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Michael Tsai
Text • Michael Tsai

macOS 26.6.2

Joe Rossignol (release notes, security, no enterprise, no developer, full installer, IPSW): macOS 26.6.2 delivers security fixes that were first made available in the macOS Golden Gate 27 beta. Howard Oakley: There don’t appear to any matching security updates to Sequoia or Sonoma, though. See also: Mr. Macintosh. Previously: iOS 26.6.1 and iPadOS 26.6.1 macOS […]

Michael Tsai
Text • Michael Tsai

iOS 26.6.1 and iPadOS 26.6.1

Joe Rossignol (iOS/iPadOS release notes, security, no enterprise, no developer): Apple today released iOS 26.6.1, iPadOS 26.6.1, visionOS 26.6.1, and macOS 26.6.2, with all of the updates containing security fixes. Apple also released iOS 18.7.10 and iPadOS 18.7.10 with security fixes. The version numbers are now out of sync with macOS because macOS 26.6.1 fixed […]

Scripting News Valid
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I'm thinking about writing my blog over in RSS.chat. It has most of the features I like, titles are optional, no character limit, links are supported, because it's the web. It supports discourse the way I like it, where every comment is a post, no difference, and you can anchor threads in different places, not just the place it was born. It's got a simple structure, without being complex. Small parts loosely joined, every part replaceable. Much more than open source. And naturally distributed.

Scripting News Valid
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Why do people care if Claude puts watermarks on text it wrote. It's screwing with its writing, not yours. As a person who publishes their own writing, and carefully labels it when it's written by an AI bot (docs, change notes, podcast show notes, quotable things it said), I want people to be able to tell that I wrote it, this is what I thought, I'm not just shoveling random written sludge to people, sloshing around, devaluing every bit of real writing in its midst. I bet teachers love the idea. Why does everyone have to have an opinion about every damned thing? And of course I have even more to say on the subject.

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Organized Thieves Are Targeting AI Server Chips With Violent Highway Hijackings

wired.com/story/the-worst-ive-ever-seen-cargo-thieves-are-turning-violent-in-pursuit-of-ai-hardware/

Paresh Dave and Aarian Marshall, reporting for Wired (News+ link in case Wired hits you with their paywall): The incidents involved two different shipments of high-value technology traveling from Silicon Valley to Southern California, according to Pachuca, who says he le...

blog - aows Valid
Text • Adrian Vila

The tractor

Galicia, August 2026.

From the video Why I work on multiple photography projects at once.

Scripting News Valid
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Meanwhile Claude wrote test files in many of our S3 buckets last night, one of which knocked FeedLand off the air. It did a scan to see what other damage it had done, and there was a lot. It went through specific orders that said it can't do those things. So I have no idea how useful these things could be if it destroys stuff in deployed projects with real users. FeedLand was down for over an hour, and stressed me out no end. Really fucked up.

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

‘Dickover’ Makes It Into The Guardian

theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/18/dickovers-baggravation-botiquette-18-new-words-tech-hellscape

Stuart Heritage, writing for The Guardian, under the splendid headline “Dickovers, Baggravation and Botiquette: 18 New Words to Describe Our Tech Hellscape”: The “dickover” is the scourge of the modern age. Coined in May by John Gruber, a tech writer, it is defined as “a...

Scripting News Valid
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Frontier observations in 2026

As I've been writing test scripts for the Frontier project, I was finding omissions or mistakes one at a time. Finally I asked Claude to research this. Where are the holes you didn't fill as we were going along? The list is surprisingly long. Then I asked it to look at other...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

OpenAI Pot Complains That Google Kettle Is Black

x.com/thsottiaux/status/2083373529081291076?s=12

Thibault Sottiaux, the OpenAI genius in charge of Codex and the new ChatGPT Homer Simpson car, on Twitter/X: I don’t come often to GMail [sic] (OpenAI is a Slack company), but I swear, every time I do open it, there is a new button somewhere around the top right corner. ...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Nature Is Healing: MacOS 27 Golden Gate Beta 6 Adds Redesigned Traffic Light Window Controls

9to5mac.com/2026/08/17/macos-27-golden-gate-beta-6-features-redesigned-traffic-light-window-controls/

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

macOS 27 Golden Gate beta 6 introduces redesigned traffic light window controls. The new look resembles older Mac OS X systems with more detail in each button.

