Além de compartilhar uma página da web usando um link normal, o navegador Mozilla Firefox também permite enviar um endereço da web de outra forma.
Mais precisamente, trata-se da geração de um código QR (QR code) — que pode, posteriormente, ser lido a partir de qualquer câmera ou compartilhado em uma postagem, por exemplo.
In March 2021, while serving as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, I hosted a discussion with General Chance Saltzman, now Chief of Space Operations for the United States […]
Back in April of this year, I suggested that the MailMaven email app for macOS might become my new best friend. Months later, with continuous minor and major improvements, the friendship has only grown richer. MailMaven 1.1 in April added POP support for those people who rely on the ancient email mailbox protocol. But MailMaven 1.2, out last week, packed more punch: fully realized AppleScript support coupled with the open standard Model Context Protocol (MCP) to allow large language model AIs to engage with MailMaven. Michael Tsai evaluated the AppleScript support and wrote that it is “really impressive.”
Support for MCP via AppleScript means that you can have AI agents communicate directly with MailMaven to improve spam detection, recognize important messages, collect order or financial information, or perform an infinite number of other tasks in which your incoming or outgoing email acts as the hub of knowledge. SmallCubed, the app’s developer, has created a basic MCP server for Claude as a working example. You can write AppleScript from scratch using its terse, thorough guide, or point a code chatbot at the page to write AppleScript for you. I currently have a few nightly scripts that collate book sales and archive the day’s email by digging into MailMaven’s database; I need to rewrite those to use AppleScript instead!
Num novo vídeo, a Neuralink de Elon Musk mostra como a sua tecnologia de implantes cerebrais já permite que participantes com paralisia controlem cadeiras de rodas elétricas com a mente.
Un internaute a découvert qu’un satellite de télécommunication Starlink de SpaceX est passé devant un satellite d’imagerie de la surface Terre pendant qu’il survolait le Texas. L’image a été retrouvée sur Google Earth. Que nous dit cet événement pas si anodin que cela ?
Apple and Ford today announced that Apple Maps will be integrated directly into Ford’s upcoming Universal Electric Vehicle (UEV) Platform through Apple’s new MapKit for Automotive SDK. Coming to Ford’s UEV Platform in 2027, this integration will deliver a beautiful and easy-to-use navigation experience powered by Apple Maps directly to the vehicle’s displays. Road-level Maps information will also enable Ford’s Latitude AI team to build a seamless hands-free driving experience.
This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise: Ford CEO Jim Farley has been bullish on CarPlay and the UEV project was previously headed up by Doug Field1, who spent several years at Apple both on the Mac hardware team and, more significantly, leading up the abandoned car effort.
This integration is interesting, though, because of the lukewarm reception of CarPlay Ultra in the automotive industry. The new “MapKit for Automotive SDK”, which as far as I can tell is being announced in this press release, seems more like the Android Automotive approach of building in support at a low level, though here it’s predominantly focused on navigation rather than providing the full stack for the car. Here’s how Apple describes it:
This integration is made possible by Apple’s new MapKit for Automotive SDK, which allows automakers to embed and customize Apple Maps. The SDK also enables automakers to deliver a cohesive navigation experience for drivers that is consistent with the look and feel of their vehicles, and provides road-level information to help automakers build hands-free driving experiences.
I also appreciated this little tidbit nestled at the very end of the press release:
In addition to the integration of Apple Maps into Ford’s UEV Platform, CarPlay will continue to be available on Ford vehicles, providing drivers with a safe and smart way to use their iPhone in the car.
The season finale of Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey’s excellent Origin Story podcast is about the Luddites, and why the name doesn’t mean what you think it means.
It’s really about people reacting negatively to new technology that threatens their jobs, and therefore their livelihood. This might be extremely relevant to some modern technology topics, come to think of it.
One week ago, three widely respected European news outlets published the results of an investigation into what they described as a "joint plan" by China and Russia to "defeat Elon Musk's Starlink."
