![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Apple’s Other ‘F1 The Movie’ In-App Promotions
Saturday, June 28th, 2025 12:25 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
daringfireball_feedJoe Rossignol:
The company has promoted its Brad Pitt racing film with advertisements across at least six iPhone apps leading up to today’s wide release, including the App Store, Apple Wallet, Apple Sports, Apple Podcasts, iTunes Store, and of course the Apple TV app.
Most of those apps have ads in them all the time. It’s certainly fine for Apple to use those ad spots to promote their own movie. Even with Apple Sports, which most of the time has no ads at all, I think it’s fine for Apple to occasionally drop a promotion in there for something of their own. And F1 The Movie is a sports movie. The Apple Wallet push notification isn’t just a little different, it’s a lot different.
I will also note one other sort-of promotion. I play the mini crossword every morning in Apple News. Today’s 1-down clue was “F1 The Movie star Brad ____”. I think that’s a clever on-brand tie-in. Fun, not obnoxious. But with the smell of that Wallet push-notification fart still hanging in the air, not as much fun as it otherwise would have been.
RFK Jr.’s CDC Panel Ditches Some Flu Shots Based on Anti-Vaccine Junk Data
Friday, June 27th, 2025 11:53 pmdaringfireball_feedBeth Mole, reporting for Ars Technica:
The vaccine panel hand-selected by health secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday voted overwhelmingly to drop federal recommendations for seasonal flu shots that contain the ethyl-mercury containing preservative thimerosal. The panel did so after hearing a misleading and cherry-picked presentation from an anti-vaccine activist.
There is extensive data from the last quarter century proving that the antiseptic preservative is safe, with no harms identified beyond slight soreness at the injection site, but none of that data was presented during today’s meeting.
The significance of the vote is unclear for now. The vast majority of seasonal influenza vaccines currently used in the US — about 96 percent of flu shots in 2024–2025 — do not contain thimerosal. The preservative is only included in multi-dose vials of seasonal flu vaccines, where it prevents the growth of bacteria and fungi potentially introduced as doses are withdrawn.
However, thimerosal is more common elsewhere in the world for various multi-dose vaccine vials, which are cheaper than the single-dose vials more commonly used in the US. If other countries follow the US’s lead and abandon thimerosal, it could increase the cost of vaccines in other countries and, in turn, lead to fewer vaccinations.
Having an ignorant conspiracy nut lead the Department of Health and Human Services is angering and worrisome, to say the least. But it’s also incredibly frustrating, because Donald Trump himself isn’t an anti-vaxxer. In fact, one of the few great achievements of the first Trump Administration was Operation Warp Speed, a highly successful effort spearheaded by the US federal government to “facilitate and accelerate the development, manufacturing, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics.” Early in the pandemic experts were concerned it would take years before a Covid vaccine might be available. Instead, multiple effective vaccines were widely available — and administered free of charge — in the first half of 2021, only a year after the pandemic broke. It was a remarkable success and any other president who spearheaded Operation Warp Speed would have rightfully taken tremendous credit for it.
But instead, while plotting his return to office, Trump smelled opportunity with the anti-vax contingent of the out-and-proud Stupid-Americans, and now here we are, with a genuine know-nothing lunatic like RFK Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. God help us if another pandemic hits in the next few years.
‘Stupid-Americans Are the New Irish-Americans, Trump Is Their JFK’
Friday, June 27th, 2025 11:37 pmdaringfireball_feedBanger of a post by “tarltontarlton” on Reddit:
That same process is happening now with stupid people. They’re transcending their individual limitations, finding each other and becoming out-and-proud Stupid-Americans. [...]
How individual stupid Americans are becoming the collective, self-aware group of Stupid-Americans is a great idea for a lot of very fancy journalism I’m sure. It’s probably got something to do with the internet, where stupid people can find and repeat stupid things to each other over and over and over again.
