By John Gruber

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SafeBase by Drata ★

My thanks to Drata for sponsoring this week at DF to promote SafeBase. SafeBase eliminates the friction of inbound security reviews. It helps you automate inbound requests, use AI to answer questionnaires, and share your security posture proactively — all through a centralized Trust Center.

To Trust ICEBlock’s Anonymity, You Have to Trust Apple ★

Dominic Preston, writing at The Verge, regarding Android fans’ bristling at ICEBlock developer Joshua Aaron’s claims that an Android (or web) version of ICEBlock couldn’t provide the same level of privacy as the iOS version:

Aaron told The Verge ICEBlock is built around a single database in iCloud. When a user taps on the map to report ICE sightings, the location data is added to that database, and users within five miles are automatically sent a push notification alerting them. Push notifications require developers to have some way of designating which devices receive them, and while Aaron declined to say precisely how the notifications function, he said alerts are sent through Apple’s system, not ICEBlock’s, letting him avoid keeping his own database of users or their devices. “We utilized iCloud in kind of a creative way,” Aaron said. [...]

But you might have spotted the problem: ICEBlock isn’t collecting device data on iOS, but only because similar data is stored with Apple instead.

Apple maintains a database of which devices and accounts have installed a given app, and Carlos Anso from GrapheneOS told me that it likely also tracks device registrations for push notifications. For either ICEBlock’s iOS app or a hypothetical Android app, law enforcement could demand information directly from the company, cutting ICEBlock out of the loop. Aaron told me that he has “no idea what Apple would store,” and it “has nothing to do with ICEBlock.”

Bruce Schneier linked to this story saying “the ICEBlock tool has vulnerabilities”, but I don’t think that’s a fair description. As far as we know, ICEBlock is as private as possible while still enabling push notifications, and a hypothetical Android version couldn’t be as private. But that privacy does depend on trust in Apple.

Also worth a note: Aaron’s wife, Carolyn Feinstein, was an auditor at the Department of Justice but was fired last month because of her husband’s app.

New York Times’ Style Guide Substitutions for ‘The President Violated the Constitution’ ★

Carlos Greaves, writing for McSweeney’s:

“The president remained steadfast in his novel interpretation of constitutional law.”

“Faced with the choice between clinging to the letter of the law and marching to the beat of his own legal drum, the president chose the latter.”

‘Obsoless’ — Ken Pillonel’s Small-Batch Cases Bring USB-C Charging to Lightning iPhones ★

Back in 2021 a young engineering student named Ken Pillonel modified his own iPhone X to replace the Lightning port with USB-C, which became a small viral sensation. He’s back at it, with a far more ambitious project: iPhone cases with USB-C ports for the last five or so years of models with Lightning ports. He’s produced three batches of cases so far, but is currently sold out.

Even if you’re not interested in buying one of these cases, Pillonel’s video documenting how he brought the concept to fruition is quite clever and fun.

Intel Needs a Big Customer for Foundry Business to Survive ★

Max A. Cherney and Stephen Nellis, reporting for Reuters:

Those customers for the company’s so-called 14A manufacturing process are crucial to the success of the technology — so much so that if it fails to secure a big one, it could shut down its cutting-edge manufacturing business altogether, according to Intel’s quarterly filing on Thursday.

The possibility that Intel could drop out of the cutting-edge manufacturing business would be a historic shift for a company that has described itself as a steward of Moore’s Law — an observation by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore about the fast rate of development of the chip industry that held true for decades. Intel is the only U.S. chipmaker capable of making advanced computing chips.

Intel has struggled for years due to management missteps, missing out on the AI race and losing market share to its longtime rival AMD.

The beginning of the end for Intel was long before the AI race or the market share they’ve lost to AMD. It was missing out on mobile. From a 2013 profile of then-CEO Paul Otellini, by Alexis Madrigal for The Atlantic:

But, oh, what could have been! Even Otellini betrayed a profound sense of disappointment over a decision he made about a then-unreleased product that became the iPhone. Shortly after winning Apple’s Mac business, he decided against doing what it took to be the chip in Apple’s paradigm-shifting product.

“We ended up not winning it or passing on it, depending on how you want to view it. And the world would have been a lot different if we’d done it,” Otellini told me in a two-hour conversation during his last month at Intel. “The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do... At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100× what anyone thought.”

That was it, the beginning of the end. It’s not just that mobile computing, as defined by the iPhone, became the largest market, by far, for chips, but that the needs of mobile devices defined the future of leading edge chipmaking across all industries: performance-per-watt, not merely sheer performance. As mobile grew, so went the economies of scale, which resulted in Apple Silicon eventually beating x86 chips not just in performance-per-watt but also in single-core performance.

goo.gl, Google’s Link Shortener, Will Stop Working Next Month ★

Emma Roth, The Verge:

Google will officially deprecate links generated with its URL shortening tool next month. On August 25th, 2025, all links in the https://goo.gl/* format will no longer work and return a 404 error message.

Google shut down its URL shortener in 2019, citing “changes we’ve seen in how people find content on the internet.” Links created with the tool continued to work since then, but Google announced last year that it would begin deprecating them as traffic to the shortened URLs declined. “In fact more than 99% of them had no activity in the last month,” Google said in its July 2024 blog post.

The heyday for link shorteners was the era when Twitter (a) was still Twitter, (b) had a 140-character post limit, and (c) each character of a URL you tweeted counted toward that character limit. None of those things are true anymore. But, still. Cool URLs don’t change.

