.1 with scoped tokens. WorkOS AuthKit already speaks that spec, so you skip building an auth provider on top.

Read the breakdown →

 ★ 

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

John Ternus Has Rehired Former Hardware VP Laura Legros

macrumors.com/2026/08/03/apple-john-ternus-hiring-retired-vp/

Juli Clover, MacRumors: Incoming Apple CEO John Ternus is rehiring Laura Legros, a former vice president of hardware engineering who retired from Apple in 2022, reports Bloomberg. Legros previously managed product delivery, development schedules, and coordination across ...

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

The Information on Apple’s Unusual Use of iCloud for Confidential Work

theinformation.com/articles/apple-icloud-policy-fueled-employee-leaks-ahead-openai-suit?rc=jfy0lk

Aaron “Homeboy” Tilley, reporting for The Information (paywalled without gift links, alas, but MacRumors has a summary): When new employees join Apple, the company often issues them an iPhone and Mac and pays for an iCloud account with a large amount of online storage ca...

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

Om Malik’s Final Essay: ‘The Myth, the Mythos and the Man’

om.co/2026/06/07/the-myth-the-mythos-and-the-man/

Om published this on Monday June 7 — the day of the WWDC keynote. He sent me a note about it, that is too personal to share in full. He described it as his “last shot” — “In case I don’t make it”. He didn’t make it. I didn’t read it right away because I was busy with WWDC. ...

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Pasting Quoted Paths and Escaped Terminal Text

Anthony Reimer: When you are shell scripting or working in Terminal, sometimes you want a quicker way to enter the path to a file or folder, particularly if you have already navigated to it in the Finder. One way that works in Terminal is to drag the file or folder from the Finder onto the […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

NSPasteboard Crashes When Handling File Promises

Wade Tregaskis: NSPasteboard mutates itself simultaneously from the main thread and the global concurrent Dispatch pool, w.r.t. to its internal type cache. This is surprisingly trivial to reproduce (sample code below) by just dropping, e.g. a file promise (such as by opening a PNG in Preview, revealing the thumbnails sidebar, and then dragging the thumbnail […]

blog - aows Valid
• Adrian Vila

Umbrella and Lighthouse

Galicia, July 2026.

From the video Photography on the Galician Coast.

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

★ Why Apple Requires a Cellular Account Through a Big Three Carrier to Lease an iPhone

For many years now, part of the co-marketing agreements between Apple and the Big Three is Apple agreeing to require a postpaid account with a Big Three carrier for all “special” iPhone financing deals, including the old iPhone Upgrade Program and the new Apple Upgrade leasing.

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

Ulysses S. Grant on the Future Dividing Line

snopes.com/fact-check/grant-next-civil-war/

Ulysses S. Grant, in 1875:

Where the citizen is sovereign and the official the servant, where no power is exercised except by the will of the people, it is important that the sovereign — the people — should possess intelligence.

The free school is the promoter of that intelligence which is to preserve us as a free nation. If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other.

Not sure if the 2020s count as “the near future”, but holy hell is that a spot-on synopsis of our current moment.

 ★ 

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

Truth Social Launches Paid Early Access to Trump Posts

npr.org/2026/08/01/nx-s1-5912219/trump-truth-social-access-insider-trading

Bobby Allyn, reporting for NPR: Trump Media & Technology Group is now shopping to traders and investors a premium version of Truth Social delivering early access to the feeds of high-profile users, including the president. Starting Saturday, for a fee of up to $100,0...