By John Gruber

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OpenAI: ‘Introducing gpt-oss’ ★

OpenAI:

We’re releasing gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b — two state-of-the-art open-weight language models that deliver strong real-world performance at low cost. Available under the flexible Apache 2.0 license, these models outperform similarly sized open models on reasoning tasks, demonstrate strong tool use capabilities, and are optimized for efficient deployment on consumer hardware. They were trained using a mix of reinforcement learning and techniques informed by OpenAI’s most advanced internal models, including o3 and other frontier systems.

The gpt-oss-120b model achieves near-parity with OpenAI o4-mini on core reasoning benchmarks, while running efficiently on a single 80 GB GPU. The gpt-oss-20b model delivers similar results to OpenAI o3‑mini on common benchmarks and can run on edge devices with just 16 GB of memory, making it ideal for on-device use cases, local inference, or rapid iteration without costly infrastructure. Both models also perform strongly on tool use, few-shot function calling, CoT reasoning (as seen in results on the Tau-Bench agentic evaluation suite) and HealthBench (even outperforming proprietary models like OpenAI o1 and GPT‑4o).

Simon Willison:

The long promised OpenAI open weight models are here, and they are very impressive. [...]

o4-mini and o3-mini are really good proprietary models — I was not expecting the open weights releases to be anywhere near that class, especially given their small sizes. That gpt-oss-20b model should run quite comfortably on a Mac laptop with 32GB of RAM.

Tuesday, 5 August 2025

Anthropic Releases Claude Opus 4.1 ★

Anthropic:

GitHub notes that Claude Opus 4.1 improves across most capabilities relative to Opus 4, with particularly notable performance gains in multi-file code refactoring. Rakuten Group finds that Opus 4.1 excels at pinpointing exact corrections within large codebases without making unnecessary adjustments or introducing bugs, with their team preferring this precision for everyday debugging tasks. Windsurf reports Opus 4.1 delivers a one standard deviation improvement over Opus 4 on their junior developer benchmark, showing roughly the same performance leap as the jump from Sonnet 3.7 to Sonnet 4.

Nothing spectacular here, but incremental improvements add up. Mike Krieger — best known as a co-founder of Instagram, now chief product officer at Anthropic — in an interview with Bloomberg:

“In the past, we were too focused on only shipping the really big upgrades,” said Anthropic Chief Product Officer Mike Krieger. “It’s better at coding, better at reasoning, better at agentic tasks. We’re just making it better for people.” [...]

“One thing I’ve learned, especially in AI as it’s moving quickly, is that we can focus on what we have — and what other folks are going to do is ultimately up to them,” Krieger said when asked about OpenAI’s upcoming release. “We’ll see what ends up happening on the OpenAI side, but for us, we really just focused on what can we deliver for the customers we have.”

I’m on board with the idea that Apple need not acquire any of these AI startups, but if they do, Anthropic — not Perplexity — seems the one most aligned with Apple’s values. And I don’t mean values in just an ethical sense, but their entire approach to product development in general.

Google Dunks on Apple Intelligence in New Pixel 10 Ad ★

Tom Warren:

In a new Pixel 10 ad, Google dunks on Apple’s failed promise of Siri AI improvements, with a narrator that suggests you could “just change your phone” if you bought “a new phone because of a feature that’s coming soon, but it’s been coming soon for a full year.”

The 30-second spot appeared on YouTube and X today, teasing the launch of Google’s new Pixel 10 devices on August 20th.

The whole Siri/Apple Intelligence thing has been an enormous self-inflicted embarrassment, but when it comes to Pixel phones, all I can think of is that Mad Men “I don’t think about you at all” GIF.

Lawsuit Alleges That Meta Pirated and Seeded Massives Amounts of Porno for Years to Train AI ★

Ashley Belanger, writing for Ars Technica:

Porn sites may have blown up Meta’s key defense in a copyright fight with book authors who earlier this year said that Meta torrented “at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries” to train its AI models. [...]

After authors revealed Meta’s torrenting, Strike 3 Holdings checked its proprietary BitTorrent-tracking tools designed to detect infringement of its videos and alleged that the company found evidence that Meta has been torrenting and seeding its copyrighted content for years — since at least 2018. Some of the IP addresses were clearly registered to Meta, while others appeared to be “hidden,” and at least one was linked to a Meta employee, the filing said.

According to Strike 3 Holdings, Meta “willfully and intentionally” infringed “at least 2,396 movies” as part of a strategy to download terabytes of data as fast as possible by seeding popular high-quality porn. Supposedly, Meta continued seeding the content “sometimes for days, weeks, or even months” after downloading them, and these movies may also have been secretly used to train Meta’s AI models, Strike 3 Holdings alleged.

