2026-08-23 00:47:10
Ian Austen, reporting for The New York Times (gift link):
The morning after he pulled negotiators from trade talks in Washington and set off a new round of American tariffs, Prime Minister Mark Carney on Saturday explained to Canadians why he walked away, calling the U.S. proposal “a bad deal.”
“We’ve recognized from the start that America has changed,” Mr. Carney said. “We recognize that sometimes, its signature is written in pencil.”
“We cannot accept what they offered and we will not give what they asked,” he added. “We were not prepared to compromise Canada’s sovereignty or undermine our key industries.”
If only Sharpie made pencils.
Carney is rising to the moment and showing the rest of the world how to deal with the Trump administration. Trump is erratic, emotionally unstable, ignorant, and dishonest. Carney is consistent, steadfast, knowledgeable, and honest. The only correct way to deal with a con man is to cut him off and call him out for what he is.
2026-08-22 22:18:29
My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring the Daring Fireball weekly newsletter this week to promote their Agent Registration. Agents are hitting your signup flow and they’re bouncing off a browser login that was designed for humans. Every one that gives up is a signup you never see.
WorkOS Agent Registration turns that traffic into signups. Enroll via the dashboard and AuthKit publishes an auth.md file that agents read to register for scoped, short-lived credentials you control.
2026-08-22 22:12:07
Toby Sterling, reporting for Reuters:
The Dutch Data Protection Authority has fined Uber €825 million ($966 million) for deactivating driver accounts through automated systems without adequately informing them, according to an August 17 decision reviewed by Reuters.
The penalty would be the second-largest issued yet under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation. It is behind only a €1.2 billion fine imposed on Meta by Ireland in 2023 for unlawfully transferring European Facebook users’ data to the United States. Meta is appealing.
Uber said it would also appeal. [...]
The Dutch authority confirmed the decision later on Friday. “Uber has committed serious infringements,” in deactivating driver accounts without warning or human involvement, the organisation’s deputy chair Monique Verdier said in a statement. “From one moment to the next they no longer had any income ... A computer should not make decisions on its own that have (such) major consequences.”
Saying that “a computer” made these decisions is like saying that when a company suspends or fires a habitually late employee, that “the time clock” made the decision. Managers at the company set the policies, and the devices measure employee compliance. Verdier’s statement is talking about this like it’s HAL 9000 deciding to kill the astronauts on the Discovery.
GDPR rules ban decisions made solely by computer algorithms when they have a significant impact on people’s lives, saying such decisions require meaningful human review and a way to challenge a decision.
Uber temporarily suspended accounts of some drivers who were suspected of fraud, including when its systems concluded drivers had taken unnecessary detours to inflate fares or accepted trips without intending to complete them. Uber said such suspensions were usually brief, and it did not permanently deactivate such accounts without human review. Drivers with low customer ratings were sometimes permanently deactivated by computer, the Dutch agency said. Uber disputed that, saying it had never automated permanent deactivation decisions.
The company said one reason it considers the fine disproportionate is that only a small number of drivers were affected, with 126 having been deactivated in Europe as a result of low customer ratings in 2021.
It’s possible that Reuters’s reporting is incomplete, but there’s no allegation here that the grounds for these suspensions were incorrect. Uber suspended drivers who were pulling long-haul scams against customers to run up fare prices, and doing the annoying thing where they accept a ride and then never show up, hoping the customer will eventually get frustrated and cancel the trip themselves. (My understanding is that drivers do this when they’re driving for, say, both Uber and Lyft. They’ll accept a ride from Uber and then if a more appealing offer comes from Lyft, they’ll accept that one too and just never pick up the customer they accepted from Uber.)
Per this fine, it’s unlawful in the EU for Uber to monitor its drivers for pulling scams against customers, or just never picking riders up, leaving them stranded. I mean, I’m not a member of the “Uber Labor Practices” fan club, but one of the best things about Uber compared to taxis is that they monitor for and take action against scam drivers.
This isn’t a two-sided conflict between employees (drivers) and a big corporation (Uber). It’s three-sided. Where does customer experience factor into this? The drivers were scamming customers, and Uber took action to stop it. This sounds to me like a system that works. The EU regulation doesn’t seem to factor in customers at all.
2026-08-22 07:18:40
Microsoft’s iPhone app for OneDrive has long supported creating three new document types via a big “+” button right in its file viewer: Excel, Word, PowerPoint. It recently came to my attention that they’ve added a fourth document type, and they even gave it real Microsoft-style “they just have no taste” file icon. Just look at it. The whole world’s coming to an end, Mallory.
2026-08-22 03:34:55
Walmart:
When we think about convenience, we think about a lot of things, but making shopping feel simpler and more seamless from start to finish is a big part. And one of the moments where that matters most is at checkout.
We want customers and members to have choice in how they pay, so they can check out in the way that works best for them. Now, beginning Aug. 24, we will be adding Tap to Pay to our payment options at select Walmart stores and Sam’s Club locations, with plans to roll it out to all U.S. stores and clubs by the end of 2026 and to fuel stations by mid-2027.
When I think about convenience, I think about CurrentC, scanning stupid-ass QR codes, and waiting 12 years to adopt Apple Pay.
2026-08-22 00:09:11
It occurred to me last night that I’d gotten less feedback regarding recent posts than usual. There were a few items I’d posted in recent days that I felt sure to hear from readers about, both yea and nay. But: nothing. Crickets chirping. I almost always hear from squeaky wheels in the EU when I write about Apple and the DMA, for example, but I heard nothing about my take yesterday that Apple has effectively pantsed the European Commission regarding App Store commissions.
I noticed this morning that the bot that auto-posts new articles to the DF Mastodon account hadn’t posted since Tuesday night. But it wasn’t the Mastodon posting bot that was broken. It was a different automated task that updates the RSS and JSON feeds. That’s what broke sometime between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. The Mastodon posting bot reads the RSS feed, and if there’s nothing new in the RSS feed, there’s nothing for the bot to post. Still though, I thought it was weird that no one who follows DF from the feeds had emailed, texted, or @replied to me to complain that new articles on the website had stopped appearing in the feeds. No one.
Then, I remembered that the DF website home page is generated from ... the RSS feed.1
So, yeah, pretty much no one but me realized that I’d written seven new posts after the last update Tuesday night. Oops. Needless to say, it no longer seems surprising at all that I haven’t heard anything from readers in a few days. My apologies for delivering most of this week’s output all at once. We can pretend today that DF is a weekly newsletter.
The system that conked out that in turn prevented the feed generation script from seeing new content has conked out once before in recent memory — last October. But when it conked out in October I noticed within a few hours, because readers kept complaining about the same typo that I had fixed, in my CMS, but which was still visible on the home page, because the home page only gets updated from the feed content. I never previously considered adding some sort of alert to check on this, because I always presumed I’d notice if new items I published weren’t appearing on the home page or in the feeds. ↩︎
