Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

Fraudulent Cryptocurrency App in Mac App Store Stole $9.5 Million From 50-Some Users

Molly White, at Web3 Is Going Just Great:

After a fake version of the Ledger cryptocurrency wallet app made it onto the normally highly curated Apple App store, customers lost $9.5 million dollars to the malicious product. Believing it was a genuine Ledger product, people entered their seed phrases into the app, then discovered their wallets were immediately drained.

One victim, a musician who goes by G. Love, wrote: “I lost my retirement fund in a hack/Scam when I switched my Ledger over to my new computer and by accident downloaded a malicious ledger app from the Apple store. All my BTC gone in an instant.” According to him, he lost 5.9 BTC (~$445,000).

The legit (if that adjective can be used for cryptocurrency apps) Ledger Live Mac app is only available as a direct download from Ledger’s website. They also do have an app in the App Store, but it’s iPhone-only.

On the Name of Apple’s Foldable iPhone

Tim Hardwick, last week at MacRumors:

Apple’s first foldable iPhone may not carry the speculative media-derived “Fold” branding after all, according to Chinese leaker Digital Chat Station. In a new post on Weibo, the oft-accurate leaker claimed that Apple’s book-style foldable could launch as the “iPhone Ultra.” Meanwhile, domestic Chinese manufacturers are allegedly deciding whether to follow Apple’s lead by tentatively branding their own upcoming foldables as “Ultra” models, but likely with a lighter price tag — Apple’s version is expected to cost between $2,000 and $2,500.

I have no inside knowledge about what Apple plans to name this device, but I’ll eat my proverbial hat if they name it “iPhone Fold”. That name is so dumb it’s what Samsung calls their foldables. You don’t name a device for what it does, you name it for what it connotes. A good name conveys feeling, not just function. “iPhone Ultra” or “iPhone Max” would both work, and Ultra sounds more luxe. So while unsurprising, that’s probably the best bet, even without the reliable word of Mr. Digital Chat Station.

But if you want my take on a wildcard name, one with some history, how about “iPhone Duo”?

Speaking of Tips

The Houston Chronicle:

Kristin Tips, the longtime presiding officer of the embattled Texas Funeral Service Commission, is no longer on the board. “Governor Abbott appreciates Kristin Tips’ service,” Andrew Mahaleris, Abbott’s press secretary, said in an email Tuesday. “An announcement on a replacement will be made at a later date.” [...]

Tips, who has run San Antonio’s prestigious Mission Park Funeral Chapels, Cemeteries & Crematories with her husband, Dick Tips, was appointed to the board by the governor in 2017 and made the presiding officer in May 2024. Tips did not respond to a request for comment.

I don’t have any questions for her, but I have at least one for her husband.

Apple Has Hidden the Pre-Creator-Studio Versions of Keynote, Numbers, and Pages in the Mac App Store

Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac:

On the iPhone and iPad, Apple made the new Creator Studio features available as updates to the existing App Store releases.

On the Mac though, the rollout was a lot more confusing. Apple kept the old iWork apps for Mac available on the App Store and launched entirely separate iWork versions with the Creator Studio features. Starting today, though, that oddity is no more. Per Aaron Perris, Apple has officially removed the old Pages, Keynote, and Numbers apps from the App Store.

If you’ve previously downloaded these apps, you’ll still find them in your download history and can re-download from there. But new users will only see one option on the App Store: the Creator Studio-compatible apps.

One reason — perhaps the reason? — this was necessarily more complex on MacOS is that the iWork apps used to have different bundle identifiers on iOS and Mac. On the Mac, the old (classic?) version of Keynote has the bundle identifier com.apple.iWork.Keynote. On iOS, it was always just com.apple.Keynote, without the iWork part. To make the single-subscription bundle work across both platforms, Apple seemingly needed to unify the bundle IDs, and they unified them using the iOS versions, sans the iWork part. The new Creator Studio versions of the Mac apps now have the same bundle IDs as the iOS versions. You can see this using Terminal, if, like me, you currently have both versions of these apps installed side-by-side:

% mdls -name kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier -r \
    /Applications/Numbers.app 

Result: com.apple.iWork.Numbers

% mdls -name kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier -r \
    /Applications/Numbers\ Creator\ Studio.app

Result: com.apple.Numbers

You can also see from the above that while the display names for the new versions remain just “Keynote”, “Numbers”, and “Pages”, the actual names of the .app bundles in the file system are now “Keynote Creator Studio.app”, “Numbers Creator Studio.app”, and “Pages Creator Studio.app”. That’s how two apps that both appear to have the same name can exist next to each other in the same Applications folder.

I’ll leave the final word to Basic Apple Guy:

Goodbye Keynote, Numbers, and Pages, and long live Keynote: Design Presentations, Numbers: Make Spreadsheets, and Pages: Create Documents

Google Will Finally Begin Punishing Sites for Back-Button Hijacking in June

Google, on their Search Central Blog:

Today, we are expanding our spam policies to address a deceptive practice known as “back button hijacking”, which will become an explicit violation of the “malicious practices” of spam policies, leading to potential spam actions.

What is back button hijacking?
When a user clicks the “back” button in the browser, they have a clear expectation: they want to return to the previous page. Back button hijacking breaks this fundamental expectation. It occurs when a site interferes with a user’s browser navigation and prevents them from using their back button to immediately get back to the page they came from. Instead, users might be sent to pages they never visited before, be presented with unsolicited recommendations or ads, or are otherwise just prevented from normally browsing the web.

Why are we taking action?
We believe that the user experience comes first. Back button hijacking interferes with the browser’s functionality, breaks the expected user journey, and results in user frustration.

Good for Google to penalize sites playing such dirty tricks, but, if they believe the user experience comes first, why are they only addressing this now in 2026? Here’s a Reddit thread from 15 years ago: “Why the fuck do websites hijack the back button? Its fucking annoying”. And why are they waiting until June to enforce it? Penalize these dickheads now.

I don’t see much back-button hijacking personally, perhaps because I don’t visit sketchy websites, but this entire issue only exists because of JavaScript. If web pages were documents, this wouldn’t even be possible.