The story was the product of a long-running inquiry by The Insider, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde. Reporters at those publications said they reviewed a cache of documents detailing growing military cooperation between China and Russia. The documents covered discussions between the nuclear powers on integrated air and missile defense systems, autonomous "swarm" loitering munitions, next-generation armored vehicles, and military aviation, the report said.
According to the papers, the investigation found evidence of a partnership between China and Russia in the field of space weapons far deeper than either country has acknowledged. One particular focus for China and Russia has been developing strategies to counter SpaceX's Starlink satellite broadband network.
Ao longo dos anos a Neuralink de Elon Musk tem partilhado casos de sucesso nos testes dos seus implantes neurais. Mas foi a chinesa Neuracle que aplicou o primeiro chip cerebral comercial.
One week ago, three widely respected European news outlets published the results of an investigation into what they described as a "joint plan" by China and Russia to "defeat Elon Musk's Starlink."
The story was the product of a long-running inquiry by The Insider, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde. Reporters at those publications said they reviewed a cache of documents detailing growing military cooperation between China and Russia. The documents covered discussions between the nuclear powers on integrated air and missile defense systems, autonomous "swarm" loitering munitions, next-generation armored vehicles, and military aviation, the report said.
According to the papers, the investigation found evidence of a partnership between China and Russia in the field of space weapons far deeper than either country has acknowledged. One particular focus for China and Russia has been developing strategies to counter SpaceX's Starlink satellite broadband network.
Writing at The New York Times, tech reporter Kashmir Hill tells the strange story (NYT gift link) of coming across an AI-generated biography of herself on Amazon.
To me, the sobering part is when Hill, unable to track down the source of her own biography, talks to an “author” of hundreds of AI books:
Mr. Johns, who has long curly white hair and the bronzed skin of someone who spends a considerable amount of time outside, retired in 2024 from his work as a cybersecurity consultant. Divorced and living alone with two Shih Tzus, he suddenly had a lot of time on his hands. He was curious about A.I. and decided to experiment with it.
“Almost everyone I know says they want to write a book,” he said. “It’s a very romantic concept to sit down and toil, page after page and paragraph after paragraph, but it doesn’t make economic sense.”
You know, it’s hard enough making any sort of living as a writer, but crowding the field with AI slop? It’s not even as if people are buying them and reviewing them favorably. They’re just old socks stuffed down the drain, clogging up the sink with putrid water.1 What are we even doing here, people?
Could an AI write that metaphor? I mean. Maybe. But it didn’t. ↩
OpenAI has not been shy about teaming with former Apple employees.
Back in May, OpenAI was rattling its saber about thinking about talking to lawyers about possibly considering a lawsuit against Apple for not treating it right when it came to ChatGPT integration.
What a misdirection! Instead, Apple has sued OpenAI—and it’s alleging that the hardware program it’s been building with Jony Ive and company is being fueled by the theft of trade secrets.
Here’s the statement Apple supplied to various news outlets on Friday:
At Apple, our teams are constantly developing breakthrough technologies to create the best products and services in the world, and protecting their work and intellectual property is something we take very seriously. Recently, significant evidence has emerged suggesting individuals employed by OpenAI wrongfully took Apple’s secret and confidential information regarding our unreleased technologies, processes, and products. We will always defend our teams’ hard work and innovations, and we are taking all appropriate steps to do so.
There’s a lot more in the court filing. As summarized by Chance Miller at 9to5 Mac:
The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that [former Apple designer Tang] Tan used insider knowledge of Apple’s confidential projects to grill job candidates in interviews. Additionally, Tan directed job candidates still working at Apple to bring actual Apple hardware components and samples for “show and tell” sessions.
Furthermore, Apple says a candidate began “screenshotting and downloading files relating to a highly confidential Apple project” hours before interviewing with Tan, who then “solicited more information about that same Apple project” once the interview started. This became an “established pattern,” Apple says.