Nice. But these changes can’t improve fast enough for me — I am impatient. The MacOS user interface had been in a slow, steady, sad, no-fun decline for years, and then, a year ago, the bottom fell out with the disaster of 26 Tahoe.

But all the changes in 27 Golden Gate are in the right direction. Golden Gate is not a mixed bag. Designers with taste and talent are clearly back at the helm. And I love that they’re still pushing UI and icon changes in mid-August, entering the home stretch of the .0 beta cycle.

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Michael Tsai
Text • Michael Tsai

Apple Proposes 15% External Purchase Fee

Juli Clover (AppleInsider): Apple has again failed to earn a stay for fee calculations in its ongoing legal fight with Epic Games. Apple's case will be heard by the Supreme Court in the term that begins in October, and Apple asked the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to pause proceedings until […]

Michael Tsai
Text • Michael Tsai

Zoom Screen Sharing Attack

Lily Hay Newman (via Ben Lovejoy): As AI models gain advanced capabilities to find vulnerabilities in software, develop ways to exploit them, and even carry out autonomous hacking sprees, researchers offered a sobering new example on Tuesday, disclosing vulnerabilities in the video conferencing platform Zoom that could have been exploited to take over targets’ devices. […]

Pixel Envy Valid
Text • Nick Heer

After Regulator’s Investigation, Apple Will Make Changes to App Tracking Transparency Prompts in Germany

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

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

MacOS 26.7 Tahoe Release Candidate Contains a Video Demonstrating Camera-Equipped AirPods in Action

macrumors.com/2026/08/17/camera-equipped-airpods-macos-26-7/

Oops.

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Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

★ Follow-Up Thoughts on Watermarking Schemes for AI-Generated Text

I want the answers that I read to be cogent, lucid, accurate, blessedly terse — and ideally to strike a consistent tone that is pleasant to my reading ear. The genie is not going back in the bottle.

Pixel Envy Valid
Text • Nick Heer

MacOS Golden Gate Reintroduces Buttons with Light and Shadow

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

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Apple TV Still Has No Start Date for ‘The Savant’

daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/19/chastain-says-the-savant-will-be-released

The Savant is a political thriller series starring Jessica Chastain that was supposed to debut a year ago. Apple “postponed” it, apparently out of fear of upsetting extremist right-wing nut jobs because the show is about an undercover investigator (Chastain) hunting down extremist right-wing nut jobs. Chastain was not happy about the show being delayed.

Last we heard about the show was back in April, when Marc Malkin reported this for Variety:

“Before it was like, ‘I don’t know if we’re going to see it,’ but now I can say, ‘We’re going to see it,’” Chastain told me exclusively on Saturday at the Breakthrough Prize ceremony in Santa Monica.

As for when, sources tell me that Apple is planning for a July release.

Given that it’s now the middle of August, I think that a July release is looking less and less likely by the day.

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Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

No Update Since Early July Regarding Siri AI Coming to the EU, Ever

ft.com/content/807d25c3-f4ac-4402-b815-3aa91018237d

The Financial Times, back on July 1, with the transcontinental byline “Michael Acton in San Francisco and Barbara Moens in Brussels” (non-paywalled summaries from 9to5Mac and MacRumors): Apple chief executive Tim Cook and EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen held “constructive”...

Scripting News Valid
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Another busy day programming with Claude on Frontier. I still have to come up with a codename. But we got to a milestone today. I was able to create, edit, publish and revise a web app using the new version of the app still running on the old machine. When it's done I will get to retire this old Mac, keep it around so we can test the new code to make sure it does what the old code does, incredibly important when porting a development and runtime environment. Claude works on its stuff at night. The workload it's going to do tonight is the equivalent of several months time for a skilled human developer who manages their time well. As people get used to working this way, I imagine the AIs will learn how to better work with humans, if that is their destiny. I still can't believe we're doing what we're doing.