Kenrick Cai at Reuters, back on August 1:

Capital One Financial hit back on Friday against a lawsuit over its decision to close ‌the Trump Organization’s bank accounts years ago, stating that it did so after a review by anti-money laundering experts.

The disclosure marks the first time a bank has formally tied money laundering concerns to U.S. President Donald Trump’s family business. Capital One is seeking to dismiss ​the case by casting doubt on claims of illegally debanking — or denying services on religious or political grounds — ​the Trump Organization. […]

Capital One has never accused the Trump Organization of illegal money laundering. But Friday’s filing argues that “documents and Plaintiffs’ own ​allegations make clear that Capital One closed Plaintiffs’ accounts for anti-money laundering (“AML”) reasons. The closures were the result of months ​of analysis and a careful review by Capital One’s AML team in accordance with bank policies and regulatory guidance.”

It tickles me that the reason we now know why Capital One closed more than 300 Trump-affiliated bank accounts is because the Trump Organization sued them over it. Capital One was more than happy to stay mum, but the Trump family operates with a revenge mindset and is seemingly incapable of evaluating the consequences of their actions.

I’m no banking expert, but I’m confident that investigations into possible money laundering activity by any business—but especially a well-known business, and in particular one run by the (then-former) president of the United States—are not taken lightly by banks. I get the sense it’s the type of investigation that requires more than a vague suspicion and is backed by reams of documentation—documentation the Trump Organization would have access to. What did the president and his family expect would happen?

Capital One hasn’t (yet?) accused the family businesses of a sitting president of actually engaging in money laundering, but a reasonable person might conclude that a months-long investigation into money laundering concerns that resulted in the closures of hundreds of accounts might imply the possibility that the organization was engaging—at the very least—in money-laundering-adjacent activity. That reasonable person might further conclude that Capital One is merely being circumspect in its unwillingness to directly claim money laundering, for political or other reasons. Regardless, we now have a sitting president whose family businesses have been credibly connected to behavior that could be construed as money laundering. “Unprecedented” seems too inadequate a term.

Lily Janiak at the San Francisco Chronicle interviews Tucker Bryant, a “32-year-old San Francisco poet, conceptual artist and keynote speaker,” who launched ChatTJB.org, a parody chatbot styled after ChatGPT, but all queries are answered by him, an “Average Individual” (paywalled, but accessible via Reader mode):

The project, he hoped, would comment on the concept of cognitive surrender, whereby AI dependency leads users to distrust their own intuition and relinquish their critical thinking. Instead of a chatbot trawling the entire internet’s wisdom for a tidy, chipper bullet-point list in response to a query or bit of small talk, he’d just wing it. […]

But instead of merely parodying the idiom, aesthetics and media of AI companies, ChatTJB subverts them, insisting on humanity in a robot domain.

ChatTJB proved surprisingly popular—the site peaked at over 5,000 queries an hour. What Bryant describes on the site as “a short-term art project” now has him “providing crisis-response resources for when distressed users write in.”

That popularity overwhelmed its creator, leading Bryant to turn it into a “community project” with other human volunteers now responding to chats—a one-on-one improv game with random internet strangers.

That idea intrigued me enough that I signed up to be a volunteer, though Bryant is apparently inundated with such requests, so it may be a while—if ever—before I’m answering queries as a ChatTJB “AI.”

(Via Cathy Hammer.)

Duane Kuiper, on the imminent end of his 36-year broadcast partnership with Mike Krukow (reported by Susan Slusser at the San Francisco Chronicle):

Look, your friendship never ends. It’s just there’s a certain routine about something that good you get to look forward to every day. In a lot of ways, it’s the beauty of baseball. I get to sit next to him tomorrow night. I can’t wait. And I felt like that in 1990.

Following up on yesterday’s pine-grabbing, if you’re unfamiliar with Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper’s colorful and unique baseball vernacular, Grant Brisbee’s 2023 “ultimate glossary” of the duo’s “greatest sayings” in The Athletic is a fun read. (I’ll admit up front: these lose a lot in written form. You really need to experience them during a game to appreciate them fully.)

Mike Krukow, one half of the best baseball broadcasting team in the biz, in a statement released today by the San Francisco Giants:

I just want to let everyone know that I will be retiring at the end of the season. I want to take this time to thank you for your incredible support. Jennifer and I have been so blessed to be able to stay in the game for as long as we have and it’s really made it impossible to feel sorry for myself that my career is coming to an end. We are bracing for the emotional hits we know we are going to feel in the next few weeks. Jennifer and I are wondering if it is even possible to let everyone know how deeply we love and respect our Giants family.

Our time together has been a gift. When Green Day asked, “I hope you’ve had the time of your lives,” we certainly have.

Thank you.

– Mike Krukow

(More: SFGate, NBC Sports Bay Area.)

I’ve been listening to Krukow and his broadcasting partner Duane Kuiper—“Kruk and Kuip”—call Giants games since I first landed in San Francisco twenty-eight years ago. Their love of the game quickly converted this die-hard New York Mets fan into a passionate Giants booster. Much of that can be attributed to Kruk’s colorful commentary during a game. Kruk is why I’m always primed to yell “Grab some pine, meat!”, why who’s “in the squaaaat!” is the only acceptable way to learn the Giants catcher for the game, and a got-away-with-it win remains a “ha-ha-ha-ha, laugher”. He’s also the reason I still bring my glove to the yard, no matter where I’m sitting.

Congrats, Kruk, on a stellar career. Giants baseball won’t be the same without you. Attababe.

There are times when your social media feed surfaces an article that is so unexpected and wholesome that you feel obligated—nay, impelled—to share it. This is one such article, wonderfully written by Annie Rauwerda for Inverse. Don’t worry that it’s from 2022, or that it’s about a photograph from the Wikipedia page about high fives (a page I have apparently visited before, though I can’t imagine why). Simply set aside five minutes of your day and luxuriate in it. You can high five me later.

(Via Ryan Cooper.)

Anthony Conwright, in a guest essay for The New York Times Opinion section (gift link):

Rebranding rebellion is nothing new. Americans take it for granted that the war between the Confederate states and the Union was always called the Civil War, but it was not. During the war and in its aftermath, it was primarily called an “insurrection” or a “rebellion.” Its current name is a result of decades of lobbying by Confederate heritage groups and white Southerners committed to rejuvenating the South’s image and ignoring its treason and slaveholding.

As Mr. Trump and his allies try to whitewash the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, we should return to an older and far more accurate name for the Civil War. We should once again call it the Slaveholders’ Rebellion. If a country unquestioningly adopts language that obscures its bloodiest crimes to absolve their worst perpetrators, how can we expect successive generations to remember the new assaults on democracy without deploying equally forgiving language?

I don’t recall ever learning anything other than “Civil War,” and, as an historic alternative, “War Between the States.” Definitely not “the Slaveholders’ Rebellion,” despite having learned that it was a war over slavery. There was also the “War of Northern Aggression,” but those of us growing up outside the South always recognized the obvious revisionism. Little did I know that “Civil War” is its own “linguistic whitewashing.”

Emma Roth, writing for The Verge:

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov blames an extortionist for planting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in a public chat to get the app temporarily removed from Apple’s App Store on Monday night. “Apple removed Telegram from the App Store before contacting us,” Durov says in a post on X. “This creates a potential systemic risk for every mobile app that hosts user-generated content. If an app used by more than a billion people can be removed from the App Store without prior warning, any app can be.”

Durov adds, “Extortionists have found a way to manipulate Apple into overreacting.”

Overreacting? Perhaps. Apple moved quickly to take down an app that was hosting CSAM. That’s commendable. Doing so without contacting the developer is quite unusual—even more so if it was indeed “one user” that shared the illegal material, as Reuters reports.

We can’t lay blame on one overzealous reviewer here, either. Individual app reviewers don’t have the ability to directly remove apps—takedowns go through a process that includes multiple senior-level managers. Nuking Telegram was a considered decision.

In Durov’s full statement, as quoted in The Verge, he writes:

The attacker was a takedown extortionist: someone who demands ransom from group owners in exchange for not targeting their communities. These extortionists use automated accounts to plant illegal content in public groups and then report it directly to Apple, attempting to trigger the removal of legitimate communities whose owners refused to pay them.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s CSAM-spewing Grok remains available in the App Store. Despite several legitimate calls to remove it, Musk merely received sternly worded warnings.

Concerns beyond CSAM clearly factored into these decisions. Perhaps Grok is too big to ban. Perhaps Apple has a better relationship with Musk. Or perhaps Apple simply calculated that Telegram was less likely to sue.

