Daring Fireball

From Drexel’s YouTube channel:

But far less recognized is that Drexel made the very bold decision of committing all students to purchase a previously unreleased and untested computer from Apple. This was, of course, the Macintosh (introduced in January 1984), which was unlike any previous computer. Drexel’s commitment to the Mac was also of great benefit to Apple, helping to legitimize this brand-new platform, which helped make the Mac a successful product that continues to thrive in education 40 years later.

This entire initiative, called the Drexel Microcomputer Project, was captured in a 1-hour documentary filmed by David Jones, Dean of the Pennoni Honors College from 2008 to 2014. The film premiered at Drexel in 1985.

I was very fortunate not only to know Dave Jones (who died in 2018) but to have him as a professor for several film criticism courses (one on westerns, and another on the works of Alfred Hitchcock). I was a computer science major, not a film major, but Jones didn’t care. He was also familiar with — dare I say, a fan of — my column in The Triangle, Drexel’s student newspaper. He took me to lunch my senior year and encouraged me to pursue writing as a career. He was a great teacher: thoughtful, kind, insightful, open-minded, and deeply knowledgeable.

I saw a screening of Going National back in 2011, and sat on a panel discussion with Jones to talk about it. It’s a good documentary, and he really captured the feel of Drexel’s campus at the time. It is a very ’80s movie. It was gratifying that I got to tell him, then, that his advice to me back in 1996 had worked out pretty well.

Alissa Falcone, in a good piece looking back at (my alma mater) Drexel University’s groundbreaking deal with Apple 40 years ago to provide deeply discounted Macintoshes to all students, and integrate them throughout the campus and curriculums:

Drexel was prepared to buy IBM computers — and had equipped its computer centers with IBMs for decades — but the cost came to more than $1,000 per unit. IBM’s young competitor Apple, on the other hand, was willing to give discounts, provided the University agreed to secret negotiations and discreet showings of its newest, unreleased personal computer.

Bruce Eisenstein, PhD, Arthur J. Rowland Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the College of Engineering, was the head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the time, and had been the founding faculty adviser for the Drexel Computer Society started in 1972. He was Drexel’s choice to meet with an Apple representative to see the future Macintosh, which had never-before-seen properties like a mouse, icons on a screen and different fonts. This new Apple product was more powerful and easier to use than earlier personal computers; novices could supposedly master it in 30 minutes (without the need to memorize and type coded commands). And Apple agreed on the $1,000 price tag for a model that sold to the public for $2,495.

“I went back to the selection committee and I said, ‘Listen, you have to forget the IBM. This new computer from Apple is the one you have to get. They are going to make it available to us for a thousand dollars — that’s all inclusive.’ And the first question was ‘Is it compatible with the IBM computer?’ Well, no. Was there software for it? No. Were there any programs for it, like a word processor? Not yet. So the committee justifiably kept saying, well, what’s the name of this? What’s it like? I couldn’t tell them. I had to say you just gotta trust me on this. So they took a vote and unanimously voted to adopt the unknown computer that turned out to be the Macintosh,” Eisenstein recalled in Building Drexel: The University and Its City, 1891-2016.

Drexel chose the untested Macintosh even knowing that Apple wouldn’t announce it to the public until January 1984 and that the computers wouldn’t be ready until March, almost halfway through that momentous academic year.

I never had the pleasure of meeting Eisenstein, but I’d sure like to thank him for his prescience. By the time I got to Drexel in 1991 the Mac was infused throughout campus.

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. Does your app get fake signups, throwaway emails, or users abusing your free tier? Or worse, bots attacks and brute force attempts?

WorkOS Radar can block all this and more. Their simple API gives you advanced device fingerprinting that can detect bad actors, bots, and suspicious behavior.

Your users trust you. Keep it that way. Check out WorkOS Radar today.

TMZ:

Seems Elon Musk is truly going to colonize Mars ... even if he has to do it himself, ’cause the tech mogul just welcomed his 14 child! Elon helped break the news Friday along with Shivon Zilis, with whom the billionaire already had three children.

You know what you call a man who has 14 children with four different mothers and has little interest or involvement in most of their lives? You call him a weirdo. This isn’t some quirk or fluke. He’s obviously some sort of eugenics freak who isn’t interested in family or fatherhood, but in spreading his seed like he’s some sort of prized racehorse. How is this any different than polygamy or assembling some sort of harem, other than that polygamists might live with and take an active role in raising their various children?

