Tuesday, August 11, 2026

How Claude Marks AI-Generated Content

Thomas Claburn:

Anthropic will embed watermarks in the text and files generated by future models it launches in the EU, as part of its effort to comply with content and transparency rules in the bloc’s AI Act.

[…]

The move may further amplify the appeal of open weight models and alienate Claude customers, who don’t necessarily want consumers of their AI-generated content to know its provenance.

[…]

Anthropic itself is already hedging about the utility of its marking method, noting that detected marks are not conclusive evidence that Claude produced the content and that the absence of marks cannot guarantee that AI wasn’t involved in the creation of a particular piece of content.

Anthropic (Hacker News):

Claude models launched in the EU on or after August 2, 2026 will support machine-readable marking at launch. Generated text will carry embedded watermarks, and generated files will include digitally signed provenance metadata where supported.

[…]

Marks will apply to output from supported Claude models across Claude Platform (API), Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and Claude Tag, and wherever Claude is offered, worldwide. Some platforms or features may not support certain marking types.

[…]

We’ll support users and other third parties to detect Claude’s marks, as the Code requires, and we’ll share details in forthcoming documentation.

John Gruber:

Anthropic is claiming this is for compliance with an EU law but that “Marking will apply to output from supported models wherever Claude is offered, worldwide.”

This is infuriatingly opaque. I won’t speak to the “signed provenance metadata” they say they’ll be embedding in generated files like PDFs, SVGs, PNGs, and JPEGs. That’s important but it’s complex. Plain text is simple. A string of text is just one character followed by another. I presume that Claude is going to start “embedding” invisible characters/byte sequences between visible characters? What they’re claiming to do here seems impossible, frankly, and anything they attempt to embed invisibly is going to cause immediate problems.

[…]

If the “watermark” is not comprised of invisible characters but rather visible ones, how in the world does this jibe with their claim that it’s “imperceptible”? (This Reddit thread claims that’s how it will work — “It’s a form of steganography where the model subtly biases its word choice to create a statistical pattern that can be detected later.” How in the world can that be squared with “it doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability”?) And any sort of semantic detection like this is going to cause false-positive problems.

Previously:

Xbox Outage Affected Discs

Jay Peters:

An extended Xbox outage that began Sunday evening didn’t just cause issues for people trying to play digital games — it blocked people from playing their disc-based games, too.

Xbox’s status page initially reported the outage on Sunday at about 11PM ET, and it also prevented people from logging in, launching apps, or finding games on the Xbox store. This morning, the page also noted that users “may have problems” playing their digital and disc games, which posts on social media confirmed. During that time, my colleague Richard Lawler was able to launch digital games he owned, but trying to boot up games tied to Game Pass popped up error code 0x87e107df, indicating the license couldn’t be verified.

Matt Birchler (Hacker News):

When Sony announced that they were discontinuing physical discs for PlayStation, I was less outraged than many. The reason I felt this way wasn’t because I loved what Sony was doing. I think it came from an understanding that physical media ain’t what it used to be.

[…]

It’s still just a license, and Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo can either intentionally or, in this case, unintentionally prevent you from playing that game, even if you own the physical copy. This isn’t even to mention the fact that when you pop the disc in your drive, you’re not playing from the disc. It’s installing it to your internal hard drive and is probably installing a bunch of updates that are required to make the game actually work at all.

Kyle Orland:

For years now, the testers at DoesItPlay have been documenting this trend, testing thousands of physical game releases to see which ones live up to the promise of full “plug and play” functionality without an Internet connection. Thus far, a full 27 percent of the physical releases they’ve tested require some sort of download to fix game-breaking bugs or obtain core game content that is not stored on the physical release itself. That ratio balloons to 34 percent for tested PS5 games and 50 percent for those on the Xbox Series X.

Previously:

Sony Removing Purchased Content

Cindy Harper (Hacker News, ArsTechnica):

Sony plans to wipe 551 movies and TV shows from the PlayStation Store libraries of customers who paid full price for them. The deletion is coming on September 1 and so far the company has said nothing about giving anyone their money back.

[…]

Anyone who hit “buy” on one of them will open their library that morning and find a hole where it used to be. PlayStation’s notice states it without apology: “You will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content from Studio Canal, and it will be removed from your video library.”

The justification Sony offers runs to six words, “due to our content licensing agreements.”

You might try to avoid this problem by purchasing physical discs, but movies and TV shows no longer always make it to that medium. And the same will be true for games.

Sid Shuman (via Nick Heer):

As consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry continue to shift away from physical discs to digital, physical game disc production for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January 2028. Following this date, new games will be available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only.

Timothy Geigner (Hacker News):

In all of our discussions about how the digital revolution has created a system in which people don’t actually own the things they think they’re buying, I get particularly frustrated by the lack of change in it all. We’ve spilled much ink complaining that this clearly anti-consumer practice needs to be done away with, where an unsuspecting public thinks they’re buying “a thing” only to learn months or years later that “the thing” they bought was actually a license to use/view/listen to another “thing”, and that license exists at the pleasure of the company that collected the money for it.

[…]

As Kotaku notes later in their post, part of what is striking in all of this is the sheer mundanity of the announcement. Because there have been no consequences, or any action at all from the public or government, Sony treats this all as if it’s perfectly normal and no big deal. You can tell me all you want about how the Ts and Cs in these purchases do in fact note that the nature of the purchase is a temporary licensing of the content for an undetermined time period… but I can promise you that the public in general doesn’t understand that. They think they’re buying a thing, not a license.

And that’s because of the purposeful obfuscation of that fact.

Kyle Orland:

Sony’s recent decision to stop producing physical PlayStation games in the near future has naturally led to a renewed focus and appreciation for physical games that can be played just by sticking a cartridge or disc in a console. But an increasing number of those “physical” games these days still require additional downloads from a centralized server to function as intended.

Previously:

Microsoft Account With Files, Photos, and Games Almost Lost

Joshua Khane (Hacker News):

Microsoft DELETED my account AND OneDrive!!?? After ACKNOWLEDGING that I’m the owner of the account and that it was compromised???

25 fucking years of data, thousands of euros spended on games?? My son’s baby pictures? GONE!

Scott:

This is EXACTLY why cloud providers should be building (and might need to FORCED to, via consumer protection regulation) access for other online backup services into their solutions INHERENTLY. Apple… are you paying attention?

That One Guy:

Honestly they could recover it, they choose not to because they dont give a shit about their user base.

XBOX Support:

We’re sorry this happened, it’s not the experience we want anyone to have when their account is compromised. We have been working to restore access to your purchases and reached out with the next steps.

Running to the press works.

Previously:

Monday, August 10, 2026

WebKit IP and DNS Leaks Affecting Proxies and Private Relay

Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk (Mastodon, Hacker News, MacRumors, Mac Power Users):

WebKit-based browsers on iOS and macOS can be configured to route all web traffic through proxy servers, which is how Tor browsers on iOS and our own Psylo work. We found three WebKit features — DNS prefetching, WebAuthn Related Origin Requests, and WebTransport — that bypass the configured proxy and send traffic directly from the device, which exposes the user’s real network. The same leaks also affect Apple’s iCloud Private Relay.

[…]

It must be noted that VPNs are not affected, since they tunnel the device’s entire network traffic at the system level.

[…]

We’ve addressed all three leaks in Psylo 1.3.1[…] Passkeys and WebTransport have legitimate uses, so both can be re-enabled at any time through per-silo toggles. This keeps Psylo leak-free out of the box, while users who need one of these features on a given site can opt in explicitly, with a clear understanding of the trade-off.

Psylo:

In an ideal world, we’d report the issues to Apple, they acknowledge the issue, and ship a fix in a timely manner. Unfortunately, our past experience with Apple tells us that reporting this issue would involve months of delays, inconsistent communication, and in some cases, denying the issue’s impact entirely.

We weren’t willing to wait months, or upwards of a year, sitting on bugs that undermine the core privacy guarantees of Psylo and iOS Tor browsers while saying or doing nothing.

[…]

Should we knowingly leave our users exposed while waiting for a system-level fix? We didn’t think that was acceptable or fair to our users. Or should we quietly ship our own mitigations without telling anyone? We didn’t think that was acceptable either. Security fixes deserve transparency, especially when they involve tradeoffs.

Psylo:

Soon after we published the blog, we sent a link to the blog and demo website to Apple in a security report to make them aware of it. Now the report is already in the status “We’re planning to address the issue you reported.” and a fix is planned for Fall 2026 🤯🤯🤯

Mysk:

It used to take months and months to reach this status. We got there in less than 24h

Running to the press always helps…

Previously:

Update (2026-08-11): Ben Lovejoy (MacRumors):

A class action lawsuit accusing Apple of false advertising, misrepresentation, and fraud has now been filed by Clarkson Law Firm – the same lawyers who previously obtained a $250M settlement over the delayed launch of Siri AI.

Hughesnet Bankruptcy

Michael Kan:

US satellite internet provider Hughesnet has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after running low on cash and losing subscribers to Starlink.

Hughes Network Systems filed in a US bankruptcy court on Sunday, but the company notes it’ll continue serving its satellite internet customers during the restructuring period.

I used Hughesnet before DSL was available. The company was really annoying to deal with, and the dish was finicky, but the service was much better than using a dial-up modem.

Previously:

Friday, August 7, 2026

Dark Hours Rejected From the App Store

[Update: See the retraction below.]

Terry Godier:

On the web, if I build something that works within the standards, it works. Whether people use it is up to them. On iOS, there is another question entirely: whether Apple decides it should exist.

[…]

In the past couple of years I’ve built three apps that were rejected from the App Store on various grounds.

[…]

A while ago I tried to submit an iOS app for Dark Hours, my astronomy website for normal people. It was rejected on the grounds that it was astrology.

[…]

I see countless ChatGPT wrappers with nearly identical icons and eye-watering subscriptions. I see astronomy apps requesting permissions that have nothing to do with looking at the night sky. My kids download games that interrupt play every few minutes to advertise the developer’s other subscription apps, each with their own $20–50 yearly plans.

Via John Gruber (Mastodon, Hacker News):

But if you actually look at Godier’s Dark Hours, for even just a few seconds, it is instantly obvious that it pertains to the science of astronomy and has absolutely nothing — zero, zilch, nada — to do with astrology.

[…]

Godier proceeded through a series of escalations up to the App Review Board and the Review Board responded that they determined the original rejection was valid because, I shit you not, “We understand that the app includes a live tarot reading feature.” Which isn’t even about astrology. It’s straight out of Kafka.

[…]

This isn’t just contrary to the benefit of developers, like Godier. It’s obviously contrary to the benefit of Apple itself, which should not just accept an app like Dark Hours, but celebrate it as an exemplar of the platform.

Mistakes happen. But in a functioning system mistakes get corrected, and mistakes as obvious as this one get corrected almost instantly and include a quick apology for the conflation. The App Store is not a functioning system.

Previously:

Update (2026-08-10): John Gruber:

To the best of my recollection, this is the first post I’ve retracted in the 24 years I’ve been writing Daring Fireball. I hope it’s the last. I was misled, both overtly and through omissions[…]

[…]

The truth is, the app, as originally submitted by Godier to the App Store (under the name “Asterly”, not “Dark Hours”), was entirely dedicated to astrology, not astronomy, and did in fact include a “Tarot card of the day” feature amongst other occultist horseshit.

[…]

I wrongly took Godier at his word, both in his public blog post and in private iMessage correspondence yesterday, that the rejection wasn’t just merely debatable, but completely and rather preposterously ungrounded. Whether Godier ever submitted a build of “Asterly” to the App Store that contained no occult horseshit and only the hard-science astronomy features that were present in his “Dark Hours” website that was available for the last week, I don’t know. But I have no reason to believe that he did.

[…]

In an uncomfortable exchange between Beher and Godier on Bluesky, Beher pointed out that Godier’s Dark Hours had the same bug as Beher’s that routed people to “random fields in Mexico”. Earlier today, Godier took his web app down and redirected his darkhours.io domain to Beher’s darkhours.app.

I’m really unhappy about this, both for my role in spreading a false story and because I think it will hurt the cause of reforming App Review. I know there are many crazy rejections and have experienced some first-hand. This story was believable because of that well-known history and because Godier didn’t seem like a nobody trying to get attention—he was the developer of another highly regarded app. But now people are going to point to true developer stories and accuse them of being fakes, too.

Jeff Johnson:

Terry Godier has just published a so-called “Mea Culpa” blaming Claude for cloning an open source app and denying foreknowledge.

There’s no mention of or apology for how Godier deceived Gruber and the world about the astronomy/astrology App Store submission/rejection.

The blog post essentially confirms that this person cannot be trusted.