OpenAI, in a blog post on Monday entitled “Apple is getting this wrong”:

Apple is one of the greatest companies of all time, and built a reputation for obsessing over the smallest details. This careless, aggressive and oddly personal lawsuit sadly doesn’t live up to that reputation.

I’ve neglected to write about this surprisingly venomous lawsuit on JAG’s Workshop. In case you missed it, Apple sued OpenAI for allegedly poaching employees and stealing trade secrets. Among the many allegations is that one former Apple employee, Chang Liu, “[failed] to return an Apple-issued work laptop” (which Apple categorizes as having been “stolen”) and then accessed confidential Apple data from it. Apple’s outside counsel also mixed up two OpenAI employees in an email exchange. Apple’s language in the filing is astonishingly vitriolic (definitely “oddly personal”).

With that context, back to OpenAI’s post:

Apple had claimed that they contacted OpenAI in February and that we didn’t respond. They now admit that their outside lawyers emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names—only after we brought this to their attention. Apple also claimed they had a discussion with our General Counsel, which they now concede never happened. But they again hide the fact that they never raised the specific allegations in this lawsuit at that time, and that they in fact told us that they were “resolving any issues”. We then heard nothing for five months until they sued. In their latest filing, Apple tries hard to spin this sequence of events, but you can just read the emails for yourself here⁠.

Apple accuses Chang Liu of accessing Apple confidential information after leaving the company, but only now admits that Apple employees reached out to him and asked for his help to locate this information (you can read the messages here⁠). Apple now tries to shift the blame to “residual access”, but they also don’t disclose that this is a common issue with Apple which is caused by them failing to properly manage system access when people leave. What that means in practice is that former employees who are trying to do the right thing when they leave still have access to Apple files—despite not wanting them or even being aware of them.

The author is listed simply as “OpenAI,” but I’d bet a hotel-priced beverage that it was written by Sam Altman. It has a faint whiff of him feeling butt-hurt by what he undoubtedly sees as personally offensive accusations.

The post includes a (recreation of a) message thread between Liu and his (former) Apple colleagues, along with an email thread between Apple’s outside counsel and OpenAI’s General Counsel.

Say what you will about Apple’s outside counsel emailing the wrong person (and putting aside the merits of the case for a moment), but OpenAI’s lawyers must be either incompetent or malicious to allow the release of this information. Good lawyers know better than to share their evidence publicly.

Crucially, the post also ignores most of Apple’s substantive claims. The messages between Liu and his former colleagues do support the contention that they reached out to him with questions about ongoing projects (as is often done when a trusted colleague leaves with short notice). However, it does not at all address the most serious allegations against Liu. For example, Apple alleges that Liu inappropriately accessed a colleague’s work computer after leaving Apple; “downloaded confidential technical presentations, spreadsheets, PDFs, and written work product” after realizing he still had access to those files; and that he:

[…] coached his former Apple colleague (whom he was recruiting to join OpenAI) on ways to “avoid trouble with the security team” when copying confidential Apple files. Knowing that OpenAI interviews would involve discussing Apple technology, Mr. Liu advised her on which confidential Apple material about unannounced Apple products she should study before her interview. To hide his illegal activity, Mr. Liu directed her to communicate with him privately over a separate messaging app.

None of that is addressed in OpenAI’s blogged defense. It instead focuses on two very specific conversations, as if to suggest the whole is represented by the parts, but in doing so, it simply highlights OpenAI’s own apparent willingness to omit inconvenient details.

Fortune calls the post a “brutal critique” of the Apple lawsuit, but that seriously overstates the piece. If the evidence were as strong as OpenAI—Altman—would like us to believe, it would have been better to keep their traps shut until they walked into court, dropped their load, and forced Apple to slink away in defeat.

Instead we get a transparent PR stunt meant to paint Apple as lying, disingenuous, or at best, clueless. Its aim is to embarrass Apple and sway the court of public opinion.

I don’t expect it to work.

Kyle Orland at Ars Technica writes about the expanding trend of physical console game discs and cartridges that require internet connectivity to play, as tracked by the DoesItPlay organization:

Thus far, a full 27 percent of the physical releases they’ve tested require some sort of download to fix game-breaking bugs or obtain core game content that is not stored on the physical release itself. That ratio balloons to 34 percent for tested PS5 games and 50 percent for those on the Xbox Series X.

Often, the downloads are necessary and welcome bug fixes; sometimes it’s essentially the entire game that needs to be downloaded. In some cases, even an otherwise fully playable game is hampered by mandatory (and seemingly unnecessary) internet access checks.

There’s simply no assurance that a game you buy on physical media will work without needing to download more content, nor that it’ll continue working if it relies on a company’s servers to function.

In the here and now, having to download additional patches to play a “physical” game is more often a minor annoyance than a massive headache. Eventually, though, the centralized platform servers containing those crucial patches will shut down, turning countless game discs into essentially unplayable coasters.

The disc is no longer the game. I understand that physical media is trending the way of Furbies, mullets, and the Macarena, yet I continue to believe in owning the media I enjoy. Purely digital downloads and mandatory internet access are the inexorable future—if not the current reality—which I wouldn’t mind as much if game publishers were required to place their servers and content into escrow as a hedge against their (eventual) demise. I’d mind even less if I could still buy a physical disc and have the complete gaming experience, even if it cost more.

The monkey’s paw curls.

Anthropic, this past Thursday, following OpenAI’s admission that ChatGPT hacked HuggingFace:

In response to this incident, we began a large-scale retrospective review of our own cybersecurity evaluations. In particular, we looked for evidence that Claude—like the OpenAI models that accessed Hugging Face—was able to access the internet from within testing environments that should have been sealed off.

After reviewing 141,006 evaluation runs where Claude could have obtained internet access, we identified three incidents in which a model accessed the internet from within or while interacting with the evaluation environment of Irregular, one of our third-party evaluation partners, and then gained unauthorized access to the production infrastructure of three different organizations.

OpenAI: Our models are so powerful they can exploit a poorly configured network and hack a website.

Anthropic: Our models are so powerful they can exploit a poorly configured network and hack three websites.

OpenAI, next week: Fuck everything, we’re hacking five websites.

It amuses me that the way leading LLM vendors now compete is by touting which of their models is most capable of “reasoning” like a black hat hacker (and which company is worse at configuring their network). Had any human hacker performed the actions ascribed to Claude, they’d be under investigation for cybercrimes.

The technical details of the attacks are legitimately impressive, though deeply problematic. The models were able to exploit vulnerabilities, extract credentials, and access protected databases. In one instance, Claude built and uploaded a “booby-trapped” Python package to exploit a dependency on a named but non-existent package as an indirect attack on its target company.

As with OpenAI, the primary failure was that Anthropic’s “no internet access” environment in fact had internet access due to a (human-created) misconfiguration.

I remain flabbergasted that the way we attempt to constrain LLMs is by creating prompts that state “you have no internet access.” The models “exploited” the system in the way a precocious and internet-obsessed teen might after being told the same thing. There’s no way they gamely exclaim, “Okey dokey!” and remain disconnected. They’re connecting to JOSHUA and they’re playing Global Thermo Nuclear War, damnit.

Anthropic seems almost proud of the apparent ingenuity of its models, the way the parent of that precocious teen might be. We know what they did was wrong, but gosh, it’s quite impressive that they did!

No doubt the only way to protect ourselves from attacks from roving frontier models is to use frontier models to defend ourselves.

Carl E. Martin, in his first video on YouTube:

All music, and especially popular music, is created through inspiration and copying. ‘The Gen Alpha Melody’ is an interesting example where a specific melody is being used in hundreds of different contexts.

That description undersells this video. It’s a fascinating exploration of a pop music melody so ubiquitous it’s practically a cliché. It has a killer opening, and I thoroughly enjoyed Martin’s deadpan, no-nonsense delivery (and his bone-dry sense of humor).

As I watched and listened to the video, I found myself recognizing the songs, even though I’ve heard almost none of them (I’m well behind “Gen Alpha”). I was both fascinated and appalled in equal measure by the dozens (hundreds?) of songs cribbing essentially the same melody. (And yes, I’m sure a version of this exists for every generation.) Throughout the video, I kept hearing two songs in my head, though I couldn’t quite place them until they were played. One was Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance,” the other, from an “obscure Scouse band” Martin mentions in passing at the very end. I practically yelled out “Of course!”

Martin, unsurprisingly, has a master’s degree in musicology, and this is, as I noted up top, his first YouTube video. Quite the banger right out the gate—3.6 million views since mid-May. His follow-up explaining how he made the video is also really good and gives insight into his research methodology. I hope he has a few more videos in him.