Think too about how conservative news outlets would portray any woman who had children with four different fathers (and counting). Or if Musk were a black man working for a Democratic president. (Imagine the Fox News take if Barack Obama had five children from three different mothers, like Donald Trump does.)

Ming-Chi Kuo, back on Sunday September 15:

Based on my latest supply chain survey and pre-order results from Apple’s official websites, I’ve compiled key data on iPhone 16’s first-weekend pre-orders for each model, including pre-order sales, average delivery times, and shipments before pre-order. [...]

Analysis and Conclusions:

iPhone 16 series first-weekend pre-order sales are estimated at about 37 million units, down about 12.7% YoY from last year’s iPhone 15 series first-weekend sales. The key factor is the lower-than-expected demand for the iPhone 16 Pro series.

Note that pre-orders for the iPhone 16 lineup only started two days prior, on Friday September 13. Here were Kuo’s estimates for first-weekend pre-order sales, compared year-over-year to the equivalent iPhone 15 models:

iPhone 16 Pro Max-16% iPhone 16 Pro-27% iPhone 16 Plus+48% iPhone 16+10%

These numbers bear no resemblance to Apple’s actual financial results for the October-December quarter. There was no marked downswing in demand for the 16 Pro and Pro Max, and there was no wild upswing in demand for the 16 Plus. Just one month after posting the above opening-weekend nonsense, Kuo himself reported, “iPhone 16 orders were cut by around 10M units for 4Q24–1H25, with most of the cuts affecting non-Pro models.” So in September Kuo claimed Pro sales were alarmingly down and regular iPhone 16 and 16 Plus sales were surprisingly strong, but in October he said Apple cut orders mostly with the “non-Pro models”. So why was any of this reported as news?

My thesis has long been that while Kuo clearly has some insight into some of Apple’s suppliers in Asia, he has no insight whatsoever into Apple’s sales. How could he? “Apple’s official websites” don’t publish sales numbers. I think he just pulls this stuff right out of his ass and hand waves that it has something to do with the estimated ship dates for new iPhone models. Further, I think Kuo picks these numbers not at random, and not based on an honest attempt to even guess the actual sales, but rather to create headlines and inject his name into the news. Has he ever once issued a “survey” that reported that iPhone demand was pretty much in line with expectations? If all you did was follow Ming-Chi Kuo’s reporting, you’d think Jeff Williams is incompetent and should have been fired years ago, because he has no ability to accurately forecast demand for Apple’s most important product. Clickbait in its purest form, detached completely from any factual reality.

Matthew Green:

If you install WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Snap or even Telegram(please don’t!) you’ll encounter a simple feature that addresses this problem. It’s usually called “disappearing messages”, but sometimes goes by other names.

I’m almost embarrassed to explain what this feature does, since it’s like explaining how a steering wheel works. Nevertheless. When you start a chat, you can decide how long the messages should stick around for. If your answer is forever, you don’t need to do anything. However, if it’s a sensitive conversation and you want it to be ephemeral in the same way that a phone call is, you can pick a time, typically ranging from 5 minutes to 90 days. When that time expires, your messages just get erased — on both your phone and the phones of the people you’re talking to.

A separate feature of disappearing messages is that some platforms will omit these conversations from device backups, or at least they’ll make sure expired messages can’t be restored. This makes sense because those conversations are supposed to be ephemeral: people are clearly not expecting those text messages to be around in the future, so they’re not as angry if they lose them a few days early. [...]

To recap, nearly every single other messaging product that people use in large numbers (at least here in the US) has some kind of disappearing messages feature. Apple’s omission is starting to be very unique.

I do have some friends who work for Apple Security and I’ve tried to talk to them about this. [...] When I ask about disappearing messages, I get embarrassed sighs and crickets. Nobody can explain why Apple is so far behind on this basic feature even as an option, long after it became standard in every other messenger.

