Tim Hardwick (Hacker News):
The Tech Transparency Project, a non-profit advocacy group, flagged 52 apps in the App Store that had links to entities found on the Treasury Department’s list of Specially Designated Nationals (SDNs), a designation that prohibits U.S. companies from doing business with them.
Linked organisations included Russian financial institutions such as Gazprombank and National Standard Bank propping up Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, and China’s Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), which has been sanctioned for involvement in repression of Uyghur minorities. Another app was run by a company owned by an accused Lithuanian drug trafficker.
The linked entities reportedly used name variants, shell developers, or partial references to obscure their sanctions status.
[…]
Legal experts say that [2019] agreement increases Apple’s exposure now, since the latest similar lapses suggest its promised improvements were insufficient. The findings also call into question Apple’s long-standing claim that its App Store provides a “safe and trusted” environment for users.
Given what gets through App Review, I’m sure you’re shocked that Apple’s sanctions status matching didn’t account for “spelling and capitalization variations” or “country-specific business suffixes.” Apple subsequently removed 35 of the apps but disputes that the others were in violation. The Google Play Store had 18 violations.
Previously:
App Review App Store App Store Scams iOS iOS 26 iOS App Legal Russia
Jim Nielsen (Hacker News):
I’ve never liked the philosophy of “put an icon in every menu item by default”.
[…]
This posture lends itself to a practice where designers have an attitude of “I need an icon to fill up this space” instead of an attitude of “Does the addition of a icon here, and the cognitive load of parsing and understanding it, help or hurt how someone would use this menu system?”
Apple currently says:
Don’t display an icon if you can’t find one that clearly represents the menu item. Not all menu items need an icon. Be careful when adding icons for custom menu items to avoid confusion with other existing actions, and don’t add icons just for the sake of ornamentation.
and in fact omits many icons in their apps. But I agree with Nielsen that there doesn’t seem to be a clear rationale for when they do this. It’s inconsistent and feels like they just didn’t finish the job or didn’t have suitable stock icons rather than that they actually considered and decided that certain commands shouldn’t have icons. It’s a mess.
Let’s look at the “File” menu in Safari[…] Some groupings have icons and get inset, while other groupings don’t have icons and don’t get inset.
[…]
Some of these menu items have the notion of a toggle (indicated by the checkmark) so now you’ve got all kinds of alignment things to deal with. The visual symbols are doubling-up when there’s a toggle and an icon.
[…]
You know what would be a fun game? Get a bunch of people in a room, show them menus where the textual labels are gone, and see who can get the most right.
Apple’s previous human interface guidelines specifically said not to use “arbitrary symbols in menus, because they add visual clutter and may confuse people.”
Nick Heer:
I am running 26.2, with a more complete set of icons in each menu, though not to the user’s benefit. For example, in Neilsen’s screenshot, the Safari menu has a gear icon beside the “Settings…” menu item, but not beside the “Settings for pxlnv.com…”, or whatever the current domain is. In 26.2, the latter has gained an icon — another gear. But it is a gear that is different from the “Settings…” menu item just above it, which makes sense, and also from the icon beside the “Website Settings…” menu item accessible from the menu in the address bar, which does not make sense because it does exactly the same thing.
James Thomson:
On Tahoe, why is the image next to the save command in the File menu “square.and.arrow.down”, but the export and share commands are “square.and.arrow.up” and import has the arrow pointing down?
The arrow icons feel very iOS. I think the basic idea is that down means into the app and up means out of the app, but it doesn’t quite work for me because saving on the Mac can create a file anywhere. If there’s a command to save, that means it’s not going into the app’s own managed storage, like with saving a photo on iOS. And the difference with save vs. export is really the file format, not the location, so it doesn’t really make sense that the arrows would go in opposite directions.
Previously:
Apple 1992 vs 2025
Design Finder Google Sheets Icons Liquid Glass Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Safari
Wade Tregaskis:
Given how buggy Apple’s screen saver framework is, I suggest not relying on animateOneFrame if you can at all avoid it. Even if that means setting up your own timer. That way when they likely break that too in some future macOS release, your screen saver won’t necessarily break as well.
[…]
stopAnimation is only used for the live preview thumbnail shown in the Screen Saver System Settings pane. It is never called in normal operation of the screen saver (contrary to what Apple’s documentation says – Apple broke that in macOS Sonoma and later).
[…]
Here’s the second big bug in Apple’s screen saver framework – every time the screen saver starts, your ScreenSaverView subclass is created again. But the old one doesn’t go anywhere. So now you have two copies running simultaneously, which as at the very least wasteful, and can easily lead to gnarly bugs and weird behaviour (e.g. if both are playing sound, or both modify persistent state).
[…]
Unfortunately Apple’s screen saver system will never terminate your screen saver process. Worse, even if you do nothing yourself, Apple’s screen saver framework code will run in an infinite loop, wasting [a small amount of] CPU time.
There was a longstanding API that worked fine for many years but then got progressively more broken.
Update (2025-12-11): James Miller:
Same experience years ago making a recreation of the After Dark Flying Toaster screensaver. It was such a strange development process…
Kevin Boyd:
I tried writing one a few years ago and got stymied by everything being terrible & no information being available. Maybe I can get back into it soon.
Bug Core Animation Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Programming Screensaver Swift Programming Language
Rebecca Bellan:
The New York Times filed suit Friday against AI search startup Perplexity for copyright infringement, its second lawsuit against an AI company. The Times joins several media outlets suing Perplexity, including the Chicago Tribune, which also filed suit this week.
The Times’ suit claims that “Perplexity provides commercial products to its own users that substitute” for the outlet, “without permission or remuneration.”
[…]
Perplexity tried to address compensation demands by launching a Publishers’ Program last year, which offers participating outlets like Gannett, TIME, Fortune and the Los Angeles Times a share of ad revenue. In August, Perplexity also launched Comet Plus, allocating 80% of its $5 monthly fee to participating publishers, and recently struck a multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images.
Emma Roth:
Perplexity became the subject of several lawsuits after reporting from Forbes and Wired revealed that the startup had been skirting websites’ paywalls to provide AI-generated summaries — and in some cases, copies — of their work. The NYT makes similar accusations in its lawsuit, stating that Perplexity’s crawlers “have intentionally ignored or evaded technical content protection measures,” such as the robots.txt file, which indicates the parts of a website crawlers can access.
[…]
The NYT is seeking damages and is also asking the court to permanently block the AI startup from engaging in its allegedly unlawful behavior.
Perplexity’s spokesperson didn’t seem to deny the allegations.
Previously:
Artificial Intelligence Business Copyright Lawsuit Legal Perplexity The New York Times Web Web Crawlers
