Tech News

Aaron Vegh and Ben Rice McCarthy (of Obscura renown) have teamed up to create Croissant, a new app — currently iPhone-only — for cross-posting to Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky. 15 years ago I wrote “Twitter Clients Are a UI Design Playground” and that piece stands up, but it’s not Twitter/X in particular (certainly not anymore — X support is conspicuously omitted from Croissant’s current lineup up supported platforms), but tweet-like platforms in general. Croissant proves that this domain remains a UI playground. It’s both visually distinctive and intuitively familiar, with a fun and fluid UI. It’s the sort of app that I want to find reasons to use.

Free to download and try with a single account; $3/month, $20/year, or $60 as a one-time purchase for multi-account support, which is where Croissant really shines.

See also: Dan Moren at Six Colors, John Voorhees at MacStories, and Nick Heer at Pixel Envy.

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My thanks to WorkOS for, once again, sponsoring the week at Daring Fireball. WorkOS is a modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. Start selling to enterprise customers with just a few lines of code. Ship complex features like SSO and SCIM (pronounced skim) provisioning in minutes instead of months.

Today, some of the fastest growing startups are already powered by WorkOS, including Perplexity, Vercel, and Webflow.

For SaaS apps that care deeply about design and user experience, WorkOS is the perfect fit. From high-quality documentation to self-serve onboarding for your customers, it removes all the unnecessary complexity for your engineering team.

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Another good overview of the Automattic/WP Engine saga, this one from Ari Levy at CNBC:

Mullenweg may be openly enthusiastic and grateful for the employees he still has on board, but the WordPress community is a mess. Many WP Engine customers are suffering, and Automattic is gearing up for a legal fight against a private equity firm with over $100 billion in assets.

Hard not to be reminded, somewhat, of the righteous indignation fueling Steve Jobs’s end of life crusade against Google for creating Android. Some big fundamental differences, of course. WordPress is GPL open source and iOS isn’t open at all. It’s the righteous fervor of the founder/leader of the company that’s reminiscent.

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Emma Roth does the yeoman’s work of summarizing the complex and fast-moving legal feud between WordPress’s commercial arm and WP Engine, a major WordPress hosting provider:

Over the past several weeks, WordPress cofounder Matt Mullenweg has made one thing exceedingly clear: he’s in charge of WordPress’ future.

Mullenweg heads up WordPress.com and its parent company, Automattic. He owns the WordPress.org project, and he even leads the nonprofit foundation that controls the WordPress trademark. To the outside observer, these might appear to be independent organizations, all separately designed around the WordPress open-source project. But as he wages a battle against WP Engine, a third-party WordPress hosting service, Mullenweg has muddied the boundaries between three essential entities that lead a sprawling ecosystem powering almost half of the web.

To Mullenweg, that’s all fine — as long as it supports the health of WordPress long-term.

See also: Mullenweg’s “alignment” offer to Automattic’s nearly 1,900 employees.

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Taegan Goddard, writing at Political Wire:

It’s worth recalling that a major reason Trump won in 2016 was that, just before the election, news broke about emails related to a closed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails being found on Anthony Weiner’s computer, the estranged husband of a top Clinton aide.

In the end, nothing came of this discovery, but the extensive news coverage of it almost certainly swayed the election. It was the top story in every major newspaper.

But this new evidence presented against Trump wasn’t even the lead story in the New York Times or Washington Post this morning. And it didn’t even make the front page of the Wall Street Journal or USA Today.

It’s true that millions of words have already been written about Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. But there was plenty of new information included in this filing which is directly relevant to the biggest news story this month.

This, I think, is entirely explained by the conventional wisdom that the U.S. news media is “liberal”, a decades-long work-the-refs strategy from Republicans. The truth is the news media is effectively in the tank for Trump, sanewashing his literal nonsense, outright lies, and violence-inspiring hate speech against even legal immigrants. But our major political news media remains so hyper-focused on appearing not to favor one political side over the other that it’s completely lost sight of what ought to be their north star: the truth. If the truth favors one party over the other, so be it. That’s the job of reporting the news.

