Thereallo, after spelunking inside the APK bundle for the Android version:

• Has a full GPS tracking pipeline compiled in that polls every 4.5 minutes in the foreground and 9.5 minutes in the background, syncing lat/lng/accuracy/timestamp to OneSignal’s servers.

• Loads JavaScript from a random person’s GitHub Pages site (lonelycpp.github.io) for YouTube embeds. If that account is compromised, arbitrary code runs in the app’s WebView. [...]

Is any of this illegal? Probably not. Is it what you’d expect from an official government app? Probably not either.

Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

The app is, at least temporarily, popular. As I type this it’s #3 in the iOS App Store top free apps list, sandwiched between Claude and Gemini. I don’t know how similar the iOS app is to the Android one, but I took one for the team and installed it, and after poking around for a few minutes, it hasn’t even prompted me to ask for location access. It’s a crappy app, to be sure. A lot of flashing between screen transitions. When you open an article, there’s a “< Back” button top left, and an “X” button top right. Both buttons seem to do the same thing. There’s no share sheet for “news” articles, which seems particularly stupid. You can’t even copy a link to an article and share it manually.

But the iOS version has a clean privacy report card in the App Store, and I don’t see anything in the app that makes me doubt that. It seems like the Android version is quite different.

Update 1: Someone on Reddit claims to have analyzed the iOS app bundle and discovered similar code as in the Android app, but I still don’t see any way to actually get the iOS app to even ask for location permission. I think there might be code in the app that never gets called. Like I wrote above, it’s clearly not a well-crafted app. If anyone knows how to get the iOS app to actually ask for location access, let me know how. Here’s another analysis of the iOS app.

Update 2: I installed the Android version of the app too, and just like on iOS, the only permission it asks for is to send notifications. Maybe they will in a future software update, but as far as I can see, the app never even tries to check the device’s location, on either platform.

The White House:

The Council will be co-chaired by David Sacks and Michael Kratsios. The following individuals have been appointed:

Marc Andreessen
Sergey Brin
Safra Catz
Michael Dell
Jacob DeWitte
Fred Ehrsam
Larry Ellison
David Friedberg
Jensen Huang
John Martinis
Bob Mumgaard
Lisa Su
Mark Zuckerberg

Under President Trump, PCAST will focus on topics related to the opportunities and challenges that emerging technologies present to the American workforce, and ensuring all Americans thrive in the Golden Age of Innovation.

Scientific American observes that 12/13 are executives, and only one, Martinis, is an academic researcher. But I mean, of course a council like this, from this administration, is going to be made up of big-cap corporate executives and founders. I’d say it’s more surprising there is even one academic researcher than that there aren’t more.

I’m more intrigued by the companies who aren’t represented: no one from Apple, no one from Microsoft, no one from Amazon. (That left room for two from Oracle, that well known bastion of corporate virtue.) Read into that what you will. Me, I can’t help but suspect that this administration is taking on a profound stink, and something like appointments to this council are akin to a game of music chairs where Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, Andy Jassy, and Jeff Bezos are happy not to have gotten seats.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, during an on-stage interview at The Hill & Valley Forum last week, was asked “What do you see as America’s unique advantages that other countries don’t have?”

His answer, after taking a moment to think, “America’s unique advantage that no country could possibly have is President Trump.”

Huang, newly appointed to the aforelinked President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, seemingly doesn’t smell the growing stink.

Hana Kiros, writing for The Atlantic:

Recently, a Costco in Florida instituted a new store policy. An employee told me that he was asked to open up every desktop computer displayed in the electronics section and remove the memory chips. Otherwise, the RAM harvesters would get them. Elsewhere, criminal groups are misdirecting trucks carrying RAM in order to loot them. All of this is happening because of a generational shortage of a part used in practically every electronic gadget on Earth.