The porn site operator explained to the court that BitTorrent’s protocol establishes a “tit-for-tat” mechanism that “rewards users who distribute the most desired content.” It alleged that Meta took advantage of this system by “often” pirating adult videos that are “often within the most infringed files on BitTorrent websites” on “the very same day the motion pictures are released.”

Meta is an empty husk of a company with no values, no beliefs, other than growth and dominance for the sake of growth and dominance.

Ghost 6.0 ★

Ghost:

When we announced Ghost 5.0 a few years ago, we were proud to share that Ghost’s revenue had hit $4M — while publisher earnings had surpassed $10M. It felt great to have such a clear sign that our goal to create a sustainable business model for independent creators was succeeding.

Today, Ghost’s annual revenue is over $8.5M while total publisher earnings on Ghost have now surpassed $100M. [...]

Unlike our venture-backed peers obsessed with growth at all costs, we’re structured as a non-profit foundation that serves publishers directly with open source software. We believe independent media cannot be beholden to proprietary tech companies, so Ghost publishers don’t just “own their email list” — they own the entire software stack that underpins their business, end to end.

Not a centralized platform controlled by a single corporation, but open infrastructure that’s shared by everyone.

Aside from my feelings about Substack — clearly the main target of Ghost’s shade-throwing here — it’s just great to see so many indie publishers and writers thriving on Ghost.

Regarding Those Rumors of Apple Pursuing an Acquisition of Perplexity ★

MacRumors, on June 20:

Apple executives have been discussing the possibility of the company making a bid to acquire Perplexity AI, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Perplexity is one of the leading AI startups that has proven popular as an AI-infused web search engine.

From that Bloomberg report by Gurman:

Adrian Perica, the company’s head of mergers and acquisitions, has weighed the idea with services chief Eddy Cue and top AI decision-makers, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The discussions are at an early stage and may not lead to an offer, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private.

Such a deal would help Apple develop an AI-based search engine, part of efforts to cope with the potential loss of a longstanding arrangement with Google. That partnership, which involves making Google the default browser on devices, generates roughly $20 billion a year for Apple — and is now under threat from US antitrust enforcers.

To date, Apple executives haven’t discussed a bid with Perplexity management. Bloomberg News reported earlier Friday that Meta Platforms Inc. tried to buy Perplexity earlier this year.

“We have no knowledge of any current or future M&A discussions involving Perplexity,” the AI startup said in a statement. Apple declined to comment.

I thought, reading between the lines of Apple’s prepared remarks and Tim Cook’s and CFO Kevan Parekh’s answers to analyst questions last week after announcing quarterly earnings, that it doesn’t sound like they think Apple needs to make a big acquisition in this space. Apple could probably acquire Perplexity for a lot less than it would cost to acquire other companies in the space, but that’s partly because Perplexity doesn’t develop or train its own models. Perplexity primarily puts up its own front end atop models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Google, and xAI. I really don’t see what buying Perplexity would gain Apple.

But even putting that aside, it just seems like Perplexity is sketchy. This whole thing where Cloudflare seemingly caught them redhanded ignoring robots.txt directives and masquerading their user-agent makes the company seem like a poor cultural fit for Apple. I can see why Meta, a company without a moral compass, approached Perplexity to sniff around regarding an acquisition. That seems like a good cultural fit.

I can’t see why Apple would want to get involved with a company like this though. Gurman’s report makes it sound like his sources are inside Apple, but man, this “Apple + Perplexity” thing feels more like something Perplexity would be seeding than one that Apple executives would be leaking.

Cloudflare: ‘Perplexity Is Using Stealth, Undeclared Crawlers to Evade Website No-Crawl Directives’ ★

The Cloudflare blog:

We are observing stealth crawling behavior from Perplexity, an AI-powered answer engine. Although Perplexity initially crawls from their declared user agent, when they are presented with a network block, they appear to obscure their crawling identity in an attempt to circumvent the website’s preferences. We see continued evidence that Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing their source ASNs to hide their crawling activity, as well as ignoring — or sometimes failing to even fetch — robots.txt files.

The Internet as we have known it for the past three decades is rapidly changing, but one thing remains constant: it is built on trust. There are clear preferences that crawlers should be transparent, serve a clear purpose, perform a specific activity, and, most importantly, follow website directives and preferences. Based on Perplexity’s observed behavior, which is incompatible with those preferences, we have de-listed them as a verified bot and added heuristics to our managed rules that block this stealth crawling. [...]

Our multiple test domains explicitly prohibited all automated access by specifying in robots.txt and had specific WAF rules that blocked crawling from Perplexity’s public crawlers. We observed that Perplexity uses not only their declared user-agent, but also a generic browser intended to impersonate Google Chrome on macOS when their declared crawler was blocked.

Perplexity has responded, accusing Cloudflare of incompetence and publicity-seeking:

Because Cloudflare has conveniently obfuscated their methodology and declined to answer questions helping our teams understand, we can only narrow this down to two possible explanations.

