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Donald Trump, sitting president of the United States, on his blog: Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP The Iranian embassy in Japan , quoting Trump: This low level of civility and intelligence shown by a leader of a country is regrettable; the shameful fervor with which intentions to comm...

My thanks to Material Security for sponsoring this week at DF. Most security teams don’t have a talent problem, they have a noise problem. Manual phishing remediation, chasing risky OAuth permissions, and auditing file shares shouldn’t be a full-time job. Material Security unifies your cloud workspace, bringing detection and response for email, files, and accounts into one place. It’s security that actually works: augmenting the native gaps in Google and Microsoft without the usual enterprise bl...

One more follow-up point after I spent two days using an iPhone 16 Pro running iOS 18.7.7 as my main phone. At some point late in the iOS 26 beta cycle last summer, it became obvious that Apple had sped up a bunch of system-level animations. Prime example: the animation when you swipe up from the bottom of the screen to go back to the Home Screen. People noticed . But it hasn’t gotten a lot of attention since. But man, if you want to notice, do what I did and spend two days back on iOS 18. So ma...

Ashley Belanger, reporting for Ars Technica: Using developer tools, the lawsuit found that opening prompts are always shared, as are any follow-up questions the search engine asks that a user clicks on. Privacy concerns are seemingly worse for non-subscribed users, the complaint alleged. Their initial prompts are shared with “a URL through which the entire conversation may be accessed by third parties like Meta and Google.” Disturbingly, the lawsuit alleged, chats are also shared with personally...

Jason Snell: Last December I complained that Apple was withholding iOS 18 security updates from iPhones capable of running iOS 26 , leaving users who didn’t want to upgrade to Apple’s latest OS version yet in some security peril. Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news: As of Wednesday April 1, Apple is pushing out iOS 18.7.7 to all devices running iOS 18. This update, released last month for devices that were not capable of running iOS 26, is now available even for compatible devices...

John Voorhees, at MacStories: It’s a new month and you know what that means: time for a roundup of everything coming to Apple TV and Apple Arcade for April 2026. What’s still not coming: Jessica Chastain’s political thriller The Savant , originally set for September, but rescheduled for “ at a later date ” out of cowardice . Apple’s “at a later date” is looking more and more like Trump’s “ in two weeks ”.  ★ 

John Buck at The Verge (gift link), excerpted from his great book, Inventing the Future : Steve Perlman: Almost everyone at Apple, and definitely everywhere else, assumed that multimedia would always require specialized hardware — and be expensive. A few of us thought otherwise. One of the few was Gavin Miller, a research scientist in Apple’s Graphics Group, who worked with Hoffert to crack the problem of software compression and decompression, otherwise known as codec. Gavin Miller, research sc...

Great roundup of links from Stephen Hackett: The crew is made up of Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen. They are now on their way to the moon, set to return in 10 days. Their rocket may be the product of a hugely-flawed program , but right now, that doesn’t matter. They are getting us closer to returning to the lunar surface than we’ve been in 50 years. That’s worth celebrating.  ★ 

Katie Deighton, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (main link is a gift link; also on News+ ): OpenAI bought TBPN to encourage constructive conversation around the changes AI creates by helping the show grow, according to a memo sent by Fidji Simo, the OpenAI’s CEO of applications. TBPN will report to Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, and will help with company communications and marketing outside of the show. “They’ve helped many brands market online and because they have ...

StepSecurity: If you have installed [email protected] or [email protected], assume your system is compromised. There are zero lines of malicious code inside axios itself, and that’s exactly what makes this attack so dangerous. Both poisoned releases inject a fake dependency, [email protected] , a package never imported anywhere in the axios source, whose sole purpose is to run a postinstall script that deploys a cross-platform remote access trojan. The dropper contacts a live command-and-control serve...

Back in March 1991, Saturday Night Live ran what I consider the best Apple parody ad ever made: “McIntosh Jr.” Siracusa and I talked about it on The Talk Show this week, celebrating Apple’s 50th anniversary, so I looked it up for the show notes. Alas, this appallingly low-resolution copy hosted on Reddit is seemingly the only free-to-watch copy of it available. (If you can find — or make — a better version, let me know .) If you have a Peacock account, you can watch it in much higher quality in ...

Jason Snell, writing at Macworld, regarding joining the staff at MacUser back in 1993: But as amazing and revelatory as the Mac was for me as a writer and editor of print and online publications, I rapidly discovered that the Apple of the period was a mess. My first day as a full-time employee, a copy editor popped his head over the cubicle wall and asked me if I had heard anything about layoffs. Welcome to the media, kid.  ★ 

60 Minutes published a short clip of a 2003 Dan Rather interview with Steve Jobs, and it’s a good one. Seems apt both regarding Apple’s continued success after Jobs’s death, and a refutation of the personality cult in The White House.  ★ 

Pogue was my guest on The Talk Show a few weeks ago to talk about his new book, Apple: The First 50 Years , and the show was a lot of fun. But the book is so good, so comprehensive, so fun that it feels essential to link to it whilst we celebrate Apple’s 50th year. I’m a print guy, generally, but the print edition of this book is especially good — it’s a gorgeous book printed in full color throughout (not just, say, 16 color pages in the middle). Apple’s history is both literally and figurativel...

David Pogue, on his new blog at Substack: When the iPhone was about to go on sale in 2007, a thousand people lined up around the block at New York City’s Apple Store. I’d written a parody of “My Way,” with the crazy idea of filming a music video with the participation of people standing in that line. It was a total blast; everyone in line was game. I edited the results together and uploaded it — and for six hours, ladies and gentlemen, it was the most watched video on YouTube. ( It’s still there...

The New York Times (gift link): Critics warn it still has many issues — its portico is too big, its stairs lead nowhere, its columns will block views from inside the ballroom. And that’s just the portico. This is a really good piece, with animated-as-you-scroll illustrations pointing out specific problems with the design. Such details affect how people passing by experience these iconic places, and how each structure fits into a capital city that has been planned around civic symbols and sightli...

Kalley Huang, writing for The New York Times (gift link): As that happened, Apple laid off staff “again and again and again,” Mr. Espinosa said. His manager told him that he had been spared because he had worked for the company for so long that his severance package would be too expensive. “I was wondering what I was going to do because I had no college degree and I had only worked at one company,” Mr. Espinosa said. Then he figured: “I was here when we turned the lights on. I might as well stic...

Who better to join the show to commemorate Apple’s 50th anniversary than John Siracusa? Sponsored by: Sentry : A real-time error monitoring and tracing platform. Use code TALKSHOW for $80 in free credits. Notion : The AI workspace where teams and AI agents get more done together. Factor : Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off your first box, plus free breakfast for 1 year, with code talkshow50off .  ★ 

Lex Friedman (with an embedded video to prove it): If you reverse the new Apple video that plays in “rewind,” it’s the Think Different ad music, pitched up. Of course it is. And, regarding that “◀︎◀︎ REW” button where the “REW” was set in bitmapped Chicago 12” but the “◀︎◀︎” was modern, Craig Hockenberry fixed it : I pretended to be Susan Kare and fixed it, bottom is the original, top is my interpretation.  ★ 

Lots of fun things I’ve never seen before in this 7-minute video. Best not to spoil them.  ★