Paris Buttfield-Addison:

A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple Developer ID, and everything associated with it, and I have no recourse. [...]

I am not a casual user. I have literally written the book on Apple development (taking over the Learning Cocoa with Objective-C series, which Apple themselves used to write, for O’Reilly Media, and then 20+ books following that). I help run the longest-running Apple developer event not run by Apple themselves, /dev/world. I have effectively been an evangelist for this company’s technology for my entire professional life. We had an app on the App Store on Day 1 in every sense of the world.

I am asking for a human at Apple to review this case. I suspect an automated fraud flag regarding the bad gift card triggered a nuclear response that frontline support cannot override. I have escalated this through my many friends in WWDR and SRE at Apple, with no success.

I am desperate to resolve this and restore my digital life.

The triggering event, as best he can determine, was his failed attempt to redeem a $500 Apple gift card purchased from a major retail chain. There’s a very active thread on Hacker News about his plight, where Buttfield-Addison himself is commenting. That thread pointed to this description of one form of gift card thievery, in which thieves tamper with the cards in-store to steal the codes, tamper with the code, and then some unsuspecting victim buys the tampered card and the thieves get the credit.

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.

After a solid run in the second half of 2025 with sponsorships sold out weeks, if not months, in advance, we’ve arrived at the end of the year with the last three weeks still open — starting this coming Monday. I’m offering those weeks at a discount.

• December 15–21 (next week)
• December 22–28
• December 29–January 4

Traffic at DF tends not to ebb over holidays, and while I slow down, I don’t stop posting. If you still check DF when you’re bored over the holidays, think about how many other people do too.

I’m also booking sponsorships for Q1 2026, and six 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.

Six-minute segment from Amazon’s AWS re:Invent keynote last week:

Payam Mirrashidi, VP, Cloud Systems & Platforms, Apple, explains how AWS Graviton helps improve developer velocity at scale. Hear Swift’s journey from the premier programming language for the Apple ecosystem to adoption by millions of developers around the world building apps for everything from devices to data centers.

(Graviton is AWS’s ARM-in-the-cloud initiative.)

Nothing earth-shaking in this brief presentation, but it’s not often you see an Apple VP on stage at another company’s keynote, or see Apple so very publicly declare their reliance on someone else’s infrastructure. It speaks to Apple and Amazon being more allies than competitors amongst the big tech companies. And of course, you even less often see anyone from Apple speak live on stage at Apple’s own keynotes, which, alas, are no longer live nor on stages.

Youki Terada, writing for Edutopia in 2022 (via Jens Kutílek):

Under close scrutiny, the evidence for dyslexia-friendly fonts falls apart. In a 2017 study, for example, researchers tested whether OpenDyslexic, a popular font with thicker lines near the bottom of the letters, could improve the reading rate and accuracy for young children with dyslexia. According to the developers of the font, which is open-source and free of charge, the “heaviness” of the letters prevented them from turning upside down for readers with dyslexia, which they claimed would improve reading accuracy and speed.

Researchers put the font to the test, comparing it with two other popular fonts designed for legibility — Arial and Times New Roman — and discovered that the purportedly dyslexia-friendly font actually reduced reading speed and accuracy. In addition, none of the students preferred to read material in OpenDyslexic, a surprising rebuke for a font specifically designed for the task.

In a separate 2018 study, researchers compared another popular dyslexia font — Dyslexie, which charges a fee for usage — with Arial and Times New Roman and found no benefit to reading accuracy and speed. As with the previous dyslexia font, children expressed a preference for the mainstream fonts. “All in all, the font Dyslexie, developed to facilitate the reading of dyslexic people, does not have the desired effect,” the researchers concluded. “Children with dyslexia do not read better when text is printed in the font Dyslexie than when text is printed in Arial or Times New Roman.”

Quoting from the abstract of the first study cited above:

Results from this alternating treatment experiment show no improvement in reading rate or accuracy for individual students with dyslexia, as well as the group as a whole. While some students commented that [OpenDyslexic] was “new” or “different”, none of the participants reported preferring to read material presented in that font. These results indicate there may be no benefit for translating print materials to this font.

The problem isn’t dyslexia if you don’t notice that OpenDyslexic is “different”.

Quoting from the second cited study:

Words written in Dyslexie font were not read faster or more accurately. Moreover, participants showed a preference for the fonts Arial and Times New Roman rather than Dyslexie, and again, preference was not related to reading performance. These experiments clearly justify the conclusion that the Dyslexie font neither benefits nor impedes the reading process of children with and without dyslexia.

OpenDyslexic’s website has a “related research” page but of the four articles they link to, three are 404s, and the other one only studied “extra-large letter spacing”. I chased down the correct link to one of the other articles they cite, and the only fonts it studied were Verdana, Arial, Georgia, and Times.

Some people claim to prefer reading text set with OpenDyslexic. Some people like Comic Sans, too. But I was unaware that these typefaces that purport to be designed specifically to benefit people with dyslexia are based on misguided beliefs that dyslexia is a visual problem, and that actual research shows they do not provide the benefits they claim to. They’re just ugly fonts.

Small follow-up point re: my post this week on iMessage’s delivery architecture being built atop the Apple Push Notification service:

APNs can only relay messages up to 4 or 16 KB in size, depending on the iOS or iPadOS version. If the message text is too long or if an attachment such as a photo is included, the attachment is encrypted using AES in CTR mode with a randomly generated 256-bit key and uploaded to iCloud. The AES key for the attachment, its Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), and an SHA-1 hash of its encrypted form are then sent to the recipient as the contents of an iMessage, with their confidentiality and integrity protected through normal iMessage encryption, as shown in the following diagram.

This explains why you can often text, but not send or receive images, with iMessage over in-flight Wi-Fi. (Thanks to Adam Shostack for flagging this detail.)