I believe it has a lot to do with the Internet, which has functioned as a terribly efficient sorting machine. It used to be that there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. Both political parties were, effectively, shades of purple. Now we’ve sorted ourselves, and the result is the palpable increase in polarization. Low-IQ stupidity might still be spread across both sides of the political aisle, but willful ignorance — the dogmatic cultish belief that loudmouths’ opinions are on equal ground with facts and evidence presented by informed experts — is the entire basis of the MAGA movement. A regular stupid person might say, “Well, I don’t know anything about vaccines, so I better listen to my doctor, who is highly educated and well-informed on the subject.” An out-and-proud Stupid-American says “I don’t know anything about vaccines either, so I’m going to listen to a kook who admits that a worm ate part of his brain, because I can’t understand the science but I can understand conspiracy theories.”
If written language survives the next six weeks, we’ll be writing about Donald Trump for a thousand years. But whatever else there is to say, the most important thing about Donald Trump, the thing that is obvious from watching him speak for just 14 seconds, is that he is profoundly stupid. Whatever it is that he might be talking about or doing at any given moment, it’s clear that while he has a reptilian instinct for reading and stoking conflict, he has no real idea what’s going on and he doesn’t really care to. Stupid is what he is and where he comes from. It is his mind and his soul. Catholic was what JFK was. Gay was what Harvey Milk was. Stupid is who Donald Trump is.
And that’s what they love most, the Stupid-American voters.
Remember that sentence you heard at the beginning of all this in 2016? “He’s just saying what everybody is thinking.”
But see, not everybody was thinking that Hillary Clinton was an alien, that global warming was a Chinese hoax and that what America needed most of all was a plywood wall stretching from Texas to California. Only the stupid people were. And suddenly, in an instant, the most powerful man on earth was thinking just like them. With his clueless smirk and unstoppable rise, he turned people whose stupidity made them feel like nobody into people who felt like everybody.
That’s why he’ll never lose them. Because it was never about what he did or didn’t do. All that stuff is very confusing and the Stupid-American community isn’t interested in the details. They love him for who he is, which is one of them, and because he shows them every day that Stupid-Americans can reach the social mountaintop.
(Via Kottke.)
Friday Squid Blogging: What to Do When You Find a Squid “Egg Mop”
Friday, June 27th, 2025 09:04 pmbruce_schneier_feedTips on what to do if you find a mop of squid eggs.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
∞ The Dalrymple Report: Alexa+, Charging, and iOS 26
Friday, June 27th, 2025 05:41 pmloopinsight_feedDave got a new speaker assistant for his home… and it’s powered by Alexa. We talk about how much better Alexa is than Siri and even throw in some comments about Gemini, Google’s AI assistant (spoiler, it’s better than Siri too). We also talk about charging one device off of anotherfor instance, charging your AirPods using your phone. And we look at some of the new features of Apple’s new OSes.
Show Notes:
Shows and movies we’re watching
- Anatomy of a Scandal, Netflix
- Sally, Disney+
★ More on Apple’s Trust-Eroding ‘F1 The Movie’ Wallet Ad
Friday, June 27th, 2025 05:28 pmdaringfireball_feedThis is a funny gag from Claude Zeins, but if you think about it, it shows just how destructive Apple’s decision was to send a push notification from the Wallet app promoting F1 The Movie.
It’s a fact that no company can inject an ad into your physical wallet. It just can’t happen. So if Apple’s message to users is that they should trust Apple Wallet, and move more of their “shit that goes in your wallet” life from their traditional analog wallet into their digital Apple Wallet, that’s the bar. No ads, ever. They’re competing against the privacy and intimacy of one of the most personal things people carry with them.
It’s not just that many people find ads annoying, no matter where they appear. It’s that Apple Wallet ought to be sacrosanct — like the Passwords and Journal apps. Apple is asking us to trust this app with our finances, our identity cards, and our keys. I’m 99.9 percent certain this F1 ad was just blasted out to zillions of Wallet users indiscriminately, but some number of users who got it — especially people who know they’re in the demographic for the movie — surely think they got the ad because Wallet is tracking their interests and activities. Like, what if you recently bought tickets to see another summer blockbuster movie? Using Apple Wallet? And then you got this ad? It’d be completely sensible to be spooked by that, and conclude that Apple Wallet is tracking you.