I can only speculate why iMessage doesn’t offer this feature. Perhaps Apple doesn’t want to imply that “disappearing messages” are in any way guaranteed to be ephemeral, which would be impossible. Who’s to say the recipient hasn’t screenshotted them? And if Messages were to impose a software block against capturing a screenshot of a “disappearing message” (like the way you can’t capture screenshots of DRM-protected video), who’s to say the recipient hasn’t used another device to take a photograph of the display showing the ostensibly-ephemeral message? E2EE is a mathematical guarantee. There’s no way to offer such a guarantee regarding ephemerality, and perhaps that gives Apple pause.

But I think that would be letting a desire for perfection get in the way of offering a feature that’s useful and good enough. People who use disappearing messages on other platforms — and as Green points out, all of iMessage’s rivals offer the feature — understand the risks. Vanishingly few people understand the difference between “encrypted in transit” and “end-to-end encrypted”. But just about everyone intuitively understands that even a “disappearing message” might be screenshotted, photographed, or otherwise recorded. There’s an implicit trust between sender and recipient.

The other angle I can think of is complexity. Messages is one of Apple’s most-used apps, and in many ways it exemplifies Apple’s approach to software design and computing in general. Where critics see an app that is popular despite offering fewer features than its rivals, Apple (and I) see an app that is popular and beloved to some degree because it offers fewer features. All new features necessarily add some complexity, and disappearing messages would add quite a bit. Can you have two chats with the same person/group, one standard and one ephemeral? If so, now you’ve raised the specter of accidentally sending what’s intended to be a disappearing message to the non-ephemeral chat with that person or group. If not, how do you send a brief disappearing-message exchange with someone with whom you have a long archive of messages you want to keep forever? (Perhaps the idea of private browsing in Safari could serve as an inspiration for disappearing messages in Messages — an entirely separate mode with a distinct visual state.)

The basic idea of disappearing messages is pretty trivial and easily understood. A good design for implementing them in Messages is not trivial. Solving these hard design problems is what makes Apple Apple, though. They’ve added some rather superficial features to Messages (Genmoji and message effects for example), so I agree with Green that they ought to tackle disappearing messages and that surely they can find a way to do it where the added complexity doesn’t create confusion. It’s a hard challenge, to be sure, but a worthy one. Apple’s designers could really have some fun with this too, with novel ways to present “disappearingness” visually.

Meghan Bobrowsky and Jeff Horwitz, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

Meta apologized Wednesday night for what it said was an “error” that led to graphic and violent videos flooding the feeds of a vast number of Instagram users, including minors. The videos, which were recommended on some users’ Reels tab, included people who appeared to have been shot to death and run over by vehicles. Some of the recommended videos had “sensitive content” warnings on them while others didn’t.

A Wall Street Journal reporter’s account featured scores of videos of people being shot, mangled by machinery, and ejected from theme park rides, often back to back. The videos originated on pages that the reporter didn’t follow with names such as “BlackPeopleBeingHurt,” “ShockingTragedies” and “PeopleDyingHub.”

That’s one hell of a glitch.

Jeff Teper, president of collaborative apps and platforms at Microsoft:

In order to streamline our free consumer communications offerings so we can more easily adapt to customer needs, we will be retiring Skype in May 2025 to focus on Microsoft Teams (free), our modern communications and collaboration hub.

NPR:

Microsoft, which acquired Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion, announced in a post on X on Friday that the iconic voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) service would soon go dark. It encouraged Skype users to instead migrate to a free version of Microsoft Teams — a communication app that helps users work together in real time.

In the more than two decades since it was founded, Skype has been largely overtaken by a bevy of competitors, such as FaceTime, WhatsApp, Zoom, and Slack.

The writing has been on the wall for a long time that Skype was no longer strategic for Microsoft. Really, even right after the acquisition, it never seemed Microsoft had any sort of plan for what to do with Skype — even though, at the time, it was their largest-ever acquisition.

But man, for a long while, Skype was singularly amazing, offering high-quality / low-latency audio calls at a time when everything else seemed low-quality / high-latency. I continued using Skype to record The Talk Show until a few years ago, and I can’t say I miss it. But I used Skype to record at least around 400 episodes — which means I’ve spent somewhere around 1,000 hours talking to people over Skype. I can close my eyes and just hear Skype’s kinda clunky but distinctive ringtone. In the early days of podcasting, seemingly every show used Skype because it was so much better than anything else. And it was free! It felt like the future. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that if not for Skype, podcasting would’ve been set back several years.