The list of bad behavior by former Apple employees goes on, including distributing internal Apple documents to new hires, evading security procedures, downloading confidential files from Apple after they had departed, coaching new hires about what confidential documents to study before leaving Apple, and lying to Apple partners to get them to disclose confidential information.
It’s… a lot to process. All that bubbling-under-the-surface tension between Apple and OpenAI is now out in the open! I’m fascinated to see where this story goes.
Jeremy White of Wired has a great tip that also serves as a reminder that amazing things can be found in accessibility settings:
Surely there must be a way to set up an iPhone as the perfect dumb phone for children—one with access to only the apps you deem appropriate, no internet browser, but with all-important tracking and navigation abilities—without having to pay another company to make it work? Well, there is. It’s been hiding in the iOS Accessibility menu the whole time. And, inexplicably, it’s a feature Apple barely talks about.
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.
It’s kind of beautiful. And absolutely the sort of thing you might want to give to a younger kid.
[Via Andy Ihnatko, who also detailed his own use of accessibility features to make streamlined workflow automations.]
EveryMac is a site with a comprehensive set of specs for Mac models, current and historic, that’s celebrating an anniversary today:
On July 2, 1996, EveryMac.com launched.
Thirty years is a long time — and a great deal has changed since then — but what has not changed is that EveryMac.com has been there to provide you with detailed info on every Mac from the original 128k to the current line. Thank you very much for your support through the years.
Back in 1995 I worked on a project for MacUser magazine called the Mac Catalog, which was a FileMaker-based spec database much like EveryMac’s. I was the person who brought the Mac Catalog to the web for the first time, in fact! The Mac Catalog died along with MacUser, but it makes me happy to see that EveryMac has survived.
A vulnerability in Apple’s “Hide My Email” tool lets almost anyone discover a person’s real email address that is supposed to be hidden by the feature, and Apple has failed to fix it for more than a year, according to a security researcher and 404 Media’s own tests.
This information originates with Tyler Murphy, who runs EasyOptOuts, a service that aims to help you remove your private information from the web. Cox says he confirmed the issue by creating a new Hide My Email address and providing it to Murphy, who returned the associated private iCloud email in about five minutes.
According to Murphy, he reported the vulnerability—the full details of which neither he nor 404 are disclosing—to Apple a year ago, and as of the end of May, the company said a security update was due “in the coming weeks”, though it still had not been patched as of the story’s publication.
While it’s hard to determine without the exact details how serious this vulnerability is, Murphy and Cox’s demo and Apple’s response do suggest that it is of concern for those relying on the feature, which is part of Apple’s paid iCloud+ service.
On Monday Apple released 26.5.2 software updates for its platforms that don’t follow the company’s usual pattern, suggesting some interesting things about how it reacts to releasing security fixes.
This update delivers security fixes that were first made available in the iOS 26.6 and iPadOS 26.6 betas.
In other words, the security fixes in 26.5.2 are based on the security fixes that were rolled into the 26.6 betas, the first of which was released publicly on May 26. That means that everyone in the security world, including bad actors, has had more than a month to analyze all of Apple’s forthcoming fixes—which still haven’t rolled out to the broad user base because 26.6 is still in beta.
With 26.5.2, Apple has decided not to wait for the entirety of 26.6 to ship to get its included security fixes out into the world. Now everyone can update to 26.5.2—and Apple recommends it—and take advantage of those security fixes immediately.
These days, reporting on security issues immediately brings up the topic of AI—on both sides. Apple says it uses frontier models to find and discover issues on its platforms, but of course, AI can also be used to analyze the changes in a beta release and deduce what bugs it’s fixing. In the AI era, the lifecycle of a beta OS release may end up being longer than Apple is willing to wait to roll out fixes.
Of course, individual bugs aren’t exploits. According to Apple, attackers need to chain multiple bugs together to create a functional exploit. Each closed bug reduces the overall attack opportunity, but Apple says none of the bugs fixed in 26.5.2 have been used in any attacks, nor was 26.5.2 released in response to any emergent security issue.
