Reading List

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

Clair Obscur's Game Awards sweep is gaming's A24 Oscar moment

The Game of the Year win for the underdog title from Sandfall and Kepler Interactive might be a sign of a changing of the guard in mainstream gaming

Source: livestream shopping app Whatnot nears ~$1B in revenue for 2025; Whatnot says it has passed $6B in gross sales this year, more than doubling 2024's sales (Ann Gehan/The Information)

Ann Gehan / The Information:
Source: livestream shopping app Whatnot nears ~$1B in revenue for 2025; Whatnot says it has passed $6B in gross sales this year, more than doubling 2024's sales  —  Livestream shopping app Whatnot is targeting close to $1 billion in revenue for 2025, according to a person with knowledge of the company's finances.

iMessage Doesn’t Use APNs for Attachments

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.)

Hannibal creator Bryan Fuller wanted his first film to be horror for everyone

When Bryan Fuller set out to make his first feature film, his goal was to make the kind of family-friendly scares that he loved as a kid. Think Gremlins or Ghostbusters. The creator of Hannibal and Pushing Daisies ended up crafting a story called Dust Bunny, about a young girl named Aurora who hires a […]

HBO Max’s new channels keep Friends and Game of Thrones playing 24/7

HBO Max is launching curated channels, a new feature that will allow you to quickly jump into a continuous feed of a popular series or tune into a specific genre. When you select a channel on HBO Max, the streaming service will start you at the beginning of whatever's playing, while giving you the ability […]