Alex Heath, reporting for The Verge:

Meta has fired “roughly 20” employees who leaked “confidential information outside the company,” according to a spokesperson.

“We tell employees when they join the company, and we offer periodic reminders, that it is against our policies to leak internal information, no matter the intent,” Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold tells The Verge exclusively. “We recently conducted an investigation that resulted in roughly 20 employees being terminated for sharing confidential information outside the company, and we expect there will be more. We take this seriously, and will continue to take action when we identify leaks.”

These firings, of course, are the follow-up to one of my favorite headlines so far this year: “Meta Warns That It Will Fire Leakers in Leaked Memo”. As I wrote in that post a month ago:

It’s not fear of getting fired that keeps employees at most companies from leaking. It’s that they find themselves aligned with the company’s mission. They feel like part of a team that they want to see succeed, and they naturally adopt an attitude of being a team player. Team players don’t leak the playbook because they don’t like the coach’s play-calling or how much playing time they’re getting. I’ve never gotten the sense that that sort of attitude exists at Meta.

I’m not sure this public crackdown will help. Meta seems to be leaning into fear to keep employees in line, rather than team spirit. Their war on leakers might prove about as effective as America’s decades-long “war on drugs”, that saw illegal drug use rise, not fall, even while our prisons filled up with non-violent drug-law offenders. What’s the Princess Leia line? “The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.” One longtime reader, who works at Netflix, contacted me after my month ago post and observed:

That is such a great take on Meta’s leaks. Netflix stuff almost never leaks, because Netflix is a place full of people who don’t want to leak things. There are virtually no barriers, just a culture and collection of people who don’t do that.

Penalties are a deterrence. But the reason most people don’t commit crimes — whether it be shoplifting or murder — isn’t fear of the potential penalties. It’s that they’re good honest people who don’t want to steal (and definitely don’t want to kill anyone).

Founder Nirav Patel, writing this week on Framework’s company blog:

We went live this morning at the Framework (2nd Gen) Event with our biggest set of announcements yet: Framework Desktop, Framework Laptop 12, and the new Ryzen AI 300 Series Framework Laptop 13. You can watch a recording of the livestream on our YouTube channel.

Sean Hollister has a good roundup of the announcements at The Verge. Back in 2021 when Framework debuted with their first laptop, I expressed pithy skepticism regarding their modular approach. I’m still skeptical, but it’s hard not to root for them and cheer for their success. In principle, Framework’s “everything is a swappable, replaceable module” approach to system design is a fun nerdy throwback to the days when it was expected that you could get inside any computer and replace or upgrade its components yourself. And Framework’s style of modularity is designed with ease-of-use in mind, like snapping Lego blocks together. But as Hollister points out, Framework still hasn’t shipped a promised GPU upgrade component for its now two-year-old Framework 16 laptop.

Also of note is how much Framework is building around chips from AMD, not Intel. Is there a single category where anyone would say “Intel makes the best chips for this”? In an alternate universe where Apple had never moved the Mac to Apple Silicon, I’m not sure if it would be tenable for Apple to still be exclusively relying on Intel for x86 chips. Intel’s chips just aren’t competitive with AMD’s.

Ben Domenech interviewed President Trump yesterday in the Oval Office, after Trump’s meeting with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The Spectator has published the entire transcript, and I read it so you don’t have to, to get the part about Apple and the UK’s encryption backdoor demand:

BD: But the problem is he runs, your vice president obviously eloquently pointed this out in Munich, he runs a nation now that is removing the security helmets on Apple phones so that they can —

DJT: We told them you can’t do this.

BD: Yeah, Tulsi, I saw —

DJT: We actually told him… that’s incredible. That’s something, you know, that you hear about with China.

It feels quite odd to strongly agree with Trump on something, but he’s not wrong about everything.

(Most of the interview is just bananas stuff, ping-ponging all over the place. I swear Trump even goes back to Hannibal Lecter, and his mistaken belief that political asylum policies are somehow related to foreign countries emptying their asylums for the criminally insane.)