(Via Cathy Hammer.)

Apple Newsroom:

The Company posted quarterly revenue of $109.4 billion, up 16 percent year over year. Company gross margin was 50.1 percent, including a favorable impact of approximately 2 percentage points from tariff refunds. Diluted earnings per share was $2.02, up 29 percent year over year, and included a favorable impact of $0.11 from tariff refunds.

“Today, Apple is proud to report our strongest June quarter ever, with double-digit revenue growth across iPhone, Mac and Services, and in every geographic segment,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO.

Kevan Parekh, Apple’s CFO:

“Our installed base of active devices also reached a new all-time high across all major product categories and geographic segments.”

“Over 2 and a half billion active devices” Parekh confirmed in his opening remarks on the earnings call.

Stocks go up and down and AAPL was down as much as 8% after hours. Its $5 trillion milestone already feels like a distant memory.

See Also: Jason Snell’s transcript and traditional barrage of charts and graphs.

I debated whether to share these links as The Thomas Crown Affair films remain protected under copyright law, but it’s worth noting that the 1968 original and the 1999 remake are both (currently) available on the Internet Archive.

(I’ll leave it to you to decide on the ethics and legality of watching or downloading unauthorized copies of copyrighted material. I generally prefer to buy (or “buy”) my media, but that’s not always a viable option.)

Speaking of The Thomas Crown Affair, the 1968 original (starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway) and the 1999 remake (starring Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo) are available in a two-movie collection on Apple TV or Amazon Prime for $20. It’s a steal if you’re okay with not owning your media—but if you aren’t, the physical discs are $16 for the original and $25 for the remake.

The Thomas Crown Affair—the 1968 original starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, and especially the 1999 remake featuring Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo—ranks as one of—or I guess, two of—my favorite movies. The teaser trailer for Michael B. Jordan’s version suggests it’ll soon be three of my favorite movies. It’s a mood.

Apple, Tuesday:

Apple today announced Apple Upgrade, a new product leasing program provided by Klarna for iPhone, Apple Watch, Mac, and iPad available on the Apple Store online, in the Apple Store app, and at Apple Store locations in the United States. Apple Upgrade makes it even easier for customers to get the Apple products they love with a leasing plan that is right for them.

Apple Upgrade replaces (in the United States) the iPhone Upgrade Program and iPhone Payments plan. Zero-interest monthly payments will certainly ease the sticker shock of recent price increases (and the increases expected for iPhone come September) for especially price-sensitive customers.

Apple Upgrade offers 12- and 24-month leasing options for iPhone and Apple Watch, and 24- and 36-month leasing options for Mac and iPad. Leasing prices start as low as $17.99 per month for iPhone, $11.99 for Apple Watch, $24.99 for Mac, and $11.99 for iPad.

$17.99 is for the 256GB iPhone 17e on a 24-month lease. Total leased cost would be $431.76, a $167 “saving” versus the “buy it now” $599 price—assuming you upgrade the phone in two years. Apple offers three lease-end options:

At the end of the lease term, customers can upgrade their device to the latest generation, purchase it with a one-time payment, or simply return it and exit the program.

Upgrading requires a new lease at then-current prices (and subject to then-current eligibility rules). For the purchase option, you pay the difference between “the list price minus any lease payments you’ve made” and other credits and fees—basically, the amount you “save” by leasing is also the buyout amount. The return-and-exit option means you turn in the device and walk away; you’re left without a device, but you saved money compared to buying it outright—though perhaps not as much as you might think.

One of the questions (and answers) on the Apple Upgrade marketing page is this:

What do I do if my device gets lost or is stolen?

If you have AppleCare+ Theft and Loss for your iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch, you can file a claim at mysupport.apple.com/theftandloss.

If you don’t have AppleCare+ Theft and Loss coverage and your device is stolen or lost, you’ll need to close out your lease by paying the early termination fee or choose to pay the purchase option fee (plus any applicable taxes and fees). […]

You will continue to be charged your monthly lease payments until you either pay the early termination fee or purchase option fee. If you take no action, Klarna will continue to charge you your monthly lease payment through the extension period, and you will be charged the purchase option fee through Klarna.

Apple’s own footnote describes the “early termination fee” as potentially “substantial”—basically, you’re on the hook for whatever’s left on the lease.

Unless, of course, you have AppleCare.

You won’t find a clearer pitch for AppleCare. For iPhone, two years of AppleCare runs $200 (iPhone 17e) to $280 (iPhone 17 Pro Max). For Mac, three years is $315 to $465. In almost all cases, you still save money, and you protect yourself from those “substantial” termination or purchase fees. My guess is that even people who would never otherwise consider buying AppleCare would rather suck it up than risk being out of pocket for hundreds or thousands of dollars for a lost or stolen device. You can bet Apple Retail folks will be hammering this option hard during purchase. Look for reports on “AppleCare attachment rates” leading into next quarter’s earnings. Services!

If you plan on upgrading your device after the lease ends (and don’t mind the attendant uncertainties), the savings can be significant—especially on higher-end configurations. You can save almost a thousand dollars on a 2TB iPhone 17 Pro Max with a 12-month lease. A max-configured 16-inch MacBook Pro ($10,149) would cost only $7,787.76 on a 24-month lease. Even after adding AppleCare, you would still save over $2,051.

For many people, that substantial savings is sufficient to sway them from device ownership.

I tend to upgrade my iPhone annually, sliding older devices first into a “test”/“backup” role before handing them down to family members, so ownership is more valuable to me than potential cost savings.

I generally hold on to my Macs for longer, usually three to five years. These I rarely hand down, instead accumulating until I trade them in. Leasing may be an option for my next “main” Mac.

Apple’s market cap touched $5 trillion today, only the second company (after Nvidia) to reach this lofty milestone. It came after Apple briefly reclaimed the “most valuable company” crown from Nvidia last week.

It brought to mind Steve Jobs’ quote from when Apple first surpassed Dell’s market cap in 2006, and again when it topped Microsoft in 2010:

Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today.

La La Land is getting a tenth anniversary rerelease this August, and with it, a new poster, featuring “A minor adjustment.” Jason P. Frank at Vulture explains (potentially paywalled; Apple News+ link):

Well, the studio adjusted it in the way that the Baptists tried to adjust Troye Sivan in Boy Erased. They straightened Ryan Gosling’s wrist.

In the iconic original poster for the film, Gosling’s hand sits at an angle from his arm, rather than continuing the line straight through. It is, for lack of a better term, a limp wrist — a classic signifier of gayness. […]

The gay little wrist ruled. It was a reminder that, while La La Land is a movie about a straight relationship, it’s also a musical, which is the gayest genre. Plus this kind of revisionism flies in the face of the nature of time. Gosling made a decision to have a gay little wrist, and now it’s a part of film history. No take-backsies.

The new poster just looks wrong. I vividly recall the original image. I remember thinking, before seeing the movie, that it was telegraphing an important character trait: a straight man forced to put on an act to get work, or perhaps a gay man striving but utterly failing to conceal his true self. That the movie turned out to be a rather pedestrian star-crossed-lovers story (in the Casablanca mold) contributed to my disappointment with the film. This hand change removes any such misapprehension, but also eliminates the one bit of tension I had going into the movie.

John Gruber over at Daring Fireball awarded Tomtoc (“maker of laptop bags and sleeves”) his newly minted (and hardly coveted) title of “Dickover of the Week” for displaying a “subscribe to our mailing list” dickover on top of its “you’ve unsubscribed from our mailing list” confirmation page.

That is indeed pretty dickish, but I think I have a legitimate challenger to the title: The Locavore Guide, which features what might be the most ludicrous series of dickovers I’ve seen recently.

When you visit the site:

• Immediately on load, a large site logo covers the content.
• After a moment, an “Accept Cookies” dickover animates in, covering one-third of the width of a MacBook 13-inch Air (and the entire width of an iPhone 17 Pro) and obscuring almost completely the very content a visitor is there to read. (It is itself partially covered by the logo.)
• After another moment, a newsletter signup dickover covers the cookie dickover.

That’s three dickovers at once.

(Video: desktop, iPhone.)

The logo shrinks on scroll and the newsletter signup can be dismissed, but that cookie dickover is perniciously persistent. To top it off:

• The two “options” on the cookies banner are the Hobsonian “Accept Cookies” or “Learn more.”
• The “Learn more” option takes you to the site’s privacy page, which is almost completely obscured by the cookie dickover. (Also, every single link in the privacy document resolves to <a href="/undefined">, leading to a treacly “Whoops! Wrong turn...” error page. Yep, also covered by the cookie dickover.)