Update (2026-08-11): Colin Cornaby:

BOTH projects were generated using Claude. So you have two people - both generating the same app from the same training data - having a public throw down over who copied who.

[…]

The “original” developer does claim to know how to code - which wasn’t clear from my research. That still doesn’t necessarily mean the original app was the source of the training data. They both may be a result of the same training data.

Nick Lockwood:

Holy shit, so the “Claude plagiarised an app” story is actually “Claude produced the same app twice when prompted to do so by two separate developers” 😅

It’s not clear to me exactly how much each developer relied on Claude or which training data was used, but I wanted to note this angle of the story.

macOS 26.6.1

Juli Clover (release notes, security, no enterprise, no developer, full installer, IPSW):

macOS Tahoe 26.6.1 fixes a vulnerability that could allow an attacker to authenticate to Screen Sharing without valid credentials.

See also: Adam Engst and Mr. Macintosh.

Previously:

macOS 15.7.9 and 14.8.9

macOS 15.7.9 (security, full installer):

This update provides important security fixes and is recommended for all users.

macOS 14.8.9 (security, full installer):

This update provides important security fixes and is recommended for all users.

These seem to fix the same screen sharing bug as the macOS 26.6.1 update.

See also: Howard Oakley.

Previously:

Thursday, August 6, 2026

Snow Leopard Lore

Ruben Schade (Hacker News):

This idea is so powerful—and so longed for—that it’s escaped containment among the Apple crowd. I’ve seen everything from Linux distro to phone updates referred to as Snow Leopard releases, when their vendors cite stability and bug fixes over new features. Likewise, people plead with their vendors for a Snow Leopard release when they feel quality has slipped.

The reality was a bit different. As I wrote at the time[…]

People conflate a bunch of different ideas when talking about Snow Leopard:

LegNeato:

Snow Leopard’s stated goal internally was reducing bugs and increasing quality. That is a fact, not marketing. I am not sure why people on the internet don’t believe that, but I was there. If you wanted to ship a feature you had to get explicit approval from leadership and the bar was high. In normal feature releases it operated bottom up “here is what we are planning to ship” and in Snow Leopard it was top down “can we ship this?”.

AFAIK Snow Leopard was the first release of this kind (the first release I worked on was Jaguar or Puma), and was a direct response to taking 8 software updates to stabilize 10.5 and the severity of the bugs found during that cycle and the resulting bad press. Leopard was a HUGE feature release and with it came tons of (bad) bugs.

[…]

Testing was basically engineers, internal QA, some strategic partners like Adobe and MS, and the Apple Seed program (which was tiny). There was very little automated testing. Apple employees are not representative of the population and QA coverage is never very complete. And we sometimes held back features from seed releases when we were worried about leaks, so it wasn’t even the complete OS that was being tested.

Software updates are always needed, though the issues they fix became less severe over time due to larger seeds (aka betas), recovery partitions, and better / more modern development practices. But I can tell you FOR A FACT that Snow Leopard had fewer major bugs over its lifetime, coalesced very quickly, and was extremely solid when Lion was released.

Ken Ferry:

I agree with you that Snow Leopard was billed as no USER VISIBLE features. But people did NOT just fix niggling bugs, it was an architecturally huge release. E.g., it introduced GCD. And unless I’m confusing the year, it rewrote the Mail backend to use it and mail hasn’t had reliable search since.

My memory is that quality was so low that we pushed back the release. With the extra time we did manage to fix enough bugs that it was well received. But internally it was more destabilizing than most releases due to the amount of architectural churn.

giantrobot:

Yeah as someone else that worked on Snow Leopard I found this article and ones like it a bit silly. They’re a lot like the old “debug code” posts on Mac forums back in the day trying to explain why Puma was slow (no, you’ve got a G3 and an unaccelerated video card).

Tiger and Leopard were sprawling releases. Tiger covered 32-bit and 64-bit PowerPC, then 32-bit x86, then 64-bit x86 Macs. Tiger was also what I guess I’d say is the first “modern” OSX release, with subsystems like launchd and a more mature OpenDirectory replacing older NeXT subsystems. Leopard in my experience was a train wreck. It shipped a lot of new features, both user facing and back end frameworks, but the development was seriously impacted from teams losing engineers to iOS. Leopard had features planned assuming 100% availability of SWE’s resources but ended up with 40-50% of SWE’s resources (made up numbers based on my feels at the time). Many new frameworks in Leopard did not land or get stable until very late in the development cycle which meant everything downstream had to scramble right before GM. It was 100% the case that Leopard was not really stable until 10.5.8 and still sucked IMHO.

There was a lot of clean-up needed in MacOS and that was Snow Leopard. It was not a perfect release but 10.6.3 (the second disc pressing IIRC) and onward were very stable. Dropping PowerPC support really helped focus QA since they didn’t need the massive array of test hardware Tiger and Leopard required. You also didn’t need to wrangle builds for four architectures, including multiple compilers as a few libraries (if not whole frameworks) were compiled with ICC on x86 for performance reasons. The “Snow Leopard wasn’t that great” meme is weird. I’m sure it had its problems like every OSX release did. Unfortunately most OSX releases broke someone’s workflow. Snow Leopard ware no different. But it was always billed internally as a “no new features” release and those features that it did ship faced a very high bar to get in the release. I definitely look back on Snow Leopard as a high water mark for macOS quality in terms of a release.

Previously:

Update (2026-08-10): Mooch:

If you weren’t there then you don’t know why I considered getting a “10.6.8” tattoo at one point. Boot Camp was no longer siloed, zero-drama Exchange support was baked in, Quicktime X hauled ass, and It was the definitive answer to the smoldering wreckage of Vista.

Mario Palomera:

Snow Leopard has always remained the best Apple OS in my memory. For me Mail search was perfect all the time, once spotlight finished indexing it was incredible, iTunes, finder, everything just worked. The consistency was felt everywhere…

macintog:

[But] there’s one other missing piece: time

everyone forgets the annual release cycle is a modern novelty. plot 10.x.0’s and 10.x.y final builds on a timeline and it becomes clear

Apple to Build Universal Clipboard for Windows

Juli Clover:

Apple is working on a new feature that will support cross-device copy and paste between iOS devices and Windows PCs.

Microsoft asked for the feature using Apple’s EU interoperability request system for developers, which Apple implemented to comply with the Digital Markets Act. Apple began evaluating the request in March, and on June 26, proposed a project plan.

[…]

Apple proposed a solution that would let an iPhone share and import items from the pasteboard to a paired accessory, like a Windows PC. Apple plans to use a solution similar to the Accessory Notifications option it added for third-party wearables in the EU in iOS 26.5. Users would need to give a paired device one-time permission to paste content from an iPhone.

[…]

Apple says introducing cross-device copy and paste is a significant engineering effort, with work expected to be complete by fall 2027.

I wonder whether Apple will restrict this to the EU.

Previously:

Illinois Photos.app People Album Lawsuit

Anurag Chawake:

Apple faces a $32.5 billion lawsuit over how its Photos app scans and stores faces. A federal judge cleared the case to proceed as a class action late last month, allowing millions of Illinois iPhone owners to join.

The case has been years in the making, and Apple has fought to shut it down at nearly every turn. Now it heads back to the court, with the company’s privacy practices on trial.

[…]

Court records have shown that the update applies to users with iCloud Photos turned on. Those accounts also need to use at least 10GB of storage and contain at least 5,000 photos and videos. Plaintiffs say all this amounts to collecting biometric data without consent, putting Apple squarely at odds with Illinois law.

Again, I find it odd that features are apparently gated based on the capacity of your iCloud account rather than the available storage.

Malcolm Owen:

The lawsuit accuses Apple of collecting biometric data without user consent in the Photos app, reports The Times. It is alleged that Photos uses facial recognition technology to scan individuals who appear in images, creating a “faceprint” for each person in the photo library.

After collecting enough samples, an algorithm is allegedly used to identify the iPhone user. That data is then stored on the iPhone within the Photos app.

I don’t see what the issue is here. My understanding is that it only uploads vectors after you’ve opted in by enabling iCloud Photos and manually assigning names. Also, the vectors don’t seem like the sort of biometric information that the law was meant to protect.

Brian Webster:

Assuming things are working properly, what should happen is that the people you have specifically named and the photos you have specifically verified sync their info via iCloud. However, the actual face detection for the rest of the photos is done on a per device basis and is not synced via iCloud, primarily for security/privacy reasons.

So, when you first set up a new device, it will pull down the names and info for the photos where you have identified a particular person, but then it still needs to go through the entire library on-device, identify the faces in each photo, and compare them to the synced information to tell which person is in which photo. So once it’s done, you should end up with mostly the same photos identified as each person, but each device still needs to do its own face detection locally.

Wednesday, August 5, 2026

Fitbit Now Syncs With Apple Health

Juli Clover:

Google Health (previously the Fitbit app) collects fitness, sleep, and wellness data from a connected wearable device. Steps, distance traveled, heart rate, sleep, and more can now be added to Apple Health. As noted on Reddit, some data such as HRV doesn't transfer over.

[…]

Syncing can be enabled after downloading the update by selecting Connections, choosing Apps and services, and then adding Apple Health.

My wife is a longtime Fitbit user. A few weeks ago, some family and friends started a friendly competition to see who could get the most steps. They’re all Fitbit users, too. Then she wanted to start comparing step counts with me, but I have an Apple Watch. I thought this would be no problem because the Health app has a sharing feature, and Fitbit and HealthKit have both been around forever. I was shocked to learn that there has never been any syncing. I don’t really understand the reason for this, as it seems like it would make the Fitbit more valuable.

It looks like the syncing part is now solved, but we still can’t automatically compare our steps. We’ve both tried inviting each other to share step counts and some other metrics multiple times over the last several weeks, and it has never worked. Either the invitation doesn’t arrive or the app just spins forever when trying to accept it.

Previously:

Mail Attempting to Sync Previous Recipients Despite Setting

Jeff Johnson (Hacker News):

Nonetheless, when I send an email in Mail app, from a non-iCloud account to an non-iCloud account, Mail immediately triggers an iCloud connection, as revealed by Little Snitch.

[…]

What could Mail be querying and saving in CloudKit when I’ve disabled Mail in iCloud?

[…]

As you can see in my screenshot at the beginning of this blog post, I have Contacts turned off in iCloud settings, so my Previous Recipients list should not be synced to iCloud. Nonetheless, I followed the commenter’s suggestion of logging in Terminal. I saw log messages that referred to com.apple.mail.recents, which might indicate Previous Recipients and would certainly explain why this happens when I send an email.

[…]

I do object to notifying Apple that I’ve just sent an email. That in itself seems like a violation of my privacy.

The settings are confusing, even more so than with System Preferences. If you go to System Settings ‣ Apple Account, it shows a round rect that says Mail and shows the Mail icon. If you click this, it lets you uncheck Sync this Mac for iCloud Mail. This mirrors the iCloud Mail checkbox that you get when you click See All to see the full list of apps. I don’t like how the top-level name and icon suggest that you’re going to a settings sheet for the Mail app, but then it actually gives you iCloud settings.

Importantly, there’s also another Mail checkbox in that list. It’s easy to miss because, first, why would you expect to see two Mail checkboxes?

And, second, it’s not obvious that there are actually three lists: a bunch of “favorite” system apps, in non-alphabetical order, for some reason including lesser ones like Freeform and Image Playground; followed by a second list of system apps in alphabetical order; and then a third list of alphabetical third-party apps.

Mail is in the second list, along with (to me) other top-tier apps like Books and Maps. Anyway, this second Mail checkbox controls the syncing of non-mail Mail data such as rules and smart mailboxes. But not, apparently, according to Apple, the previous recipients.

Previously:

Telegram Temporarily Removed for CSAM

Hartley Charlton (The Verge):

Apple briefly removed Telegram from the App Store on Monday night after a review found content that violated its guidelines against child sexual abuse material (CSAM), but restored the app a short while later, according to Reuters.

It seems like this was a symbolic gesture. Removing the app didn’t affect any of the customers who had already downloaded it. Probably none of them saw the image. And restoring the app doesn’t mean that it’s completely free from CSAM—probably none of the major platforms is. It just means that Telegram did the obvious thing after the violation was reported, which presumably they would have done, anyway.

Jeff Johnson:

They removed an entire app for ONE app user???

And before even contacting the developer? Telegram banning the account is what actually prevented users from potentially seeing the CSAM. Apple’s action seems like either a mistake or trying to send them a message.

I would note, by the way, that the Telegram app was apparently never removed from the Mac App Store. Which goes to show how little Apple cares about the Mac App Store.