I’m sure it is true that 99 percent of goo.gl links had no activity in the past month. But I’m just as sure that it would cost next to nothing for Google to keep goo.gl up and running in perpetuity. I mean, 99 percent of all URLs probably had no activity in the last month. 99 percent of all books ever written weren’t read in the last month either, I bet — but that’s no excuse for libraries to throw them in the trash.

It’s fine that Google stopped allowing for the creating of new links a while back, but there’s no reason they should ever stop redirecting existing links. The whole reason anyone might have used goo.gl instead of something like bit.ly is misplaced trust in Google. I trust Google with almost nothing long-term. Mark my words, they’re going to do this with Gmail accounts eventually.

4chan Clowns Find Open Database of Images From Viral Women’s Dating Safety App ‘Tea’ ★

Emanuel Maiberg and Joseph Cox, reporting for 404 Media:

Users from 4chan claim to have discovered an exposed database hosted on Google’s mobile app development platform, Firebase, belonging to the newly popular women’s dating safety app Tea. Users say they are rifling through peoples’ personal data and selfies uploaded to the app, and then posting that data online, according to screenshots, 4chan posts, and code reviewed by 404 Media. In a statement to 404 Media, Tea confirmed the breach also impacted some direct messages but said that the data is from two years ago.

Tea, which claims to have more than 1.6 million users, reached the top of the App Store charts this week and has tens of thousands of reviews there. The app aims to provide a space for women to exchange information about men in order to stay safe, and verifies that new users are women by asking them to upload a selfie.

Tea jumped to the top spot in the App Store (it’s still at #4 as I type this, trailing only ChatGPT, Netflix, and Amazon Prime Video) and has been getting a lot of coverage this week. A wide open, publicly accessible database of users’ driver’s licenses and self portraits is, to say the least, pretty egregious.

I’m not accusing Tea in particular of being vibe-coded, but I do wonder if this sort of thing is going to become commonplace as more apps and services come online after being developed in slapdash AI-assisted manners.

Friday, 25 July 2025

The Talk Show: ‘The Shift-2 Crowd’ ★

Jason Snell returns to the show to talk about the early PC platform rivalries of the 1980s, iOS 26 leaks (and Apple suing YouTuber Jon Prosser), the various Apple OS 26 public betas and the state of Liquid Glass, and more. (Where by “more” I mean a little baseball and keyboard nerdery.)

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Thursday, 24 July 2025

Public Betas for Apple OSes 26 ★

The public betas are out for iOS/iPadOS/WatchOS/MacOS 26, and Dan Moren and Jason Snell cover them all at Six Colors. Here’s Moren on iOS 26:

Apple’s new design language, dubbed Liquid Glass, applies across all their platforms, but unsurprisingly, it feels most at home on the iPhone and iPad. That’s in part because of the touch interface; the literal hands-on nature makes the feel responsive and more like physical things that you’re interacting with. For example, dragging the new magnifying loupe across the screen, watching the way it magnifies and distorts text and images as it passes over them — this interaction has always been unique to iOS for practical reasons, but the way it feels here doesn’t have a direct analogue on other platforms.

For it now being late July, though, there remain a lot of glaring problems. I hope to be proven wrong, but I think the legibility/usability problems are going to make the 26.0 versions of Apple’s OSes unpopular. Functionally, iOS and iPadOS 26 betas 4 are solid. MacOS 26 Tahoe really adds some great productivity features. But visually, not so much for any of these OSes (especially MacOS) — and that, to me, is a serious problem.

Anyway, public beta commentary:

• Dan Moren on iOS 26.
• Jason Snell on iPadOS 26.
• Moren on WatchOS 26.
• Snell on MacOS 26 Tahoe.

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Wednesday, 23 July 2025

Yours Truly With David Barnard on the Sub Club Podcast ★

David Barnard:

On the podcast I talk with John about the fascinating 40-year history of Apple’s developer relations, how almost going bankrupt in the 1990s shaped today’s control-focused approach, and why we might need an “App Store 3.0” reset.

Yet another fun appearance on a podcast. There’s a good transcript too, if you’re more of a reader than a listener.

Tuesday, 22 July 2025

The Financial Times Reports the UK Is Backing Down From Its Demand for Apple to Grant It an iCloud Encryption Backdoor ★

Anna Gross, Tim Bradshaw, and Lauren Fedor, reporting for the Financial Times (syndicated without paywall at Ars Technica):

Sir Keir Starmer’s government is seeking a way out of a clash with the Trump administration over the UK’s demand that Apple provide it with access to secure customer data, two senior British officials have told the Financial Times. The officials both said the Home Office, which ordered the tech giant in January to grant access to its most secure cloud storage system, would probably have to retreat in the face of pressure from senior leaders in Washington, including Vice President JD Vance.

“This is something that the vice president is very annoyed about and which needs to be resolved,” said an official in the UK’s technology department. “The Home Office is basically going to have to back down.”

Both officials said the UK decision to force Apple to break its end-to-end encryption — which has been raised multiple times by top officials in Donald Trump’s administration — could impede technology agreements with the US.

“One of the challenges for the tech partnerships we’re working on is the encryption issue,” the first official said. “It’s a big red line in the US — they don’t want us messing with their tech companies.”

One dystopian element of the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act is that when companies are issued demands under the law — which critics in the UK call “the Snoopers’ Charter” — it’s a criminal offense subject to imprisonment to reveal to anyone that the UK government issued the demand. You will recall that after receiving this demand, in February this year Apple pulled iCloud Advanced Data Protection from users in the UK.