The difference between how these same publications treated Hillary Clinton’s “but her emails” nonsense in 2016 compared to Jack Smith’s motion this week could not be more stark.

Update: If you prefer, imagine if a special counsel appointed by the Attorney General submitted a brief alleging any crimes at all committed by Kamala Harris. Let’s say personal tax evasion — crimes, but insignificant compared to multiple attempts to overthrow the results of the last presidential election. The major U.S. newspapers and cable channels would have covered nothing else in the days since. Yet for this brief laying out copious evidence that Trump attempted the worst crime imaginable against U.S. democracy itself, it’s relative crickets chirping and shoulder shrugs. Remember too that Trump is already a convicted felon. If Harris had been convicted of a felony this year, do you think it would be mentioned more frequently in news stories than it actually is for Trump? If you don’t, I have a bridge to sell you.

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I missed this announcement from MLB a month ago:

Major League Baseball today announced a new multi-year international partnership with European workwear leader STRAUSS that makes the German company the Official Workwear Partner of MLB. The partnership marks STRAUSS’ first league-wide deal in the United States. STRAUSS entered the U.S. market in late 2023, and American brand awareness is the cornerstone of its marketing efforts. The new partnership also affords STRAUSS marketing rights with MLB across Canada, Mexico and Europe. As part of the deal, STRAUSS’ name and logo will adorn MLB batting helmets during the Postseason and regular season games in Europe, as well as MiLB batting helmets all season long, beginning in 2025.

But I couldn’t miss it watching postseason games on TV this week: there’s a ridiculous-looking “Strauss” on both sides of every player’s batting helmet now, as prominent as the team logo on the front. It looks even more desperate and obsequious on the helmets than it does printed in all-caps in MLB’s bootlicking press release. This is the sort of gimmick you expect from a struggling independent minor league team, not Major League Baseball.

They should’ve put the rights to these on-helmet ads up for public auction. I’d have chipped in for a fan-backed initiative to buy that on-helmet ad space to affix this slogan: “FIRE ROB MANFRED”.

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Victoria Gomelsky, reporting with absurd credulity for The New York Times:

Hodinkee, the watch enthusiast website based in Manhattan that has helped spread the gospel of mechanical watchmaking since its founding in 2008, has a new owner.

On Friday, the Watches of Switzerland Group, one of the world’s largest watch retailers with more than 220 multibrand and brand stores in Britain and the United States, announced that it had acquired the media company, which includes a website, a magazine, a brand partnerships division and an insurance business. Neither company would disclose the terms of the deal. [...]

Both Mr. Clymer and Mr. Hurley said Hodinkee’s staff, which now totals about 35 people, would remain intact and that its editorial team would remain independent of Watches of Switzerland oversight.

“But at a point in time,” Mr. Hurley said, “when you click on the Hodinkee Shop, you will see the full range of the product that WatchesofSwitzerland.com carries. We are going to do some work over the next several months to make that effectively seamless.”

There is a name for a publication that is owned by a retailer: catalog. I’d love to be proven wrong and see Hodinkee return to excellence, but that seemed far more likely as an independent website than as a subsidiary of the world’s largest premium watch retailer. For years I read Hodinkee daily; for the last few years I largely stopped reading it at all. Here’s Clymer’s own column announcing the acquisition (“joining forces”) and his return to day-to-day leadership of the site.

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An important follow-up to yesterday’s item about Russia demanding Apple remove VPN apps from the Russian App Store: you can use a VPN on iOS without an app. It just requires some futzing in Settings and a VPN provider that supports it. Presumably, this technique remains available to iPhone users in Russia. Here are instructions from one such VPN provider, ForestVPN:

1. Access Settings:
   • Open the Settings app on your iPhone.
   • Tap on General and scroll to VPN & Device Management.
2. Add VPN Configuration:
   • Select Add VPN Configuration.
   • Choose your desired protocol, such as L2TP or IKEv2.
3. Enter VPN Details:
   • Fill in the necessary fields like Description, Server, Remote ID, and Local ID. These details can be found on the ForestVPN website.
4. Save and Connect:
   • Tap Done to save your configuration.
   • Enable the VPN by toggling the switch next to your newly created profile.