Telegram:

I’m sure this stance will be applied equally to all other apps in the store, in the future right? @Apple

Pavel Durov (Telegram, MacRumors):

Because Telegram quickly removes illegal content from public groups using all kinds of moderation tools, the attacker had to resort to a technical trick. He inserted AI-modified illegal content by editing an old message in an active group chat. As a result the content was effectively hidden from the group’s members, preventing them from seeing/reporting it.

The attacker was a takedown extortionist: someone who demands ransom from group owners in exchange for not targeting their communities. These extortionists use automated accounts to plant illegal content in public groups and then report it directly to Apple, attempting to trigger the removal of legitimate communities whose owners refused to pay them.

[…]

Extortionists have found a way to manipulate Apple into overreacting. Apple removed Telegram from the App Store before contacting us. This creates a potential systemic risk for every mobile app that hosts user-generated content. If an app used by more than a billion people can be removed from the App Store without prior warning, any app can be.

Marcus Mendes:

During the time the app was unavailable, many speculated that the move was politically motivated, or perhaps in response to the recent discovery that Telegram has allegedly been using an obfuscated private UIKit API to animate its emoji picker.

It’s sad but kind of hilarious that both of these so disparate theories were considered possible. Durov really does have political enemies, and Apple really does seem to have it out for Telegram. But, also, using private API to animate emojis totally seems like something that Telegram would do and that Apple would overreact to.

Previously:

Update (2026-08-06): Matt Burgess (Hacker News):

Over the last nine months, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has run dozens of paid ads that include explicit AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and images of minors alongside sexually suggestive statements, according to details of the ads shared with WIRED. The ads, which in some cases reached several thousand accounts, were targeted at people living in the United States, United Kingdom, and more than a dozen European countries.

This is much worse than what happened with Telegram, yet Apple didn’t overreact.

There’s also the Twitter/Grok case.

Previously:

Tuesday, August 4, 2026

OpenAI Open Letter Responds to Apple Lawsuit

Sarah Perez (Hacker News):

Apple is now seeking a preliminary injunction in its trade secrets case against OpenAI, which aims to stop the AI model maker from moving forward with developing an AI device or other products based on Apple’s technology. […] In a new filing, Apple is requesting expedited discovery from the accused OpenAI employees, senior systems engineer Chang Liu and Chief Hardware Officer Tang Yew Tan; OpenAI, and its foundation; and io, the device startup co-founded by Apple’s former lead designer Jony Ive.

OpenAI (Hacker News, ArsTechnica, The Verge, MacRumors, 9To5Mac):

Apple had claimed that they contacted OpenAI in February and that we didn’t respond. They now admit that their outside lawyers emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names—only after we brought this to their attention. Apple also claimed they had a discussion with our General Counsel, which they now concede never happened. But they again hide the fact that they never raised the specific allegations in this lawsuit at that time, and that they in fact told us that they were “resolving any issues”. We then heard nothing for five months until they sued. In their latest filing, Apple tries hard to spin this sequence of events, but you can just read the emails for yourself here.

Apple accuses Chang Liu of accessing Apple confidential information after leaving the company, but only now admits that Apple employees reached out to him and asked for his help to locate this information (you can read the messages here). Apple now tries to shift the blame to “residual access”, but they also don’t disclose that this is a common issue with Apple which is caused by them failing to properly manage system access when people leave. What that means in practice is that former employees who are trying to do the right thing when they leave still have access to Apple files—despite not wanting them or even being aware of them.

William Gallagher:

What it does not even touch is the accusation that Chang Liu retained his Apple laptop, which seems to be proven by what OpenAI posted. Apple further says that Liu entered shared network folders after leaving the company, and did so to download dozens of confidential files.

Then, too, OpenAI ignores the specific further accusation that ex-Apple employee Tang Tan both emailed documents to himself and sought trade secrets from employees he was recruiting for the ChatGPT company.

asimpletune:

What really matters is the claim that Apple never raised those issues in the lawsuit with them. OpenAI claims the emails prove this, but to me all the emails prove is Apple sent an email that said “please see the attached letters”. We don’t know what is in the attachments but I imagine those were the relevant issues they raised.

[…]

The fact that the lawyer emailed the wrong person is moot if they caught it and resolved it days later.

Previously:

Update (2026-08-05): John Gruber:

In OpenAI’s phrasing, it sounds like Apple’s attorney sent the entire initial letter of concern to the wrong person, and that’s why OpenAI never responded — because it wasn’t sent to the correct person (OpenAI general counsel Che Chang). That’s not what happened. The initial blockbuster “hey we think you guys are stealing our trade secrets and we want to talk to you about it” letter was sent to Che Chang. And Che Chang never did respond to Apple’s lawyers. That a mistaken email thanking Che Chang for a phone call that never happened (because that email was intended for another OpenAI employee) was also sent is irrelevant. I don’t understand why OpenAI is continuing to focus on this inconsequential mistake.

[…]

The iMessage transcripts that OpenAI provides at the bottom of their post do not contradict Apple’s claims at all. […] Apple also claims that Liu accessed confidential information, presumably in Box and definitely not in iCloud Drive, on five different occasions, up until 27 April 2026, over three months after he left Apple. These chat transcripts offer no explanation for that.

[…]

To me, the most interesting response from OpenAI wasn’t their blog post, and was in fact released by Apple, as “Exhibit F” to one of their expert declarations submitted to the court last night.

Confidential Apple Files in iCloud

Juli Clover:

The way Apple combines work and personal iCloud accounts left some employees able to access confidential documents after departing the company, reports The Information. The site spoke to more than half a dozen former Apple employees who were unknowingly left with access to sensitive content.

[…]

Apple told The Information that the OpenAI lawsuit is unrelated to any files left available on iCloud and that it does not pursue legal claims against former employees who accidentally have Apple documents in their personal iCloud accounts.

[…]

In a now-settled legal dispute, chip company Rivos claimed Apple intentionally lets former employees retain access to files “as part of a planned effort to generate a pretextual basis to sue the employees and their new employer for ‘stealing’ Apple material.” In the Rivos case, an employee was targeted for keeping work files in his personal iCloud account.

Andrew Orr:

The documents included confidential material such as plans for product launch events. The former employees said they made no effort to retain access and unexpectedly found the files mixed with their personal iCloud data.

The problem reportedly grew from Apple’s practice of encouraging employees to connect their personal Apple IDs to company-funded iCloud storage.

[…]

Apple also relied heavily on iMessage for workplace conversations and file sharing before rolling out Slack around 2019. Former employees could retain old iMessage conversations and attachments, while Apple could terminate their Slack access when they left.

John Gruber (Mastodon):

If you use your personal Apple ID, you get a magic “Apple Work” folder in iCloud Drive. When you leave Apple, that “Apple Work” folder disappears. But any other files or folders that were shared with you that were outside that magic folder are still in your iCloud Drive, because it’s still your personal iCloud account.

[…]

You still have the same Apple ID account, even though you no longer have an employee @apple.com email account. Overall, this is a humane way of dealing with digital identity. Your Apple ID account is you, the person, not “example@icloud.com”, one specific unique email address. And you, the person, may well have multiple email addresses — all of which can be associated with your one Apple ID account. That makes Apple IDs more nuanced and complicated than a simple mapping of one email address = one account. And it obviously makes access restrictions more complicated.

Yesterday, OpenAI released messages to show that Apple employees (with permission) retained access to the departing employee’s personal iCloud account so that they could access work files that were stored there. It’s just a mess that both the software and corporate policy encourage mixing everything in one account.

Eric Schwarz:

As many things I know about Apple, this whole thing both makes perfect sense and feels absolutely bonkers.

Previously:

Apple Fires Engineer Who Kept Customer Device IDs Private

Ryan Merket (Hacker News, PDF):

The company said his performance was the reason, according to a lawsuit Boardman filed in San Francisco Superior Court. Boardman says that explanation was a pretext. His version of the story begins three years earlier, inside Apple’s technical relationship with the largest wireless carriers in the United States, with a category of data capable of identifying nearly every phone on the network.

[…]

Apple considered serial numbers and IMEIs personally identifiable information under its internal policies, Boardman alleges. Representatives working with carriers other than AT&T required the carrier to obtain a customer release before Apple supplied the data. The Apple representative assigned to AT&T did not enforce that requirement, according to the complaint. Boardman says the identifiers were then transmitted through “unsecured email communications.”

He reported the practice to his manager and sought guidance from Apple’s legal department. He alleges that the company never gave him a written response.

I don’t think he has much of a legal case. Apple was probably within its rights to fire him if what he refused to do was against company policy but not illegal. It doesn’t sound like Apple is disputing that, at least not yet.

However, I think this is interesting because:

Previously:

Monday, August 3, 2026

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 Terminal window, which then types the path into the current command. However, another method was introduced in El Capitan (OS X 10.11) that allows you to copy the full path onto the clipboard.

In Finder, you can hold down Option and choose Edit ‣ Copy Pathname.

Starting in macOS Sequoia, copying the path to the clipboard using the method described generates a path that can be directly pasted into the Terminal or a script and be interpreted as that path without further manipulation.

It adds single quotes and or escapes characters, but only if necessary.

There are certainly some people who are unhappy with this change in behaviour but most Mac Admins will not be among them.

You can get the unescaped path via AppleScript.

Anthony Reimer (via Miles Wolbe):

Graham Pugh pointed out that if you have text on the clipboard, you have the option of pasting that text “escaped” in Terminal. Simply copy the text from whatever source you choose (e.g., the output of an AutoPkg run, where paths are not escaped), then in Terminal choose Edit > Pasted Escaped Text or use the shortcut Command-Control-V.

[…]

As a bonus, this concept can be applied to a tip I learned from Armin Briegel a few years ago, namely that if you select something in Terminal that you want to then paste into the current shell command, you can skip the copy-paste dance and instead just press Command-Shift-V to do it in one step (or if you prefer menus, Edit > Paste Selection). If you add the Control key to that sequence, the text pasted is escaped (Edit > Paste Escaped Selection or Command-Control-Shift-V).

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 onto the sample project’s window).

[…]

Since this bug causes semi-random memory corruption, it manifests in a large number of ways – not all of which are all that helpful.

[…]

SwiftUI’s onDrop(of:isTargeted:perform:) method makes no claims or promises as to what thread / queue it executes the closure on, and in fact according to the anonymous Apple engineer it never executes the closure on the main thread.

Now, while that may be the intent, the reality of that is wrong – in my experience it always executes the closure on the main thread (which makes a lot of sense to me as drag-and-drop event handling in AppKit has always been on the main thread in practice).

Apple also told him that NSPasteboard is not safe to use outside the main thread, even though that’s not documented, it’s not @MainActor, and Apple’s own code does do that.

Friday, July 31, 2026

Apple’s Q3 2026 Results

Apple (transcript, Hacker News):

The Company posted quarterly revenue of $109.4 billion, up 16 percent year over year.

[…]

“Today, Apple is proud to report our strongest June quarter ever, with double-digit revenue growth across iPhone, Mac and Services, and in every geographic segment,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO.

Jason Snell:

iPhone revenue was up 22%, Mac revenue was up 10.4%, Services revenue was up 12%, and Wearables revenue was up 6%. iPad revenue was down 6%.

John Voorhees:

Together, iPhone and Services accounted for 77.7% of Apple’s $109.4B in net sales.

Jordan Golson:

Gross margin for the quarter was 50.1 percent, compared to 46.5 percent in the year-ago quarter.

Jason Snell:

You can’t argue with the strong iPhone and Mac sales figures, and Apple specifically called out the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Neo, which Cook said “has been especially popular” and suggested that the company is still struggling to make them fast enough.

It’s admirable (and sensible) that Cook isn’t pointing fingers at anyone but customers who want Apple products, but the key phrase in his statement is “the supply chain just has less flexibility in it than normal.” This is an acknowledgement that while in the past, Apple might have been able to boost chip production from its partners, today the chip industry is maxed out thanks to the wild building of chips for AI applications.

[…]

As an aside, Cook also alluded to reports that Apple has tried to get the U.S. government to authorize purchase of RAM from some forbidden Chinese chipmakers, which has aroused political ire.

See also: MacRumors.

Previously:

Pastebot 3 for Mac

John Voorhees:

What sets Pastebot 3 apart is its addition of deep automation tools. Not only does the update add MCP support, making it an excellent tool to use with Claude or ChatGPT/Codex, but it includes a brand new CLI that you or an agent can use from Terminal or incorporate into scripts you build.

[…]

New filters have been added that allow you to transform clippings using text transformations and even shell scripts. Using the ability to script custom filters, I’ve begun adding a few of my own to Pastebot for things like adding and removing bullets from multiple lines of text.

I’ve long been aware of this app but hadn’t paid much attention because I’m happy using LaunchBar as my clipboard and snippet manager. LaunchBar has some transformations built-in, and I’ve built up a collection of my own scripts, but it’s appealing that Pastebot comes with so many out of the box.

