Reading List

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

MacOS Seemingly Crashes After 49 Days of Uptime — a ‘Feature’ Perhaps Exclusive to Tahoe

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

Software developer Photon, whose product requires running a bunch of Macs to connect to iMessage, discovered a pretty major bug:

Every Mac has a hidden expiration date. After exactly 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47 seconds of continuous uptime, a 32-bit unsigned integer overflow in Apple’s XNU kernel freezes the internal TCP timestamp clock… ICMP (ping) keeps working. Everything else dies. The only fix most people know is a reboot.

The whole story is wild (albeit technical). Photon says they’re working on a fix, but really, this is something Apple should be working on.

If you keep track of time using milliseconds, and store that in an unsigned 32-bit integer, it overflows after 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47 seconds. That’s the bug.

I think this bug is new to Tahoe. If you look at Apple’s open-source XNU kernel code — e.g. lines 3,732 to 3,745 in tcp_subr.c — you can see that the lines assigning the time in milliseconds to a uint32_t variable were checked in just six months ago, whereas most of the file is five years old. Also, I personally ran my MacBook Pro — at the time, running MacOS 15.7.2 Sequoia — up to 91 days of uptime in January. I even mentioned that remarkable uptime in my annual report card, in praise of Apple’s software reliability. Apple’s pre-Tahoe reliability, that is.

I was hesitant to link to this at all because the original (unbylined) report from Photon is so hard to follow. It’s downright manic — over 3,500 words with 33 section headings (<h2> and <h3> tags), with no cohesive narrative. The bug, seemingly, is not that complicated. The whole write-up from Photon just screams “AI-generated slop” to me, and I thus hesitate even to link to Snell’s piece linking to it. But I think the bug is real, and my sympathy for everyone afflicted with MacOS 26 Tahoe is sincere. (And if I’m wrong about the post being AI slop and a human at Photon actually wrote this, I would suggest taking it easy with the cocaine.)

The EFF is quitting X

The digital privacy nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation will no longer be posting on X as of Thursday, largely due to a sharp decline in views on the platform over the past several years. In a blog post announcing the departure, EFF's social media and video manager Kenyatta Thomas explained that the nonprofit used to get […]

xAI has filed a lawsuit challenging Colorado's landmark AI anti-discrimination law, set to take effect in the summer, saying it violates free speech protections (Financial Times)

Financial Times:
xAI has filed a lawsuit challenging Colorado's landmark AI anti-discrimination law, set to take effect in the summer, saying it violates free speech protections  —  Elon Musk's AI lab claims the regulations violate free speech protections  —  Elon Musk's xAI has filed a lawsuit challenging …

John Deere will pay farmers $99 million over right-to-repair lawsuit

John Deere has agreed to pay farmers $99 million to resolve a class action lawsuit that accused the agricultural giant of preventing farmers and mechanics from accessing the materials needed to repair equipment, as reported earlier by Reuters. As part of the proposed settlement, John Deere says it will make repair resources available for a […]

macOS 26.4.1

Juli Clover (no release notes, no security, enterprise, no developer, full installer, IPSW): macOS Tahoe 26.4.1 addresses an issue that could cause the M5 MacBook Air and M5 Pro/Max MacBook Pro models to fail to join 802.1X Wi-Fi networks when using content filter extensions. See also Mr. Macintosh and Howard Oakley. Previously: macOS 26.4 MacBook […]