1. Cloudflare needed a clever publicity moment and we–their own customer–happened to be a useful name to get them one.
2. Cloudflare fundamentally misattributed 3-6M daily requests from BrowserBase’s automated browser service to Perplexity, a basic traffic analysis failure that’s particularly embarrassing for a company whose core business is understanding and categorizing web traffic.

Whichever explanation is the truth, the technical errors in Cloudflare’s analysis aren’t just embarrassing — they’re disqualifying. When you misattribute millions of requests, publish completely inaccurate technical diagrams, and demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of how modern AI assistants work, you’ve forfeited any claim to expertise in this space.

Perplexity’s response makes it sound like Cloudflare just doesn’t get how leading-edge AI chatbots work, and what users expect of them. But going back to Cloudflare’s post, they specifically cite OpenAI as an exemplar in respecting the directives of website publishers:

When we ran the same test as outlined above with ChatGPT, we found that ChatGPT-User fetched the robots file and stopped crawling when it was disallowed. We did not observe follow-up crawls from any other user agents or third party bots. When we removed the disallow directive from the robots entry, but presented ChatGPT with a block page, they again stopped crawling, and we saw no additional crawl attempts from other user agents. Both of these demonstrate the appropriate response to website owner preferences.

And nothing in Perplexity’s response attempts to explain Cloudflare’s accusation that Perplexity is adopting a false generic user-agent when their own declared user-agents are disallowed. Seems shifty to me.

‘Apple: The First 50 Years’ — New Book by David Pogue, Coming Next Year ★

Coming March 17, 2026:

In time for Apple’s 50th anniversary, “CBS Sunday Morning” correspondent David Pogue tells the iconic company’s entire life story: how it was born, nearly died, was born again under Steve Jobs, and became, under CEO Tim Cook, one of the most valuable companies in the world.

The 600-page book features 360 full-color photos, new facts that correct the record and illuminate Apple’s subversive culture, and 150 fresh interviews with the legendary figures who shaped Apple into what it is today.

Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Has a Rollable Expanding Display ★

Antonio G. Di Benedetto:

Part of me still can’t believe it, but Lenovo did the thing: it took a bonkers concept for a laptop with a rollable screen and built the tech into something you can actually own and use like a normal computer. Except, as conventional as the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 can be, it’s far from a normal computer. It’s a $3,300 laptop with a screen that expands from 14 inches to 16.7 inches at the push of a button.

Oh, and it’s actually good. Not just good, but very good. I still can’t believe it.

Di Benedetto, as you can see, is enthusiastic for the laptop. I think it’s a clever idea, but this first instance seems pretty compromised:

As with a foldable phone, you can see some creases and ripples in the screen’s lower third — the part that rolls up — especially at oblique angles. If I look closely while working on a bright-white document, I can sometimes make out a faint shadowy strip, but I rarely see it, even when staring at that spot. The motorized screen takes about eight seconds to extend or retract, and it’s no louder than the fans on an average gaming laptop. People right near you in a quiet space will hear it, but even ambient sounds like a TV in the background easily mask the motor.

The New York Post Is Expanding to LA, Launching The California Post Next Year ★

Alexandra Steigrad, reporting for The New York Post:

The new publication will be headquartered in Los Angeles and feature a robust staff of editors, reporters and photographers dedicated to covering news, entertainment, politics, culture, sports and business — all with a distinctly California perspective.

The California Post will be supported by the team in New York providing national and international news. The content will appear in a daily print edition and will have its own dedicated homepage for Californians with stories being published across multiple other platforms, including video, audio and social media.

Who says print is dead?

Apple Q3 2025 Results and Charts ★

Jason Snell, at Six Colors:

On Thursday, Apple reported its third-quarter 2025 fiscal results. Revenue was $94 billion (a fiscal third-quarter record), up 10% versus the year-ago quarter. Mac revenue was up 15%, iPhone revenue up 13%, and Services revenue up 13%. The Wearables/Home/Accessories category was down 9% and iPad revenue down 8%.

See also: the transcript of the analyst call, and a column Snell wrote on the results and call.

Two notes from the analyst call and prepared remarks. First, Apple did, for the first time, acknowledge the risk that Judge Amit Mehta, when he issues his remedies in the US v. Google case, might ban Google from making traffic acquisition cost payments, which would cut off at least $20 billion per year in Apple’s revenue. But while Apple is acknowledging there’s a risk, they’re not giving any hint what they plan to do if that happens. From the call:

Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: Hi, yes, thank you so much. Tim, I know you said similar growth in Services and that’s predicated with Google payments continuing. Is there any way for us to dimensionalize or maybe just conceptually talk about maybe options if the counter were to happen, if the payments were not allowed in some way? What are some of the things that Apple could do given that it is a significant chunk of profitability?