Smart home reporter Jennifer Pattison Tuohy at The Verge reports that parent company Assa Abloy has folded Level, which it acquired in 2024, into its Kwikset brand and removed the company’s founders:
The Verge obtained exclusive details from a person familiar with the restructuring who requested anonymity as they were part of the layoffs. They shared an audio recording of a meeting in which Peter Boriskin, CTO for Assa Abloy North America, and Kimberly Cummins, head of North American HR, informed the staff that their positions had been eliminated, effective immediately, as “a part of a larger restructuring of the Level business.” A LinkedIn post from a now-former employee corroborates the layoffs.
As an owner and daily user of three Level locks, this news is certainly worrying. An Assa Abloy spokesperson told The Verge that the company will “continue to develop and sell the Level Lock platform and hardware” but given that the majority of the engineering team seems to also be out, there are certainly questions around it.
On the upside, all of Level’s products now support Matter, which means that at least basic functionality ought to continue working for some time to come. But this is still potentially a disappointing move for a unique product.
Rogue Amoeba’s Paul Kafasis is encouraged by the interface improvements Apple is making in macOS 27, but points out that there’s still one huge issue from last year that needs to be resolved, namely forcing all Mac icons to be trapped inside a single, uniform shape:
Apple’s prohibition on shapes is a step backward for both usability and creativity in app icons. Icons are now harder to distinguish because they’re no longer allowed to be distinctive. But there’s no technical reason for it. Apple could, and should, once again allow icons to take on a wide variety of shapes.
It’s clear that some people within Apple recognize that the transition to Liquid Glass introduced mistakes. They also appear to have the authority to fix those mistakes. Refinements to Apple’s own icons in Golden Gate are a welcome course correction, as is the much-celebrated Liquid Glass opacity slider. It’s time to correct the mistake of banning icon shapes as well.
Kafasis makes the important point that uniform shapes make it more difficult for users, especially those with vision issues including color deficiency, to differentiate between icons. He also references an argument from TidBITS’s Adam Engst that the uniformity sabotages Apple’s own clear and tinted icon formats.
I stumbled on this post via Bluesky, in which Jason Hazeley was utterly baffled by this section of a printed book:
The movement takes the place of a scherzo and is mainly constructed [of] the welcome datacompordinary major scale with the four lower notes shifted a semitone upward.
In the photo of the book passage, (presumably) Hazeley’s finger is pointing at the phrase “welcome datacompordinary major scale.” He wrote, “Absolutely stumped. Have never seen this term, can find no definition anywhere, and can’t parse it.”
Some Mac third party keyboards used to (or maybe still do for all I know) have a little feature where if you didn’t type anything for a while they would themselves type ‘welcome datacomp’. Here’s a nice little rant by someone who got caught by this.
That linked post is from 1994. In it, Chris Tate describes being baffled by a third-party ADB (the predecessor to USB) keyboard:
This past weekend, while trying to get some text-editing work done, I had to leave the computer alone for a while. Upon returning, I found to my horror that the text “welcome datacomp” had been inserted into the text I was editing. I was certain that I hadn’t typed it, and my wife verified that she hadn’t, either. A quick survey showed that the “clipboard” (the repository for information being manipulated via cut/paste operations) wasn’t the source of the offending text.
That story includes a cameo from John Norstad, the creator of the definitive free Mac antivirus app, who had apparently been contacted by numerous people assuming it was a virus:
Yes, we have heard of this. It’s a practical joke in the ROM code in some third-party keyboards. The only solution is to get your bad keyboard replaced.
My guess is that this wasn’t a practical joke as much as some sort of firmware test gone awry, but regardless, “welcome datacomp” managed to appear in numerous publications, as Haller’s post details. Someone finding it in a printed book in 2026 just shows you how the weird tech quirks of the past can just keep echoing long after they’ve gone.
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