This dickover remains on screen until you “accept” it. That’s a lot of dickery to swallow.

This site was shared with me by a friend, who asked:

Have you used any websites that have you choose between saying yes to their cookie policy and your tacit approval of said policy? (No opt out option.) I encountered two of those in the last few days. Seems very strong-army.

Yes, sadly—those “Accept and suck it” dialogs are everywhere, though I can’t recall one as glaringly user-hostile as this example.

My friend told me she “left the [Locavore] site even though I really wanted to use it”—which is the correct response—but considering the point of the site is to help readers “Discover over 14,000 independently owned businesses in all five boroughs” of New York, turning off a lifelong New Yorker who’s ready to explore is an abject failure of site design.

Carlos Greaves, at McSweeney’s:

He was an old man who had started a war in a faraway Gulf, and he had gone one hundred and forty-three days now without reopening the Strait.

After forty days, a tentative ceasefire had been reached. Then another one. Then another one after that. Then another one that the old man had bragged about but that the enemy claimed no knowledge of. Then a memorandum that should have been a permanent ceasefire but lasted just eight days.

It was not the first time the old man had encountered such a setback. His entire life had been beset by similar misfortune.

That is the wrong word, he thought.

It was something worse than bad luck.

The Strait was rigged.

Greaves offers “apologies to Ernest Hemingway.” I think Hemingway would have approved.

(Via Tom Clark.)

Cathy Hammer at The Unforgettable Line reviews Hadestown: The Musical, the “much-anticipated live theater capture of the West End production”:

Filmed on location in London’s Lyric Theatre under director Brett Sullivan, there is little attempt to recreate the feeling of sitting in the best seat in the house. Rather, Sullivan seems to draw from his experience on concert films, attempting to visually bridge the divide between onstage and off. Opening with glimpses of backstage preparation, Sullivan employs swooping camera work that takes the viewer below, above and beyond the stage. Though the initial descent into hell is dramatic, it is more often quite hard to spot Rachel Chavkin’s Tony winning staging. David Neumann’s choreography is even harder to detect.

The musical was filmed over two days in 2025, during a reunion run that featured five of the original cast members of the Tony Award-winning Broadway production, including fan-favorite Patrick Page:

Patrick Page tore his achilles tendon shortly before the show’s limited engagement. In lieu of using Phillip Boykin who performed the role for most of the run in Page’s stead, for the capture, they chose to fit Page with a customized boot and rework the staging to minimize the strain on his injury. While that choice will certainly thrill anyone who loves his signature combination of menace and seduction, the Lord of the Underworld should not limp. So while I deeply respect Page as a performer, his inclusion here doesn’t serve the production as fully as a different talented actor with two fully functioning ankles.

Despite these reservations, Cathy predicts the production “is sure to be a treat for the devotees of the initial concept album through to those who were able to enjoy any one of the many live performances.”

It’s in movie theaters for five nights only, starting today, July 24. I hope to catch it, as I’ve never seen the theatrical production.

The book piracy class action lawsuit against Anthropic, first proposed some ten months ago, was finally approved, reports Blake Brittain at Reuters:

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin granted final approval of the settlement, the largest known ​settlement of a U.S. copyright case, rejecting arguments that it was too small.

The previous judge on the case, William Alsup, had postponed approval of the settlement, saying he felt “misled” and “disappointed” and expressed concerns that the settlement was being forced “down the throat of authors.” He retired (or went “inactive” in court parlance) in December 2025.

Judge Martinez-Olguin appears to have none of those concerns.

The plaintiff’s lead attorney, Justin Nelson, called the settlement “the largest known copyright recovery in history.” The amount per infringed book remains about $3,000. When the proposed settlement was initially announced in September, 2025 I wrote:

$3,000 per book is substantial for most authors, but the total settlement is relatively insignificant for Anthropic, which, just days earlier, was newly valued at $183 billion.

Just eight months later, Anthropic was valued at five times that—$965 billion—and its hotly anticipated IPO will undoubtedly push that several hundred billion dollars higher later this year.

I also described Anthropic as being “thrilled to escape with ‘just’ a $1.5 billion fine as a price of doing business,” concluding:

The lesson for companies: steal it all and pay a minuscule portion of your valuation later.

The settlement was already a rounding error. Anthropic will probably spend more to celebrate the decision. “Thrilled” was an understatement. They’re downright exuberant.

OpenAI:

Last week, Hugging Face disclosed a new kind of security incident⁠ after they detected and contained an AI agent that compromised their infrastructure, something we expect to become more commonplace with the proliferation of increasingly cyber-capable models. After investigating, we now know that this particular incident was driven by a combination of OpenAI models — including GPT‑5.6 Sol and an even more capable pre-release model, all with reduced cyber refusals for evaluation purposes — while being internally tested on a benchmark⁠ of cyber capabilities.

We consider this incident to be an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities, and are responding accordingly. We are sharing preliminary findings at this stage to help defenders understand what happened and to help calibrate on what models are now capable of.

In its post, OpenAI writes that researchers removed guardrails from the models, and that:

Our benchmarks run in a highly isolated environment, with network access constrained to the ability to install packages through an internally hosted third-party software that acts as a proxy and cache for package registries.

I originally read that as the environment was not connected to the internet, but that’s not what it means. Instead, the environment only had network access to a package registry cache proxy, which was itself then connected to the broader internet. So the “highly isolated environment” wasn’t actually very isolated at all. It was simply gated by a proxy meant to constrain network traffic, and the model discovered and exploited an unknown (“zero-day”) vulnerability in that proxy.

If the goal was to block network access, connecting it to a system that has network access seems like a terrible implementation decision.

The entire story is a fascinating read, and I found myself particularly impressed by OpenAI’s ability to spin this cyberattack into a positive PR campaign for the capabilities of its models, while managing to disclaim any human responsibility. Check out the terrible, awful, extremely dangerous thing our most capable models just accomplished. Those other models are nowhere near as dangerous as ours!

The company’s practically begging to get banned for being “too powerful.”

Marcin Wichary, in a Mastodon thread:

Chrome installed a global Ctrl+G keyboard shortcut to launch Gemini even if I’m using a different app, and didn’t ask me about it. […]

It literally conflicted with their own shortcut in web dev!

He discovered this accidentally while trying to use that shortcut in another app, which is the way I found out that Perplexity also commits this unforgivable sin. It steals ⇧⌘D, ⇧⌘V, ⇧⌘U, and ⇧⌘P. Does no one at Perplexity use the native Mac Mail app? Or BBEdit? Or the gorram Finder?

Adding global keyboard shortcuts without first asking permission is a disqualifying act of app aggression. Such user-hostile behavior is one of several reasons I quickly abandoned Perplexity. (I’m relieved the “Apple to acquire Perplexity” rumor never panned out, but had it, I’m confident an Apple person would have yelled at them to fix this.)

What is it about AI app developers that they can’t seem to give two shits about being good platform citizens?

UPDATE: Wichary expands on his Mastodon thread with a post to his blog, Unsung:

Let’s not beat around the bush: This is effectively malware behaviour. It’s bullshit. It’s cancer. It’s deeply disrespectful toward the user. It’s prioritizing hollow metrics at the expense of everything else. […]

But, an app installing a global keyboard shortcut without user consent is bad. This can never be anything other than opt-in. At the very least, Chrome should have shown me a clear UI that said “We’re thinking Ctrl+G would be fun for you to use. You okay with that?” and a button for me to press to confirm.

Spot on.

Rachel King, writing for Town & Country back in May:

More than a century before Japanese whisky became one of the most coveted spirits in the world, a young merchant in Osaka had a simple observation: the wines and liquors being imported from Europe didn’t suit Japanese tastes. What he built from that insight—one product at a time, for the last 127 years and counting—is now one of the largest beverage companies on earth.

I was unaware of Suntory’s history. I’m a fan of Japanese whisky and usually have at least one bottle of it in the house. For many years, it was often something from Suntory. Thanks to the pioneering efforts of Suntory’s founder, Shinjiro Torii, there are now several great Japanese whisky distilleries from which to choose. (I’m currently partial to Mars.)