VPN apps remove complexity from this process, but it’s worth noting that VPN access doesn’t require an app.

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Chili Palmer, reporting for HighSpeedInternet:

Starlink announced on Oct. 2 it will offer one month of free internet in Hurricane Helene disaster areas. The free service will be available to new customers who order through the Starlink website and to customers who activate a kit they already have, whether it was donated or purchased at a retail store. Existing customers may also be eligible.

The announcement comes after more than 500 Starlink kits were distributed throughout the disaster area by private relief organizations.

It’s hard to overstate how differently Elon Musk would be perceived if he weren’t a whackjob on political and cultural issues.

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Ryan Christoffel, writing for 9to5Mac:

Hurricane Helene has caused massive damage and taken over 100 lives across several US states. Many thousands of people are without power and/or cell service. But in the wake of the storm, reports have surfaced about a key iOS 18 feature that has been a lifeline for survivors: Messages via satellite.

Apple added Messages via satellite to millions of iPhones via its recent iOS 18 update. And now, according to reports on social media, it seems the feature arrived just in time. Here are a few tweets highlighting how useful the feature has proven.

It’s great that iOS 18 shipped before Helene hit, but a shame that it’s so new that most users haven’t yet upgraded. And once Helene hit and knocked out all comms in the most severely-hit areas, it was too late. (Apple hasn’t yet pushed iOS 18 to the majority of users whose devices are set to install updates automatically, and typically doesn’t do so with new iOS versions until the .1 release in October or November.) Some heads-up people were specifically recommending that iPhone 14 and 15 users in Helene’s path update to iOS 18 before it hit specifically to get this feature. But still: the feature is already making a huge difference.

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Cool Hunting:

We love getting into the nerdy details of design innovations and the iPhone 16‘s new Camera Control button presented a perfect opportunity to dig in. For this first podcast of our new Design Tangents series aptly named Nerdy Details we sit down with Johnnie Manzari from the Apple Human Interface team and Rich Dinh, Senior Director of Product Design, to talk about cameras and photography through the lens of the new control on “the world’s most popular camera.”

You don’t often get to hear Apple employees speak about their work. When you do, it’s often largely about trying to get the feel right.

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Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

iPhone users are being notified about an excessive heat weather event through Apple’s Weather app on iPhone. While the weather event is happening in the Santa Clara Valley region of California, the alert says that the occurrence is happening in an area nearby regardless of where you live.

Hall had a good theory — that the warnings were being to delivered to people who live nowhere near Santa Clara Valley because Apple includes Cupertino as a default location for the Weather app — but in an update acknowledges that the warning notification is being received by users who don’t have any saved locations near the heat wave. (I’ve gotten the notification on multiple devices, and don’t have Cupertino saved as a Weather location.)

What a weird bug.

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The United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia:

Haotian Sun, 34, and Pengfei Xue, 34, both Chinese nationals, were sentenced today for participating in a sophisticated scheme to defraud Apple Inc. out of millions of dollars’ worth of iPhones. U.S. District Court Judge Timothy J. Kelly sentenced Sun to 57 months in prison, and sentenced Xue to 54 months in prison. [...]

According to the government’s evidence, between May 2017 and September 2019, Sun, Xue, and other conspirators defrauded Apple Inc. by submitting counterfeit iPhones to Apple Inc. for repair to get Apple to exchange them with genuine replacement iPhones. Sun and Xue received shipments of inauthentic iPhones from Hong Kong at UPS mailboxes throughout the D.C. metropolitan area. They then submitted the fake iPhones, with spoofed serial numbers and/or IMEI numbers, to Apple retail stores and Apple Authorized Service Providers, including the Apple Store in Georgetown. Trial evidence and evidence developed after trial showed that members of the conspiracy submitted more than 6,000 inauthentic phones to Apple during the conspiracy, causing an intended loss of approximately $3.8 million and an actual loss of more than $2.5 million.