Hamilton Nolan, in a 2021 piece for The Columbia Journalism Review, under the headline “Bezos Has Been Hands-Off. What if That Changes?”:

Bezos has given the paper the resources to be bigger and better, and, by most accounts, pretty much stayed out of the newsroom’s hair, besides appearing one day to present a bicycle to former editor Marty Baron. The Amazon boss has never been an overtly political man, except to the extent that he supports whatever helps him stay rich and take over the world with his robotic form of ultra-capitalism. But he is not inclined to spend his time on the phone haranguing Post editors about coverage decisions. When you are worth close to $200 billion, your time is too valuable for that.

There is no guarantee, however, that that will always be true. [...]

Discussing this question with nuance is not easy. The paper will always say that Bezos does not interfere. Bezos himself will always say that he does not interfere. Factions of the public on the right and the left will always hold that Bezos’s ownership inherently corrupts the paper’s coverage.

I do give Bezos credit for taking public ownership of his assertion of control over the paper’s opinion pages now. This is a major change, and he’s not trying to hide it or shy away from responsibility for it.

Jeff Bezos, in a memo he shared publicly on X:

I shared this note with the Washington Post team this morning:

I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages.

We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. [...]

I offered David Shipley, whom I greatly admire, the opportunity to lead this new chapter. I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t “hell yes,” then it had to be “no.” After careful consideration, David decided to step away. This is a significant shift, it won’t be easy, and it will require 100% commitment — I respect his decision. We’ll be searching for a new Opinion Editor to own this new direction.

He owns the paper, and the opinion pages are the traditional place for a newspaper’s owner to assert their beliefs. And while Bezos was famously hands-off for the first decade of his ownership (he bought the Post from the Graham family for $250 million in 2013), this latest dictum doesn’t feel out of the blue or surprising in the least. It feels like the natural culmination of his asserting control over the paper’s opinion pages that started with his blockbuster decision to nix the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris just a few weeks prior to the election, and reached a breaking point when the paper refused to run a cartoon by Pulitzer-winning Ann Telnaes that mocked Bezos (along with other billionaires) for paying into Trump’s inauguration committee racket — prompting Telnaes to resign in righteous protest.

How are remaining staffers at the Post taking this? Not happily. Reports Liam Reilly, media reporter at CNN:

Current staffers echoed those sentiments. Philip Bump, who writes the “How to Read This Chart” newsletter at the Post, asked Bluesky “what the actual fuck” five minutes after the announcement went out. Post tech reporter Drew Harwell on Bluesky shared a summary of comments on the story generated by the Post’s own AI tool that highlighted “significant discontent” from readers and “a strong sentiment of betrayal among long-time subscribers.” And, tellingly, David Maraniss, an editor at the paper, said on Bluesky that he would “never write for (the Post) again as long as (Bezos is) the owner.”

More tellingly, the Post’s own media critic, the excellent Erik Wemple, intended to write about the policy change but saw his own column spiked. It’s a good sign that things have gone off the rails when a publication’s own media critic is disallowed from writing about their own publication.

Loved this remembrance by Manohla Dargis in The New York Times:

When Clint Eastwood needed a performer who could persuasively go boot-toe to boot-toe with him in his brutal 1992 western Unforgiven, he needed an actor who was his towering equal onscreen. Eastwood needed a performer with strange charisma, one who could at once effortlessly draw the audience to his character and repulse it without skipping a beat. This actor didn’t need the audience’s love, and would never ask for it. He instead needed to go deep and dark, playing a villain of such depravity that he inspired the viewer’s own blood lust. Eastwood needed a legend who could send shivers up spines. He needed Gene Hackman.

Just an unbelievable career, in such a wide variety of films. His roles in The Conversation, The French Connection, and Unforgiven are atop most people’s lists, and I do love each of those movies. But he was so good in everything. What a great Lex Luthor he was in 1978’s Superman. Mississippi Burning, The Royal Tenenbaums, Bonnie and Clyde, The Birdcage, Hoosiers. By chance, I just re-watched David Mamet’s Heist a few weeks ago. Like so many of Hackman’s movies, that’s another one that repays multiple viewings across decades.

Joseph Menn, reporting for The Washington Post:

The U.S. Justice Department told Congress in November there were no major disputes with the United Kingdom over how the two allies seek data from each other’s communication companies.

But at that time, officials knew British authorities were preparing a demand that Apple build a back door to its users’ encrypted data, according to people familiar with the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal department matters. [...]

