2026-03-07 05:59:49
Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always relevant to at least some sizable portion of the DF audience, so you, the reader, are never annoyed and hopefully often intrigued by them. And, from the sponsors’ perspective, they work. My favorite thing about them is how many sponsors return for subsequent weeks after seeing the results.
Sponsorships have been selling briskly, of late. There are only three weeks open between now and the end of June. But one of those open weeks is next week, starting this coming Monday:
I’m also booking sponsorships for Q3 2026, and roughly half of those weeks are already sold.
If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch — especially if you can act quick for next week’s opening.
2026-03-07 04:32:47
Google Threat Intelligence Group, earlier this week:
Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) has identified a new and powerful exploit kit targeting Apple iPhone models running iOS version 13.0 (released in September 2019) up to version 17.2.1 (released in December 2023). The exploit kit, named “Coruna” by its developers, contained five full iOS exploit chains and a total of 23 exploits. The core technical value of this exploit kit lies in its comprehensive collection of iOS exploits, with the most advanced ones using non-public exploitation techniques and mitigation bypasses.
The Coruna exploit kit provides another example of how sophisticated capabilities proliferate. Over the course of 2025, GTIG tracked its use in highly targeted operations initially conducted by a customer of a surveillance vendor, then observed its deployment in watering hole attacks targeting Ukrainian users by UNC6353, a suspected Russian espionage group. We then retrieved the complete exploit kit when it was later used in broad-scale campaigns by UNC6691, a financially motivated threat actor operating from China. How this proliferation occurred is unclear, but suggests an active market for “second hand” zero-day exploits. Beyond these identified exploits, multiple threat actors have now acquired advanced exploitation techniques that can be re-used and modified with newly identified vulnerabilities.
2026-03-07 04:21:12
Nick Heer, writing at Pixel Envy, uses Pages (from 2009 through today) to illustrate Apple’s march toward putting “greater focus on your content” by making window chrome, and toolbar icons, more and more invisible:
Perhaps Apple has some user studies that suggest otherwise, but I cannot see how dialling back the lines between interface and document is supposed to be beneficial for the user. It does not, in my use, result in less distraction while I am working in these apps. In fact, it often does the opposite. I do not think the prescription is rolling back to a decade-old design language. However, I think Apple should consider exploring the wealth of variables it can change to differentiate tools within toolbars, and to more clearly delineate window chrome from document.
This entire idea that application window chrome should disappear is madness. Some people — at Apple, quite obviously — think it looks better, in the abstract, but I can’t see how it makes actually using these apps more productive. Artists don’t want to use invisible tools.
Clean lines between content and application chrome are clarifying, not distracting. It’s also useful to be able to tell, at a glance, which application is which. I look at Heer’s screenshot of the new version of Pages running on MacOS 26 Tahoe and not only can I not tell at a glance that it’s Pages, I can’t even tell at a glance that it’s a document word processor, especially with the formatting sidebar hidden. One of the worst aspects of Liquid Glass, across all platforms, but exemplified by MacOS 26, is that all apps look exactly the same. Not just different apps that are in the same category, but different apps from entirely different categories. Safari looks like Mail looks like Pages looks like the Finder — even though web browsers, email clients, word processors, and file browsers aren’t anything alike.
2026-03-07 02:09:10
The Verge:
Sean Hollister: What would you say the differences are between the Apple and Google cases?
Tim Sweeney: I would say Apple was ice and Google was fire.
The thing with Apple is all of their antitrust trickery is internal to the company. They use their store, their payments, they force developers to all have the same terms, they force OEMs and carriers to all have the same terms.
Whereas Google, to achieve things with Android, they were going around and paying off game developers, dozens of game developers, to not compete. And they’re paying off dozens of carriers and OEMs to not compete — and when all of these different companies do deals together, lots of people put things in writing, and it’s right there for everybody to read and to see plainly.
I think the Apple case would be no less interesting if we could see all of their internal thoughts and deliberations, but Apple was not putting it in writing, whereas Google was. You know, I think Apple is... it’s a little bit unfortunate that in a lot of ways Apple’s restrictions on competition are absolute. Thou shalt not have a competing store on iOS and thou shalt not use a competing payment method. And I think Apple should be receiving at least as harsh antitrust scrutiny as Google.
Interesting interview, for sure — but it’s from December 2023, when Epic scored its first court victory against Google. And, notably, it came before Sweeney signed away his right to criticize Google or the Play Store.
But I don’t see Epic’s ultimate victory in the lawsuit as a win for Android users, and I don’t think it’s much of a win for Android developers either. These new terms from Google just seem confusing and complicated, with varying rates for “existing installs” vs. “new installs”.
2026-03-07 01:36:16
Sean Hollister, writing for The Verge:
But Google has finally muzzled Tim Sweeney. It’s right there in a binding term sheet for his settlement with Google.
On March 3rd, he not only signed away Epic’s rights to sue and disparage the company over anything covered in the term sheet — Google’s app distribution practices, its fees, how it treats games and apps — he signed away his right to advocate for any further changes to Google’s app store policies, too. He can’t criticize Google’s app store practices. In fact, he has to praise them.
The contract states that “Epic believes that the Google and Android platform, with the changes in this term sheet, are procompetitive and a model for app store / platform operations, and will make good faith efforts to advocate for the same.” [...]
And while Epic can still be part of the “Coalition for App Fairness,” the organization that Epic quietly and solely funded to be its attack dog against Google and Apple, he can only point that organization at Apple now.
Sounds like a highly credible coalition that truly stands for fairness to me.
2026-03-06 23:50:39
Ethan W. Anderson, on Twitter/X:
I’ve plotted the most expensive McDonald’s burger and the least expensive MacBook over time. This analysis projects that the most expensive burger will be more expensive than the cheapest laptop as soon as 2081.
Looking to the past, if you plug $599 in today’s money into an inflation calculator, that’s just ~$190 in 1984, the year the original Macintosh launched with a price of $2,495 (which works out to ~$7,800 today.)
