Daring FireballModify

2026-02-28 03:28:44

Mike Masnick, writing for Techdirt:

Read that again. If West Virginia wins — if an actual court orders Apple to start scanning iCloud for CSAM — then every image flagged by those mandated scans becomes evidence obtained through a warrantless government search conducted without probable cause. The Fourth Amendment’s exclusionary rule means defense attorneys get to walk into court and demand that evidence be thrown out. And they’ll win that motion. It’s not even a particularly hard case to make.

2026-02-28 02:45:16

Rob Griffiths, writing at The Robservatory:

So I have macOS Tahoe on my laptop, but I’m keeping my desktop Mac on macOS Sequoia for now. Which means I have the joy of seeing things like this wonderful notification on a regular basis. Or I did, until I found a way to block them, at least in 90 day chunks. [...]

The secret? Using device management profiles, which let you enforce policies on Macs in your organization, even if that “organization” is one Mac on your desk. One of the available policies is the ability to block activities related to major macOS updates for up to 90 days at a time (the max the policy allows), which seems like exactly what I needed.

I followed Griffiths’s instructions about a week or so ago, and I’ve been enjoying a no-red-badge System Settings icon ever since. And the Tahoe upgrade doesn’t even show up in General → Software Update. With this profile installed, the confusing interface presented after clicking the “ⓘ” button next to any available update cannot result in your upgrading to 26 Tahoe accidentally.

I waited to link to Griffiths’s post until I saw the pending update from Sequoia 15.7.3 to 15.7.4, just to make sure that was still working. And here it is. My Software Update panels makes it look like Tahoe doesn’t even exist. A delicious glass of ice water, without the visit to hell.

I have one small clarification to Griffiths’s instructions though. He writes:

4/. Optional step: I didn’t want to defer normal updates, just the major OS update, so I changed the Optional (set to your taste) section to look like this:

forceDelayedSoftwareUpdates

This way, I’ll still get notifications for updates other than the major OS update, in case Apple releases anything further for macOS Sequoia. Remember to save your changes, then quit the editor.

I was confused by this step, initially, and only edited the first line after <!-- Optional (set to your taste) -->, to change <true/> to <false/> in the next line. But what Griffiths means, and is necessary to get the behavior I wanted, requires deleting the other two lines in that section of the plist file. I don’t want to defer updates like going from 15.7.3 to 15.7.4.

Before editing:

<!-- Optional (set to your taste) -->
<key>forceDelayedSoftwareUpdates</key><true/>
<key>enforcedSoftwareUpdateMinorOSDeferredInstallDelay</key><integer>30</integer>
<key>enforcedSoftwareUpdateNonOSDeferredInstallDelay</key><integer>30</integer>

After:

<!-- Optional (set to your taste) -->
<key>forceDelayedSoftwareUpdates</key><false/>

I’ll bet that’s the behavior most of my fellow MacOS 15 Sequoia holdouts want too.

2026-02-28 02:12:53

Back in December, Adam Engst wrote this interesting follow-up to his feature story at TidBITS a few weeks prior exploring the differences between the new Unified and old Classic interface modes for the Phone app in iOS 26. It’s also a good follow-up to my month-ago link to Engst’s original feature, as well as a continuation of my recent theme on the fundamentals of good UI design.

The gist of Engst’s follow-up is that one of the big differences between Unified and Classic modes is what happens when you tap on a row in the list of recent calls. In Classic, tapping on a row in the list will initiate a new phone call to that number. There’s a small “ⓘ” button on the right side of each row that you can tap to show the contact info for that caller. That’s the way the Phone app has always worked. In the new iOS 26 Unified mode, this behavior is reversed: tapping on the row shows the contact info for that caller, and you need to tap a small button with a phone icon on the right side of the row to immediately initiate a call.

Engst really likes this aspect of the Unified view, because the old behavior made it too easy to initiate a call accidentally, just by tapping on a row in the list. I’ve made many of those accidental calls the same way, and so I prefer the new Unified behavior for the same reason. Classic’s tap-almost-anywhere-in-the-row-to-start-a-call behavior is a vestige of some decisions with the original iPhone that haven’t held up over the intervening 20 years. With the original iPhone, Apple was still stuck — correctly, probably! — in the mindset that the iPhone was first and foremost a cellular telephone, and initiating phone calls should be a primary one-tap action. No one thinks of the iPhone as primarily a telephone these days, and it just isn’t iOS-y to have an action initiate just by tapping anywhere in a row in a scrolling list. You don’t tap on an email message to reply to it. You tap a Reply button. Phone calls are particularly pernicious in this regard because the recipient is interrupted too — it’s not just an inconvenience to you, it’s an interruption to someone else, and thus also an embarrassment to you.

Here’s where it gets weird.

There’s a preference setting in Settings → Apps → Phone for “Tap Recents to Call”. If you turn this option on, you then get the “tap anywhere in the row to call the person” behavior while using the new Unified view. But this option only appears in the Settings app when you’re using Unified view in the Phone app. If you switch to the Classic view in the Phone app, this option just completely disappears from the Settings app. It’s not grayed out. It’s just gone. Go read Engst’s article describing this, if you haven’t already — he has screenshots illustrating the sometimes-hidden state of this setting.