The department said it reminded its British counterpart of the CLOUD Act’s “requirement that the terms of the Agreement shall not create any obligation that providers be capable of decrypting data.” The report did not mention the looming order, and said any demands for reduced security would come under Britain’s Investigatory Powers Act, and so were not within the scope of the CLOUD Act.

On Wednesday, Sen. Alex Padilla and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, both California Democrats, faulted the November certification, saying “it splits the finest of hairs” by suggesting that the CLOUD Act didn’t apply to any decryption order. The two lawmakers, who sit on the Judiciary committees in their respective chambers of Congress, asked Bondi to reconsider whether Britain was violating the Cloud Act by ordering a break to Apple’s encryption.

Two of the people familiar with the certification process said the FBI has pursued backdoor capabilities unsuccessfully in the United States and would have been in a stronger legal position to win that if Apple had already had to create such a mechanism for another government.

Just utterly disgraceful behavior from the Biden administration — choosing to look the other way at a clear violation of the CLOUD Act to help their purported buddies in the UK, at the direct expense of a US company’s autonomy and US citizens’ privacy. I don’t see how this dissembling can be defended. Upon learning of the UK’s odious demands on Apple, the Biden administration’s response wasn’t to defend Apple (or Americans’ privacy), but instead to try to hide it from Congress. Unreal.

Zac Hall, reporting for 9to5Mac:

According to a letter seen by 9to5Mac, the Trump Administration is investigating whether the UK may have broken a bilateral agreement when secretly demanding that Apple build a global backdoor into iCloud.

Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard wrote in a letter responding to Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona that she was not made aware of the UK’s secret demand by her UK counterparts. However, she suggested, the UK government may have broken a bilateral privacy and surveillance agreement in making the demand.

Gabbard’s letter is available here (and I’m hosting a copy). From her letter:

Thank you for your letter dated 13 February 2025 concerning reported actions by the United Kingdom toward Apple that could undermine Americans’ privacy and civil liberties at risk. I am aware of the press reporting that the UK Home Secretary served Apple with a secret order directing the company to create a “back door” capability in its iCloud encryption to facilitate UK government access to any Apple iCloud users’ uploaded data anywhere in the world. I share your grave concern about the serious implications of the United Kingdom, or any foreign country, requiring Apple or any company to create a “backdoor” that would allow access to Americans personal encrypted data. This would be a clear and egregious violation of Americans’ privacy and civil liberties, and open up a serious vulnerability for cyber exploitation by adversarial actors.

I was not made aware of this reported order, either by the United Kingdom government or Apple, prior to it being reported in the media. I have requested my counterparts at CIA, DIA, DHS, FBI and NSA to provide insights regarding the publicly reported actions, and will subsequently engage with UK government officials. The UK’s Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, also known as the Snoopers’ Charter, which I understand would be at issue, allows the UK to issue a “gag order,” which would prevent Apple or any company from voicing their concerns with myself, or the public. [...]

My lawyers are working to provide a legal opinion on the implications of the reported UK demands against Apple on the bilateral Cloud Act agreement. Upon initial review of the U.S. and U.K. bilateral CLOUD Act Agreement, the United Kingdom may not issue demands for data of U.S. citizens, nationals, or lawful permanent residents (“U.S. persons”), nor is it authorized to demand the data of persons located inside the United States. The same is true for the United States — it may not use the CLOUD Act agreement to demand data of any person located in the United Kingdom.

I’m so pleased by Gabbard’s response here, including making it public, that I’m gladly willing to overlook her “back door”/”backdoor” and “UK”/”U.K.” inconsistencies. (DF style is now to close it up: backdoor.)

Short of the UK backing down and retracting its secret demand for an iCloud backdoor from Apple, this is the best that Apple and privacy advocates could hope for. The gag-order aspect of the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act prevented Apple from even fighting it in court. But a US ruling that would hold it illegal for Apple to comply would put Apple in an impossible situation, where they can’t comply with a UK legal demand without violating the law of the home country. That would actually give Apple the ground to fight this in the UK.

It is not coincidental that UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is set to visit the White House tomorrow. This is a message in advance that the US considers all aspects of this demand on Apple unacceptable.

I referenced Downie twice earlier today — once in my item linking to Charlie Monroe (developer of Downie) writing about the indie app business, and earlier in my post about using Downie to download the MP3 from Jony Ive’s interview on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs.

