Tim Hardwick: A lawsuit brought against Apple by music streaming app Musi has been dismissed by a federal judge, after she ruled that Apple’s developer agreement gives it the right to remove any app from the App Store at any time, “with or without cause.” […] Musi claimed it complied with YouTube’s terms, but Apple […]

Anne Applebaum, writing for The Atlantic (gift link):

Specifically, they remember that for 14 months, the American president has tariffed them, mocked their security concerns, and repeatedly insulted them. As long ago as January 2020, Trump told several European officials that “if Europe is under attack, we will never come to help you and to support you.” In February 2025, he told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he had no right to expect support either, because “you don’t have any cards.” Trump ridiculed Canada as the “51st state” and referred to both the present and previous Canadian prime ministers as “governor.” He claimed, incorrectly, that allied troops in Afghanistan “stayed a little back, a little off the front lines,” causing huge offense to the families of soldiers who died fighting after NATO invoked Article 5 of the organization’s treaty, on behalf of the United States, the only time it has done so. He called the British “our once-great ally,” after they refused to participate in the initial assault on Iran; when they discussed sending some aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf conflict earlier this month, he ridiculed the idea on social media: “We don’t need people that join Wars after ​we’ve already won!”

Meanwhile, Irina Slav at Oilprice.com writes that oil — which was trading around $60 per barrel before the war — might soon be headed to $150–200 per barrel. $200! Energy Common Sense reports “This is now a multi-month, likely rest-of-year story of elevated prices and elevated risk.” Axios reports that most Americans will soon be paying over $4/gallon for gasoline, but I walked by Center City Philly’s lone gas station at lunch, and regular gas remains under $4 and premium under $5 — both with an entire one-tenth of one cent to spare.

The Economist quips:

Although President Donald Trump says he has “destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military Capability”, the 0% that remains is playing havoc with the global economy by choking off 10-15% of its oil supply.

This whole dumb fiasco might go down as the canonical example for the phrase “hoist with his own petard”. You just hate to see it.

Mark Simonson:

Just by coincidence, I discovered a copy of U&lc magazine in the graphics classroom. U&lc was published by ITC, the International Typeface Corporation, a typeface publisher, and the designer and editor was the legendary Herb Lubalin. I’d never seen such beautiful typography and design. It was a motherlode for an aspiring typophile like me. [...]

I decided right then that someday, somehow, I wanted to design typefaces.

Adamya Sharma, reporting for Android Authority:

When Google execs previously said sideloading would become a high-friction process on Android, they really weren’t kidding. The company is finally sharing what Android’s new sideloading flow will look like in practice, and if you’re someone who installs apps outside the Play Store, you’re going to feel it immediately, and you’re going to feel it deeply. [...]

When Android’s new sideloading rules come into force, installing apps from developers without Google verification (more on that later) will become extremely tedious by design and require a 24-hour lock before users can install them.

Here’s Google’s own explanation of the new restrictions. “Open always wins”, baby.

Would be interesting to hear Tim Sweeney’s thoughts on this, but he took a sack of cash in exchange for agreeing that whatever Google does with Android hence is “procompetitive” until 2032.

One of the most controversial opinions I’ve long espoused, and believe today more than ever, is that it was a terrible mistake for web browsers to support JavaScript. Not that they should have picked a different language, but that they supported scripting at all. That decision turned web pages — which were originally intended as documents — into embedded computer programs.

There would be no 49 MB web pages without scripting. There would be no surveillance tracking industrial complex. The text on a page is visible. The images and video embedded on a page are visible. You see them. JavaScript is invisible. That makes it seem OK to do things that are not OK at all.

In my piece riffing on Bose’s “The 49MB Web Page” yesterday, I reiterated my also-longstanding argument that publications with print editions do things with their websites that they’d never in a million years do with their print editions. The way The New York Times uses JavaScript to present popovers that obstruct reading the actual article text would be the equivalent of them gluing pages together in the print edition, using tape labeled with an advertisement. They wouldn’t do that. But they do the equivalent, using JavaScript, on every page of their website.