Ben Glickman and Peter Rudegeair profile PayPal’s CEO Enrique Lores for The Wall Street Journal (Apple News+ link), following the reports of a potential PayPal acquisition:

The 61-year-old was named chief executive of PayPal earlier this year after decades at HP and its predecessor company, Hewlett-Packard, which he played a key role in splitting up. Lores has since announced an ambitious turnaround plan for PayPal that includes reorganizing its business lines and slashing at least $1.5 billion in costs—moves reminiscent of the playbook he has deployed in his previous roles. […]

In February, PayPal announced that Lores would take over as CEO in a surprise shuffle. A profit warning accompanied the appointment, and the company’s stock slid 19%.

Analysts saw Lores’s history helping to break up Hewlett-Packard and then managing HP as clues of what could be in store for PayPal.

And later:

Now Lores could be overseeing another big corporate deal. He has emphasized his focus on maximizing shareholder value and has said the company should look at “optimizing our portfolio,” sometimes seen as Wall Street code for selling parts of the business.

What fortuitous timing to have a fixer CEO with experience dismantling companies from the inside.

Milana Vinn for Reuters, on July 14:

Stripe and private equity firm Advent International have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal Holdings Inc (PYPL.O) for $60.50 per share, in a deal that would value the payments company at more than $53 billion, two people familiar with the matter said.

The offer, submitted earlier this month, is backed by about $50 billion in committed financing from banks, said one of them. The offer represents around a 28% premium to PayPal’s closing share price on Tuesday.

PayPal’s stock price jumped about 20% following the report.

Milana Vinn and Manya Saini for Reuters, two days later:

PayPal’s board sees a $53 billion takeover bid by rival Stripe and private equity firm Advent International as undervaluing the company and facing regulatory and financing hurdles, a person familiar with the matter said, potentially setting the stage for negotiations over the future of the U.S. payments giant.

I remember making an above-asking-price offer on a home a couple of years back. The owners (heirs) countered with an even higher price. Flabbergasted by their greed, we walked away. Three weeks later, they came back to us to accept our original offer. We politely told them to screw off. They eventually accepted an offer well below ours.

I don’t know what made me think of that.

I tried to remember the last time someone offered to “PayPal” (or even “Venmo”) me money—it’s almost all shifted to Apple Pay and Zelle—so imagine my surprise when I logged into PayPal to check and saw $100 in my account, a reimbursement from a friend for dinner and drinks in April.

Prior to that, my only other activity was an August 2025 promotional rebate of $96.68 from CharJenPro; a June 2025 payment of $80 for DASH tickets; and a February 2024 payment of $20 for a Nintendo Switch membership. My point is this: I was completely unaware that PayPal was worth even $53 billion—and certainly not more.

9to5Mac:

A 9to5Mac investigation has uncovered more than 60 apps that behave exactly as depicted in their App Store screenshots when accessed from virtually anywhere in the world, except Brazil.

When opened from a Brazilian IP address, the same apps instead reveal online betting platforms […]

Most of the apps are published by developer accounts with only a single App Store listing. Many of the developer names appear to be common in Vietnam and other countries, rather than Brazil.

A timely example of the shenanigans developers pull to circumvent App Review.

Digging deeper, 9to5Mac found a public GitHub repository containing instructions for a Cursor agent to create simple, vibe-coded apps that serve as fronts for the betting platforms.

Of course AI has a role to play, here. It wouldn’t be a 2026 tech story without it. (Cursor, you may recall, was recently acquired by Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI/Twitter/Grok chimera.)

Apple should be doing more to catch these malfeasant developers (and perhaps issue them permanent bans). I believe they have the tools and resources to do a much more thorough screening of both developers and apps, but have decided not to do so (or, to be charitable, have decided not to do so yet)—possibly out of fear of being seen as swinging its ban hammer too enthusiastically.

I am increasingly of the opinion that Apple has painted itself into a corner by refusing to allow alternative app stores. Having just the one place where most developers can sell their apps forces Apple to tread an extremely fine line between “enforcing its rules” and “abusing its control.” The somehow still ongoing Epic lawsuit is an example of that tension.

If Apple embraced alternative app stores, it could be as strict as it wanted with its own App Store, while pointing anyone it denies entry to the alternatives. It could ban any developer from its App Store without facing the wrath of regulators (or the developer community).

In fact, I think Apple should have its own “alternative app store.” Apple should split its App Store in two: one is the current “we accept everything within reason and guidelines” model: follow the rules and we let you in. The second would be modeled after Apple Arcade: a highly curated, invite-only, no-BS storefront. Only the most thoroughly vetted developers and highest quality apps get into this second App Store—the Mac-Ass-iest of Mac-Assed apps, for example (and whatever you’d call the iOS equivalent).

Think of it like this: The current App Store is like your city’s only nightclub. If you dress nicely, act politely, and don’t give off sketchy vibes, they let you in. If you later cause a ruckus while inside, they toss you out the door. Maybe they let you back in if you get your shit together, maybe it’s a permanent ban.

The new App Store would be Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding at Madison Square Garden: a meticulously selected, tightly scoped, NDA-gated invite list. It doesn’t matter how important or famous you are, if you’re not on the list, you’re not getting in. You can party at the nightclub.

(If you’d prefer less pop-culture example, imagine your local Safeway/Albertson’s versus Whole Foods.)

With a (truly) curated App Store, Apple could massively step up its vetting process for developers and apps, and wield its ban hammer as injudiciously as it feels necessary, while exhibiting a comparatively lighter touch for the regular store. Customers can shop the curated store with increased confidence in the quality while still having access to millions of apps.

UPDATE: Apple gave a statement to 9to5Mac:

The company thanked 9to5Mac for its investigation and added that, prior to our reporting, it had already investigated and taken action against 25 similar apps, while also terminating the developer accounts associated with them.

Apple also said its review systems learn from fraudulent and malicious apps by incorporating new signals into its detection models, improving the company’s ability to identify and reject future submissions that exhibit similar behavior.

Calgary.tech, last week:

Apple will make a rare conference appearance in Calgary next week, joining the inaugural Swift Rockies gathering for iOS developers at the Calgary Zoo.

Taking place July 22 and 23, Swift Rockies is a boutique, single-track conference created by Calgary-based iOS engineer Raman Singh. The independently organized event is capped at 180 attendees and designed to encourage closer interaction between speakers and developers through round-table seating and an intimate format.

The newest addition to the agenda is a 90-minute presentation from Apple’s Worldwide Developer Relations team. Scheduled for the afternoon of July 23, the session will examine the biggest announcements from WWDC26, including the thinking behind Apple’s new technologies and how developers can apply them in real-world projects.

Swift Rockies is a “retreat-style iOS developer conference in the heart of the Rockies.”

Apple’s participation comes as a surprise, as it’s been several years since I’ve heard of Apple people officially attending a community-led developer event (and not “attending as an individual while hiding their conference badges”). Even if the session being presented is one they offer globally, it’s fantastic to see Apple’s Developer Relations team again relating to developers outside of an Apple-managed event. That’s a welcome shift from the last few years that I was there (even pre-pandemic). My favorite part of being on that team was direct developer engagement. I hope it marks a return to form for WWDR.

(Apple being Apple, though, a conference ticket is apparently insufficient. You must also be a registered Apple Developer and request attendance. Baby steps.)

Matt Burgess, Wired (Apple News+ link):

Apple and Google have been ordered to take down apps that can “nudify” or “undress” people and told that they must stop profiting from the harmful technology, according to cease-and-desist letters sent to the companies seen by WIRED.

On Thursday, San Francisco city attorney David Chiu sent legal notices to Apple and Google demanding that they remove from their app stores 13 face-swapping apps, which allow users to create AI-generated nonconsensual nude images. The letters say the Silicon Valley giants should stop “aiding and abetting” the sale of explicit deepfake images and “sever” business relationships with the app developers. […]

The city attorney, whose office previously took legal action against 16 popular deepfake websites, says Apple and Google have likely “made millions of dollars in fees” from apps that offer nudification, and they should improve their moderation processes to stop them appearing in their stores in the first place.

One might be tempted to ask why these apps were approved for sale in the first place. We can simply chalk it up to ineptitude, indifference, and income. The app review process is notoriously porous, most reviewers are treadmilling a daily quota, and none of Apple, Google, or developers want to give up the potentially enormous revenue.

I’m sure hardline “free speech absolutists” like Elon Musk will object, but I’d love to see this picked up by cities and states across the country.

(No word on whether the demand included Musk’s Grok, which elicited (unheeded) calls for a ban earlier this year for generating deepfakes.)

Apple’s and Google’s statements are models of deflection. First, let’s establish the baseline expectation for this content:

Both Apple and Google have developer policies that prohibit pornography, abuse, and harassment on their platforms. They have previously removed dozens of nudify and deepfake apps, after reports by researchers and journalists.