Two of the best movies ever made, John McTiernan’s Die Hard in 1988, and Michael Mann’s Heat in 1995, revolved around plots to steal bearer bonds. (Also: Beverly Hills Cop — not quite one of the best films ever made, but a classic, for sure.) But bearer bonds have fallen out of favor as the world of legitimate finance has become almost entirely digital. A good heist film targeting a big shipment of RAM chips would be very 2026.

Grace Kay, Ashley Stewart, and Pranav Dixit, writing for Business Insider (News+):

“Part of bringing me on, and giving me the responsibilities of a CEO, was to make sure that I could really run that part of the company with autonomy,” Simo, whose title is CEO of applications, told Business Insider.

Altman defers to Simo when he doesn’t feel strongly, she said, and they “debate it out” when he does.

I am deeply suspicious of any company with two CEOs. It occasionally works, like at Netflix, when they’re not just co-CEOs but co-equals. Simo does not seem Sam Altman’s equal at OpenAI.

As OpenAI races toward a possible IPO later this year, Simo, who oversees nearly two-thirds of the company, has a delicate balancing act. She must craft a strategy to make products profitable, while convincing staffers who joined a research-driven organization that commercialization won’t change the mission.

The stakes are high. Deutsche Bank estimated that OpenAI is expected to amass the “largest startup losses in history,” totaling a projected $143 billion between 2024 and 2029. (An OpenAI spokesperson said that figure is incorrect, and one person familiar with the numbers said OpenAI’s internal projections are in line with other reports of $111 billion cash burn by 2030.)

It’s really something when the number in the company’s favor is a loss of $111 billion.

One former Meta employee recalled a moment when, after a contentious meeting, Simo sent a one-line follow-up saying she was unlikely to change her mind, so the team shouldn’t waste time trying to persuade her. She has little patience for internal debates that lose sight of the product, the former employee said, and she’s skilled at “being super clear in her directive so teams don’t scramble and waste time.”

Debates that lose sight of the product quality, or lose sight of the product revenue? Given that Simo rose to prominence at Facebook, eventually running the Facebook blue app, and considering the product quality vs. product revenue balance of that app, I think we know the answer.

This whole dumb “superapp” idea that leaked last week sounds exactly like the sort of thing someone who ran the Facebook app would think is a good idea. The difference, I expect, is that Facebook is free to let product quality (and experience quality) fall by the wayside because their social platforms have such powerful network effects. People stay on Facebook and Instagram even as the experiences worsen because everyone they know is also still on those apps. There’s no network effect like that for ChatGPT. Claude is already rising to near-equal status in popularity, and Gemini isn’t far behind, and Simo hasn’t even started enshittifying ChatGPT yet. People will just switch.

The Apple.com homepage has a nice little animation showing sketches of the company’s most iconic products. The video file itself is hosted here, but I’m not sure how permanent that link is.

Tim Cook posted a different video on Twitter/X, a VHS-style “rewind” through Apple product history. This one’s more fun. There’s an absolutely exquisite audio glitch at a certain moment — chef’s kiss. Bit of a shame that it’s only on X as far I know. Update: Ah, Apple posted the same video to their homepage, linked to a “◀︎◀︎ REW” button set in bitmapped Chicago 12, but it’s seemingly only shown when you visit on an iPhone. I don’t see the button from my Mac or iPad. But you should be able to watch the video from any device at this link. (I would have awarded bonus points for making the “◀︎◀︎” triangles pixel art too. I mean, come on!)

And, last night, Paul McCartney played a full concert at Apple Park for Apple employees. Good to see the two Apples burying the hatchet.

The AP:

Hershey said Wednesday it will use classic recipes for all Reese’s products starting next year, a change that comes after the grandson of Reese’s founder criticized the company for shifting to cheaper ingredients.

Running to the press never works.

(Stick to Trader Joe’s, I say.)