What I don’t like about the Financial Times’s framing of this is that they describe it only in terms of politics between the Trump administration and Starmer’s. This is not merely about a foreign government “messing with their tech companies”. It’s fundamentally about privacy and security. It is a human rights and civil liberties issue, first and foremost. The Trump administration is on the correct and just side of this issue. Whether they’re on the correct side for the right reasons, I don’t know, but that’s what’s most important here. A secret backdoor is abhorrent from all perspectives: privacy, security, civil liberties. (Not to mention impossible cryptographically with E2EE — mandating a backdoor is effectively banning E2EE, which is why Apple pulled Advanced Data Protection from the UK.)

Conversely, one reason the UK went through with this demand is that the Biden administration was, disgracefully, on the wrong side of this, choosing to look the other way and lie to Congress about what the UK was planning to do.

OS 26 Beta 4’s Are Out ★

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Apple today provided developers with the fourth betas of iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 for testing purposes, with the updates coming two weeks after Apple seeded the third betas.

MacOS, WatchOS, tvOS, and VisionOS too, all in lockstep. Also, a good first look at what’s changed in iOS 26 beta 4 from beta 3. Some of the things Apple is tweaking between betas need more than minor tweaking. Also: Apple Intelligence summaries for news notifications are back.

The Computer History Museum’s Vintage Computer Festival: August 1–2 ★

CHM:

Come and explore an extraordinary showcase of historical computers, from pristine originals to ingenious modern hacks. Computer enthusiasts around the world look forward to the annual Vintage Computer Festival.

Experience hands-on demos of historical systems from the 1960s through the 1990s, learn preservation tips, and try out brands like Apple, Atari, Commodore, Tandy/Radio Shack, and more.

It’s in Mountain View, so I can’t make it, but given all the recent nostalgia that’s been in the air regarding the early PC era, I wish I could.

Hackers Exploit Zero-Day Microsoft SharePoint Exploit, Attacking Governments and Businesses Around the World ★

Ellen Nakashima, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Joseph Menn, reporting for The Washington Post:

The U.S. government and partners in Canada and Australia are investigating the compromise of SharePoint servers, which provide a platform for sharing and managing documents. Tens of thousands of such servers are at risk, experts said, and Microsoft has issued no patch for the flaw, leaving victims around the world scrambling to respond.

The “zero-day” attack, so called because it targeted a previously unknown vulnerability, is only the latest cybersecurity embarrassment for Microsoft. Last year, the company was faulted by a panel of U.S. government and industry experts for lapses that enabled a 2023 targeted Chinese hack of U.S. government emails, including those of then-Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

This most recent attack compromises only those servers housed within an organization — not those in the cloud, such as Microsoft 365, officials said. After first suggesting that users make modifications to or simply unplug SharePoint server programs from the internet, the company on Sunday evening released a patch for one version of the software. Two other versions remain vulnerable and Microsoft said it is continuing to work to develop a patch.

“Just pull the plug” — classic Microsoft security.

With access to these servers, which often connect to Outlook email, Teams and other core services, a breach can lead to theft of sensitive data as well as password harvesting, Netherlands-based research company Eye Security noted. What’s also alarming, researchers said, is that the hackers have gained access to keys that may allow them to regain entry even after a system is patched. “So pushing out a patch on Monday or Tuesday doesn’t help anybody who’s been compromised in the past 72 hours,” said one researcher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because a federal investigation is ongoing.

Sounds bad.

The nonprofit Center for Internet Security, which staffs an information-sharing group for state and local governments, notified about 100 organizations that they were vulnerable and potentially compromised, said Randy Rose, the organization’s vice president. Those warned included public schools and universities. The process took six hours Saturday night — much longer than it otherwise would have, because the threat-intelligence and incident-response teams have been cut by 65 percent as CISA slashed funding, Rose said.

Another DOGE success story.

Reuters: ‘Meta, X, and LinkedIn Appeal Unprecedented VAT Claim by Italy’ ★

Reuters:

Italian tax authorities argue that free user registrations with X, LinkedIn and Meta platforms should be seen as taxable transactions as they imply the exchange of a membership account in return for a user’s personal data.

The issue is especially sensitive given wider trade tensions between the EU and the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump. Italy is claiming 887.6 million euros ($1.03 billion) from Meta, 12.5 million euros from X and around 140 million euros from LinkedIn. [...]

According to several experts consulted by Reuters, the Italian approach could affect almost all companies, from airlines to supermarkets to publishers, who link access to free services on their sites to users’ acceptance of profiling cookies.

Charging a VAT on free account signups does not strike me as a good idea.

‘Google Solves Its Pixel 10 Leaks by Just Showing Us the Phone’ ★

Jay Peters, The Verge:

Google’s Pixel 10 launch event is just under a month away, but the company is already revealing the official design of the base phone. You can currently see a video of the phone on Google’s website (and below). It looks just like the official renders that leaked earlier today, which showed that the phone will have a third back camera (which is rumored to be a telephoto sensor).

That’s certainly one way to deal with leaks. It looks like a Pixel 9, which looks like an iPhone 12–16 with a different (but cool) camera mesa.

Monday, 21 July 2025

Will Wonders Never Cease? ★

Brody Ford and Hannah Miller, reporting for Bloomberg:

Oracle Corp. is in discussions with Skydance Media LLC for a major software deal once the media company’s acquisition of Paramount Global is complete. The new arrangement is expected to be worth about $100 million per year, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named speaking about the private discussions. The agreement would see Paramount and its subsidiaries using Oracle’s cloud software, the people said.

Skydance was founded by David Ellison, the son of Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison.

Reminiscent of SpaceX’s $2 billion “investment” in xAI. (Via Peter Kafka.)

Commanders : Goofus :: Guardians : Gallant ★

Mike Florio, NBC Sports:

And while the Guardians stood up and responded to Trump, the Commanders are hiding under the bed. With the NFL right next to them.