From Pastebot’s main UI, you can select multiple items at once and right-click to add them to a Stack, or you can pick them one at a time in any order you’d like. As you select items, they’re numbered in the order you’ll paste them into a document using a keyboard shortcut. It’s an excellent feature for filling out forms or copying data from one spreadsheet to another.

Juli Clover:

There are also rule-based Smart Pastebins for automatic organization, like every link or image copied from Safari. Smart Pastebins can be filtered by clipping size, type, file extension, creation date, text, text length, and more. Multiple parameters can be combined for detailed filtering, and custom notes can be added to clippings to make them easy to find via search.

[…]

Tapbots says Pastebot 3 was built to work with Apple's Universal Clipboard feature, and when enabled and active, anything you copy on your iPhone is saved in Pastebot automatically.

John Gruber:

Chief among my favorite features:

  • Remembers up to 1,500 clippings (up from a mere 1,000 in v2).
  • Syncs via iCloud. If I copy something on one Mac, it’s in my Pastebot history on my other Macs.
  • That sweet Tapbots UI.

Marcus Mendes:

Importantly, Pastebot 3 requires macOS 26 Tahoe or later and comes with a 14-day free trial. Users can buy the app directly from Tapbots for $39 or subscribe through the App Store for $2.99 per month or $24.99 per year.

[…]

The direct purchase includes one year of updates, with additional years available for $19 each. Users who stop paying for updates can continue using the latest version covered by their purchase. Pastebot 2 owners can also get a $12.99 upgrade discount by entering their existing license key at checkout.

scottybee:

They are not offering any upgrade path for MAS customers. The reason they stated was “upgrade pricing has always been our way of thanking people who bought directly from the site.”

Paul Haddad:

I generally try to avoid complaining about App Store review, since I do think they have a really hard job to do. But I’m about 2 more PB3 rejections from just giving up.

Previously:

Paste and Match Style Is Not the Answer

Marcin Wichary:

The problem is that PAMS is drunk with power and flattens everything on its way[…]

That includes:

  • emphasis by italics or bolding
  • links
  • bulleted and numbered lists
  • strike-through text
  • headlines

None of these are “style.” This is actual information that should not be removed.

Sometimes, Paste and Match Style is what you want, but I like when apps also provide other options, as he discusses. For example, the Omni apps now offer Paste and Merge Styles.

Previously:

Thursday, July 30, 2026

Acorn 8.6

Gus Mueller (release notes):

  • A new brushing engine that has been rewritten using Metal shaders. It includes an option for “velocity thinning”, where the faster you draw your brush strokes, the thinner the lines.
  • A new acorn shell tool that you can use to send JavaScript to Acorn, as well as start an MCP server. So if you’ve got a favorite LLM you like to use, you can now use it to drive Acorn. The JavaScript section of the release notes are a good read if you’re interested in that. In addition:
    • The JS API has also been updated with examples for most calls.
    • The shell tool has a -jsio argument which lets you do things like:
      echo "acorn.takeLayeredScreenshot();" | acorn -jsio
  • Big ML models (used for Select Subject and Super Resolution Scaling) are now downloaded on demand. If AI isn’t your thing, they won’t take up any space on your Mac.

I feel lucky that Acorn is enough for me.

Chris Person:

Very few software companies outside of Microsoft have the kind of leverage over entire industries. Premiere, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Lightroom and After Effects are all load bearing to some extent within their respective fields despite the fact that many people I know loathe using them.

Via Nick Heer:

I have said it before and I will say it again: if I had known the path Adobe’s software would eventually go down, I might very well have picked a different career.

Previously:

Dropping Manifest V2 Extensions

Sayan Sen (Hacker News):

For a while now the transition away from Manifest V2 (MV2) to MV3 has been on-going and it looks like it is entering its final phase of deprecation, at least, in the case of Google Chrome. A recent discussion thread in the w3c WebExtensions Community Group GitHub repo has highlighted how the latest and upcoming versions of the most popular browser are expected to be its final releases with support for MV2 extensions.

[…]

Here is a rundown of the changes coming in the final such releases of Chromium releases:

Other Chromium-based browsers like Opera and Microsoft Edge could soon follow suit too. Although it is not specified, Edge began disabling uBlock Origin back in February, and Opera could also stop the functioning of MV2 add-ons, even though it had committed to support MV2 for longer in October 2024.

Google:

Aug 31st 2026: All remaining Manifest V2 extensions removed from the Chrome Web Store

Previously:

Wednesday, July 29, 2026

Chrome Browser Default at the Top of the Mac App Store

Jeff Johnson (Mastodon):

Released less than a month ago by an unknown developer, Chrome Browser Default has somehow become a top download in the United States Mac App Store, alongside well-known developers Amazon, WhatsApp/Facebook/Meta, and Microsoft[…]

[…]

Chrome Browser Default is the top search result for “Google Chrome” in the Mac App Store. Chrome itself is distributed as a direct download from Google, outside the Mac App Store. Notice also that the Chrome Browser Default app icon resembles the Google Chrome app icon[…]

Both the name and icon violate Apple’s guidelines, and the preview images are not actually screenshots of the app. The App Store is great for distributing apps that piggyback on the names of popular apps. They’d be hard to find with a regular Web search, but in the App Store they appear at the top.

The app appears to do what the description says it does, though it’s quite primitive and likely vibe-coded. I can add rules, but I couldn’t find a way to edit or delete added rules, which is ridiculous. The developer’s privacy policy is on GitHub in a repository where most of the commits were co-authored by Claude.

[…]

At the bottom is a section that shows, allegedly, what “People are Saying” about the app. Yet none of these 5-star reviews are from the App Store. According to Google Search, the reviews are not from anywhere on the web.

Jeff Johnson:

This app is no longer available in the Mac App Store.

[…]

I have no idea why the Dutch name “Standaard Browser Wisselen” appears in the alert, because the App Store Purchased section says “Chrome Browser Default,” and my only Mac system language is English (US). The name of the developer in the App Store was Chinese, 立花 卢.

[…]

My suspicion is that Apple, not the developer, removed the app from the App Store, which explains why I can’t download it. Whether this removal was triggered by my blog post or by App Store user reports, I don’t know.

Craig Grannell:

Doesn’t say amazing things for the Mac App Store that I find it faster to search for something in a search engine than within the MAS itself. And that’s when I already know the name of what I’m looking for.

Previously:

Hidden Gambling Apps in Brazilian App Store

Marcus Mendes:

Last April, Brazilian officials notified Apple and Google over an alleged lack of age controls in betting apps on their respective app stores.

9to5Mac:

Brazilian users browsing the App Store rankings in categories such as Navigation, Travel, and Weather have noticed a growing number of poorly made games appearing among the top results, many of them featuring AI-generated illustrations of animals as their app icons. Many carry an AL age rating, making them available to users of all ages, including children.

As it turns out, these are so-called jacket apps, which are just a front for hidden betting and gambling apps.

[…]

The repository also includes explicit instructions intended to prevent the apps from being flagged as suspicious during App Store review. These include giving each app uniquely named startup and remote-configuration codes, making it harder for reviewers to identify them as part of the same group.

Ironically, the App Store’s own recommendation system appears to have little trouble grouping the apps together, as the “You Might Also Like” section on several of these apps points users toward other suspicious apps more frequently than they point to genuine apps.

John Gruber (Mastodon):

Obviously the main problem is that these apps disguise themselves Trojan Horse-style, and slip through App Store review undetected. I don’t think it’s reasonable to think App Store review could catch every attempt at this sort of thing though — if the horses are disguised well-enough, some of them are going to slip through. That’s actually fine.

I agree that it’s unreasonable to expect App Review to catch all those, but then Apple should not be pretending that it can. This was all obvious from day one. The public perception of App Review is completely at odds with what it actually can and does do.

But the first example 9to5Mac cites isn’t well disguised at all. What sense does it make that “PotatoPlot Puzzle” — a game featuring a rabbit potato farmer — is a weather app? How is that not a red flag right there?

[…]

I always mention that the point of such a squad shouldn’t be to make the App Store 100 percent scammer-free — which I believe is an impossible goal that would set the team up for failure. The point should be only to make the App Store free of successful scams. Focus on the most popular apps and the most lucrative apps.

The App Store is more than 18 years old. The idea of patrolling the top charts probably occurred to Apple before it even shipped. They just don’t want to do it.

Nick Lockwood:

Apple only took 24 hours to approve my iOS app update that crashed instantly on launch. Such a blessing to have that extra level of reliability and security that only a manual review process can provide 🙏

Incidentally, the crash was due to a missing dylib - something that could easily have been detected by the automated scan process, if only that scan were designed to protect users’ and developers’ interests instead of Apple’s.

Kyle Hughes:

There is simply no other way to maintain a modern, healthy software ecosystem without making sure that apps that have been around for 7 years and 20 major versions can’t get a build looked at within 48 hours. There’s no other way. Probably needs to be longer, honestly.

I had to file an Expedited Review Request because this update is a legitimate emergency. Four hours later, App Review rejected the build because they didn’t follow the first sentence of the testing instructions (which haven’t changed in 7 years). Back to Waiting for Review! There’s no other way.

Previously:

Update (2026-07-30): Kyle Hughes:

We got rejected in the Expedited Review again, this time for not having an account deletion feature. Except we do, and it’s one button press away from the screen that the reviewer was on. And it has always existed. Is this how the expedited review works? Malicious incompetence?

Update (2026-07-31): Kyle Hughes:

If you were wondering how long one of the “you can ask us to approve this build and can fix this issue in the next release” App Review errors takes to resolve when you’re in the Expedited Review Queue… me too! So far, 18 hours. (Ignoring the fact that we have the feature the rejection was for.)

Kyle Hughes:

Certainly it means “within a week,” right? “Within a month,” please? “In your lifetime,” I can only hope.

Tahoe Contact Posters

I continue to have problems with Contacts in Tahoe. The latest issue is that the Messages app constantly displays a banner showing that one of my contacts has updated her poster. I don’t want to use it; I want to keep the photo that I chose. But clicking the × button does not dismiss the New poster available from [Person] banner. It remains anchored atop that conversation.

Sidenote: I hate that it wants me to click Update Contact but that the image shown is the old photo. How can I commit to the new photo without even knowing what it looks like? How can I undo if I don’t like it?

Sidenote 2: I’m also getting repeated Siri found an event banners in Messages, but they go away after about three clicks. They’re extra annoying because (unlike above) they animate in again each time I dismiss them, and they’re for events that are already on my calendar.

I thought maybe I could fix things by going into the Contacts app. Unfortunately, the Contact Photo & Poster button there is inoperative. Sometimes it flickers when I click it. Sometimes nothing happens at all. Sometimes after clicking the button it will open the photo chooser sheet for the next contact that I view.

I just want a single setting to let me choose my own photos. I never want to use a poster or be notified that one has changed.

Ben Lovejoy:

Ternus, said he was committed to building on the company’s momentum in the entertainment business when he takes the helm of the iPhone maker in September […]

“I think we have such tremendous momentum right now in ​Apple TV,” Ternus told Reuters on the red carpet at the premiere of the fourth season of Ted ​Lasso. “There’s so many amazing shows, so many amazing characters and stories, and so we’re just going to keep building on the momentum.”

Have we seen any indication yet that he cares about software?

Previously:

Tuesday, July 28, 2026

Apple Upgrade

Apple (Hacker News):

Apple today announced Apple Upgrade, a new product leasing program provided by Klarna for iPhone, Apple Watch, Mac, and iPad available on the Apple Store online, in the Apple Store app, and at Apple Store locations in the United States.

[…]

Apple Upgrade offers 12- and 24-month leasing options for iPhone and Apple Watch, and 24- and 36-month leasing options for Mac and iPad. Leasing prices start as low as $17.99 per month for iPhone, $11.99 for Apple Watch, $24.99 for Mac, and $11.99 for iPad.

The $17.99/month gets you a base model iPhone 17e for 24 months. This is a total of $431.76 vs. $599 for buying a new one today, but then you have to make a decision:

At the end of the lease term, customers can upgrade their device to the latest generation, purchase it with a one-time payment, or simply return it and exit the program.

I used to get a new phone every other year, but I kept my iPhone 12 mini for three years and will likely keep my 15 Pro for four years. In addition to making it easier to buy phones without the up-front payment, Apple is probably hoping this will encourage more customers to get back on the two-year cycle. Given the choice between continuing a small monthly payment and getting a new phone or making a larger payment to keep their old phone, many may opt to upgrade.