This seems like a scam you might expect to get away with a few times. Maybe more than a few, if you keep taking the counterfeit iPhones to different stores. But 6,000?

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Jason Snell returns to the show to discuss Apple’s September product announcements, and Meta’s Orion prototype AR glasses. Absolutely no baseball talk, almost.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Switzerland and Italy have redrawn part of their border in the Alps due to melting glaciers, caused by climate change. Part of the area affected will be beneath the Matterhorn, one of Europe's tallest mountains, and close to a number of popular ski resorts. Large sections of the Swiss-Italian border are determined by glacier ridgelines or areas of perpetual snow, but melting glaciers have caused these natural boundaries to shift, leading to both countries seeking to rectify the border. Switzerland officially approved the agreement on the change on Friday, but Italy is yet to do the same. This follows a draft agreement by a joint Swiss-Italian commission back in May 2023. Statistics published last September showed that Switzerland's glaciers lost 4% of their volume in 2023, the second biggest loss ever after 2022's record melt of 6%. An annual report is issued each year by the Swiss Glacier Monitoring Network (Glamos), which attributed the record losses to consecutive very warm summers, and 2022 winter's very low snowfall. Researchers say that if these weather patterns continue, the thaw will only accelerate. On Friday, Switzerland said that the redefined borders had been drawn up in accordance with the economic interests of both parties. It is thought that clarifying the borders will help both countries determine which is responsible for the upkeep of specific natural areas. Swiss-Italian boundaries will be changed in the region of Plateau Rosa, the Carrel refuge and Gobba di Rollin -- all are near the Matterhorn and popular ski resorts including Zermatt. The exact border changes will be implemented and the agreement published once both countries have signed it. Switzerland says that the approval process for signing the agreement is under way in Italy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Allen Pike:

As I understand it, my first experience in a self-driving car was typical:

• Minute 1: “How safe is this? Will it notice that cyclist? What about those construction cones?”
• Minute 10: “This is wild. It’s driving so calmly and safely. I love it.”
• Minute 20: (Bored, checking my email in the back seat.)

It was like a firmware update to my brain.

Imagine how exhilarating subways must have been a century ago — zipping across cities in high-speed underground trains. All technology becomes mundane quickly. It’s kind of amazing when you notice it happening with yourself.

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Om Malik, after Apple’s September 9 “It’s Glowtime” event at Steve Jobs Theater:

I decided to become a fly on the wall and chronicle the spectacle unfolding in front of me. I focused on those who were there to create content about the devices, not the devices themselves. It was fun to just float among the crowds with my Nikon Zf and a 40mm lens.

It was a wonderful spectacle — just to bask in this new kind of raw media energy. Content for the sake of content. Events for the sake of content. Fog of content. It’s the new way of the world. As a student of media, I love this chaos and change — because from chaos and change comes the future.

I’m linking to this photo essay despite, not because of, the fact that it includes a portrait of yours truly dicking around on his phone in the small room where the media wait for post-event briefings. Steve Jobs Theater is a beautiful and unique space, but there are aspects of the space that are hard to capture in photos. Om’s collection here captures the feel of it.

I tried to return the favor by photographing the photographer.

See also: Om’s thoughts on the event and announcements.

