Reading List

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

An Easter Morning Message of Hope From the Winner of the FIFA Peace Prize

Donald Trump, sitting president of the United States, on his blog:

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP

The Iranian embassy in Japan, quoting Trump:

This low level of civility and intelligence shown by a leader of a country is regrettable; the shameful fervor with which intentions to commit war crimes are repeated is staggering; and the fact that the Divine is invoked regardless of ill intentions clearly exposes deep fanaticism. Apologies for sharing this language.

Material Security

My thanks to Material Security for sponsoring this week at DF. Most security teams don’t have a talent problem, they have a noise problem. Manual phishing remediation, chasing risky OAuth permissions, and auditing file shares shouldn’t be a full-time job.

Material Security unifies your cloud workspace, bringing detection and response for email, files, and accounts into one place. It’s security that actually works: augmenting the native gaps in Google and Microsoft without the usual enterprise bloat. Stop fighting fragmented consoles and start focusing on strategy. It’s time to simplify your SecOps.

See for yourself how Material scales.

Sponsorship Openings for Daring Fireball

Sponsorships have been selling briskly, of late. Knock on wood. As of yesterday, the next opening on the schedule wasn’t until the very end of July. However, due to some schedule rejiggering, next week is now open. After next week, though, the next opening remains the week starting July 27.

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. I’m also booking sponsorships for Q3 and Q4 2026, and over half of those weeks are already sold.

iOS 26 Feels Faster Than iOS 18

One more follow-up point after I spent two days using an iPhone 16 Pro running iOS 18.7.7 as my main phone. At some point late in the iOS 26 beta cycle last summer, it became obvious that Apple had sped up a bunch of system-level animations. Prime example: the animation when you swipe up from the bottom of the screen to go back to the Home Screen. People noticed. But it hasn’t gotten a lot of attention since.

But man, if you want to notice, do what I did and spend two days back on iOS 18. So many little things feel slower. I don’t know if anything actually is slower, but because the animations are slower, it looks slower, and that means it feels slower. Apple should speed up some of these animations again this year. (And/or offer a system-wide setting to make them faster. I do not want to eliminate these animations. I just want them to go very very fast.)

Class Action Lawsuit Says Perplexity’s ‘Incognito Mode’ Is a ‘Sham’

Ashley Belanger, reporting for Ars Technica:

Using developer tools, the lawsuit found that opening prompts are always shared, as are any follow-up questions the search engine asks that a user clicks on. Privacy concerns are seemingly worse for non-subscribed users, the complaint alleged. Their initial prompts are shared with “a URL through which the entire conversation may be accessed by third parties like Meta and Google.”

Disturbingly, the lawsuit alleged, chats are also shared with personally identifiable information (PII), even when users who want to stay anonymous opt to use Perplexity’s “Incognito Mode.” That mode, the lawsuit charged, is a “sham.”

Everything about Perplexity looks like a scam.