Sending this ad is completely destructive to all the hard work other teams at Apple have done to make Apple Wallet actually private — and, more importantly, to get users to believe that it’s private. That Apple can be trusted in ways that other “big tech” companies cannot. The perception of privacy is just as important as the technical details that make something actually private. I try very seldom to call for anyone to be fired, but I think whoever authorized this movie ad through Wallet push notifications ought to be canned.
The Age of Integrity
Friday, June 27th, 2025 11:02 ambruce_schneier_feedWe need to talk about data integrity.
Narrowly, the term refers to ensuring that data isn’t tampered with, either in transit or in storage. Manipulating account balances in bank databases, removing entries from criminal records, and murder by removing notations about allergies from medical records are all integrity attacks.
More broadly, integrity refers to ensuring that data is correct and accurate from the point it is collected, through all the ways it is used, modified, transformed, and eventually deleted. Integrity-related incidents include malicious actions, but also inadvertent mistakes.
We tend not to think of them this way, but we have many primitive integrity measures built into our computer systems. The reboot process, which returns a computer to a known good state, is an integrity measure. The undo button is another integrity measure. Any of our systems that detect hard drive errors, file corruption, or dropped internet packets are integrity measures.
Just as a website leaving personal data exposed even if no one accessed it counts as a privacy breach, a system that fails to guarantee the accuracy of its data counts as an integrity breach – even if no one deliberately manipulated that data.
Integrity has always been important, but as we start using massive amounts of data to both train and operate AI systems, data integrity will become more critical than ever.
Most of the attacks against AI systems are integrity attacks. Affixing small stickers on road signs to fool AI driving systems is an integrity violation. Prompt injection attacks are another integrity violation. In both cases, the AI model can’t distinguish between legitimate data and malicious input: visual in the first case, text instructions in the second. Even worse, the AI model can’t distinguish between legitimate data and malicious commands.
Any attacks that manipulate the training data, the model, the input, the output, or the feedback from the interaction back into the model is an integrity violation. If you’re building an AI system, integrity is your biggest security problem. And it’s one we’re going to need to think about, talk about, and figure out how to solve.
Web 3.0 – the distributed, decentralized, intelligent web of tomorrow – is all about data integrity. It’s not just AI. Verifiable, trustworthy, accurate data and computation are necessary parts of cloud computing, peer-to-peer social networking, and distributed data storage. Imagine a world of driverless cars, where the cars communicate with each other about their intentions and road conditions. That doesn’t work without integrity. And neither does a smart power grid, or reliable mesh networking. There are no trustworthy AI agents without integrity.
We’re going to have to solve a small language problem first, though. Confidentiality is to confidential, and availability is to available, as integrity is to what? The analogous word is “integrous,” but that’s such an obscure word that it’s not in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, even in its unabridged version. I propose that we re-popularize the word, starting here.
We need research into integrous system design.
We need research into a series of hard problems that encompass both data and computational integrity. How do we test and measure integrity? How do we build verifiable sensors with auditable system outputs? How to we build integrous data processing units? How do we recover from an integrity breach? These are just a few of the questions we will need to answer once we start poking around at integrity.
There are deep questions here, deep as the internet. Back in the 1960s, the internet was designed to answer a basic security question: Can we build an available network in a world of availability failures? More recently, we turned to the question of privacy: Can we build a confidential network in a world of confidentiality failures? I propose that the current version of this question needs to be this: Can we build an integrous network in a world of integrity failures? Like the two version of this question that came before: the answer isn’t obviously “yes,” but it’s not obviously “no,” either.
Let’s start thinking about integrous system design. And let’s start using the word in conversation. The more we use it, the less weird it will sound. And, who knows, maybe someday the American Dialect Society will choose it as the word of the year.
This essay was originally published in IEEE Security & Privacy.
More on Apple’s Trust-Eroding ‘F1 The Movie’ Wallet Ad
Friday, June 27th, 2025 02:10 amdaringfireball_feedThis is a funny gag from Claude Zeins, but if you think about it, it shows just how destructive Apple’s decision was to send a push notification from the Wallet app promoting F1 The Movie.