Jacob Krol, writing at TechRadar:

To understand exactly what that means five years on, TechRadar sat down with Apple VP of Platform Architecture Tim Millet and Director of Audio Product Marketing Eric Treski to unpack how AirPods Max 2 is finally catching up to its own ambitions. [...]

One of the boldest claims Apple makes for AirPods Max 2 is a 1.5× improvement in active noise cancellation — achieved without changing a single physical component. “Getting those improvements to ANC and especially that 1.5 times more powerful ANC, which of course is a feat in itself, considering we didn’t change the actual design of the headphone at all from a form factor or material standpoint,” says Treski.

That improvement isn’t limited to a specific frequency band either. “We take that average at 1.5 times across an average of all frequencies. We’re not cherry-picking individual frequencies or a certain range,” he adds. That means AirPods Max 2 should perform better whether it’s blocking louder, booming sounds or higher-pitched ones — and that’s a high bar, given that the original AirPods Max were no slouches when it came to blocking out sound.

Ryan D’Agostino, writing at Esquire (News+ link, in case Esquire stiffs you with their paywall):

Cook was at Jobs’s house the day he died. As he drove back to the office to announce it to the employees and, in so doing, to the world, he felt a strange kind of shock — strange because Jobs had been sick for so long, had even refused medicine when he was first diagnosed, instead trying to cure the disease with fruit juices, and so there should have been no shock at all.

“By that time, unfortunately, there was an inevitability to it,” Cook says. “But I was in denial for so long about the disease and where it would go, because I had watched him bounce back so many times, I assumed he always would. When I took the CEO role, I thought he was going to be executive chairman forever — that’s what I thought literally six weeks earlier. Looking back, I know somebody could say, How could you think that, given the circumstances? But that’s not the way I was wired in that moment.”

D’Agostino, fondly recalling the Apple IIe his family got for Christmas in 1983, wrongly remembers that, “When we turned it on, there was a little trash can in the corner of the screen.” Don’t let that conflation of the IIe and the Macintosh (yet to come in 1983) turn you off. It’s a good profile. Cook’s thoughts on Steve Jobs are touching, and D’Agostino gets Cook to expound upon his strategy of “engagement” with the Trump administration to a degree that I don’t think any other interviewer has. Cook’s answer is over 400 words, and Esquire, to their credit, ran the whole thing.

By far the dumbest Internet Jackass Day “joke” I’ve seen so far is this one from the official New Jersey state account on Twitter/X, claiming that effective immediately, they’re lifting the statewide ban on self-service gasoline. For those of you who’ve never been there, I swear, you cannot pump your own gas anywhere in the state. It’s so ridiculous — and the historical reason so crooked — that people have a hard time believing it. You have to wait for an attendant, who is generally rude and almost always slow. Back in the day, they were extra slow returning with change when you paid in cash, hoping you’d just give up and leave. I’d rather run out of gas and just abandon my car on the side of the road than buy a single gallon of gas in New Jersey. And yet here’s the official state Twitter account yucking it up like the joke isn’t on them.

Lex Friedman (with an embedded video to prove it):

If you reverse the new Apple video that plays in “rewind,” it’s the Think Different ad music, pitched up.

Of course it is.

And, regarding that “◀︎◀︎ REW” button where the “REW” was set in bitmapped Chicago 12” but the “◀︎◀︎” was modern, Craig Hockenberry fixed it:

I pretended to be Susan Kare and fixed it, bottom is the original, top is my interpretation.

Who better to join the show to commemorate Apple’s 50th anniversary than John Siracusa?

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Kalley Huang, writing for The New York Times (gift link):

As that happened, Apple laid off staff “again and again and again,” Mr. Espinosa said. His manager told him that he had been spared because he had worked for the company for so long that his severance package would be too expensive.

“I was wondering what I was going to do because I had no college degree and I had only worked at one company,” Mr. Espinosa said. Then he figured: “I was here when we turned the lights on. I might as well stick around until we turn the lights off.”

Lovely read.