I somehow hadn’t heard of (or more likely, just hadn’t noticed) Downie until a few weeks ago, when I first came across Monroe’s blog post, via Michael Tsai. Here’s the pitch for Downie, from its website:

Ever wished you could save a video from the Internet? Search no more, Downie is what you’re looking for. Easily download videos from thousands of different sites.

That’s it. You give it a web page URL, and Downie will download any video (or audio) files embedded on the page. Downie offers all sorts of convenience features, like browser extensions, post-processing, and more. But the main interface is super obvious and easy.

For years, I’ve used the open source yt-dlp command-line tool for this task (and before yt-dlp, its predecessor, youtube-dl). When I saw Downie, I thought to myself, “That looks cool, but I don’t really download that many video or audio files to justify paying for a commercial app.” But then I slapped myself (figuratively) and I realized I should at least try it. I’m so glad I did. It’s like using Transmit instead of the command-line tools for secure FTP connections. It’s cool that the Mac has a Unix terminal interface and support for zillions of free and open source utilities, but the point of using a Mac is to use great Mac apps. And Downie is a great Mac app.

What I’ve found over the last month isn’t just that I enjoy using Downie far more than invoking yt-dlp, but that I use Downie more often than I used yt-dlp, because it’s so much easier and more reliable. For example, when I wrote about Fox Sports’s new scorebug that debuted in the Super Bowl, I used Downie to download local 4K copies of this month’s Super Bowl 59, along with Super Bowl 57 from two years ago, to compare Fox’s new scorebug with their previous one. Local video files are easy to navigate frame-by-frame to capture the perfect screenshot; YouTube’s website makes it impossible to navigate frame-by-frame.

Downie is a $20 one-time purchase (and is also included with a Setapp subscription). I’ve only been using it for a month or so, and I already feel like I’ve gotten $20 of utility from it. (I went ahead and bought Monroe’s other major app, Permute, too.)

Charlie Monroe, developer of excellent apps such as Downie and Permute:

But also don’t do this alone. I work 365 days a year. Last year, I worked 366 days (2024 was leap year). I’m not saying that I work 8 hours each day, but even during weekends, holidays, vacation, I need to tend to support emails in the morning for an hour or so and then once more in the afternoon or evening. I cannot just take off and leave for a few days without seeing the consequences and going insane when I get back. I currently receive about 100 reports from my apps each day. Some are about license code issues, some are crash reports, some are Permute conversion issues, some are Downie download issues, but it all adds up to the average of the 100 reports a day.

If I were to leave for a vacation for 10 days… You do the math what would I be getting back to. Plus your users don’t want to wait for 10 days. Even 5 days. There are users who are unwilling to wait an hour and just don’t realize that you cannot be at the computer 24-hours a day and that you’re perhaps in a different time zone and sleeping. The unfortunate thing about this is that going through the support emails in my case is something that takes about 2-3 hours a day — which is not enough to hire someone and train them. Not to mention that most of the reports actually need some technical knowledge. So unless I would hire another developer, in the end, the really administrative stuff that someone could do instead of me is a 30-minute-a-day job.

I wouldn’t recommend never taking a complete break for anyone, but there are some businesses where someone needs to spend an hour-plus on certain tasks each day. If you’re a one-person operation, that person is you, even while on vacation. No one gets into indie development because they look forward to doing support, either. It’s the designing, programming, crafting, and refining of the apps that drives them. But it’s like being a musician or comedian in some ways. For those endeavors, the grind is traveling from one city to another for gigs. Or like running a restaurant, as dramatized on The Bear — prep work, cleaning, procurement, reservations, food allergies, more cleaning. It never stops. For indie developers, the grind is support. (Small restaurants typically close for a day or two each week; technical support email addresses don’t.) There’s just always a lot of menial work involved with being a professional artist. But that’s also why so many indie developers — like, seemingly, Monroe — find the endeavor worthwhile. Because artistic work is deeply fulfilling.