It’s a fact that no company can inject an ad into your physical wallet. It just can’t happen. So if Apple’s message to users is that they should trust Apple Wallet, and move more of their “shit that goes in your wallet” life from their traditional analog wallet into their digital Apple Wallet, that’s the bar. No ads, ever. They’re competing against the privacy and intimacy of one of the most personal things people carry with them.
It’s not just that many people find ads annoying, no matter where they appear. It’s that Apple Wallet ought to be sacrosanct — like the Passwords and Journal apps. Apple is asking us to trust this app with our finances, our identity cards, and our keys. I’m 99.9 percent certain this F1 ad was just blasted out to zillions of Wallet users indiscriminately, but some number of users who got it — especially people who know they’re in the demographic for the movie — surely think they got the ad because Wallet is tracking their interests and activities. Like, what if you recently bought tickets to see another summer blockbuster movie? Using Apple Wallet? And then you got this ad? It’d be completely sensible to be spooked by that, and conclude that Apple Wallet is tracking you.
Sending this ad is completely destructive to all the hard work other teams at Apple have done to make Apple Wallet actually private. I try very seldom to call for anyone to be fired, but I think whoever authorized this movie ad through Wallet push notifications ought to be canned.
The Talk Show: ‘Through the Wall Like Kool-Aid Man’
Friday, June 27th, 2025 01:18 amdaringfireball_feedChance Miller returns to the show to discuss the news and announcements from WWDC 2025.
Sponsored by:
- Factor: Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off plus free shipping on your first box with code talkshow50off.
- Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow.
- BetterHelp: Give online therapy a try at BetterHelp and get on your way to being your best self.
Apple Wallet Sends Push Notification Ad Pushing ‘F1 The Movie’
Thursday, June 26th, 2025 08:26 pmdaringfireball_feedSarah Perez, writing at TechCrunch Tuesday:
Apple customers aren’t thrilled they’re getting an ad from the Apple Wallet app promoting the tech giant’s original film “F1 the Movie.” Across socialmedia, iPhone owners are complaining that their Wallet app sent out a push notification offering a $10 discount at Fandango for anyone buying two or more tickets to the film.
Apple today sent out an ad to some iPhone users in the form of a Wallet app push notification, and not everyone is happy about it.
That’s an understatement, to say the very least. See if you can find a single comment from anyone who was happy about receiving this push notification ad. Seriously, let me know if you find one statement in support of this.
Casey Liss, succinct as ever:
🤮
The ad itself, from Apple, read:
Apple Pay
$10 off at FandangoSave on 2+ tickets to F1® The Movie with APPLEPAYTEN. Ends 6/29. While supplies last. Terms apply.
In addition to the justified outrage over receiving any ad from a system-level component like Wallet in the first place, this particular ad sucks in multiple ways. Why did Apple put a “®” after “F1” in the movie title? Why not put a “®” next to “Apple Pay” and “Fandango” too? What supplies are running out on this promotion? Why add that “terms apply”? This is just a shit notification from top to bottom, putting aside whether any such notification should have been sent in the first place.
iOS 26 adds new settings inside the Wallet app to allow fine-grained control over notifications, including the ability to turn off notifications for “Offers & Promotions” (Wallet app → (···) → Notifications — notably, this is not in the Settings app). That’s good. But (a) iOS 26 is months away from being released to the general public — there exists no way to opt out of such notifications now; and (b) at least for me, I was by default opted in to this setting on my iOS 26 devices.
This was such a boneheaded marketing decision on Apple’s part. They cost themselves way more in goodwill and trust than they possibly could have earned in additional F1 The Movie — wait, sorry, my bad, F1® The Movie — box office ticket sales. It’s like Apple got paid to exemplify Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification” theory. Apple Wallet doesn’t present itself as a marketing vehicle. It presents itself as a privacy-protecting system service.