Juli Clover:

The payoff amount is the difference between what was paid during the leasing period and the retail price of the device, minus any remaining trade-in credits. Klarna is not charging a fee for the leasing program, so an iPhone that’s $1,099 can be leased and then purchased for $1,099 with no extra cost beyond taxes.

I guess this means that, for a bit of hassle, you can essentially buy the device for the list price at 0% interest.

Lease participants can opt to end a lease early and return a device, but Apple says there may be “substantial fees” for terminating a lease before the end of the term.

[…]

Customers must upgrade, end the lease, or purchase the device at the end of the lease term. If that doesn’t happen, the lease converts to a month-to-month lease for up to six months.

[…]

Damage to an iPhone, losing an iPhone, or having an iPhone stolen could incur fees.

Aisha Malik:

The rollout of the program comes as Apple has been struggling with supply chain issues related to “RAMageddon,” which refers to the industry-wide shortage of memory chips that is driving up the price of hardware. As a result, Apple recently announced price hikes for its Mac and iPad lineups, sparing the iPhone for now. The new Upgrade program seems to be Apple’s answer to making those higher prices more manageable for consumers.

Customers can manage their lease directly in the Klarna app, where they can view their billing schedule and track remaining payments.

With the launch of the new Upgrade program, Apple is discontinuing its existing in-house financing and installment programs in the U.S., which include the iPhone Upgrade Program and iPhone Payments.

John Voorhees:

For iPhones, you have to have a carrier and can’t use a prepaid plan.

[…]

For iPads, the starting prices range from $12.99/month to $24.99/month, Macs range from starting prices of $24.99/month to $48.99/month, and the Apple Watch ranges from starting prices of $11.99/month to $47.03/month. But again, these are just starting prices. You can configure a fully loaded 16-inch MacBook Pro that is just under $230/month, and it won’t include AppleCare.

As a point of comparison, under the current program that is being discontinued, I pay $69.50/month for an iPhone 17 Pro Max, but I have a 512GB model, so my lease price for the same phone would be $40.83/month, significantly lower, but keep in mind that doesn’t include AppleCare+, which would add $13.99/month or $139/year for that iPhone. On a monthly basis, that puts a new iPhone 17 Pro Max with 512GB of storage and AppleCare+ at just under $55/month. Still a superior deal, but not nearly as good as the landing page might initially lead you to believe.

[…]

If you lease accessories for your device, those don’t have to be returned. Why? Presumably because they have no value to Apple or Klarna.

Marcus Mendes:

9to5Mac can now confirm that code found in the iOS 27 beta appears to reveal a broader system for managing a financed iPhone, including the ability to restrict apps and services when payments are missed.

The code describes a system called App Managed Features, which allows an authorized financing or provider app to enroll an iPhone and perform ongoing status checks.

If the contract is no longer in good standing, Apple’s system services can place the iPhone in “Restricted Mode,” which blocks access to most apps until the payment or contract issue is resolved, while keeping a small set of apps available.

I bet there are some governments that would love to commandeer that for their own purposes.

Finally, the new framework also introduces a new type of activation lock called “Partner Finance Lock,” which is meant to prevent users from erasing, reselling, or stripping a restricted device for parts.

Previously:

Update (2026-07-29): Emma Roth:

Apple says it won’t limit the capabilities of devices leased through its new Upgrade program if you miss a payment. In an emailed statement to The Verge, Apple spokesperson Brian Bumbery says, “There will be no restricted mode and/or there will be no limitations put on device functionality due to missed payments or default with the Apple Upgrade program.”

So then what is the code that 9to5Mac found for?

Marcus Mendes:

One possibility is that it was developed for financing programs offered by carriers, retailers, or other partners outside Apple Upgrade, potentially including markets where device restrictions are already used to enforce installment agreements.

See also: Mac Power Users, TidBITS, MacRumors, Slashdot.

Update (2026-07-30): Ryan Christoffel:

Here’s what every eligible product costs with Apple Upgrade.

Emma Roth:

Here’s a breakdown of how much you’d pay for the devices included in the Apple Upgrade program, as well as how much more you’d pay to purchase the devices outright at the end of your lease[…]

[…]

Klarna doesn’t say what will happen if you don’t pay the outstanding balance.

[…]

During the lease, Klarna owns your device. You’re responsible for any damage, and will get charged a fee if you don’t return the device in “good condition.” That’s why Apple is encouraging customers to sign up for an AppleCare subscription that could drive up the cost of your lease even more.

[…]

Apple also notes that you’ll have to pay an early termination fee if you want to return the device before your lease ends or if you want to upgrade early.

Eyes:

If you lose the leased phone you have to pay Klarna for the phone plus early lease cancellation fees.

D. Griffin Jones:

The Apple Card Monthly Installments aren’t going away, so I’ll keep using that.

[…]

When you finance using the Apple Card Monthly Installments, you pay a fixed amount to own your device. There are no savings here — aside from the 3% cashback — the monthly payment is the purchase price divided by either 12 or 24 months.

John Gruber:

When you lease an iPhone through Apple Upgrade, you need a cellular account on one of the big three U.S. carriers: AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon. That kind of stinks, and I’m not quite sure I understand why.

Eyes:

The iPhone upgrade program always required it. For a time you could do Apple Card installments without a carrier if you bought it online but never in store. I assume there is carrier pressure to tie the phones to the carriers. Activating iPhones on carriers was a key metric at the Apple Store.

Previously:

Update (2026-08-03): John Gruber (Mastodon):

Credit-risk assessment is seemingly part of it. There’s a lot of fraud in iPhone purchases specifically and cell phone service generally. The big three carriers do a significant amount of risk assessment before letting you open a new postpaid account; that you have an active account with one of them is a signal that you’re not trying to lease an iPhone using phony credentials in order to sell it.

But the bigger reason is the complex nature of the contracts between Apple and each of the big three carriers.

macOS 26.6

Juli Clover (release notes, security, enterprise, developer, full installer, IPSW):

According to Apple’s release notes for the update, macOS Tahoe 26.6 includes security fixes for the Mac and it optimizes Spotlight for the release of macOS 27.

Mr. Macintosh:

Additionally a fix addressed where some notifications incorrectly displayed deprecation notices for some apps identified as Intel processor only. Also addressed was that HDR screenshots might appear garbled when sent in Messages.

Mr. Macintosh:

The macOS Tahoe 26.6 update breaks the all‑time record for CVEs patched in a single macOS release, with a total of 155.

Here’s a look back at how many CVEs were patched in each Tahoe update so far.

See also: Hacker News.

Howard Oakley:

Patrick Wardle has also drawn attention to a change in the leaf certificate used to sign Apple binaries to “macOS Software Signing”, where previously it was just “Software Signing”.

Previously:

macOS 15.7.8 and 14.8.8

Marcus Mendes:

Following the rollout of no less than seven Release Candidates, Apple has now finally released macOS Sonoma 14.8.8 and macOS Sequoia 15.7.8 officially.

macOS 15.7.8 (security, full installer):

This update provides important security fixes and is recommended for all users.

macOS 14.8.8 (security, full installer):

This update provides important security fixes and is recommended for all users.

Previously:

iOS 26.6 and iPadOS 26.6

Juli Clover (iOS/iPadOS release notes, security, enterprise, developer):

iOS 26.6 and iPadOS 26.6 include security fixes for the iPhone and iPad. The updates also optimize the Spotlight index in preparation for iOS 27 and iPadOS 27.

There are a lot of security fixes.

Rosyna Keller:

Yay, iOS 26.6 is out. And it fixes a privacy leak I filed in April that allowed malicious apps/Ad SDKs to track a user across apps.

Previously:

Update (2026-07-29): Kirk McElhearn:

Yesterday’s iOS update fixed the battery problem that I’ve had for the past couple of months. My iPhone 16 Pro Max would not make it a full day on a single charge.

watchOS 26.6

Juli Clover (release notes, security, developer):

According to Apple’s release notes, watchOS 26.6 includes unspecified bug fixes and security updates.

Previously:

tvOS 26.6

Juli Clover (no release notes, security, developer):

No new features were found in tvOS 26.6 during the beta testing period, so it likely focuses on bug fixes and performance improvements.

Previously:

audioOS 26.6

Ryan Christoffel (no release notes):

But beyond under-the-hood changes, you won’t find new features in these updates.

It still doesn’t play all my purchased music.

Previously:

visionOS 26.6

Juli Clover (release notes, security, no enterprise, developer):

Apple’s release notes say that visionOS 26.6 includes bug fixes and security improvements in addition to optimizing the Spotlight index for the upcoming visionOS 27 launch.

Previously:

Monday, July 27, 2026

EagleFiler 1.9.21

EagleFiler 1.9.21 is a maintenance release of my Mac digital filing cabinet and e-mail archiving app. It can now capture the selected messages from MailMaven, including all their metadata, and can link back to the original message. The capture key now works with the Helium browser, and importing from Mariner Paperless and Microsoft Outlook is improved as well.

Previously:

MailMaven 1.2

SmallCubed:

AppleScript support makes it possible to automate message processing and connect Maven with other applications such as Hookmark, EagleFiler, Filemaker, and DEVONthink. Almost anything you normally do by interacting with MailMaven’s interface, such as searching for messages, tagging, filing, flagging, and composing, can now be automated.

[…]

AppleScript makes it possible to control Maven using the natural language capabilities of AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT via a MCP server. […] To connect AI assistants to Maven, we have developed a basic MCP server that implements over 25 end points. This can be downloaded and installed from our MailMavenMCP repository on GitHub. With the MailMavenMCP you can instruct your assistant to access and process messages without the need to write any AppleScript. For example, if you want a summary of the conversation you are reading, simply instruct the assistant to “Summarize the conversation of the currently selected message in MailMaven”.

The AppleScript support is really impressive. It’s extensive and thoughtfully designed and implemented, with performance in mind:

A query is a temporary AppleScript-based smart mailbox that can are used to locate and examine/manage messages.

Using queries is much faster than iterating through messages in mailboxes because it uses Maven’s internal mechanism for locating messages that smart mailboxes use.

Depending on the scope and nature of an iterative search which can take seconds, if not minutes to process, queries are almost instantaneous. Moreover, queries have the ability to sort messages and filter duplicates.

[…]

Scripts can be performed from Maven’s inbox, outbox, and keystroke rules via the Run AppleScript Rule action.

I’m excited to see a new app leaning into this old technology, which remains unsurpassed. EagleFiler is already taking advantage of the AppleScript support to enable importing messages (with all their metadata) just by pressing a hotkey. I also expect it to enable some great new features in future versions of SpamSieve.

Previously:

Sparrow Wallet Lawsuit

Joe Rossignol (PDF):

The complaint alleges that Apple violated California’s Consumers Legal Remedies Act and other laws by failing to adequately review and monitor apps distributed through the App Store, despite marketing it as “a safe and trusted place to discover and download apps.” Due to these assurances in Apple’s marketing, the complaint said the plaintiffs trusted that a Sparrow Wallet app they downloaded from the App Store on iOS was legitimate, when in reality it was a fraudulent spoof designed to steal Bitcoin from users.

Sparrow Wallet is only available on Windows, macOS, and Linux. The popular Bitcoin wallet is not available on iOS, but scammers have released fake lookalike apps in the App Store that can trick users into giving up control of their funds.

[…]

Even when victims reported fraud, the lawsuit alleges that Apple often took little to no action, and it says other fake Sparrow apps remain in the App Store.

Sparrow Wallet developer Craig Raw has publicly addressed Apple’s slow response to multiple fake versions of his app appearing in the App Store. In a January 2024 social media post, for example, he said “there is still a scam ‘Sparrow Wallet’ app on the @Apple App Store, despite myself and others having reported it weeks ago.”

Craig Raw:

My attempt to protect users from scam apps on the @AppStore has gotten my Apple Developer account flagged for termination - ironically, for “dishonest activity”.

[…]

I’m the developer of the real Sparrow Wallet, a desktop app, and I hold the registered US trademarks for the name and logo. I have publicly warned @Apple and the community about these fake apps from early 2024, but they keep appearing.

The app @Apple flagged was a placeholder that was never published. Its only purpose was to warn users that Sparrow is desktop-only and that other “Sparrow” apps aren’t mine. This approach may have been misguided, but there was nothing dishonest about it.

Joe Rossignol:

In response to our request for comment, Apple said it has taken swift action to remove any apps impersonating Sparrow Wallet[…] Apple says it takes immediate action against apps that do not comply with its guidelines.

Previously:

Update (2026-07-28): Sarah Perez:

The complaint targets one of Apple’s longtime competitive arguments: that its tight control over its App Store makes its platform safer than those offered by its rivals. The company has used this claim to push back against deregulation of the app ecosystem, including third-party app stores and sideloading.

