Daring Fireball
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‘Torrenting From a Corporate Laptop Doesn’t Feel Right’
Ashley Belanger, reporting for Ars Technica on new details from an authors group lawsuit alleging Meta trained its AI models on a trove of pirated books: Last month, Meta admitted...
★ My 2024 Apple Report Card
While there are several areas where Apple maintained consistent excellence in 2024, I can’t think of a single area where Apple levelled up. Not one. That feels like a problem.
Apple Settles Lawsuit Against Former Employee Who Leaked to The Information and WSJ
Joe Rossignol, reporting for MacRumors: Last year, we reported that Apple sued its former software engineer Andrew Aude for providing journalists with confidential information about the company’s future plans, including...
★ Bootable Mac Startup Drive Backups, and Another Ode to SuperDuper
I know how different storage is today — abundant, cheap, reliable — but I still have feelings about my data that are rooted in the distant past.
Tim Sweeney on the Apps With Porn in Apple’s App Store
Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, on X: Apple is being extremely disingenuous in attacking the European Union here. The iOS App Store hosts the Reddit app, which provides access to massive...
AltStore PAL Is Free of Charge, Thanks to ‘MegaGrant’ From Epic Games
Apple, in its media statement re: Hot Tub (the you-have-to-admit-it’s-a-fun-name hardcore porn app now available in the AltStore PAL alternative app marketplace in the EU), closed its statement with the...
★ ‘Hot Tub’, a Hardcore Porn App for iOS, Hits AltStore in the E.U.
So, no, Apple neither approves of Hot Tub in particular, nor the ability to distribute native porn apps in general. Everyone involved with both AltStore and Hot Tub knows this,...
Dithering
If you enjoy podcasts, you should subscribe to Dithering, the twice-weekly 15-minutes-on-the-button podcast I do with Ben Thompson. Dithering as a standalone subscription costs just $7/month or $70/year. (It’s also...
LBJ on the Difference between Republicans and Democrats
The LBJ Presidential Library, regarding a largely ad-libbed address Lyndon Johnson gave to a group of 150 non-incumbent Democratic candidates for Congress in 1966: He talked about the difference between...
‘Apple in China’ — New Book by Patrick McGee, Coming in May
Speaking of books, Simon & Schuster announced a new one: Apple isn’t just a brand; it’s the world’s most valuable company and creator of the twenty-first century’s defining product. The...
Rick Reilly’s ‘Commander in Cheat’
Speaking of cheating, my favorite book from Trump’s first term was Rick Reilly’s Commander in Cheat, which I linked to, with an excerpt still available at The Guardian, when it...
‘Don’t Believe Him’
Ezra Klein in an audio essay/transcribed column at The New York Times: That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because...
Cabel Sasser: ‘The Snacks & Cereals of 2024’
A delight, as usual. (My one suggestion for 2025’s list: My Dad’s Chips. Holy hell are these good potato chips. I’ve got a particular weakness for the French Onion ones....
Swift Playground Gets an Update and Loses Its Plural
Interesting detail with the latest update to Apple’s app for learning and tinkering with Swift: it’s now named Playground, singular, not Playgrounds, plural. I’m not going to argue that much...
Where Are the Bluesky Clients?
Parker Ortolani: Mastodon clients have become the new UI playground in the same way that Twitter clients used to be. But what I can’t wrap my head around is the...
★ As if Anyone Needed Further Proof, Patrick Soon-Shiong’s Los Angeles Times Is Now a Propaganda Rag (and They’re Bad at HTML)
You can’t see the link or click on it as rendered in a browser, because there’s no content between the opening `<a …>` and closing `</a>` tags, but whoever at...
Perfect Headline: ‘Meta Warns That It Will Fire Leakers in Leaked Memo’
Alex Heath, writing at The Verge: Moments after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s all-hands comments to employees were widely leaked, a company executive warned in an internal memo that leakers will...
The WSJ on Zuckerberg’s $25 Million Payoff to Trump
Annie Linskey and Rebecca Ballhaus, reporting for The Wall Street Journal: “It looks like a bribe and a signal to every company that corruption is the name of the game,”...
One of These Lickspittle Tech Titans Is Not Like the Others
NBC News, “Meta Agrees to Pay $25 Million to Settle Trump Lawsuit”: Meta said Wednesday it would pay $25 million to settle a four-year-old lawsuit from President Donald Trump over...
LocalSend: Open Source Cross-Platform Alternative to AirDrop
Via David Smith on Mastodon, who writes: The recent work I’ve been doing has required a lot of sharing files between testing devices (and my Mac). AirDrop should be the...