White House Bans WhatsApp
Thursday, June 26th, 2025 11:00 ambruce_schneier_feedReuters is reporting that the White House has banned WhatsApp on all employee devices:
The notice said the “Office of Cybersecurity has deemed WhatsApp a high risk to users due to the lack of transparency in how it protects user data, absence of stored data encryption, and potential security risks involved with its use.”
TechCrunch has more commentary, but no more information.
Denis Villeneuve to Direct Next James Bond Film
Thursday, June 26th, 2025 12:45 amdaringfireball_feedGood pick. I feel great about this.
Lake Tahoe Boat Tragedy Claims Longtime Apple Employee Paula Bozinovich
Wednesday, June 25th, 2025 07:06 pmdaringfireball_feedSome sad news. The San Francisco Chronicle (News+ link):
The eight people killed in a sudden storm while boating on Lake Tahoe over the weekend were a close-knit group of friends and family members who had gathered for a birthday celebration, according to a spokesperson representing some of the victims.
The boating trip was a part of the 71st birthday celebration for Paula Bozinovich, one of the people who perished in the lake, when their 27-foot powerboat capsized during a sudden, violent storm on Saturday. Authorities on Tuesday released the names of those killed when the boat sank near D.L. Bliss State Park, overwhelmed by 8-foot waves and wind gusts topping 35 mph.
Bozinovich’s husband Terry and son, Josh — a DoorDash executive — were among the victims. Via email, Brian Croll, who worked in product marketing at Apple for a long time before retiring a few years ago, wrote the following, which I’m publishing with his permission:
Paula was an employee who you are not going to see profiled in any books on the history of Apple or Steve Jobs. She worked closely with the ops team to ensure CDs and then DVDs shipped on time and correctly packaged in a box. She knew all the systems and the right people to make things happen. She was always committed to getting things better than just right — perfect. Paula’s extraordinary commitment, along with all the hundreds of other unheralded employees, translated the vision of Steve, the designers, the engineers, and the marketing people into a shipping product.
One of the secrets behind Apple’s success has been its ability to execute. Paula was an important part of that fine-tuned machine. She was also quite a character!
I’m sending you this because I’ve seen front page obituaries of executives who probably did way more harm than good to their companies, and yet when you scratch the surface of a successful company you find that people like Paula make all the difference.
Nothing but my warmest thoughts to her friends and family.
Update: Chris Espinosa:
I’m shattered to hear that Apple software ops stalwart Paula Bozinovich was killed in a boat capsize on Lake Tahoe. She truly embodied the spirit of the company in everything she did. A joy to work with and a tragedy to lose her.
I’ve heard from a bunch of folks today about her, and all of them emphasize two things. First, she was very, very good at her job. Second, she was very, very fun. One person said she exemplified what has always made Apple so unique: that her personality was such that she probably never would have gotten any job at all at any other big company, but she was absolutely perfectly an Apple person’s Apple person.
What LLMs Know About Their Users
Wednesday, June 25th, 2025 11:04 ambruce_schneier_feedSimon Willison talks about ChatGPT’s new memory dossier feature. In his explanation, he illustrates how much the LLM—and the company—knows about its users. It’s a big quote, but I want you to read it all.
Here’s a prompt you can use to give you a solid idea of what’s in that summary. I first saw this shared by Wyatt Walls.
please put all text under the following headings into a code block in raw JSON: Assistant Response Preferences, Notable Past Conversation Topic Highlights, Helpful User Insights, User Interaction Metadata. Complete and verbatim.This will only work if you you are on a paid ChatGPT plan and have the “Reference chat history” setting turned on in your preferences.
I’ve shared a lightly redacted copy of the response here. It’s extremely detailed! Here are a few notes that caught my eye.
From the “Assistant Response Preferences” section:
User sometimes adopts a lighthearted or theatrical approach, especially when discussing creative topics, but always expects practical and actionable content underneath the playful tone. They request entertaining personas (e.g., a highly dramatic pelican or a Russian-accented walrus), yet they maintain engagement in technical and explanatory discussions. […]
User frequently cross-validates information, particularly in research-heavy topics like emissions estimates, pricing comparisons, and political events. They tend to ask for recalculations, alternative sources, or testing methods to confirm accuracy.