“As part of a sustained marketing campaign, Apple has positioned itself, its products and services, as offering a level of security and trustworthiness superior to any competing technology company,” the new filing states. “This includes assurances about the safety of applications distributed through its App Store. By retaining exclusive control over which apps are permitted on Apple devices, Apple has structured its platform to ensure that consumers depend entirely on its promise of safety and reliability,” it reads.

With third-party app stores, there would be an incentive to do better vetting than Apple, and with sideloading it would be clear that the app was not being downloaded from sparrowwallet.com.

Update (2026-07-29): Jeff Johnson:

What struck me about Apple’s response is that it places the burden of curating the App Store on developers and users rather than taking responsibility for it. After all, Apple reviews every version of every app before it can be published to the App Store. If Apple is curating the App Store, then why do scams have to be reported and removed? One wonders how the scams get past Apple review in the first place, and even if Apple review “is not perfect” (a gross euphemism), how the second line of defense, Apple employees patrolling the App Store for scams that the review team missed, also fails. The burden of App Store curation should not fall to me, a lone indie developer.

Apple’s response also ignores that the indie developer did report the scams, multiple times.

Previously:

Friday, July 24, 2026

Advertising Cognitive Dissonance

John Gruber (Mastodon):

This to me is proof that Apple leadership is suffering from cognitive dissonance over their slide into advertising. They’re conflating cause and effect. The Apple brand stands for high-quality superior user experiences because the devices and software Apple makes traditionally deliver high-quality superior user experiences. The work Apple ships is what makes the brand what it is. But now they’re stricken with the mindset that it’s the Apple brand that makes something a high-quality superior experience.

[…]

If you refuse to admit that the ads make these services worse, you also can’t admit that there’s a reason to offer an ad-free experience. So the thinking is something like “Apple always focuses on the user experience, and never deliberately makes the user experience worse. Therefore, if an Apple service shows ads, those ads are high quality and don’t detract from the quality of the product or the experience of using it. Therefore, there’s no reason to offer users a paid ad-free tier, because there’s no reason to want to avoid Apple’s ads.”

What a brand stands for can change over time. It’s eventually determined by the products, not the mantras.

Manton Reece (2010):

I feel bad admitting it, because some of my friends are betting on iAd revenue to feed their family, but I’m just not on board with Apple running an advertising network. I don’t want to see ads in my apps, and I don’t want Apple to ever lose even a little of what it means to be a product-driven company.

Previously:

Update (2026-07-28): John Gruber (Mastodon):

The whole thing is funny because at a fundamental level we all just know in our bones that Apple never even considered putting “Intel Inside” stickers on Macs.

[…]

Apple still treats its hardware with that level of respect. With reverence. iPhones don’t even say “iPhone” on the hardware. No model or serial numbers. No small print. Just an Apple logo on the back.

[…]

Putting themselves in customers’ shoes today, how many ads do Apple’s executives want stuck in the results when they search for an app in the App Store? We know the honest answer. But the answer evidenced by the actual App Store is “Two really big ones, including one in the first spot.”

At least you could peel off the stickers.

Jason Snell:

While Apple can spin adding ads to Apple Maps as a revolutionary new way for businesses to be discovered, it’s telling that its initial announcement was hidden inside a press release about an entirely different product, and introduced as “Enhanced Discoverability in Apple Maps.” Those choices show that this isn’t something Apple is actually proud of—and that the people in charge of communicating and explaining Apple’s decisions to the world are at odds with those who are making the decisions about expanding revenue.

[…]

To this day, you’re confronted with an ad for Creator Studio every time you create a new document in those apps, and their default toolbars contain buttons that won’t work unless you subscribe to the bundle. As a result, Apple has essentially turned its free productivity suite—software that was designed to enhance the inherent value of Apple’s products—into a freemium package with upsell to a creative professional subscription bundle that’s irrelevant (and a terrible value!) for most of its existing users.

[…]

There are many more examples. Using notifications to promote subscriptions and badging the Settings app to push AppleCare plans are among the ways Apple has chosen to intervene in the user experience to drive revenue. I’m actually not opposed to the idea that Apple should communicate opportunities for its customers to get more out of their devices—but it should be careful not to cross the line into actively annoying those customers. If someone doesn’t want to see what you offer, you need to accept that and go away—not keep needling them. Apple often falls on the wrong side of that line.

[…]

It makes me wonder if the people making these decisions at Apple have lost track of the Apple brand and what it stands for.

John Gruber:

What Snell’s column makes clear is that the incremental revenue Apple is gaining from putting shitty ads in its software comes at a price. They’re withdrawals from Apple’s brand equity. And I would argue that the value they’re detracting from the brand far out-values the dollar amount they’d padding to Apple’s bottom line.

[…]

If your competitors’ stores all smell like dogshit, don’t aim to have the store that smells the least like shit. Aim to have a store that smells pristine. “Our stores only carry a vague whiff of dogshit” is not insanely great.

Hotelling’s Law, like I was saying.

Adam Chandler:

This is not an “update”. This is an advertisement.

Update (2026-07-29): John Gruber:

The people haven’t changed, but Apple has. Strong leaders inevitably shape the personality — the spirit — of organizations over time. Apple in 2011 was peak Steve Jobs Apple. Apple in 2026 is peak Tim Cook Apple. But it was Cook who popularized the “you’re not the customer, you’re the product” argument against “free with ads” online services. But that was in 2014.

Marcin Wichary:

“Slippery slope” is a perfect term. But I wanted to add something here. In my experience, in the realm of UI, there is no middle notch. I’ve seen it time and time again… the moment you open the door to One, Infinity starts exerting its pull[…]

Previously:

Update (2026-08-03): Jon Snader:

I HATE, HATE, HATE having ads pop up when I’m trying to do something else. It’s bad enough on Web sites where at least they have the excuse of having to make money some how but it rises to intolerable when they put them up on a device I’ve already paid for.

The annoyance is reason enough to dislike Apple’s ads but for me the worst thing is that they’re corrupting and inevitably lead to the user being replaced by the advertiser as the customer.

Update (2026-08-05): John Gruber:

Only search engines that agree to pay Apple for the traffic are in the list, and there’s no option for users to add custom ones.

Tyler Hall:

It says a lot about modern Apple that I can’t find an unsubscribe link in this marketing email.

John Gruber:

Apple News ads have been going down the toilet for years, but it didn’t used to be literal.

Golden Gate Application Support Protection

Wojciech Reguła:

Looks like moving the user’s TCC db to /private/var/containers/Data/ProtectedSystem/[UUID]/Data/Library/Application Support/com.apple.TCC/ was not the only change in the whole privacy castle of macOS 27. (What btw was a great move as now attackers with full disk access permissions can’t modify your privacy settings)

macOS 27 quietly ships a new privacy mechanism I hadn’t seen documented anywhere: it extends the com.apple.macl protection that has always guarded sandboxed apps’ ~/Library/Containers/<bundle-id>/Data folders to a hand-picked set of non-sandboxed apps’ ~/Library/Application Support/<name> folders too. I noticed it by accident — Firefox’s profile folder was suddenly inaccessible from Terminal, while MacPass, a password manager sitting right next to it, was wide open. That asymmetry didn’t sit well with me, so I pulled the thread. It ends in a hardcoded app allowlist baked into /usr/libexec/sandboxd (thx @ciphwall for the hint), meant to be updated live via XProtect.

Previously:

How to Hide an Update in the Mac App Store

Jeff Johnson:

Although you can hide and unhide apps in your App Store purchase list, it turns out that hiding an app in the App Store purchase list does not hide the app in the updates list! I honestly can’t figure out the benefit of hiding an app in the App Store. The list of your purchased apps—a misnomer, as the list includes free apps—is practically unusable anyway: you can neither sort nor search the list. Maddeningly, the Mac App Store sorts your purchased apps by date of first install rather than by name, so it’s difficult even to scan the list manually to find a specific app.

[…]

You can clear the Updates list in the Mac App Store by deleting some cache files on disk, but that’s at best a momentary solution. The unwanted update will return eventually, or immediately if you use the Reload Page (⌘R) command.

A more lasting solution is, counterintuitively, to install the update. The trick is that you can keep more than one copy of a Mac App Store app on disk.

I wonder how long you can keep using the old version. You won’t be able to download it again. You can save a backup, but as some point a certificate will expire or you’ll get a new Mac and need a new receipt file. In theory, the store should be able to fetch one for you, but I wouldn’t rely on that long-term.

Previously:

Recording the iPhone Screen With a Mac

Marcin Wichary:

This instruction is a fever dream of three weird things in sequence:

  • What on earth is “QuickTime”?
  • I am recording with a player?
  • Why can’t I choose the option [“New Screen Recording”] that describes exactly what I want to do?

[…]

It’s noticing this kind of complexity, places where an easy way was chosen, design debt accumulated, and things got simply too weird. Apple allowed three weird things to accumulate here.

It makes sense in terms of the history and how the technology works, but from a clean slate one might expect this functionality to be in the Screenshot app, Screen Sharing, iPhone Mirroring, or perhaps even Finder.

Previously:

Thursday, July 23, 2026

Anthropic Book Training Settlement

AP (Hacker News):

A federal judge has approved a $1.5 billion copyright settlement in which artificial intelligence company Anthropic will pay thousands of authors about $3,000 per book after using pirated copies of their works to train its Claude chatbot.

[…]

Bestselling thriller novelist Andrea Bartz first brought the suit with two other authors in 2024. It’s the first major settlement in dozens of AI copyright lawsuits that are still working their way through courts.

Dare Obasanjo:

Somewhat ironic given recent claims from Anthropic about others training their AI on its work.

Previously:

EU Antitrust Fines for Google Search and Play Store

Tim Hardwick (Wired):

Google was today fined €890 million ($1 billion) by the European Union for breaching antitrust rules with regard to its search and Google Play store services.

The European Commission found that Google had broken the Digital Markets Act (DMA) by using its dominant position in the search market to favour its own services, like shopping and hotel deals, over those of rivals.

The Commission also said that the company had abused its position by preventing developers from directing users to cheaper ways to buy apps and app subscriptions on websites and alternative app stores.

Sergiu Gatlan:

The Commission noted that Google has begun testing changes to how its own services are placed in search results and rolled out changes to its steering terms, which the EU’s main executive body described as substantial progress towards compliance.

“Google has fallen short of effective compliance with the Digital Markets Act, and today we have taken decisive yet balanced enforcement action sanctioning these breaches,” said Teresa Ribera, Executive Vice-President for Clean, Just and Competitive Transition.

“The best products should succeed because they’re better, not because they’re owned by the company running the search engine. And European consumers have a right to be told by app developers where to sign up to the best offers, even when the app store owner does not get a cut.”

John Gruber (Mastodon):

With search, Google is required to share with competitors — search engines and AI chatbots alike — a massive amount of user data from Google Search user interactions. What terms people search for, what they click on in results, what languages and devices they use. It’s all ostensibly anonymized but that’s tricky when it comes to search terms. A lot of the terms people type into web search fields are to some degree personally identifying. The EC seems to be saying it’s Google’s problem to filter out things like passwords and usernames and omit them from the shared datasets. Google can charge money for this access, but only under “fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND)” prices, based on a Commission-defined methodology.

Previously:

Update (2026-07-27): John Gruber:

So if you search for the score of a sporting event, it’s illegal in the EU for Google to show you the score, like this search I just tried. What the EC is saying is that because Google Search is so popular, it’s no longer allowed to improve.

plantain:

It drives me insane when in Europe the link between Google Search and Google Maps is broken and I often have to copy paste an address between the two. Thanks EU, what if I like Google’s integrations?

phiresky:

They could have simply added a selector when a user first clicks on the maps preview in the search result, and then remembered it on device or across that user’s account.

But of course, then the user could choose a competitor’s product and Google would have to honor it. That would be horrible, so instead they just made the user experience worse for everyone and elegantly made people blame the EU.

See also: Hacker News.

Google Loses Final EU Antitrust Appeal

Ryan Whitwam (PDF, Reddit):

Back in 2018, Google was handed a record-setting 4.34 billion-euro ($4.9 billion) fine in Europe for abusing its monopoly on Android. The company has spent the intervening years challenging that decision, but the continent’s highest court has put a stop to that. The Court of Justice of the European Union has affirmed the penalty, meaning Google is out of options.

[…]

The EU took issue with Google search and Chrome being the default options on Android. Even devices made by other companies, such as Samsung and Xiaomi, include Google apps as the default per the Android licensing agreement, giving Google an unfair advantage, according to European antitrust regulators. This is not to be confused with a 2.95 billion euro ($3.45 billion) fine against Google’s advertising monopoly issued by the European Union last year.