We’ve sent multiple emails to both the team and the league seeking comment on one of the biggest stories in all of sports. No one has responded. It’s a common, low-tech, P.R. play. Ignore the request, and maybe the reporter will forget about it. Force the reporter to remember, and to ask again. And maybe again.

Here’s the statement from Guardians team president Chris Antonetti:

“I understand there are very different perspectives on the decision we made a few years ago, but it’s a decision we made and we’ve gotten the opportunity to build the brand as the Guardians over the last four years and we’re excited about the future that’s in front of us.”

I’d recommend going a little further and saying that everyone in the organization loves the new brand, but that’s quibbling. What the Commanders and the NFL are doing is cowardice.

‘CBS: The Tiffany Network’ ★

Letterman: “You can’t spell CBS without BS.”

HRW Report Documents Abusive Practices at Three Florida Immigration Detention Centers Since January 2025 ★

John Holmes for Human Rights Watch (via The Guardian):

One woman described arriving at Krome — a facility that typically only holds men — late at night on January 28. Officers then confined her for days with dozens of other women without bedding or privacy, in a cell normally used only during incarceration intake procedures. “There was only one toilet, and it was covered in feces,” she said. “We begged the officers to let us clean it, but they just said sarcastically, ‘Housekeeping will come soon.’ No one ever came.”

A man recalled the frigid conditions in the intake cell where he was detained: “They turned up the air conditioning... You could not fall asleep because it was so cold. I thought I was going to experience hypothermia.”

This report documents serious violations of medical standards. Detention facility staff routinely denied individuals with diabetes, asthma, kidney conditions, and chronic pain their prescribed medications and access to doctors. In one case at Krome, a woman with gallstones began vomiting and lost consciousness after being denied care for several days. Officers returned her to the same cell after emergency surgery to remove her gallbladder — still without medication. [...]

Staff were dismissive or abusive even when detainees were undergoing a visibly obvious medical crisis. For example, staff ignored a detained immigrant who began coughing blood in a crowded holding cell for hours. In that case, unrest ensued, and a Disturbance Control Team stormed the cell, forcing the men in it to lie face down on the wet, dirty floor while officers zip-tied their hands behind their backs. A detainee said he heard an officer order the cell’s CCTV camera feed to be turned off. Another detainee said a team member slapped him while shouting, “Shut the fuck up.”

During another incident, officers made men eat while shackled with their hands behind their backs after forcing the group to wait hours for lunch: “We had to bend over and eat off the chairs with our mouths, like dogs,” one man said.

The Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution:

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Sunday, 20 July 2025

WorkOS: Summer Launch Week ★

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF to promote their summer launch week. You may recall their previous launch week back in spring, when I emphasized that their launch week announcements were worth checking out just to admire the retro-modern design of the web page. Well, they’ve done it again, with all-new retro pixel-art design. It’s so fun and well done, with a bunch of UI elements that you can play with.

Amidst the fun of the presentation, they once again have a slew of great new features, including:

• Custom CSS for AuthKit.
• Feature Flags — “Assign flags, expose them in JWTs, and roll out features with targeted control.”
• Supabase Native Auth Integration.
• CLI Auth — “Log in from the command line with OAuth 2.0 device grant flow”.

Mad King Watch: Trump Threatens to Interfere With Stadium Deal Unless Washington Commanders Change Name Back to ‘Redskins’ ★

Reuters, with a headline that truly could have come from The Onion, “Trump Threatens Washington Stadium Deal Unless NFL Team Readopts Redskins Name”:

U.S. President Donald Trump threatened on Sunday to interfere with a deal to build a new football stadium in Washington, D.C., unless the local NFL team, now known as the Commanders, changes its name back to Redskins. The American football team dropped the name Redskins in 2020 after decades of criticism that it was a racial slur with links to the U.S. genocide of the Indigenous population.

Trump had called for a return to the name Redskins — and for the Cleveland Guardians baseball team to once again adopt the name Indians — on other occasions, but on Sunday he added that he may take official action.

“I may put a restriction on them that if they don’t change the name back to the original ‘Washington Redskins,’ and get rid of the ridiculous moniker, ‘Washington Commanders,’ I won’t make a deal for them to build a Stadium in Washington,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform.

The team moved from Washington to suburban Landover, Maryland, in 1997, but earlier this year reached an agreement with the local District of Columbia government to return to the city with a new stadium expected to open in 2030.

Trump has limited authority to intervene under the current home-rule law governing federal oversight of the District of Columbia, but he has raised the prospect of taking more control, telling reporters in February, “I think we should take over Washington, D.C.”

It should be emphasized — and shame on Reuters for not doing so — that Trump can’t just “take control” of the District of Columbia. Per Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, it’s Congressional authority that oversees the district, not the Executive branch.

Here are the two posts from his blog that got this obvious attempt to distract from his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein. (“Look at me, I’m a crazy old angry racist, not a creepy old pedophile!”)

Don’t Forget About Atari ★

Cory Ondrejka joins in on the 40-year-old retro computing reminiscing:

For being otherwise bright folks, it’s remarkable how completely wrong they all are. The Atari was the best computer to have.

This whole friendly debate reminds me of the oft-cited adage that the best camera is the one you have with you: The best computer in the 1980s was whichever one your parents bought you. I honestly don’t remember anyone I knew who had an Atari computer. Atari game consoles, sure — almost everyone I knew had a 2600, and we all coveted the 5200. But they sure were cool-looking.