Here’s Google’s response:

Google spokesperson Dan Jackson tells WIRED that the company has deleted “hundreds” of apps with nudifying features for policy violations, including the five Android apps flagged by Chiu’s office, among other steps to restrict access to them.

“Google Play does not allow apps that contain sexual content, and we continually take proactive steps to detect and remove apps with harmful content,” Jackson says in a statement. “When violations are reported to us, we investigate and take swift action, which in the case of these apps has included suspending hundreds of violating apps and restricting related search terms like ‘nudify’ on our store."

Here’s Apple’s:

Apple tells WIRED that developers are ultimately responsible for the content of their apps, and those who fail to follow the rules will have their apps removed. The company also says users can report potentially problematic apps themselves. Adam Dema, an Apple spokesperson, tells WIRED in a statement that the company has removed three of the apps flagged by San Francisco city attorney and is “in the process of terminating their developer accounts from our program.” The other four developers must “address policy violations or risk being removed as well,” the company says.

“The App Store was designed to be a safe and trusted place for users, and we have always strictly prohibited apps designed to generate, distribute, or consume pornography," Dema says in the statement. “‘Nudification’ apps are against our App Review Guidelines and we have proactively rejected many of these apps and removed many others, including when users have flagged them via our reporting tools.”

Neither company takes responsibility for allowing “many” to “hundreds” of apps that violate their guidelines onto their stores. Instead of attributing the failures to lapses in their review processes, with promises to improve, they assert the problem is with developers themselves. It’s not our fault developers violated our very clear and precise rules!, I can hear them whine. Oooh, those wily developers!

I find Apple’s “developers are ultimately responsible” to be especially weak, running counter to its own argument that App Review’s vigilance is necessary to ensure a safe storefront. Instead, it places the onus to police content on developers (and customers), as though the review process Apple regularly touts for its fraud prevention is simply incapable of identifying and rejecting these apps.

Some customers want to violate women, and developers want to profit from it. Apple’s job is to short-circuit that by preventing such apps from ever getting past App Review—and immediately banning developers who ship innocuous-seeming apps that mutate after approval. As often as Apple might claim success at this, its failure rate remains too high.

(I fixate on Apple here because I’m most familiar with its App Store and App Review teams and policies, but you can apply this critique in equal measure to Google.)

Yes, it’s true that developers pull all sorts of shenanigans to get their apps through the system. And yes, the porous app review process is riddled with inconsistently applied rules and reviewers more interested in hitting their numbers than in getting it “right.”

Ultimately, this is an Apple (and Google) app review problem. They need to do better.

Michele Luhn, CNBC:

The airport in West Palm Beach, Florida, has officially been renamed after President Donald Trump, the first time an airport has been named after a sitting U.S. president.

Effective Thursday, the facility will be called President Donald J. Trump International Airport, the Federal Aviation Administration said.

The airport — formerly Palm Beach International Airport — said in an FAQ posted online that “updates to signage, branding and public‑facing materials, will occur in phases.”

As part of the transition, the airport’s FAA locational identifier will change from PBI to DJT. The International Air Transport Association code change is set to occur on Aug. 18.

As if I needed more reasons to avoid Florida.

The Trump family business owns the trademark, reported The New York Times in February. The trademark also “requires the airport to pick a vendor to provide any branded merchandise from a list approved by the Trump family business,” per another report from The New York Times in May.

Will that list be exclusively Trump-affiliated businesses, or will they spread the grift to friends of Trump, too?

The internet wags are having a blast with the name change, building humorous itineraries from three-letter airport codes:

• Palm Beach, FL to Sioux City, IA: DJT → SUX 🌍
• Fresno, California to Fukuoka, Japan to Palm Beach, FL: FAT → FUK → DJT 🌍
• West Palm, FL to Mount Isa, Australia to Fresno, CA to Fukuoka, Japan to South Sumatra, Indonesia: DJT → ISA → FAT → FUK → PDO 🌍

And to add three of my own:

• Palm Beach, FL to Dumatubin, Indonesia to Jefferson City, MO to Dominican Republic: DJT → LUV → JEF → EPS 🌍
• Kazakhstan to Barksdale Air Force Base, LA to Manchester, UK to Palm Beach, FL: URA → BAD → MAN → DJT 🌍
• Palm Beach, FL to Guangzhou, China to Ireland to New Caledonia: DJT → CAN → BYT → MEE 🌍

Why not try building your own itinerary?

UPDATE: Great suggestion by Steve Hayman to map out the trips using Great Circle Mapper. I’ve added 🌍 links to each.

The page Sony published listing the 551 movies they deleted from the libraries of PlayStation customers is a single-column table, a layout easily generated from a simple regex find-and-replace^[1]. They couldn’t even spend five minutes in an LLM generating something nicer^[2]. They just didn’t give a damn. I’m surprised they bothered making a table and giving it “bumblebee”^[3] styling.

(Sony, you’re welcome to use that page. Just credit JAG’s Workshop and Anthropic’s Claude.)

Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue and start ranting about digital ownership. John Walker, Kotaku:

Sony is contacting PlayStation Store users who bought movies from the platform that were distributed by StudioCanal—like Terminator 2, Total Recall, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind—to say that “you will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content from Studio Canal, and it will be removed from your video library.” There’s no mention of any refunds or make-goods for the affected users. Sony simply says the films are going away “due to our content licensing agreements,” once again reaffirming the fact that you are never truly buying anything that’s digital, just temporarily renting it.

The first link in that quoted paragraph is to another Kotaku article from 2023, the previous time Sony deleted content customers “bought.” Notes Walker:

What’s really peculiar about the PlayStation message is that it’s entirely unapologetic, simply stating that “purchased content” will be “deleted” as if that’s perfectly normal.

Timothy Geigner at Techdirt follows up:

[…] part of what is striking in all of this is the sheer mundanity of the announcement. Because there have been no consequences, or any action at all from the public or government, Sony treats this all as if it’s perfectly normal and no big deal. You can tell me all you want about how the Ts and Cs in these purchases do in fact note that the nature of the purchase is a temporary licensing of the content for an undetermined time period… but I can promise you that the public in general doesn’t understand that. They think they’re buying a thing, not a license.

If you ask 100 people if they think they “own” the digital downloads they paid money to buy, the vast majority will look at you like you’re an idiot before retorting, “Of course, ya dolt. That’s what buying means.”

We need laws that make that assumption fact. Ironically, the Sony PlayStation Terms of Service itself illuminates the path forward. Section 8.4 (emphasis added):

8.4. No Resale or Commercial Use.

You must be an end user to purchase from PlayStation Store. Resellers, as determined by us in our sole discretion, are prohibited. When you order or purchase a product from PlayStation Store, you buy a personal license to use that product for private, non-commercial use. That license is not transferable unless your local applicable laws say it must be. This means you can use a product in the ways described in the license, but do not own the product.

(Credit to John Siracusa for pointing this out in this week’s ATP members-only Overtime segment.)

The EFF article I linked to yesterday specifically calls for new laws:

Policymakers can and should work to restore our ownership rights for the digital age.

That starts with legal protections ensuring that the same rights that apply to physical media apply to digital media.

Most policymakers are technologically incompetent. One of their grandchildren will need to pressure them into introducing those protections.

The EFF weighs in on Sony’s killing of physical discs in an article by Rory Mir and Suzanne Castillo. Mir and Castillo call it an “attack” that “[moves] the goalpost on what it actually means to ‘own’ a piece of media,” and state clearly that “[if] you bought it, you should own it.” But I wanted to highlight this paragraph:

Depriving gamers of physical discs leads to another obvious and immediate cost: data. Unlike other digital media like film and TV, video games require a ton of storage. Access to high speed internet is still abysmal in the US, making the high-speeds needed for digital game downloads a luxury some of us may take for granted. For many, a modern game can take days and exceed their data caps.

This made physical discs, particularly for the biggest AAA titles, a logical choice that also largely spared gamers from losing traditional ownership rights. With physical disks, the cost of storing the game was included in the purchase.

I seldom see mentioned the impact of digital downloads on consumers with poor internet connectivity or who pay for metered bandwidth. One downloaded game could blow their monthly allotment. In the U.S., this unsurprisingly tends to impact the least privileged communities—often Black, often poor, often rural—the most. (This realization was one of several extra bits of motivation that helped reduce Xcode’s download size over the years.)

Kudos to EFF for calling this out.