Arjun Kharpal:

In 2022, a lower EU court reduced the fine to the current 4.1 billion euros from 4.34 billion euros previously.

Google has argued that the Android operating system provides choice for users and supports developers and businesses across Europe.

Via John Gruber:

Google last year booked $132 billion in profit; this fine is about 3 percent of that..

[…]

There’s never a reason not to string the appeal process out, but it’s especially true when your profits are growing at an exceptional rate. By growing their profits around 5×, they’ve reduced the relative sting of this fine by 5×

Previously:

Apple Loses Masimo Appeal

Marcus Mendes:

Apple’s requests to overturn a $634 million patent verdict and secure a new trial in its long-running legal battle with Masimo were denied.

Wesley Hilliard:

There doesn’t appear to be any other path for appeal or recourse, as the judge rejected both requests for either a new judgement or trial.

[…]

In the end, Masimo didn’t succeed in getting the Apple Watch banned or fundamentally redesigned. It won an empty victory with the funds it will be paid, and the patents affecting the lawsuit will expire in 2028 and 2029 anyway.

Paul Terpstra:

Although the ruling confirms the financial penalty, it does not affect current Apple Watch users. The smartwatch’s blood oxygen monitoring feature remains available after Apple introduced a software update in January 2024 that allowed sales to continue despite earlier legal challenges.

Previously:

Wednesday, July 22, 2026

Whisper and SpeechAnalyzer

Om Malik (2023):

One of the key advantages of MacWhisper, as it utilizes the Whisper technology, is its superior accuracy in transcriptions compared to other services I have used. I was an early adopter of Rev.com and eventually switched to Otter.ai, for which I paid approximately $100/year. However, I have since canceled my subscription.

[…]

After comparing the audio transcripts from MacWhisper and Otter, I found that while Otter’s formatting is superior, there is hardly any difference in the transcriptions. I started with the free model, which was sufficient for my needs, and eventually upgraded to the large models. Nowadays, I primarily use MacWhisper to transcribe my voice memos, which I then import into Lex.Page.

Bon Adamson:

Whisper, which is made by OpenAI, has the distinct advantage of allowing you to transcribe audio in almost any language you may ever need to. For the time being, Otter can only transcribe English. The benefits of better accuracy and accurate punctuation that the service already holds over Siri hold up across other languages as well. If you’re looking to transcribe non-English audio accurately, Whisper is definitely the best option available on Mac.

Dan Moren:

By taking advantage of OpenAI’s Whisper framework, Audio Hijack can now take any audio it’s recording and generate a text transcript. While this process was possible before—see Jason’s lengthy post about his workflow—it required a lot of fiddling and several different tools to accomplish; it’s certainly a lot easier to simply drop Audio Hijack’s block into your existing session. If you record multiple sources, it can even appropriately label each one—though if you record multiple people via one input, say the other end of a Zoom call, it can’t distinguish between the various participants.

Inscribe (2026, Hacker News):

Apple’s new SpeechAnalyzer is the most accurate on-device speech engine we tested. It beat every Whisper model we ship, including Whisper Small, on both the clean and the noisy half of LibriSpeech, while running roughly three times faster than Small. And the API it replaces, SFSpeechRecognizer, came last on clean speech: behind even Whisper Tiny, a 40MB model.

[…]

The new API cuts word error rate by 3.5 to 4x on the same audio: from 9.02% to 2.12% on clean speech, and from 16.25% to 4.56% on noisy speech. There is no accuracy trade-off to weigh; the new API wins everywhere we measured, and it produces punctuated, cased text where the legacy engine’s output is rougher.

[…]

All five engines ran comfortably faster than real time: between roughly 12x and 40x on the M2 Pro, meaning an hour of audio transcribes in about 1.5 to 5 minutes on-device. SpeechAnalyzer was about 3x faster than Whisper Small per second of audio while beating it on accuracy.

Yuki:

SpeechAnalyzer’s ReportingOption.fastResults reads like a knob you’d reach for when you want to trade power for latency. That framing is what cost me the afternoon.

[…]

If a recording matters — and in a notes app, a lost meeting is the worst thing that can happen to a user — then the container you write while recording has to be PCM in CAF. Not m4a, and not AAC-in-CAF either.

[…]

AVAudioEngine’s inputNode silently ignores your device selection

[…]

I wanted summarization to run on-device. Everything else in Nib’s transcription path does, the audio never leaves the machine, and it would have been a much cleaner story to tell.

But 4,096 tokens for the Foundation Models isn’t enough.

Previously:

CrashStealer

Thijs Xhaflaire (via Ric Ford):

Jamf Threat Labs discovers and investigates CrashStealer, a C++ macOS infostealer that impersonates Apple's crash-reporting framework to harvest browser credentials, cryptocurrency wallets and keychain data, encrypting stolen files with AES-GCM before exfiltrating them to a remote command-and-control server.

[…]

Unlike the payload it eventually installs, the dropper is properly code signed and notarized: it is a universal (arm64 and x86_64) binary signed with the Developer ID Emil Grigorov (WWB7JA7AQV), has hardened runtime enabled, and carries a stapled notarization ticket. Notably, the disk image itself is signed as well, not just the application inside it, which is uncommon in malicious DMG delivery where the container is typically left unsigned.

[…]

That file supplies the curl command the dropper runs next. Staging the first hop on a trusted developer domain keeps the initial network activity inconspicuous.

[…]

[The script] clears extended attributes on the staged bundle with xattr -cr, makes the inner binary executable, strips the payload's existing signature and re-signs it ad-hoc (codesign --remove-signature followed by codesign -s - --force --deep --no-strict), registers it with Launch Services via lsregister -f, and finally launches it in the background with open -g -n.

Previously:

Sunsetting Google Earth for Mac

The Google Earth Team:

We’re continuing to make Google Earth on web and mobile (Android | iOS) the best place for people to get helpful geospatial insights. While you can continue using the legacy Google Earth Pro desktop app, it will no longer be available for new downloads beginning on June 25, 2027. We encourage using web and mobile for the best Google Earth experience.

Via Nick Heer:

This is a two-factor loss: the MacOS app is Intel-based and, thus, will no longer be supported by the system come next year.

[…]

On the Google Earth community thread, you will find comments from people with all sorts of interesting use cases for the desktop app.

Rui Carmo:

This is going to be the end of an era for me. One of the first things I did with the early versions of Google Earth was wire it up to Vodafone’s mobile network data, producing some genuinely unique–for the time, at least–visualisations of network usage over time.

Previously:

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

Apple Park: Designed to Isolate

Malcolm Crawford (Mastodon):

The open-plan floors make it hard to concentrate. The building is so large that getting from one meeting to the next eats real time out of the day. It’s common for people to run meetings with colleagues over Webex — colleagues on the same campus, sometimes no more than two hundred yards away.

Ironically, Apple Park replaced a campus that did far better on the same measure without ever trying to. Infinite Loop produced far more of the accidental, cross-team contact Apple Park was explicitly built to create. Working out why starts with what Infinite Loop got right by accident. It continues with what the research on office proximity says about why that kind of thing happens at all. And it ends with what Apple Park could become instead — including a version of the fix Apple already trusts enough to run for a hundred people a year.

[…]

There’s no obvious focal point for the whole site — most sections have their own sitting area and their own coffee bar, but nothing plays the role Caffè Macs and the IL1 coffee bar played together at Infinite Loop. Caffè Macs at Apple Park seats a thousand people and feels built for throughput, not conversation. Everything is organised per-segment rather than around a shared centre, which is convenient for the people in that segment and useless for the discovery-by-accident that made the old campus work.

[…]

By multiple accounts from people who were there during design and construction, the site was flagged as under-provisioned for meetings and conferences before it even opened.

Via Jason Anthony Guy:

Apple Park is a beautiful structure, but is not terribly conducive to focused or collaborative work. Even as an occasional visitor I found it overwhelming. Employees sit shoulder to shoulder, voices bounce off and bleed through glass walls, and privacy is a virtual impossibility. My friends and colleagues who worked there regularly found it difficult to be productive.

I worked in Infinite Loop (Building 3, 2nd floor) for thirteen years (right below Developer Publications, where Malcolm spent a good portion of his Apple career). I loved IL because its design made serendipitous encounters easy. Whether it was sitting outside Caffè Macs or in the IL 1 Atrium, I would inevitably bump into someone and have a conversation that furthered an in-flight project, sparked something new, or simply reinforced the social ties that bind colleagues.

It helped that at that time, Apple had perhaps 10,000 employees, most of whom were in or near IL. After iPhone came about and IL started getting locked down, much of the natural collaboration dissipated, disappearing behind badged doors and disclosures.

Ken McLeod:

IL provided a place to focus on your work[1], as well as seating spaces that are out of the flow of traffic where you can have an informal meeting[2]. At AP, every collaborative space is effectively in the middle of a hallway. That turns out to be enormously distracting, both to you and to those people trying to work in the glass bullpen right next to it.

[1] before all cubicles and offices became multi-person shared spaces

[2] before all those spaces were filled in with more offices

Helge Heß:

“The IL1 atrium really was the crossroads of the company in those days” I really don’t think that this is true literally by any means. Assuming “those days” overlap with the time I’ve been there (pre Park). The XFs in IL have been extremely scarce. IL was way too small and overloaded, I’d actually say it was very similar to Apple Park. No one really wanted to work there in those tiny offices with multiple people 🤷‍♀️

Steve Hayman:

I loved the IL1 atrium. I’d sit there and hope that someone like MMalc would wander by, and they often did. It was a real destination for field people who didn’t get to visit the mothership very often. I miss that. AP had nothing like it.

Eric Schwarz:

I think of my days in college—most dorms residence halls were not air conditioned, so at the end of August, you had to open your window (often to place a box fan) and door to create some airflow. People walking through the building would meet by chance. Newer buildings tended to be less lively and more like a hotel—all the doors closed and rarely much activity. Through renovations, most of the buildings have had air conditioning added, dropping those interactions over the years.

Previously:

Update (2026-07-22): Dr. Drang:

As you may know, the Lumon Industries building that Mark, Helly, Irving, and Dylan work in is a former Bell Labs facility in Holmdel, New Jersey. I first learned about the building several years ago, when I read Jon Gertner’s excellent history of The Labs, The Idea Factory. It’s a distinctive place designed by Eero Saarinen in the early 60s.

Bell Labs was known for the fruitful collaboration of its researchers, often started through chance meetings in the hallways of other Bell Labs facilities. The new Holmdel building was supposed to further that sort of teamwork, but things didn’t work out as planned.

macintog:

I worked in IL1 for over a decade. The day I saw the open-plan spaceship, I knew I would never set foot inside. There are more rewarding ways to work in a barn.

The EnshAIttification of Day One

Aleem Shaun:

I’ve used Day One for more than a decade. It was an excellent journalling app. Private, minimal, easy to use, with excellent features such as geolocation, weather, ‘On this Day’, and book printing. Features that got out of the way and either worked quietly in the background or appeared only when you summoned them. That’s changed.

Now there are new subscription tiers. Previously, the tiers were Free and Premium. Simple. Premium included sync and a few other things that I can’t remember, but it was compelling enough that I’ve been a Premium subscriber from the beginning. Now, without consultation, I’m Silver (not Premium), and there’s a new, more expensive AI-driven tier, Gold. I don’t object solely on that basis. You would think I could just choose to remain on ‘Silver’ and all would be well. But no. Even with these features turned off in settings, I’m visually prompted in the app to upgrade to Gold and use the Daily Chat (with AI), which I’ve turned off and can only use if I upgrade. And yet, there it is, taunting me.

Via Eric Schwarz:

Even Apple is guilty of doing this in the Settings app and the former iWork apps.

Previously:

Apple Services Price Hikes 2026

Chance Miller:

Here are the new monthly prices for Apple Music and Apple One as of today:

Apple Music

Apple One

The price increases for Apple Music come after Spotify announced its own round of price hikes earlier this year, which Apple poked fun at on social media. Even with today’s price hikes, though, Apple Music remains cheaper than Spotify.

Lee Peterson:

Apple Music no longer makes sense when I’m already paying for YouTube Premium. Apple Music goes up to £11.99, YouTube Premium is £12.99 and on top of a good music service you get no ads on YouTube.

Mike Rockwell:

Distilling my longtime argument down to its simplest bit, I’d ask “do you want to pay $10 a month for music for the rest of your life?”

But truly, it was never going to just be $10 per month. The price was going to go up over time. It was going to get more expensive to have access to the same music.

If you purchase your music, though, I think most people would reach a point in their life where they stop buying new music entirely or they’re only buying a few albums per year. The cost of music would go down for you over time.

That was my thinking, too, but then I found that music I’ve purchased from Apple won’t work on my HomePod. I refuse to condone that behavior, so now I have two solid reasons not to subscribe to Apple Music.