Oddly enough, Jack Tramiel^* — who founded and named Commodore in 1953 as a typewriter company and was running the company when it launched the PET (1977), VIC-20 (1980), and Commodore 64 (1982) — left the company after a dispute with the board in 1984 (a common industry occurrence in those days, seemingly), founded a new company briefly named Tramel Technology (not “Tramiel”, for ease of spelling), which bought the then-failing consumer business of Atari from Warner Communications and took the Atari name for its own. In 1985 Tramiel launched the Atari ST line at CES. To me the 16-bit Atari ST barely registers in my memory — I don’t think I ever encountered one anywhere, including in a store. When I think of Atari personal computers I think of the 8-bit Atari 800 (pretty cool!) and 400 (horrible — perhaps the worst keyboard ever shipped) from 1979.

(Anyway, neither of those aforecited adages are really true, though. Some cameras are much better than others. And the best computers back then were the Apple II’s.)

* Just me or was Tramiel a dead ringer for character actor Gordon Jump, of WKRP in Cincinnati fame?

The WSJ on Late Night TV’s Ad Revenue Decline, and CBS’s Decision to Cancel The Late Show ★

Joe Flint and John Jurgensen, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

But digital advertising revenue hasn’t made up for the fall in ad dollars going to traditional broadcast programming. Spending on linear advertising for the late-night segment on ABC, CBS and NBC fell from $439 million in 2018 to $221 million in 2024, according to Guideline, an ad-tracking platform.

That’s a precipitous decline, if accurate. But still, given that Colbert’s The Late Show has consistently been the highest-rated overall and tied with ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live for the 18–49 year-old demographic, it feels very safe to presume that it generated at least a full third — say, $75–80 million — of that $221 million total. It’s reported that Colbert’s salary is $20 million per year, and Colbert himself said the other night the show employs 200 staff.

If, as anonymous CBS sources are claiming to multiple outlets, the show lost $40 million last year, that means it costs something on the order of $120 million per year to produce, or $100 million after Colbert’s salary. With a staff of 200 people, that’s an average salary of $500,000. I know it costs money to heat and cool the Ed Sullivan theater, and I’m sure there are other costs. But there is no way the average salary of a staff member on the show is half a million per year.

And, even if somehow The Late Show did lose money last year, it seems implausible that CBS wouldn’t first ask for budget cuts — staff reductions, a salary cut for Colbert, whatever else might possibly be running up a $120 million/year budget — before just shutting the whole thing down. NBC’s Late Night With Seth Meyers sadly cut the live studio band last year, for example. $75 million per year in ad revenue is way down from its Letterman era heyday, but that’s surely more than enough to produce a talk show. Also, all of this back-of-the-napkin budget analysis neglects to assign any promotional value to the show. CBS gets to promote everything else on the network to over 2 million people per night with house ads during commercial breaks and guests on the show from other CBS programs.

Saturday, 19 July 2025

Myke Hurley Interviews Yours Truly for the Cortex ‘State of the Workflow’ Series ★

Myke Hurley:

For this episode, I took a slightly different approach for the main section, following step-by-step how John writes and publishes an article. I think this is a template I want to follow with future guests, taking a detailed look at what they do from beginning to end.

I’m so pleased with how this interview turned out — I actually think it may be one of the best of my career. I’ve never had the chance to have a one-on-one podcast with John before, and I’m happy we waited until now to make it happen.

We spoke for a long time, and at some point like halfway through, it really hit me that Hurley was asking really good questions. If you’re interested in how I work and the tools I use, you should enjoy listening to this interview as much as I enjoyed participating in it.

Puck: ‘Was Colbert’s Cancellation Really “Economic” for CBS?’ ★

Matthew Belloni, writing at Puck (paywall-busting gift link) regarding the claim from anonymous CBS sources that The Late Show lost $40 million last year:

Nobody can know for sure. All I can tell you is what I’m hearing. Several sources at both CBS and Skydance insist the decision was based on economics, not politics. After all, if this was about appeasing Trump, they argue, Cheeks would have pulled Colbert off the air ASAP rather than giving him 10 more months in the chair. “Trust me, there’s no conspiracy,” a very good source close to Colbert told me tonight. Still, two other people with deep ties to CBS and Late Show suspect otherwise. After all, when a network decides that a show is too expensive, executives typically go to the key talent and ask them to take pay cuts, fire people, or otherwise slash costs. That didn’t happen here — though with Colbert said to be making between $15 million and $20 million per year, a pay cut wouldn’t have solved the problem on its own. And given the company’s willingness to fold to Trump, there’s no reason for you or me to think they would stand up to any political pressure, or resist any specific demand (which, of course, is the reason to not settle frivolous litigation…). If Chris McCarthy, Cheeks’s counterpart on the cable TV side, cancels The Daily Show in the next couple weeks, I think we’ll have a good idea what’s going on. But for now, I cautiously (and skeptically) believe that this was mostly an economic decision.

Friday, 18 July 2025

ChatGPT Agent ★

OpenAI:

You can now ask ChatGPT to handle requests like “look at my calendar and brief me on upcoming client meetings based on recent news,” “plan and buy ingredients to make Japanese breakfast for four,” and “analyze three competitors and create a slide deck.” ChatGPT will intelligently navigate websites, filter results, prompt you to log in securely when needed, run code, conduct analysis, and even deliver editable slideshows and spreadsheets that summarize its findings.

At the core of this new capability is a unified agentic system. It brings together three strengths of earlier breakthroughs: Operator’s ability to interact with websites, deep research’s skill in synthesizing information, and ChatGPT’s intelligence and conversational fluency.

ChatGPT carries out these tasks using its own virtual computer, fluidly shifting between reasoning and action to handle complex workflows from start to finish, all based on your instructions.

Impressive examples in the embedded videos in the post.