A while back — around 20 years ago, at the height of the “Delicious” renaissance in indie development for Mac OS X — there was a developer who burst onto the scene with a deservedly very popular app. It was gorgeous and fast. It had a lot fewer features than other apps in its somewhat-crowded category, but that was also part of the app’s appeal. It was like a sporty little roadster in a category full of practical sedans and trucks. He eventually came out with a second app, and it too was popular. His apps were sort of like Panic’s, aesthetically, I’d say. They not only looked cool, they were well-designed from a usability perspective too. This developer, so I’ve been told, spent almost no time at all on tech support from customers. How was this possible, a friend of mine asked him. Easy, this developer said. When the inbox for support emails looked full, he’d do a Select All, then Delete. Inbox zero.

This story has always made me laugh. It’s hilarious, in a way. But ultimately it was a sign that he just wasn’t cut out for the indie app business. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that his apps went dormant around 2010, and I haven’t heard of him or from him in like 15 years. He was super talented so I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s doing great work in some other business, perhaps inside a much bigger company, where developers and designers are isolated from customers, rather than enmeshed with them like indies inherently are.

Alex Heath, writing for The Verge:

Just a few weeks after everyone freaked out about DeepSeek, Elon Musk’s Grok-3 has again shaken up the fast-moving AI race. The new model is ending the week at the top of the Chatbot Arena leaderboard, while the Grok iOS app is at the top of the App Store, just above ChatGPT. Even as Musk appears to be crashing out from his newfound political power, his xAI team has managed to deploy a leading foundational model in record time. [...]

While its Deep Research reports are nowhere near as in depth as OpenAI’s, Grok-3’s “thinking” capabilities appear to be roughly on par with o1, according to Andrej Karpathy, who noted in his deep dive comparison that “this timescale to state of the art territory is unprecedented.”

Benedict Evans, back in 2021, observed:

Elon Musk is a bullshitter who delivers. This breaks a lot of people’s pattern-matching, in both directions.

This summation of Musk is more apt, and more useful, today than it was four years ago. The Boring Company is seemingly a complete fraud, and he’s been making unfulfilled promises about Tesla “full self-driving” for over a decade. But Tesla Motors has done more to make electric cars mainstream than all other automakers combined. Starlink delivers extraordinary satellite Internet service, with no real competitors. SpaceX has rejuvenated the rocket industry. xAI seems to fall on the “actually delivers” side.

Twitter/X seems to fall squarely in the middle. It’s a mess in many ways, and seems not one iota closer to Musk’s promised vision of an “everything app”, but under Musk’s ownership it has been transformed, and while it isn’t more popular than it used to be, it also isn’t less (or much less) popular. It’s just a different somewhat scummier audience and vibe.

My betting money says the whole DOGE thing is very much on the bullshit side, but Musk’s overall track record spans the gamut from outright scams to extraordinary historic accomplishments. He’s such a prolific and shameless bullshitter that I wouldn’t take Musk at his word about anything, even what he had for lunch. But I’d be loath to bet against him on an engineering endeavor.

Chris Welch, writing at The Verge:

Apple has acknowledged a peculiar bug with the iPhone’s dictation feature that briefly displays “Trump” when someone says the word “racist.” The Verge has been unable to reproduce the issue, but it picked up attention on Tuesday after a video demonstrating the strange substitution went viral on TikTok and other social media.

The company provided a statement to The New York Times and Fox News confirming the bug. “We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers dictation, and we are rolling out a fix as soon as possible,” an unnamed spokesperson said, according to Fox News.

From the Times story:

The issue appeared to begin after an update to Apple’s servers, said John Burkey, the founder of Wonderrush.ai, an artificial intelligence start-up, and a former member of Apple’s Siri team who is still in regular contact with the team.

But he said that it was unlikely that the data that Apple has collected for its artificial intelligence offerings was causing the problem, and the word correcting itself was likely an indication that the issue was not just technical. Instead, he said, there was probably software code somewhere on Apple’s systems that caused iPhones to write the word “Trump” when someone said “racist.”

“This smells like a serious prank,” Mr. Burkey said. “The only question is: Did someone slip this into the data or slip into the code?”

Paul Kafasis (my guest on the latest episode of The Talk Show) captured a video of the glitch in action. I guess it could be a protest prank from a rogue employee, but I suspect it’s just a machine learning glitch — maybe caused by the fact that Trump’s name gets mentioned alongside “racist” so often? It’s definitely a little weird, but all sorts of things about Siri are a little weird.