Tim Cook: Yeah, Wamsi, I don’t really want to speculate on the court ruling and how they would rule and what we would do as a consequence of it.

Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: OK, I guess we’ll wait for that ruling to come out.

Yes, I guess we will.

Similarly, on AI strategy and which aspects Apple sees as commodities and which it deems as essential and proprietary:

Krish Sankar, TD Cowen: Tim, I’m curious about your thoughts on AI for edge devices. You know, there’s like some people who think that LLM could be a commodity in the future. Do you see a scenario where LLMs become a core part of your iOS, or is the SLM the way to go, and how to think about evolution of edge devices in a futuristic AI world, and is smartphone going to be the choice of device? I’m curious your thoughts on it, broadly speaking.

Tim Cook: The way that we look at AI is that it’s one of the most profound technologies of our lifetime, and I think it will affect all devices in a significant way. What pieces of the chain are commoditized and not commoditized, I wouldn’t want to really talk about today because that gives away some things on our strategy, but I think it’s a good question.

These quarterly calls are better than nothing, but when it comes to anything not in their prepared statements, Apple seldom reveals anything at all.

Sunday, 3 August 2025

Hello Weather ★

My thanks to Hello Weather for sponsoring last week at DF. Regular readers know that I am an inveterate aficionado of weather apps. I’m not really much of a meteorology nerd, but I’m a pedestrian in a city with widely varying seasons. But even more so, I find weather apps to be a true playground for UI design and the presentation of quantitative information. Different weather apps take very different approaches, and I find the differences fascinating.

I first recommended Hello Weather back in 2021, and it’s been in my regular rotation of weather apps ever since. Back at the beginning of summer when they booked the sponsorship for this week, I started using the new version 4.0 (now up to 4.1.4) as my daily driver. I love it. It even has one of my favorite features for hot humid summers — a preference to set “feels like” as the primary temperature display (including in places like widgets). Hello Weather remains, as ever, attractive and useful in its design. And it offers everything you want in an iOS weather app: widgets for the home screen and Lock Screen, a Watch app, notification options (precipitation, severe storms, morning/evening forecast reports), and, wow, a veritable slew of forecast data providers to choose from.

Hello Weather’s privacy story is perfect: they collect zero user data, have no tracking or ads, and their privacy policy is written by humans for humans.

I highly recommend you download Hello Weather and start a 7-day free trial.

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Sunday, 3 August 2025

How to Leave Substack ★

Simple single-page website with (a) reasons to leave Substack; (b) links to comprehensive step-by-step instructions for how to move to other platforms, such as Ghost, Buttondown, and Beehiiv; and (c) links to several popular publications that moved and are glad they did.

Google Reverses Course, Will Keep goo.gl Links Redirecting ★

Google:

While we previously announced discontinuing support for all goo.gl URLs after August 25, 2025, we’ve adjusted our approach in order to preserve actively used links. We understand these links are embedded in countless documents, videos, posts and more, and we appreciate the input received.

Nine months ago, we redirected URLs that showed no activity in late 2024 to a message specifying that the link would be deactivated in August, and these are the only links targeted to be deactivated. If you get a message that states, “This link will no longer work in the near future”, the link won’t work after August 25 and we recommend transitioning to another URL shortener if you haven’t already.

All other goo.gl links will be preserved and will continue to function as normal. To check if your link will be retained, visit the link today. If your link redirects you without a message, it will continue to work.

Nice!

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Saturday, 2 August 2025

Ana Marie Cox on the Shaky Foundation of Substack as a Business ★

Ana Marie Cox, who knows a thing or two about indie publishing and journalism, on her AMC All the Time blog about a month ago:

My take is more dire, because I’m not sure about “savvy and stamina” as the distinguishing characteristics of those who might be able to migrate elsewhere. I think plenty of smart folks might find themselves stuck.

Substack is rickety. It’s as unstable as a SpaceX launch, as overpromised as a Stephen Miller marriage.

Substack does not have a clear future as a newsletter business, I’m not the first to notice that. But it doesn’t have to fail outright to be a disaster. It just has to keep trying to become a life-sized map of the internet: maximum content, maximum churn. The center cannot hold — especially not for newsletters, a format that depends on intimacy and long-standing trust.

The Substack bust will not just take out a few hot-take merchants and media dilettantes. It’s going to take down a lot of working journalists who’ve built modest, sustainable incomes as well as the fragile public sphere we’ve been piecing together in the ashes of Twitter and the twilight of traditional journalism.

Taylor Lorenz’s scoop today on Substack’s Nazi notification oopsie reminded me that I’ve been meaning to link to this post from Cox casting a serious stink eye at Substack’s business. As she says up front, “Let’s set Substack’s ‘Nazi problem’ aside for a moment. What if the bigger issue is being stranded on a collapsing platform ... with a bunch of Nazis?”