Joe Rossignol:

While the monthly and annual prices of AppleCare+ plans for Macs and iPads received a slight increase this week, AppleCare One continues to start at $19.99 per month in the U.S., making the multi-device plan even more valuable.

Previously:

Apple Financial Statements: Products vs. Services

John Gruber (Mastodon, 2):

Some of [Cook’s letter] remains true, but has lost some truthiness — and truthiness matters. But some of it is no longer true, period. It’s no longer just “one small part” of Apple’s business that serves advertisers. Here in 2026, search results in the App Store not only show paid ads — frequently for casinos — but the search results are visually dominated by paid ads now that Apple has added a second ad to results. Apple News+ is a paid subscription that offers a genuinely great value for the number of paywalled publishers whose content it includes, but articles on the News app tend to include the weirdest AI-generated ads on the Internet. (How many young blond women am I supposed to believe need hearing aids?) And — at this writing, still “coming soon” — Apple is launching ads on Apple Maps. Apple Maps remains free of charge to use, so according to Tim Cook, we’re not the customer. We’re the product. Or, if you prefer, our frustration is the product.

[…]

The ratio of ads to organic results in App Store search — especially when measured in screen area — is clearly not aligned with Cook’s 2014 statement that “Our software and services are designed to make our devices better. Plain and simple.” Obviously not. App Store search today is designed primarily to generate more revenue for Apple. That’s not criminal, but it’s a change.

[…]

What gave Tim Cook’s privacy letter heft in 2014 wasn’t just the clarity of its plain language, but the fact that you didn’t have to take his word for it that the ads Apple showed you respected your privacy, because Apple didn’t show you ads in 2014. Apple today can’t say that.

[…]

John Ternus should return Apple’s privacy policy to its 2014 clarity. The trust Apple would earn from such a move would far out-value whatever revenue these ads pad to their already hefty and ever-increasing quarterly Services numbers.

I wish that were the case, but I fear this is kind of a Hotelling’s Law situation, where Apple can get most of the benefit by being just slightly better on this axis. Where else do its customers have to go?

Jeff Johnson (Mastodon):

In the second fiscal quarter of 2018, services generated $9 billion in revenue (net sales), whereas in Q2 2026, that amount had grown to $31 billion! In this blog post, I want to focus on understanding the relative financial importance of products and services for Apple.

[…]

In 2025, services were 42% of Apple gross margin. How does 26% of net sales become 42% of gross margin? The explanation is that services have a much lower cost of sales. The products gross margin was 37% of products net sales, while the services gross margin was an astonishing 75% of services net sales. In other words, Apple services are almost pure profit!

Does this 75% account for TV and movie production costs?

With persistent general inflation, consumers do not have unlimited money to spend on Apple products. At least in the near future, it’s reasonable to question how much further room is available for growth in profits from Apple products. To satisfy the demands of investors, Apple executives including CEO-elect John Ternus may be forced to rely even more than before on growth in services, which do not face as much pressure on cost of sales as hardware products.

Previously:

Monday, July 20, 2026

Licensing a Mac App With RevenueCat

Jared Sorge:

I know there are options out there like Paddle, FastSpring, and Lemon Squeezy that have worked for many apps like mine over the years. But I also wanted something simple for my users. Not to mention Apple Pay was a must-have.

I believe all the services he mentions do support Apple Pay.

  • RevenueCat serves as the source of truth for whether or not a customer is licensed.

  • I create RevenueCat customer IDs from local iCloud identifiers (more specifically, calling userRecordID() on my CKContainer in CloudKit).

  • When the user makes a purchase, they earn an entitlement that I look for in Arborist to grant them a license.

He doesn’t need to run his own server, and the purchases are automatically tied to the user’s iCloud account, so there are no e-mails or serial numbers to deal with. On the other hand, well, it’s all dependent on the Apple Account.

The app, which helps manage Git worktrees, is shipping now.

Previously:

Git Tower 17

Bruno Brito (release notes):

In Tower 15, we introduced the “Fully Merged” badge and Automatic Branch Management to help you keep your repository tidy. With Tower 17, we’re taking the detection behind that badge to a whole new level. […] Tower now matches your local branches against merged pull requests from your hosting service, such as GitHub or GitLab.

[…]

Trust is everything when deleting branches — so we redesigned the “Fully Merged” hint view to show you exactly which checks matched.

[…]

One that is particularly noteworthy is that updating submodules is now significantly faster! Tower gathers each submodule's Git data concurrently instead of one at a time—something you will especially notice in repositories with many submodules.

I’m sad that they got rid of the yellow icon.

Previously:

Siri AI Beta

Federico Viticci (Mastodon):

The AI frontier from the two big labs (and – we have to be honest with the numbers here – probably SpaceXAI and Meta now, too) is in a completely different league at the moment. I spent my first couple of weeks with Siri AI trying to convince myself that I could replace Codex with Siri AI, and that was the wrong approach. There is a potential future in which Siri AI can become a more proactive and capable agent, but that’s not what Apple is shipping this year.

[…]

Siri AI is a dramatically better Siri for typical Siri stuff. The new Siri understands your commands and nuanced requests better because of the LLMs behind it; it can often perform multiple requests in one go (such as setting multiple timers with one command); the new expressive (and customizable!) voices sound great, and they’re terrific at reading and summarizing notifications. Apple’s first advantage compared to other chatbots is right here: only Siri can integrate with the iPhone and iPad to this extent, so even if the Foundation models aren’t as smart as the competition, Siri can do a lot more for most people on their devices because neither OpenAI nor Anthropic have OSes they can control.

[…]

The biggest issue I’ve encountered is the inconsistency of it all. Very often, the new Siri AI still replies with a generic “Uh oh, something went wrong“ error that doesn’t explain what the error was or why it happened. Sometimes, I ask a question via voice, and it errors out, but then a few seconds later, I type the same question in the app, and it’s fine.

[…]

My problem is that, right now with Apple’s own apps, both the index and Siri’s ability to perform actions are very inconsistent. The assistant hallucinates abilities it doesn’t have, and it frequently just doesn’t work.

Dan Moren:

The good news is that Siri AI is capable: impressively so, at times. In the lowest of low bars, it certainly beats the pants off the previous incarnation of Siri, but its access to your own personal data and all of the app on your phone also unlocks a host of new possibilities.

But it’s also not without the pitfalls that underlie all LLM-powered chatbots: errors in understanding, hallucinations, and so on.

[…]

The app itself is pretty barebones, letting you view those conversations in List or Grid layouts, select multiple conversations to delete them, and pin or rename any single conversation. In Settings : Siri, you can choose to either open to the overview or to a new conversation and decide whether old conversations are kept for 30 days, 1 year, or forever. It’s a little strange that one-off queries (“What’s the average height of the Norwegian World Cup team?”) are stored alongside more involved conversations (“Can you help me build a specific RSS feed for this site?”); I also ended up with a few orphan blank “New conversations” which I deleted, but it’d be nice if you could filter to find those. Conversations are fully searchable and sync between devices via iCloud.

John Voorhees:

Despite the current limitations, if you use chatbots as a replacement for Google Search, you’ll probably have a good experience with the new Siri app. That’s because even in these early betas, if you ask Siri something like, “Give me a day trip itinerary for a trip to Chicago this Saturday,” you’re likely to get good but pretty middle-of-the-road recommendations. From there, though, you can drill down with follow-up queries to get something more in line with your tastes. The results include source links you can follow, too. Given the ad-strewn mess that web search has become, using Siri for this sort of thing is a meaningfully better experience.

The one caveat on Siri’s world knowledge is that it’s roughly 2-3 weeks stale in some places.

[…]

A good example is Music. You can prompt Siri to play a song, but most of the rich metadata in the app isn’t exposed to Siri, which is a shame because it is exposed elsewhere, for example to AppleScript.

Previously:

Update (2026-08-04): Benjamin Mayo:

Thanks to the top-to-bottom revamp that is Siri AI, Siri is reliably intelligent. Finally. We are still in the midst of beta season, and Apple is yet to confirm whether Siri AI will formally launch with iOS 27 in September or sometime later in the year, but the feature is up to scratch. There are bugs and glitches and edge-case quirks, but on the whole, it wipes the floor with old Siri and is competent enough to supplant my everyday usage of other chatbots too.

[…]

Siri AI can get a snapshot of what’s on screen, but it cannot control the UI for you autonomously. As such, if you ask it to do something outside of its library of available app actions, it will say it can’t do that. Often, it can quote the relevant steps for you to do it yourself, but obviously that falls short of the ideal experience. This feels a bit lacklustre to people already embracing AI agents en masse. Claude and Codex on Mac do not hit these walls; they are all too keen to move your mouse for you and run terminal commands until the job is done.

Previously:

notarytool Can’t Handle Zip64 Files

Wade Tregaskis:

In short: if you have any file in your app (or whatever it is you’re trying to get Apple to sign) that is over 4 GiB, you must use a disk image (DMG) to package it for notarytool, not a zip file.

This is because support for files larger than 4 GiB requires using the “Zip64” zip file format, which would be fine except Apple’s notary servers can’t handle them.

Previously:

Update (2026-07-22): Rosyna Keller:

It’s recommended to notarized exactly what you’re going to ship to users and shipping zips is extremely risky because you never know what tool the user will use to decompress the file.

Multiple unzipping tools will strip necessary extended attributes that could cause the code signature to fail to validate. This is especially true if you put non-code files in “code places” and they have to be signed with an extended attribute.

Friday, July 17, 2026

San Francisco Demands Removal of Nudify Apps

Matt Burgess (MacRumors, ArsTechnica):

On Thursday, San Francisco city attorney David Chiu sent legal notices to Apple and Google demanding that they remove from their app stores 13 face-swapping apps, which allow users to create AI-generated nonconsensual nude images. The letters say the Silicon Valley giants should stop “aiding and abetting” the sale of explicit deepfake images and “sever” business relationships with the app developers.

[…]

Researchers have repeatedly found and reported apps in Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store that allow people to generate sexual images using AI—including some apps being rated as suitable for use by children. While new laws and bans aim to tackle the scourge of explicit deepfakes online, technology and social media companies consistently direct millions of people toward the harmful tech.

Both Apple and Google have developer policies that prohibit pornography, abuse, and harassment on their platforms.

Burgess gives the impression, which is my base assumption, that these 13 apps were clear about what they do, so App Review has no excuse for missing them. But I’m sure it’s keeping us all safe in other regards.

Meanwhile, in a preprint research paper published in May, researchers from Cornell University and Georgetown University identified 420 apps offering general face-swapping capabilities on Google’s and Apple’s app stores. They tested 155 to see if they could be used to create face swaps with nude images; in 70 percent of cases, it was possible, with the apps not including safety measures to prevent this.

Previously:

Update (2026-07-21): Danny Bradbury:

Chiu isn’t arguing that hosting an app automatically makes a platform liable for what it does. Platform operators already won that battle with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. That 30-year-old law says websites generally aren’t responsible for content posted by users, allowing platforms to host user-generated content without getting sued every time someone defames someone in a comment thread.

Courts have often extended those protections to cover app stores too. Apple and Google are treated as distributors of whatever a third-party developer uploads, rather than publishers.

Chiu is attempting to sidestep that argument by focusing on the companies’ payment systems, noting that Apple and Google collect a cut of every in-app purchase. According to the Tech Transparency Project (TTP), that means they profit from apps that generate revenue by creating non-consensual intimate imagery.

EU Exempts Apple Watch and AirPods From Battery Removal Requirement

Hartley Charlton:

The European Commission yesterday adopted new exemptions to its Batteries Regulation that free the Apple Watch and AirPods from having to offer user-removable and replaceable batteries.

[…]

The reasoning largely mirrors why devices like electric toothbrushes were already exempt: Opening a compact, sealed enclosure and failing to reseal it properly could let water in and create a safety risk. Products can also qualify for exemption if their construction makes battery removal inherently dangerous, or if there is no realistic way to build in user access given current manufacturing methods.

[…]

The iPhone was already exempt from the removability rule under the original regulation, thanks to its battery cycle life and water resistance rating.

Marcus Mendes:

Although the Commission has adopted the exemption, it must still undergo scrutiny by the European Parliament and the Council of the EU.

[…]

To read the European Commission’s full delegated act, follow this link.

Previously:

Update (2026-07-20): See also: Hacker News.

Update (2026-07-30): Rui Carmo:

This is one of those exceedingly rare cases where EU legislation has produced an unambiguously good outcome: from February 2027, Logitech’s European wireless devices will ship with hard-pack, user-replaceable batteries, and Logitech will sell certified replacements.

Copyright © 2000–2026 Michael Tsai.