Billionaire Jackass Bill Ackman Bought His Way Into Playing in a Legit Professional Tennis Tournament and, Shockingly, He Embarrassed Himself and Everyone Involved With Letting Him Play ★

Real athletes get 30 For 30 documentaries; fake athletes get fake ones. Not sure which are more enjoyable.

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Friday, 18 July 2025

Apple Sues Jon Prosser Over iOS 26 Leaks ★

Eric Slivka, reporting last night for MacRumors:

While the Camera app redesign didn’t exactly match what Apple unveiled for iOS 26, the general idea was correct and much of what else Prosser showed was pretty close to spot on, and Apple clearly took notice as the company filed a lawsuit today (Scribd link) against Prosser and Michael Ramacciotti for misappropriation of trade secrets.

Apple’s complaint outlines what it claims is the series of events that led to the leaks, which centered around a development iPhone in the possession of Ramacciotti’s friend and Apple employee Ethan Lipnik. According to Apple, Prosser and Ramacciotti plotted to access Lipnik’s phone, acquiring his passcode and then using location-tracking to determine when he “would be gone for an extended period.” Prosser reportedly offered financial compensation to Ramacciotti in return for assisting with accessing the development iPhone.

Lipnik, the Apple employee, was fired, but isn’t named in the lawsuit because seemingly all he did was improperly secure his device running an early build of iOS 26. That’s against company policy, but not against the law.

Prosser, on X, disputes the description of his involvement in Apple’s lawsuit:

For the record: This is not how the situation played out on my end. Luckily have receipts for that.

I did not “plot” to access anyone’s phone. I did not have any passwords. I was unaware of how the information was obtained.

Looking forward to speaking with Apple on this.

Prosser also shared one screenshot of his Signal message correspondence with Ramacciotti.

(MacRumors’s copy of Apple’s lawsuit is hosted at Scribd, which is free to read in a browser, but requires a paid account to download the original PDF. I’m hosting a copy of the PDF here.)

Thursday, 17 July 2025

Network Pinheads at CBS Are Ending ‘The Late Show’ ★

The above links to an Instagram reel with Colbert breaking the news at the start of his show airing tonight. Here’s the same clip on X, if you prefer. He, apparently, was as surprised as anyone.

Here’s Jed Rosenzweig’s story at (the excellent) LateNighter:

“The Late Show with Stephen Colbert will end its historic run in May 2026 at the end of the broadcast season,” the network said in a statement. “We consider Stephen Colbert irreplaceable and will retire The Late Show franchise at that time. We are proud that Stephen called CBS home. He and the broadcast will be remembered in the pantheon of greats that graced late night television.”

The statement was issued jointly by George Cheeks (Co-CEO of Paramount Global and President and CEO of CBS), Amy Reisenbach (President of CBS Entertainment), and David Stapf (President of CBS Studios).

CBS emphasized that the decision was not related to performance or content: “This is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night. It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.”

This stinks to high hell. Colbert has the best ratings in late night TV.

Wednesday, 16 July 2025

Rare Earth Magnet Maker MP Materials Is Having a Big Week ★

Spencer Kimball, reporting for CNBC one week ago:

The Defense Department will become the largest shareholder in rare earth miner MP Materials after agreeing to buy $400 million of its preferred stock, the company said Thursday.

MP Materials owns the only operational rare earth mine in the U.S. at Mountain Pass, California, about 60 miles outside Las Vegas. Proceeds from the Pentagon investment will be used to expand MP’s rare earths processing capacity and magnet production, the company said. Shares of MP Materials soared about 50% to close at $45.23. Its market capitalization grew to $7.4 billion, an increase of about $2.5 billion from the previous trading session. [...]

MP Materials CEO James Litinsky described the Pentagon investment as a public-private partnership that will speed the buildout of an end-to-end rare earth magnet supply chain in the U.S.

“I want to be very clear, this is not a nationalization,” Litinsky told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Thursday. “We remain a thriving public company. We now have a great new partner in our economically largest shareholder, DoD, but we still control our company. We control our destiny. We’re shareholder driven.” U.S. miners are facing a unique threat from “Chinese mercantilism,” Litinsky said. The Pentagon investment in MP could serve as a model for similar deals with other U.S. companies, the CEO said.

This news caught my eye when Taegan Goddard linked to it from Political Wire yesterday (quipping, “I’m old enough to remember when this was called ‘socialism’”), because yesterday MP Materials landed a $500 million deal from Apple. Apple Newsroom:

Today Apple announced a new commitment of $500 million with MP Materials, the only fully integrated rare earth producer in the United States. With this multiyear deal, Apple is committed to buying American-made rare earth magnets developed at MP Materials’ flagship Independence facility in Fort Worth, Texas. The two companies will also work together to establish a cutting-edge rare earth recycling line in Mountain Pass, California, and develop novel magnet materials and innovative processing technologies to enhance magnet performance. The commitment is part of Apple’s pledge to spend more than $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years, and builds on the company’s long history of investment in American innovation, advanced manufacturing, and next-generation recycling technologies. [...]

When complete, the new recycling facility in Mountain Pass, California will enable MP Materials to take in recycled rare earth feedstock — including material from used electronics and post-industrial scrap — and reprocess it for use in Apple products. For nearly five years, Apple and MP Materials have been piloting advanced recycling technology that enables recycled rare earth magnets to be processed into material that meets Apple’s exacting standards for performance and design. The companies will continue to innovate together to improve magnet production, as well as end-of-life recovery.

Apple pioneered the use of recycled rare earth elements in consumer electronics, first introducing them in the Taptic Engine of iPhone 11 in 2019. Today, nearly all magnets across Apple devices are made with 100 percent recycled rare earth elements.