Substack pitches itself to would-be independent writers as a thriving platform that’s fundamentally about independent blog publishing and email newsletter distribution. That could be a great business. But it would be a relatively small business compared to Substack’s fund raising (over $100 million so far, and currently looking to raise more) and the implied valuation that fund raising implies (at one point, they were pitching investors that they were worth $1 billion, which is about as realistic as El Gringo Loco Anaranjado’s promises that Mexico will pay for a US border wall).

Ghost is a platform and business that’s actually built for independent writers. So is Buttondown (which Cox uses for her site). Beehiiv too. There’s a whole cottage industry of creator-oriented blog-cum-newsletter platforms. Substack, on the other hand, is a trap. It breaks my heart to see great writers as disparate as Paul Krugman and Michael Chabon set up their ostensibly independent presences on Substack. Writers check in, but — if Substack gets their way — they won’t check out.

Looking at the numbers Cox lays out, Substack’s future looks even worse than I thought. Before they go under, though, their investors will put the screws to them, and Substack will take its heel turn.

Substack Sends Notification Promoting Nazi Blog ★

Ashley Belanger, writing for Ars Technica:

After Substack shocked an unknown number of users by sending a push notification on Monday to check out a Nazi blog featuring a swastika icon, the company quickly apologized for the “error,” tech columnist Taylor Lorenz reported. [...]

Substack has long faced backlash for allowing users to share their “extreme views” on the platform, previously claiming that “censorship (including through demonetizing publications)” doesn’t make “the problem go away — in fact, it makes it worse,” Lorenz noted. But critics who have slammed Substack’s rationale revived their concerns this week, with some accusing Substack of promoting extreme content through features like their push alerts and “rising” lists, which flag popular newsletters and currently also include Nazi blogs.

Gizmodo reports:

The publication in question, NatSocToday, describes itself as a “National Socialist weekly newsletter featuring opinions and news important to the National Socialist and White Nationalist Community.” The newsletter’s image header is a Nazi flag, and its latest post, as of Wednesday, was an article that includes the sentence: “We demand the return of all territory currently occupied by jews and non-Whites in historically White homelands.” It does not appear to be a particularly popular blog, and currently has fewer than a thousand subscribers.

A mantra of “we host all views, but don’t promote or endorse all views” doesn’t hold much water when you promote a blog whose logo is a straight-up Nazi swastika.

Friday, 1 August 2025

The Talk Show: ‘Michigan-Starred Fine Dining’ ★

Special guest Louie Mantia joins the show to talk about Liquid Glass, the various OS 26 updates, and the worrisome state of Apple’s UI design overall. Also: sandwiches.

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Thursday, 31 July 2025

Apple Files Vigorous Response to DOJ Lawsuit: ’Threatens the Very Principles That Set iPhone Apart’ ★

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

Apple has voiced its opposition to the case many times over the last year. Now, it has officially filed its answer to the DOJ’s antitrust complaint, pushing back forcefully against the allegations.

As a refresher, the DOJ’s antitrust lawsuit focuses on five major aspects of the iPhone experience: super apps, cloud streaming games, third-party messaging apps, third-party smartwatches, and third-party digital wallets. In today’s filing, Apple says the DOJ “fundamentally misunderstands” those five things.

Apple outlines:

• DOJ says Apple stifles the success of “super apps,” despite the fact that Apple’s rules allow and support such apps, and indeed a multitude of “super apps” exist on the App Store today.
• DOJ says Apple blocks cloud streaming games, even though Apple allows streaming games both over the web and in the App Store where they can stream games directly to users.
• DOJ says Apple degrades third-party messaging apps, even though they are widely available and enormously popular on iPhone already.
• DOJ says Apple limits the functionality of third-party smartwatches, even though they can effectively pair with iPhone, share data to and from the iPhone via a companion app, and take advantage of certain functionalities Apple has developed, which are expanding over time.
• DOJ says Apple withholds access to iPhone hardware necessary for third-party digital wallets to use tap-to-pay technology; however, Apple developed and provides a mechanism that protects user security.

One part of Apple’s defense that seems mostly proven already is that this industry moves fast and the competitive landscape is always changing. I’d say three of the DOJ’s five main arguments are already stale: Apple has since opened up cloud gaming; third-party messaging apps can now be set as default; and tap-to-pay has been opened up. And I think the other two points, on “super apps” and third-party connected devices like watches, are nonsense. Especially the “super apps” thing.

Miller, of course, embeds Apple’s full response at the bottom of his post. The argument is worth a read — it’s very cogently and plainly written.