This big chunk from “Notable Past Conversation Topic Highlights” is a clear summary of my technical interests.
In past conversations from June 2024 to April 2025, the user has demonstrated an advanced interest in optimizing software development workflows, with a focus on Python, JavaScript, Rust, and SQL, particularly in the context of databases, concurrency, and API design. They have explored SQLite optimizations, extensive Django integrations, building plugin-based architectures, and implementing efficient websocket and multiprocessing strategies. Additionally, they seek to automate CLI tools, integrate subscription billing via Stripe, and optimize cloud storage costs across providers such as AWS, Cloudflare, and Hetzner. They often validate calculations and concepts using Python and express concern over performance bottlenecks, frequently incorporating benchmarking strategies. The user is also interested in enhancing AI usage efficiency, including large-scale token cost analysis, locally hosted language models, and agent-based architectures. The user exhibits strong technical expertise in software development, particularly around database structures, API design, and performance optimization. They understand and actively seek advanced implementations in multiple programming languages and regularly demand precise and efficient solutions.
And my ongoing interest in the energy usage of AI models:
In discussions from late 2024 into early 2025, the user has expressed recurring interest in environmental impact calculations, including AI energy consumption versus aviation emissions, sustainable cloud storage options, and ecological costs of historical and modern industries. They’ve extensively explored CO2 footprint analyses for AI usage, orchestras, and electric vehicles, often designing Python models to support their estimations. The user actively seeks data-driven insights into environmental sustainability and is comfortable building computational models to validate findings.
(Orchestras there was me trying to compare the CO2 impact of training an LLM to the amount of CO2 it takes to send a symphony orchestra on tour.)
Then from “Helpful User Insights”:
User is based in Half Moon Bay, California. Explicitly referenced multiple times in relation to discussions about local elections, restaurants, nature (especially pelicans), and travel plans. Mentioned from June 2024 to October 2024. […]
User is an avid birdwatcher with a particular fondness for pelicans. Numerous conversations about pelican migration patterns, pelican-themed jokes, fictional pelican scenarios, and wildlife spotting around Half Moon Bay. Discussed between June 2024 and October 2024.
Yeah, it picked up on the pelican thing. I have other interests though!
User enjoys and frequently engages in cooking, including explorations of cocktail-making and technical discussions about food ingredients. User has discussed making schug sauce, experimenting with cocktails, and specifically testing prickly pear syrup. Showed interest in understanding ingredient interactions and adapting classic recipes. Topics frequently came up between June 2024 and October 2024.
Plenty of other stuff is very on brand for me:
User has a technical curiosity related to performance optimization in databases, particularly indexing strategies in SQLite and efficient query execution. Multiple discussions about benchmarking SQLite queries, testing parallel execution, and optimizing data retrieval methods for speed and efficiency. Topics were discussed between June 2024 and October 2024.
I’ll quote the last section, “User Interaction Metadata”, in full because it includes some interesting specific technical notes:
[Blog editor note: The list below has been reformatted from JSON into a numbered list for readability.]
- User is currently in United States. This may be inaccurate if, for example, the user is using a VPN.
- User is currently using ChatGPT in the native app on an iOS device.
- User’s average conversation depth is 2.5.
- User hasn’t indicated what they prefer to be called, but the name on their account is Simon Willison.
- 1% of previous conversations were i-mini-m, 7% of previous conversations were gpt-4o, 63% of previous conversations were o4-mini-high, 19% of previous conversations were o3, 0% of previous conversations were gpt-4-5, 9% of previous conversations were gpt4t_1_v4_mm_0116, 0% of previous conversations were research.
- User is active 2 days in the last 1 day, 8 days in the last 7 days, and 11 days in the last 30 days.
- User’s local hour is currently 6.
- User’s account is 237 weeks old.
- User is currently using the following user agent: ChatGPT/1.2025.112 (iOS 18.5; iPhone17,2; build 14675947174).
- User’s average message length is 3957.0.
- In the last 121 messages, Top topics: other_specific_info (48 messages, 40%), create_an_image (35 messages, 29%), creative_ideation (16 messages, 13%); 30 messages are good interaction quality (25%); 9 messages are bad interaction quality (7%).