The timing of these two announcements could be purely coincidental, but I can’t help but wonder if both moves were fueled by concerns about China cornering the market on rare earth magnets. Conversely, I wonder if this deal (and promotion of it) from Apple is aimed just to placate the Trump administration. A $500 million commitment is surely a big deal for MP Materials. It’s not that big a deal for Apple. What makes it interesting is that it’s with an American company.

More on Commodore, Apple, and the Inchoate Personal Computer Era ★

Jason Snell:

If you find yourself walking down the street in the 1980s and you see someone coming who prefers the VIC-20 to the Apple II, cross to the other side of the street. (That said, the VIC-20 really was revolutionary. It was by far the most affordable home computer anyone had ever seen at that point. It was laughably underpowered … but: it was only $300! They sold a million of ’em.)

Snell takes issue (correctly!) with Drew Saur’s framing of the Apple II as “corporate”. As Snell points out, Commodore was founded by a suit — Apple was founded by two guys whose first collaboration was making phone-phreaking blue boxes.

But a more pertinent point was made by Dr. Drang on Mastodon:

I don’t want to get on the bad side of @gruber and @jsnell, but when they say the Commodore 64 cost $600, that’s misleading. Yes, it cost $600 when it was released, but its price dropped quickly. By the time I bought one in late ’83 or early ’84, it was selling for $200 at Kmart. To recognize that it was a great computer for the price, you have to know what that price really was.

When I wrote the other day that the C64 cost $600, it didn’t jibe with my memory. But my thinking is too set in the ways of Apple, where a computer debuts at a price and then stays at that price. A price around $200 is more what I remember for the C64, at a time when a bare-bones IIe cost $1,400. Inflation-adjusted, $200 in 1984 is about $620 today, and $1,400 is about $4,300. That’s why so many more kids of my era got their parents to spring for a Commodore 64 but not an Apple II. They were rivals in some sense, but really, the Apple II was a different class of computer, and cost nearly an order of magnitude more. Inflation-adjusted, it’s very similar to the difference in both price and capabilities of the Meta Quest versus Vision Pro.

(Me, I didn’t own a computer until I went to college. My parents wouldn’t buy me one because they feared if they did, I’d never leave the house. I resented it at the time, but in hindsight, they might have been right. I didn’t fight too hard because we had an Atari 2600 and a generous budget for game cartridges. Plus, my grade school had a few Apple IIe’s (alongside a bunch of cheap TI-99/4A’s), and my middle/high school had an entire lab of Apple IIe’s and IIc’s.)

Tuesday, 15 July 2025

Drew Saur’s Ode to the Commodore 64 ★

Drew Saur, pushing back on my post slagging on the Commodore 64:

I cannot argue with your nostalgia. It is uniquely yours.

That said: The Commodore 64 as cheap-feeling and inelegant! Oh my.

I was fourteen when the Commodore 64 came out, and I want to convey — in as brief a form as I can — why it captured so many hearts during the 8-bit era.

What a great post. Fond memories all the way down the stack with that whole era of computing. As I told Saur in email, my fondest memory of the Commodore 64 is that they sold them at Kmart, and for years had a working model on display. And every time I’d go to Kmart with my mom, I’d swing by the electronics department and type:

10 PRINT "KMART SUCKS!!!!"
20 GOTO 10
RUN

Sometimes I’d be clever and do something like add an incrementing number of spaces to make the lines go diagonally. Something like:

5 LET X = 0
10 PRINT SPC(X); "KMART SUCKS!"
20 X = X + 1
30 IF X > 28 THEN X = 0
35 FOR T = 0 TO 100 : NEXT : REM SLOW DOWN
40 GOTO 10
RUN

This never got old for me. Try it yourself. (And of course I never actually commented my code at Kmart — that REM is for you, if you’re wondering what that do-nothing FOR loop is for.)

The Party of ‘Free Speech’ ★

David A. Graham, writing at The Atlantic:

Not that long ago, believe it or not, Donald Trump ran for president as the candidate who would defend the First Amendment.

He warned that a “sinister group of Deep State bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media” was “conspiring to manipulate and silence the American people,” and promised that “by restoring free speech, we will begin to reclaim our democracy, and save our nation.” On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order affirming the “right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech.”

If anyone believed him at the time, they should be disabused by now. One of his most brazen attacks on freedom of speech thus far came this past weekend, when the president said that he was thinking about stripping a comedian of her citizenship — for no apparent reason other than that she regularly criticizes him.

“Because of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship. She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her,” he posted on Truth Social.

The people who griped that the Biden Administration was anti-free-speech because they ... checks notes ... applied soft pressure on companies like Meta to clamp down on algorithmically promoting disinformation are pretty quiet these days.

Monday, 14 July 2025

‘Elon Musk Gives Himself Another Handshake’ ★

Nick Heer, Pixel Envy on the news that SpaceX “invested” $2 billion in the xAI money pit:

This comes just a few months after xAI acquired X, one year after Musk shifted a bunch of Tesla-bound Nvidia GPUs to xAI, and just a few years after he used staff from Tesla to work on Twitter. So, to recap: he has moved people and resources from two publicly traded companies to two privately owned ones, has used funds from one of his privately owned companies to buy another one of his privately owned companies, and is now using one of his publicly traded privately owned companies to give billions of dollars to (another) one of his privately owned ones.

Musk can and should be able to do whatever he wants with his privately held companies, like X Corp and SpaceX. But the way he treats Tesla Motors, which is publicly traded, as though it’s just part of his personal fiefdom is absurd. And the European Commission isn’t fooled.