Zuckerberg on ‘Personal Superintelligence’ ★

Mark Zuckerberg, concluding a 600-word essay ostentatiously typeset in the style of web pages circa 1994^*:

Meta believes strongly in building personal superintelligence that empowers everyone. We have the resources and the expertise to build the massive infrastructure required, and the capability and will to deliver new technology to billions of people across our products. I’m excited to focus Meta’s efforts towards building this future.

What about the metaverse? Wasn’t that the thing? What Zuckerberg, and thus Meta, actually believe strongly in is jumping on whatever trend becomes a hype bubble. The company’s soul is empty.

* Actual web pages from 1994 didn’t include nearly a megabyte of JavaScript to display 3 kilobytes of text.

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Wednesday, 30 July 2025

YouTube Is Rolling Out an Age-Estimation Algorithm to Identify US Teens ★

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

YouTube on Tuesday announced it’s beginning to roll out age-estimation technology in the U.S. to identify teen users in order to provide a more age-appropriate experience. The company says it will use a variety of signals to determine the users’ possible age, regardless of what the user entered as their birthday when they signed up for an account.

Well-intentioned though I think this is, it still feels more than a little dystopian.

Tuesday, 29 July 2025

Sony Sues Tencent for Allegedly Ripping Off ‘Horizon’ Video Games ★

Reuters:

Sony released the first game in the Horizon series, Horizon: Zero Dawn, on its PlayStation 4 in 2017. The games follow a red-headed woman named Aloy as she navigates a post-apocalyptic world populated by human tribes and robotic animals.

Sony said in its complaint that it declined an offer from Tencent to collaborate on a new Horizon game last year. Tencent later announced Light of Motiram, which Sony said features identical gameplay, story themes and artistic elements to Horizon as well as many other similarities.

Sony said that video game journalists have characterized Light of Motiram as a “knock-off” of Horizon, including one who called the game Horizon Zero Originality.

Tencent is the Chinese software giant behind, amongst many other things, WeChat, China’s “everything app”.

The E-Book Editions of Timothy Snyder’s ‘On Tyranny’ Are Just $2 ★

Back in March I linked to and recommended Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, a cogent collection of 20 short essays. I was never a big e-book reader, both because I love printed books so much and because I welcome any respite from reading on screens of any sort. But if e-books are your thing, note that Apple Books currently has it for just $2. Amazon’s Kindle edition is also $2 — and the paperback edition, which is the lovely little thing I own, is an oddly but low-priced $7.31.

Amazon Is Selling M4 MacBook Airs for $200 Off ★

These prices — which I presume are a back-to-school season promotion — are even lower than those during the weeklong “Prime Day” earlier this month, and you don’t need to be a Prime subscriber to get them:

• The pretty-good base configuration (16 GB RAM, 256 GB storage) is just $800.
• The configuration with 16 GB RAM and 512 GB is $1,000, the normal price for the base model.
• You can splurge and get 24 GB RAM with 512 GB storage for just $1,200.

These are make-me-rich affiliate links, as is this link for AirPods Pro 2 for just $200, $50 off.

Microsoft Introduces ‘Copilot Mode’ in Edge ★

Sean Lyndersay, general manager of Edge at Microsoft:

For decades, the way we’ve used browsers has remained linear: open a tab (or 20), search for something, read a page, repeat. It’s a model that’s worked well, but it hasn’t fundamentally changed. Until now. As AI begins to reshape nearly every facet of digital life, we’re witnessing a turning point in how we interact with the web. Now, it’s worth asking: is your browser working for you as much as it should?

Color me skeptical about the idea that my web browser should be “working for me”, rather than serving as a tool for me to work with. The AI hype cycle is pointing to a future where automated agentic web browsers surf automated AI-generated websites. Robots consuming robot-generated content — an infinite loop of AI onanism.

This is why today we’re excited to launch Copilot Mode, a new experimental mode in Microsoft Edge, and our next step towards building a more powerful way to pilot the web.

With Copilot Mode on, you enable innovative AI features in Edge that enhance your browser. It doesn’t just wait idly for you to click but anticipates what you might want to do next. It doesn’t just give you endless tabs to sift through but works with you as a collaborator that makes sense of it all. It keeps you browsing, cuts through clutter and removes friction to unlock your flow — all built to the highest Microsoft standards of security, privacy and performance trusted by billions of people and businesses worldwide — with you as the user always in control.

Microsoft is famously known for presenting interfaces that “cut through clutter” and “remove friction”. I’m sure this will be great.

I am reminded of the decade-ago Netflix strategy espoused by Ted Sarandos: “The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.” I think something similar is behind Microsoft trying to make Copilot front-and-center in Edge, and Google’s concurrent move to junk up Chrome with AI-generated suggestions. Their goal is to make their web browsers chatbots faster than OpenAI can make ChatGPT a web browser.

HBO is still around. It even just got its name back. But Netflix won that race.