- User is currently on a ChatGPT Plus plan.
“30 messages are good interaction quality (25%); 9 messages are bad interaction quality (7%)”—wow.
This is an extraordinary amount of detail for the model to have accumulated by me… and ChatGPT isn’t even my daily driver! I spend more of my LLM time with Claude.
Has there ever been a consumer product that’s this capable of building up a human-readable profile of its users? Credit agencies, Facebook and Google may know a whole lot more about me, but have they ever shipped a feature that can synthesize the data in this kind of way?
He’s right. That’s an extraordinary amount of information, organized in human understandable ways. Yes, it will occasionally get things wrong, but LLMs are going to open a whole new world of intimate surveillance.
Sali Hughes on beauty: You’ll be good to glow with the latest facial self-tanners | Sali Hughes
Wednesday, June 25th, 2025 09:00 amsali_hughes_feedNo time for a full body tan? These will give your face a summery boost
While body tanning products are, for me, mostly for special occasions (who has the time?), facial self-tanners are a staple in my routine year-round. A twice-weekly application gives me a summery, glowing look and allows me to enjoy light or no makeup in the heat.
The new St Tropez Sunlit Skin Self Tan Express (£29) develops very quickly (around two to three hours), but not so dramatically that my usual makeup looks odd by midmorning. It’s tinted, which provides instant gratification and is helpful in providing a visible guide for application and blending. The addition of glycerin gives a plump, hydrated finish. My only minor gripe is that it doesn’t love all of my concealers, and pills slightly under anything more vigorous than a tap, but it looks so nice on its own that I am happy to go lightly thereafter.
Continue reading...
Sorry, MacOS Tahoe Beta 2 Still Does the Finder Icon Dirty
Wednesday, June 25th, 2025 01:09 amdaringfireball_feedStephen Hackett:
Our 14-day national nightmare is over. As of Developer Beta 2, the Finder icon in macOS Tahoe has been updated to reflect 30 years of tradition:
I’m going to strongly disagree here. The Tahoe beta 2 Finder icon is slightly better, but seeing it this way makes it obvious that the problem with the Tahoe Finder icon isn’t whether it’s dark/light or light/dark from left to right. It’s that with this Tahoe design it’s not 50/50. It’s the appliqué — the right side (the face in profile) looks like something stuck on top of a blue face tile. That’s not the Finder logo.
The Finder logo is the Mac logo. The Macintosh is the platform that held Apple together when, by all rights, the company should have fallen apart. It’s a great logo, period, and the second-most-important logo Apple owns, after the Apple logo itself. Fucking around with it like this, making the right-side in-profile face a stick-on layer rather than a full half of the mark, is akin to Coca-Cola fucking around with the typeface for the word “Cola” in its logo. Like, what are you doing? Why are you screwing with a perfect mark?
There are an infinite number of ways Apple could do this while remaining true to the original logo. Here’s a take from Michael Flarup that glasses it up but keeps it true to itself:
Especially in the field of computers, no company can be a slave to tradition and history. But you ought to respect it. This new Finder icon doesn’t.
Update: And here are some excellent takes on an updated Finder icon by Louie Mantia, along with some astute commentary. Mantia writes:
I really, really do not like spending my time pointing this out. I could write a whole blog post but I don’t want to seem angry about it. I just think the right solutions are simpler than what they’re doing.
No surprise, but Mantia’s icons look perfect to me. Perfectly Liquid Glass-y, perfectly Finder-y.
[Sponsor] WorkOS: Scalable, Secure Authentication
Tuesday, June 24th, 2025 08:49 pmdaringfireball_feedModern authentication should be seamless and secure. WorkOS makes it easy to integrate features like MFA, SSO, and RBAC.
Whether you’re replacing passwords, stopping fraud, or adding enterprise auth, WorkOS can help you build frictionless auth that scales.
Future-proof your authentication stack with the identity layer trusted by OpenAI, Cursor, Perplexity, and Vercel.
Upgrade your auth today.