Lee Elia, Former Major League Manager, Dies at 87 ★

Steve Berman, The Athletic:

Lee Elia, who managed the Philadelphia Phillies and Chicago Cubs for two seasons apiece but is perhaps best known for a profane postgame rant critical of Chicago fans, died on Wednesday. He was 87. The Phillies announced his death in a statement on Thursday, though they did not say where he died or cite a cause. [...]

The team noted that Elia was a Philadelphia native who signed with the Phillies in 1958. He was in the organization on and off throughout the decades, including as a minor league player, manager, scout and director of instruction. He was the third-base coach for the Phillies team that won the 1980 World Series.

You’ll never hear a better example of how to talk like a Philadelphian than Elia’s famed 1983 rant, after the Cubs opened the season 5-14. Earmuffs for any (non-Philadelphian) children in the room.

Elmore Leonard’s Perfect Pitch ★

Anthony Lane, in a crackerjack piece for The New Yorker on the writing and work of Elmore Leonard:

So, when does Leonard become himself? Is it possible to specify the moment, or the season, when he crosses the border? I would nominate “The Big Bounce,” from 1969 — which, by no coincidence, is the first novel of his to be set in the modern age. As the prose calms down, something quickens in the air, and the plainest words and deeds make easy music: “They discussed whether beer was better in bottles or cans, and then which was better, bottled or draft, and both agreed, finally, that it didn’t make a hell of a lot of difference. Long as it was cold.”

What matters here is what isn’t there. Grammatically, by rights, we ought to have an “As” or a “So” before “long.” If the beer drinkers were talking among themselves, however, or to themselves, they wouldn’t bother with such nicety, and Leonard heeds their example; he does them the honor of flavoring his registration of their chatter with that perfect hint of them. The technical term for this trick, as weary students of literature will recall, is style indirect libre, or free indirect discourse. It has a noble track record, with Jane Austen and Flaubert as front-runners, but seldom has it proved so democratically wide-ranging — not just libre but liberating, too, as Leonard tunes in to regular citizens. He gets into their heads, their palates, and their plans for the evening. Listen to a guy named Moran, in “Cat Chaser” (1982), watching Monday-night football and trying to decide “whether he should have another beer and fry a steak or go to Vesuvio’s on Federal Highway for spaghetti marinara and eat the crisp breadsticks with hard butter, Jesus, and have a bottle of red with it, the house salad ... or get the chicken cacciatore and slock the bread around in the gravy ...”

The ellipses are Leonard’s, or, rather, they are Moran’s musings, reproduced by Leonard as a kind of Morse code. We join in with the dots. But it’s the “Jesus” that does the work, yielding up a microsecond of salivation, and inviting us to slock around in the juice of the character’s brain.

The genius in the second example is the verb choice: slock. There are dozens of verbs that could have worked there, but none better.

Leonard is probably tops on the list of authors whose work I love, but of which I haven’t read nearly as much as I should. There are novelists who are good at creating (and voicing) original vivid characters, novelists who are good at plot, and novelists who are just great at writing. Leonard hits the trifecta.

Experts Said This Was a Damn Clever Post by Jason Kottke ★

Jason Kottke:

Large media companies, and the NY Times in particular these days, like to use the phrase “experts said” instead of simply stating facts. The thing is, many other statements of plain truth in that brief Times post lack the confirmation of expertise. To aid the paper in steering their readers away from notions of objective truth, here’s a suggested rewrite of that Bluesky post.

Reborn Commodore Is Taking Pre-Orders for New Commodore 64 Models ★

Last year, retro computing YouTuber Christian “Peri Fractic” Simpson bought licensed the branding rights and some of the IP belonging to Commodore (which rights have been transferred five times since the original company went bankrupt in 1994). Last week they launched their first product:

This is the first real Commodore computer in over 30 years, and it’s picked up a few new tricks.

Not an emulator. Not a PC. Retrogaming heaven in three dimensions: silicon, nostalgia, and light. Powered by a FPGA recreation of the original motherboard, wrapped in glowing game-reactive LEDs (or classic beige of course).

Via Ernie Smith, who has been following this saga thoughtfully.

This is, no question, a fun and cool project, and I hope it succeeds wildly. But personally, the Commodore 64 holds almost no nostalgic value for me. The Commodore 64 — which came out in 1982, when I was 9 — always struck me as cheap-feeling and inelegant. Like using some weird computer from the Soviet Union. Just look at its keyboard. It’s got a bunch of odd keys, like “Run Stop” and “Restore”, and all sorts of drawing-related glyphs (used when programming) printed on the sides of the keycaps. Now compare that to the keyboards from the Apple II Plus (1979), which has just one weird key, “REPT” (for Repeat — you needed to press and hold REPT to get other keys to repeat, which, admittedly, seems inexplicable in hindsight), and to the Apple IIe (1983), which has no weird keys and whose keyboard looks remarkably modern lo these 42 intervening years.

That said, while both systems came with 64 kilobytes of RAM, the Apple IIe cost $1,400 when it debuted (~$4,600 today, inflation adjusted); the Commodore 64 cost $600 (~$2,000 today). Some things haven’t changed about the computer industry in my lifetime.

The most interesting computers Commodore ever made, by far, were the Amigas. The Amiga brand and IP were cleaved from Commodore long ago, and alas, the new Commodore doesn’t have them. But they’ve expressed interest in buying them. Something like this Commodore 64 Ultimate but for an Amiga — now that might get me to reach for my credit card.

Sunday, 13 July 2025

‘Classic Web’ on Mastodon ★

Classic Web is a fun account to follow on Mastodon. Curator Richard MacManus posts half a dozen or so screenshots per day of, well, classic websites from the late 1990s and 2000s. Makes me feel old and young at the same time.

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