Google Chrome Adds AI-Generated Store Summaries ★

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:

Google on Monday announced an update to its Chrome web browser that will introduce AI-generated store reviews to U.S. shoppers with the aim of helping to determine the best places to make a purchase. The feature, which will be available by clicking an icon just to the left of the web address in the browser, will display a pop-up that informs consumers about the store’s reputation for things like product quality, shopping, pricing, customer service, and returns.

The feature, which is currently available only in English, will generate the summaries based on reviews from partners, including Bazaarvoice, Bizrate Insights, Reputation.com, Reseller Ratings, ScamAdviser, Trustpilot, TurnTo, Yotpo, Verified Reviews, and others.

I have never heard of a single one of these “partners”. It’s bad enough that so many web pages themselves are increasingly covered with distracting junk, much of it AI-generated slop. But now browsers themselves will be adding their own layers of distracting cruft atop the websites. The entire premise of Chrome — the reason for its name — is that it was originally designed to simplify the UI of the browser app itself, the “chrome”, at a time when Internet Explorer and even Firefox were increasingly cluttered and confusing. I feel like this is a sign that Chrome is completely losing its way — AI-generated slop from the browser layered atop AI-generated slop in the underlying web pages.

Dare Obasanjo, on Bluesky, takes this news credulously:

Google Chrome is now going to provide AI generated summaries of online stores covering topics like customer service, product quality, shipping, pricing and return policy.

This is on the heels of Microsoft Edge announcing Copilot mode earlier today. Apple’s Safari is being left behind in the AI wars.

I would argue that Safari is looking ever more like a proverbial glass of ice water in hell. These Chrome AI overviews (Chrome is also, for example, going to start presenting its own AI-generated menu summaries for restaurants) don’t seem like user-centric features to me. They seem like features designed to turn the dial up on Google’s slice of commissions from web transactions.

Monday, 28 July 2025

Security Breach at Tea Worsens, Revealing Users’ DMs About Abortions and Cheating ★

Emanuel Maiberg and Joseph Cox, reporting again for 404 Media:

Despite Tea’s initial statement that “the incident involved a legacy data storage system containing information from over two years ago,” the second issue impacting a separate database is much more recent, affecting messages up until last week, according to the researcher’s findings that 404 Media verified. The researcher said they also found the ability to send a push notification to all of Tea’s users.

It’s hard to overstate how sensitive this data is and how it could put Tea’s users at risk if it fell into the wrong hands. When signing up, Tea encourages users to choose an anonymous screenname, but it was trivial for 404 Media to find the real world identities of some users given the nature of their messages, which Tea has led them to believe were private. Users could be easily found via their social media handles, phone numbers, and real names that they shared in these chats. These conversations also frequently make damning accusations against people who are also named in the private messages and in some cases are easy to identify. [...]

Some of the private messages viewed by 404 Media include:

• One user tells another they just discovered their husband on the app being discussed. “I am his wife,” many of the messages say.
• Another appears to show a woman contacting others about a man she is engaged to.
• Multiple messages which appear to show women discussing their abortions.
• Chat logs between women discovering they are dating the same man, exchanging information such as what car he drives for verification.

When I linked to 404 Media’s coverage of the initial breach at Tea the other day, I wrote, “I’m not accusing Tea in particular of being vibe-coded”. Well, I still don’t know if Tea’s service architecture was vibe-coded, but it’s now clear that whoever made it was shamefully incompetent. They shouldn’t have made any sort of services backend, let alone one like Tea’s that’s intended to carry incredibly sensitive personal information and messages.

This is an outright privacy — and quite possibly, personal security — disaster. With the abortion discussions and the current bifurcation of women’s rights here in the US, it could be a legal disaster, too. 4chan clowns have taken the images and data and created maps of Tea users’ addresses, and a Mark-Zuckerberg-“Facemash”-style site for ranking users’ appearance.

For women who’ve already signed up and started using Tea, I doubt there’s anything that can be done to remove them from exposure. Even if Tea offers a “delete your account” feature, I wouldn’t trust that it actually deletes anything from their database, let alone everything. And the cat’s already out of the bag for any bad actors who figured out this second exploit before Tea was alerted.

Yet another data point for the argument that any “private messaging” feature that doesn’t use E2EE isn’t actually private at all.

Republican Election Group Is Attempting to Organize Against Text Message Filtering in iOS 26 ★

From this paywalled report at Punchbowl News, as quoted by Taegan Goddard at Political Wire:

“The Senate GOP campaign arm is warning that Apple’s new iOS update could cost them $25 million in fundraising revenue, as well as priceless GOTV opportunities,” Punchbowl News reports.

Here’s a copy of the original memo from the NRSC (National Republican Senatorial Committee). What they’re freaking out about is the new iOS 26 Messages feature (which will be available in Messages on iPadOS and MacOS 26 too — but because these messages are sent as SMS and because the iPhone is so many people’s primary or sole messaging device, it’s the platform they’re focusing on) that will automatically sort messages from unknown senders into a new “Unknown Sender” inbox.