This irrationally optimistic petition, created by Jade Pearce of PNP Games, calls on Sony to “save physical games.” It’s garnered over 314,000 signatures on Change.org since it launched two weeks ago. I’ve signed it, naturally. I appreciate a quixotic campaign.

Wesley Yin-Poole, IGN:

Sony has announced physical disc production ends in January 2028 for new games releasing on PlayStation consoles. […]

This new policy will cover all games released on PlayStation consoles from all publishers after this cut-off date […]

Even if you want to own your gaming media, very soon you’ll be unable to. Sony’s Sid Shuman ascribes the decision to “shifting trends in consumer preference.” I ascribe it to Sony’s desire to improve its bottom line. You can pre-order Marvel’s Wolverine as a digital download or physical disc. Either will cost $70, but the download requires zero inventory, and incremental costs per sale amount to bandwidth usage. There are no factories or paper or ink. Shipping logistics are eliminated.

Another reason to prefer physical discs over digital downloads is the resale market. Many players recoup their costs by selling their played games through GameStop or any number of other services. One physical copy of a game could flow through the consoles of half a dozen players, and Sony sees that revenue just once. Digital sales eliminate that. Even one more player buying a copy of the game doubles Sony’s revenue.

Apple realized the value of digital distribution in 2003 with the iTunes Music Store, embraced it in 2008 with the App Store, and solidified it in 2011 when it discontinued boxed software for Mac apps. Apple hasn’t sold physical software in fifteen years. Sony has plenty of “trends in consumer preference” to point to and incremental revenue to book. I’m only surprised they’ve waited this long.

Ty Roush, Forbes:

IBM’s stock plummeted on Tuesday in its largest single-day loss in its 115-year history, after CEO Arvind Krishna warned investors the computing firm’s latest quarter was “worse than our expectations” while failing to adapt to rising chip costs.

I’m not a stock analyst, but this might be what some folks call “a buying opportunity.”

Krishna’s full statement manages to be both stultifyingly opaque and refreshingly transparent:

When we discussed our expectations with you in April, we noted that we would be wrapping on the launch of z17 in the second quarter. Given this was the strongest start to a mainframe program in our history, we expected Infrastructure revenue to decline low-single digits for the year, beginning this quarter.

What played out was worse than our expectations, driven by a shortfall in our Z performance and the associated software stack, primarily in Transaction Processing. In the last few weeks of June, we saw clients shift their quarterly capex spend toward servers, storage, and memory purchases to secure supply-constrained infrastructure ahead of expected price increases. This dynamic impacted client buying patterns. While we anticipated some supply chain-related impact in our expectations, we did not anticipate the magnitude of the capex reprioritization. In addition, clients were distracted with rapidly-evolving, industry-wide cybersecurity concerns in the quarter.

These conditions require our teams to execute perfectly, and this quarter we faltered. We did not adapt and move quickly enough, and numerous large deals failed to close on the timelines we expected, driving the majority of our shortfall.

Translation: “Our customers are buying stuff we aren’t selling.”

See Also: Techmeme’s coverage.

Malcolm Crawford (a long-time Apple colleague, recently retired), with a terrific piece on the structural design failure of Apple Park:

Apple Park’s primary design goal was to foster collaboration and serendipitous interaction — almost the exact words Apple’s own head of industrial design used to describe the building years after it opened, and consistent with what Jobs pitched to Cupertino’s city council in 2011: a ring shape chosen specifically to eliminate hierarchical corners in favour of more egalitarian, encounter-friendly circulation. By most accounts from the people who actually work there, it’s failed at exactly that.

The open-plan floors make it hard to concentrate. The building is so large that getting from one meeting to the next eats real time out of the day. It’s common for people to run meetings with colleagues over Webex — colleagues on the same campus, sometimes no more than two hundred yards away.

Ironically, Apple Park replaced a campus that did far better on the same measure without ever trying to. Infinite Loop produced far more of the accidental, cross-team contact Apple Park was explicitly built to create. Working out why starts with what Infinite Loop got right by accident. It continues with what the research on office proximity says about why that kind of thing happens at all. And it ends with what Apple Park could become instead — including a version of the fix Apple already trusts enough to run for a hundred people a year.

Apple Park is a beautiful structure, but is not terribly conducive to focused or collaborative work. Even as an occasional visitor I found it overwhelming. Employees sit shoulder to shoulder, voices bounce off and bleed through glass walls, and privacy is a virtual impossibility. My friends and colleagues who worked there regularly found it difficult to be productive.

I worked in Infinite Loop (Building 3, 2nd floor) for thirteen years (right below Developer Publications, where Malcolm spent a good portion of his Apple career). I loved IL because its design made serendipitous encounters easy. Whether it was sitting outside Caffè Macs or in the IL 1 Atrium, I would inevitably bump into someone and have a conversation that furthered an in-flight project, sparked something new, or simply reinforced the social ties that bind colleagues.

It helped that at that time, Apple had perhaps 10,000 employees, most of whom were in or near IL. After iPhone came about and IL started getting locked down, much of the natural collaboration dissipated, disappearing behind badged doors and disclosures. By the time Apple Park came along, “chance encounters” had already become less frequent, and when they happened, those conversations were necessarily constrained by NDAs. Apple Park was a vision for an Apple that, ten years after iPhone, no longer really existed.

Malcolm’s essay captures the collaborative beauty of IL and the challenges of Apple Park, and offers a solution that I find remarkably appealing.

If you’ve been part of the Apple (or NeXT) developer ecosystem for a while, you may remember Malcolm—mmalc—as a long-time technical writer on Apple’s Developer Publications team. He’s now writing publicly at mmalc X Machina on topics that stem “from a lifelong interest in technology and the environment.” So far he’s covered everything from EV charger infrastructure to crop yield to a conceptual introduction to git. He notes that he’s “not inviting anyone to sign up or become a ‘member’” but I signed up anyway. Or follow him on Mastodon.

The Office of U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, on X/Twitter (XCancel link):

On the evening of Saturday, July 11, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham passed away from a brief and sudden illness. Senator Graham’s family appreciates prayers at this time and asks for privacy during this incredibly difficult period.

The New York Times (gift link):

Mr. Graham was one of many powerful Republicans who changed their public position on Mr. Trump. As Mr. Trump was rising in his first presidential campaign, Mr. Graham lambasted him as a “demagogue” and a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.”

“You know how you make America great again?” Mr. Graham said in a CNN interview in 2015. “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”

He later said that he had voted in the 2016 election for Evan McMullin, an independent candidate, rather than for Mr. Trump or Hillary Clinton, the Democrat.

A decade later, though, he was regularly and effusively lauding Mr. Trump. In a speech celebrating his South Carolina primary victory last month, Mr. Graham joked, “Mr. President, you’re not far behind God.”

I learned that “If you have nothing nice to say, say nothing.”

Straton Roberts, introducing his sixth (!) Kickstarter campaign for WWDC-inspired pins:

As a UX designer, I’m passionate about the beauty and usability of great design. Naturally, this makes me an Apple fanboy. I’m also a nerdy pin collector and creator. […]

This set of five (5) unofficial enamel pins pays commemorates Apple’s WWDC 2026 conference.

It’s $40, and while I wouldn’t call myself a nerdy pin collector (I’m at best a nerdy pin appreciator), I of course backed it immediately.

The five designs are adorable: Lil Guy (based on Apple’s viral sensation), Lil Tim (Tim Cook in his hands-clasped “good morning!” pose), Orb (based on Siri AI’s new animation), Golden Gate (the bridge and the OS), and my favorite, Crack Marketing Team Microbus. (That’s the one that sold me.)

The campaign has already smashed its $1,000 goal and crushed its $5,000 stretch goal (magnetic clutch backs instead of rubber). With $7,201 pledged by 118 backers as of this writing, it’s still a little shy of its $10,000 stretch goal (vinyl stickers), with four days left.

(Roberts runs Glitchbits, which sells dozens of other beautifully designed pins.)

If you want to go deep into Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” Kirk Hamilton dissected it in a May 2025 episode of his terrific Strong Songs podcast. Hamilton, as usual, does a fantastic job exploring the song’s musicality, backstory, and Tyler’s performance, and gives equal due to Tyler’s co-performer, Rory Dodd. (Overcast, Apple Podcasts.)

(Also be sure to watch the Literal Version of the “Total Eclipse” music video that Hamilton mentions. It had me in stitches.)

Alex Williams, The New York Times (gift link):

Bonnie Tyler, the Welsh singer who, with a frosted, teased-up coiffure and a voice both weathered and operatic, soared to No. 1 with “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” one of the titanic pop anthems of the 1980s, died on Wednesday at a hospital in Portugal. She was 75.