I’ll wait.

Engst and I discussed this at length during his appearance on The Talk Show earlier this week. Especially after talking it through with him on the show, I think I understand both what Apple was thinking, and also why their solution feels so wrong.

At first, I thought the solution was just to keep this option available all the time, whether you’re using Classic or Unified as your layout in the Phone app. Why not let users who prefer the Classic layout turn off the old “tap anywhere in the row to call the person” behavior? But on further thought, there’s a problem with this. If you just want your Phone app to keep working the way it always had, you want Classic to default to the old tap-in-row behavior too. What Apple wants to promote to users is both a new layout and a new tap-in-row behavior. So when you switch to Unified in the Phone app, Apple wants you to experience the new tap-in-row behavior too, where you need to specifically tap the small phone-icon button in the row to call the person, and tapping anywhere else in the row opens a contact details view.

There’s a conflict here. You can’t have the two views default to different row-tapping behavior if one single switch applies to both views.

Apple’s solution to this dilemma — to show the “Tap Recents to Call” in Settings if, and only if, Unified is the current view option in the Phone app — is lazy. And as a result, it’s quite confusing. No one expects an option like this to only appear sometimes in Settings. You pretty much need to understand everything I’ve written about in this article to understand why and when this option is visible. Which means almost no one who uses an iPhone is ever going to understand it. No one expects a toggle in one app (Phone) to control the visibility of a switch in another app (Settings).

My best take at a proper solution to this problem would be for the choice between Classic and Unified views to be mirrored in Settings → Apps → Phone. Show this same bit of UI, that currently is only available in the Filter menu in the Phone app, in both the Phone app and in Settings → Apps → Phone:

If you change it in one place, the change should be reflected, immediately, in the other. It’s fine to have the same setting available both in-app and inside the Settings app.

Then, in the Settings app, the “Tap Recents to Call” option could appear underneath the Classic/Unified switcher only when “Unified” is selected. Switch from Classic to Unified and the “Tap Recents to Call” switch would appear underneath. Switch from Unified to Classic and it would disappear. (Or instead of disappearing, it could gray out to indicate the option isn’t available when Classic is selected.) The descriptive text describing the option could even state that it’s an option only available with Unified.¹

The confusion would be eliminated if the Classic/Unified toggle were mirrored in Settings. That would make it clear why “Tap Recents to Call” only appears when you’re using Unified — because your choice to use Unified (or Classic) would be right there.

2026-02-28 00:32:49

MG Siegler, writing at Spyglass:

Of course, Netflix could have absorbed such a cost. It’s a $400B company (well, before this deal, anyway) — double Disney! Paramount Skydance? They’re worth $11B. Yes, they’re paying almost exactly $100B more than they’re worth for WBD. Yes, it’s looney. But really, it’s leverage.

To be clear, Netflix was going to pay for the deal with debt too, but they have a clear path to repay such debts. They have a great, growing business. They don’t require the backstop of one of the world’s richest men, who just so happens to be the father of the CEO. How on Earth is Paramount going to pay down this debt? I’m tempted to turn to another bit of Paramount IP for the answer:

1. Step one
2. Step two
3. ????
4. PROFIT!!!

2026-02-27 23:33:15

CNBC:

Block said Thursday it’s laying off more than 4,000 employees, or about half of its head count. The stock skyrocketed as much as 24% in extended trading.

“Today we shared a difficult decision with our team,” Jack Dorsey, Block’s co-founder and CEO, wrote in a letter to shareholders. “We’re reducing Block by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000, which means that over 4,000 people are being asked to leave or entering into consultation.” [...]

Other companies like Pinterest, CrowdStrike and Chegg have recently announced job cuts and directly attributed the layoffs to AI reshaping their workforces.

In an X post, Dorsey said he was faced with the choice of laying off staffers over several months or years “as this shift plays out,” or to “act on it now.”

Dorsey’s letter to shareholders was properly upper-and-lowercased; his memo to employees, which he posted on Twitter/X, was entirely lowercase. That’s a telling sign about who he respects. Dorsey, in that memo to employees:

we’re not making this decision because we’re in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that’s accelerating rapidly.

i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i’d rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome.

AI is going to obviate a lot of jobs, in a lot of industries. So it goes. But in the case of these tech companies — exemplified by Block — it’s just a convenient cover story to excuse absurd over-hiring in the last 5–10 years. Say what you want about Elon Musk, but he was absolutely correct that Twitter was carrying a ton of needless employees. This reckoning was coming, and “AI” is just a convenient scapegoat.

2026-02-27 09:30:25

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

Perhaps the most surprising announcement on Thursday was that Apple and Netflix, which have had a rather stand-offish relationship when it comes to video programming, have struck a deal to swap some Formula One-related content. Formula One’s growing popularity in the United States is due, perhaps in large part, to the high-profile success of the Netflix docuseries “Drive to Survive.” The latest season of that series, debuting Friday, will premiere simultaneously on both Netflix and Apple TV. Presumably, in exchange for that non-exclusive, Apple will also non-exclusively allow Netflix to broadcast the Canadian Grand Prix in May. (Insert obligatory wish that Apple and Netflix would bury the hatchet and enable Watch Now support in the TV app for Netflix content.)

What a crazy cool partnership.