Quoting from the NRSC letter (emphasis in original):

Apple’s iOS 26 update introduces aggressive message filtering. Political texts — even from verified and compliant senders-will be treated as spam by default, silently sent to an “Unknown” inbox with no alerts or notifications. That change has profound implications for our ability to fundraise, mobilize voters, and run digital campaigns.

It’s important to understand: Apple isn’t just targeting cold outreach or spammy actors. Every political message — shortcode, long code, doesn’t matter-gets pushed into the dark. The only workaround-getting a voter to reply — is increasingly rare and entirely at the mercy of Apple’s unclear rules. How will a voter reply if they never get the message?

Apple’s “rules” for this new feature aren’t unclear at all. If a sender is not in your saved contacts and you’ve never sent or responded to a text message from them, they’re considered “unknown”. That’s it. The feature isn’t even really new — you’ve been able to filter messages like this in Messages for years now, but what iOS 26 changes is that it now will be on by default and has a new more prominent — better, IMO — interface for switching between filter views. Update: I was wrong that this filtering will be on by default in iOS 26 — I was fooled because I had previously enabled “Filter Unknown Senders” in Settings → Apps → Messages → Unknown & Spam (which you need to scroll down quite a bit to get to). I do think, though, that many more iOS users will be using this feature starting with iOS 26 — it’s both better designed and less hidden.

Back to the NRSC letter:

Here’s the shift in practice. Today, a voter with an iPhone gets our message just like a normal text. In iOS 26, unless that person has already replied, our message is silently sent to the “Unknown” inbox. No ping, no badge, just buried in an inbox few people ever check.

We’ve spent years complying with rigorous standards — providing full documentation, opt-in proof, and message samples via Campaign Verify and The Campaign Registry — yet Apple ignores that. Carriers respect it. Apple doesn’t.

Estimated prospecting losses: NRSC alone could see a $25M+ revenue hit. Since 70% of small-dollar donations come via text, and iPhones make up 60% of US mobile devices, the macro effect could be over $500M in lost GOP revenue. [...]

Unfortunately, K St and trade groups are asleep at the wheel. Apple isn’t engaging. But we have only a few weeks left before the public release. If we’re going to push back, it has to be now. We have a very narrow window to fix this.

“Unknown Senders” isn’t spam. It’s for ... unknown senders. Which these political texts are. I don’t know anyone who enjoys getting these texts in their primary timeline of messages. What the NRSC is asserting here is that they have a right to put political solicitations in your primary Messages view, and to have them appear as notifications, which is ridiculous.

Also, there’s no reason to believe that Republican candidates and groups will be more affected by this than Democratic ones. There’s no filtering by message content. It’s just a change to stop sending notifications for texts from unknown senders, and to put those messages in a separate timeline by default. People will check the Unknown Senders timeline occasionally too — all sorts of text messages from bots will go there, including some you want or need.

Adam Aaronson Drank Every Cocktail ★

Adam Aaronson:

The International Bartenders Association, or IBA, maintains a list of official cocktails, ones they deem to be “the most requested recipes” at bars all around the world. It’s the closest thing the bartending industry has to a canonical list of cocktails, akin to the American Kennel Club’s registry of dog breeds or a jazz musician’s Real Book of standards. [...]

As of 2025, there are 102 IBA official cocktails, and as of July 12, 2025, I’ve had every one of them.

The journey has taken me to some interesting places, and now that it’s done, I have a little story to tell for each cocktail. I’m not gonna tell you all 102 stories, but I do want to debrief the experience. Drinking all 102 cocktails turned out to be unexpectedly tricky, and for reasons you’ll soon understand, I might be one of the first people in the world to do it.

Fun story, copiously documented with details, locations, photos, and sidenotes. Truly a blogger’s blog post.

Saturday, 26 July 2025

SafeBase by Drata ★

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carlos Greaves, writing for McSweeney’s:

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

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

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

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

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

Intel Needs a Big Customer for Foundry Business to Survive ★

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emma Roth, The Verge:

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

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

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

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

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

Update: Google has come to its senses and will keep these redirections working.

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

Emanuel Maiberg and Joseph Cox, reporting for 404 Media:

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

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

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

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

Friday, 25 July 2025

The Talk Show: ‘The Shift-2 Crowd’ ★

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

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Thursday, 24 July 2025

Public Betas for Apple OSes 26 ★

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

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

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

Anyway, public beta commentary:

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

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Wednesday, 23 July 2025

Yours Truly With David Barnard on the Sub Club Podcast ★

David Barnard:

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

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

Tuesday, 22 July 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OS 26 Beta 4’s Are Out ★

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

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

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

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