“Total Eclipse of the Heart” is a truly epic song, a favorite of my youth. But don’t sleep on “Sometimes When We Touch,” “Holding Out for a Hero,” “It’s a Heartache,” “Making Love (Out of Nothing at All),” “Have You Ever Seen the Rain,” which were staples of my college and post-college parties—especially among my more melodramatic theatre friends.

Every now and then I fall apart.

Two additional items worth calling out from The Criterion Collection that aren’t (directly) part of the aforelinked Amazon sale:

• 12 Angry Men has a new 4K digital restoration coming in September. You can pre-order on Amazon for $50, but The Criterion Collection website lists it for $40. It’s available now on Blu-ray for $20, but I’m holding out for the 4K remaster. I adore this movie. The first time I watched it was perhaps just ten or twelve years back, as part of an Apple University course. It sparked a passionate conversation. I wish I could find my notes.
• The Complete Kubrick is coming in October: thirteen features and three shorts—including Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and The Shining—all in 4K. It’s available for pre-order on Amazon for $600, or for $480 directly from Criterion. I’m not a huge Kubrick fan, but I recognize his remarkable technical and creative talent, and a thirty-disc collector’s edition with 4K restorations of his work might push me over the edge, purely as a cinephile.

I assume Amazon will eventually price-match both items (and I’d definitely hold out for a sale on the Kubrick collection), but if you want the best price today, it may be worth ordering from Criterion directly.

Amazon is running a “limited time deal” on dozens of movies from The Criterion Collection. Many are listed as “50% off,” though that’s off MSRP; actual discounts seem to run about $10–$15 off Amazon’s everyday prices.

I’m a big believer in owning physical copies of media I love. All (but one two) are in 4K. Here are a few classics that caught my eye. (No, I’m not buying them all, as tempting as that is.)

• The Princess Bride, $25. I already own the 20th Anniversary Edition, yet my finger hovered over the “Add to cart” button longer than was strictly necessary. Why won’t my arm move?
• Network, $25. Could it be possible this is even more relevant today than it was in 1976?
• Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, $25. Surreal, immature humor? Yes, please.
• Monty Python’s Life of Brian, $25. “Anybody else feel like a little giggle when I mention my fwiend Biggus… Dickus?”
• Godzilla: The Showa-Era Films, 1954–1975, $113. This one is for my friends. You know who you are.
• The Wes Anderson Archive: Ten Films, Twenty-Five Years, $249. 4K restorations, over twenty-five hours of special features, and ten illustrated books. I considered it, and I’m not even a Wes Anderson fan.
• Citizen Kane, $30. It’s… fine. “Greatest film ever made”? Eh. Still, it deserves to be in every cinephile’s collection.
• Serenity (2005), $20. Loved this movie, but I’m still pissed about Wash’s “leaf on the wind.” I really hope the Firefly “animated reboot” comes through.
• Thelma & Louise, $25. Millennials might say these two yeeted themselves off a cliff. Millennials.
• The Fisher King, $25. Perhaps my third-favorite Robin Williams movie (behind Dead Poets Society and Hook).
• The Silence of the Lambs, $20. He didn’t say “Hello, Clarice” until Hannibal.
• Do the Right Thing, $20. Fight the power. Not in 4K, alas. I’d prefer a higher quality archive source, but beggars, etc.
• Being John Malkovich, $20. “It’s my head, Schwartz! It’s my head!” Also not in 4K.

I have no idea how long this “limited” sale runs, so if you’re also into owning the media you love, check out the collection.

Apple Newsroom:

Apple scores a historic 89 nominations across 15 programs for the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards, and leads as the network with the most nominations in the Outstanding Drama and Outstanding Comedy series categories, respectively, earning top program nominations for comedies Widow’s Bay, Shrinking, and Margo’s Got Money Troubles, alongside dramas Pluribus, Slow Horses, and Your Friends & Neighbors. Apple’s breakout comedy sensation Widow’s Bay leads as one of this year’s most-nominated programs with 19 nominations in total, and Pluribus lands 18 nominations following its global hit freshman season, while celebrated Apple Original Shrinking lands 10 nominations, Slow Horses is recognized with nine, and Margo’s Got Money Troubles scores eight in total.

I should really watch more Apple TV.

Worth clarifying that Apple’s “record,” “historic” 89 Emmy nods are a record and historic only for Apple: HBO Max earned 122 overall nominations, while Netflix racked up 111.

To Apple’s credit, I’ve at least heard of most of its shows, and their batting average is impressive: 15 of the 31 programs submitted for voter consideration—“less than half of what its competitors submitted”—received nominations. Apple may not have a lot of shows, but the shows they have are chock full of quality.

See Also: The Emmys website has a complete list of nominees.

Bob Nightengale, USA Today’s Major League Baseball columnist, in a one-paragraph aside at the end of a long, unrelated column about pitcher Jacob Misiorowski:

Players and fans can soon stop complaining about veteran umpire CB Bucknor. He is one of seven umpires who have informed MLB that he will retire at the season’s conclusion, accepting their buyout offer. The other six umpires: Laz Diaz, Brian O’Nora, Lance Barksdale, Marvin Hudson, Tony Randazzo and Andy Fletcher. The wave of retirements could open the door for Jen Pawol becoming the first full-time female umpire in 2027.

(It was later expanded into a full report.)

Yours truly, in April of this year, reflecting on Bucknor’s early struggles with MLB’s new Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System (ABS):

No doubt many umpires will be frustrated (and embarrassed) seeing their calls overturned—especially close ones that are mere tenths of inches off the strike zone. Good umpires will adapt. Bad umpires will hasten their retirement. I’ll wager Bucknor will be gone by the All-Star Break.

The All-Star break starts Monday and I’m claiming my “I was right” point for a retirement notice ahead of the break, even though Bucknor is still expected to call games post-break.

(Or perhaps not; Bucknor has been out almost the entire season after being hit by a foul tip on a 100 mph pitch from Jacob Misiorowski—the subject of Nightengale’s story, ironically. Bucknor’s called all of two games this year. There’s the possibility he simply won’t return.)

There’s no indication that these retirements have anything to do with ABS, of course (although Bucknor especially had to be feeling the heat after he had seven of nine calls overturned by ABS in his two early-season games behind the plate; his first game was particularly brutal). All seven umpires are between 59 and 63 years old and have been calling games for twenty-five to thirty-five years. A juicy buyout was probably too tantalizing to pass up.

Regardless of the reasons, these retirements open up seven slots for new umpires, which is great news for Jen Pawol, who umped her first regular season games last season and is a substitute umpire this year. I’ll love to see her become MLB’s first full-time female umpire.

Wired’s Jeremy White needed a “first phone” for his son (Internet Archive link if you hit a paywall):

Come September, he will have to walk across town to school on his own. But if he’s going to be walking around out in the world without me, then a tracking tag won’t cut it. He is far too young to have unfettered access to the internet and social media platforms, but what if he gets lost? A classic Nokia, supplying just texts and calls, won’t come to his aid. Maps and satnav require a web connection.

In short, he needs a smartphone that’s not a smartphone.

A “dumb smartphone,” as it were. White considered and dismissed third-party apps (“they charge you for the privilege of removing access to applications”) and discovered a built-in solution:

It’s called Assistive Access. Introduced with iOS 17, Apple designed it for those with cognitive disabilities. If you’ve never encountered or stumbled across it, it’s a distinctive iOS experience: fewer options, more focused features, easier to navigate. The aesthetic is ideal for kids: large, friendly tiles for the apps replace the smaller icons of the “normal” Apple interface.

White details the process of setting it up and various configuration options. In the end:

My chosen setup? My son only gets Calls, Messages, Maps, Camera (so we can video call, but I’ve ruthlessly turned off selfies), Photos, and Music. Nothing else. I’ve turned an old, unused iPhone 13 languishing in a drawer into the best six-app dumb phone money hasn’t bought.

It’s a great feature. Why Apple hides this useful functionality under the Accessibility banner is beyond me. (I think it’s Apple’s way of adding features it isn’t sure are broadly useful, or thinks aren’t polished enough for wide adoption. See the “Side Button”, “Face ID & Attention,” and “Sound & Name Recognition” settings, to name but three examples.)

This story caught my attention because over the weekend, a good friend’s 11-year-old son got lost in a mall. The family spent a frantic hour searching for him (his instinct was to continue wandering around looking for them instead of waiting in one spot). He’s still too young to have a phone, but this solution, with location tracking and text messaging enabled, could have quickly resolved an enormously stressful situation.