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Google has obtained (PDF) a default judgment against two men who abused its DMCA takedown system to falsely target 117,000 URLs of competitors' online stores. With none of the defendants showing up in court, a California federal court sided with the search engine. Through an injunction, the men are now prohibited from sending false takedown notices and creating new Google accounts. TorrentFreak reports: Last November, Google decided to take action against the rampant DMCA abuse. In a lawsuit filed at a federal court in California, it accused Nguyen Van Duc and Pham Van Thien of sending over 100,000 fraudulent takedown requests. Many of these notices were allegedly filed against third-party T-shirt shops. [...] Following the complaint, the defendants, who are believed to reside in Vietnam, were summoned via their Gmail accounts and SMS. However, the pair remained quiet and didn't respond in court. Without the defendants representing themselves, Google requested a default judgment. According to the tech giant, it's clear that the duo violated the DMCA with their false takedown notices. In addition, they committed contract breach under California law. Google said that, absent a default judgment, the defendants would continue to harm consumers and third-party businesses. These actions, in turn, will damage Google's reputation as a search engine. In July, U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim recommended granting Google's motion for default judgment. The recommendation included an injunction that prevents the two men from abusing Google's services going forward. However, the District Judge had the final say. Last Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Edward Davila adopted the recommendations, issuing a default judgment in favor of Google. The order confirms that defendants Nguyen Van Duc and Pham Van Thien violated the DMCA with their false takedown notices. In addition, they committed contract breach under California law. In typical copyrights-related verdicts, most attention is paid to the monetary damages, but not here. While Google could have requested millions of dollars in compensation, it didn't request a penny. Google's primary goal was to put an end to the abusive behavior, not to seek financial compensation. Therefore, the company asked for an injunction to prohibit the defendants from sending false takedowns going forward. This includes a ban on registering any new Google accounts. The request ticked all the boxes and, without a word from the defendants, Judge Davila granted the default judgment as well as the associated injunction.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cerebras Systems, an AI chip startup, filed (PDF) for an IPO and plans to trade under the ticker "CBRS" on Nasdaq. CNBC reports: Cerebras competes with Nvidia, whose graphics processing units are the industry's choice for training and running AI models. Cerebras says on its website that its WSE-3 chip comes with more cores and memory than Nvidia's popular H100. It's also a physically larger chip. In addition to selling chips, Cerebras offers cloud-based services that rely on its own computing clusters. [...] In addition to Nvidia, Cerebras cites AMD, Intel, Microsoft and Google as competitors, "as well as internally developed custom application-specific integrated circuits and a variety of private companies." Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company makes the Cerebras chips. Cerebrus warned investors that any possible supply chain disruptions may hurt the company. Cerebras was founded in 2016 and is based in Sunnyvale, California. Andrew Feldman, the startup's co-founder and CEO, sold server startup SeaMicro to AMD for $355 million in 2012. The company said in 2021 that it was valued at over $4 billion in a $250 million funding round.In May, G42 committed to purchasing $1.43 billion in orders from Cerebras before March 2025, according to the filing. G42 currently owns under 5% of Cerebras' Class A shares, and the firm has an option to purchase more depending on how much Cerebras product it buys.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon Prime is launching a new Shark Tank-style competition show where contestants pitch products to a panel of celebrity investors and a live audience called "The 100." If a product wins audience approval, it gets featured in Amazon's Buy It Now Store, accessible via QR codes during episodes. The show, called Buy It Now and hosted by JB Smoove, premieres on October 30, 2024. You can watch a trailer for it on YouTube. The Verge reports: The company announced the show earlier this year but has now released a trailer showing what it will look like. Contestants pitch their ideas to the audience. If the crowd votes for them, then the panelists pick which ones will show up on Amazon's Buy It Now Store: a new storefront launching alongside the show that viewers can reach using a QR code that shows up during episodes. One presenter per episode will get a $20,000 prize, too. Apart from Smoove -- who you may remember from Curb Your Enthusiasm and Harley -- the show will feature "a star-studded rotating panel of celebrity panelists," including Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Anderson, Tabitha Brown, Tony Hawk, and Christian Siriano. It will also include three Amazon executives, and Ring founder and current CEO of Door.com (formerly Latch) Jamie Siminoff will serve as the "resident judge and entrepreneurial panelist." Oh, and those panelists will be selling their own products on that Buy It Now Store.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.