The New York Times (gift link):

Critics warn it still has many issues — its portico is too big, its stairs lead nowhere, its columns will block views from inside the ballroom.

And that’s just the portico.

This is a really good piece, with animated-as-you-scroll illustrations pointing out specific problems with the design.

Such details affect how people passing by experience these iconic places, and how each structure fits into a capital city that has been planned around civic symbols and sightlines since the 1790s. The deliberation is also an expression of democracy, said Carol Quillen, the president and chief executive of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has sued the administration over the ballroom.

“Even if we are slow and we make mistakes and we fight, that process has meaning to us,” Ms. Quillen said. No project belonging to the public should be the vision of just one man, she said.

That is, however, how the ballroom has often been described.

“President Trump is the best builder and developer in the entire world, and the American people can rest well knowing that this project is in his hands,” Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, said in a statement. Past administrations and presidents have wanted a ballroom for more than 150 years, he said, and Mr. Trump will accomplish it.

The way that these lickspittles talk about Trump exactly the way North Koreans speak of Little Kim, or that anyone in any other cult speaks of the cult leader, is just revolting. Even the Chinese don’t speak of Xi “The Pooh” Jinping like this. No one in China pretends Xi is a genius architect.

David Pogue, on his new blog at Substack:

When the iPhone was about to go on sale in 2007, a thousand people lined up around the block at New York City’s Apple Store.

I’d written a parody of “My Way,” with the crazy idea of filming a music video with the participation of people standing in that line. It was a total blast; everyone in line was game. I edited the results together and uploaded it — and for six hours, ladies and gentlemen, it was the most watched video on YouTube. (It’s still there.)

Anyway. That night, I got a call from Jobs’s assistant. “I have Steve on the line,” she said. “Can you take the call?”

I was out to dinner with my family, but I said yes.

“David?” Jobs said when he came on the line. “I saw that song video you posted today.”

Oh GREAT, I thought. I steeled myself for another epic reaming by the CEO of Apple.

“I just wanted to say, it was the funniest fucking thing I’ve ever seen,” he said.

Pogue was my guest on The Talk Show a few weeks ago to talk about his new book, Apple: The First 50 Years, and the show was a lot of fun. But the book is so good, so comprehensive, so fun that it feels essential to link to it whilst we celebrate Apple’s 50th year. I’m a print guy, generally, but the print edition of this book is especially good — it’s a gorgeous book printed in full color throughout (not just, say, 16 color pages in the middle). Apple’s history is both literally and figuratively colorful, and the photos and screenshots Pogue includes are terrific.

The book is nothing short of an instant classic — simultaneously a very enjoyable read, and a meticulously-researched reference for the decades to come. Pogue both covers well-known ground and reports umpteen nuggets, anecdotes, and details that have never been told before. For example, we all know that Steve Jobs was resistant to opening the iPhone to third-party apps. But Pogue interviewed Scott Forstall and got this story, about just how far Steve Jobs thought Apple could go to expand the iPhone’s software library while not opening it to third-party developers:

“I want you to make a list of every app any customer would ever want to use,” he told Forstall. “And then the two of us will prioritize that list. And then I’m going to write you a blank check, and you are going to build the largest development team in the history of the world, to build as many apps as you can as quickly as possible.”

Forstall, dubious, began composing a list. But on the side, he instructed his engineers to build the security foundations of an app store into the iPhone’s software-“against Steve’s knowledge and wishes,” Forstall says. [...]

Two weeks after the iPhone’s release, someone figured out how to “jailbreak” the iPhone: to hack it so that they could install custom apps.

Jobs burst into Forstall’s office. “You have to shut this down!”

But Forstall didn’t see the harm of developers spending their efforts making the iPhone better. “If they add something malicious, we’ll ship an update tomorrow to protect against that. But if all they’re doing is adding apps that are useful, there’s no reason to break that.”

Jobs, troubled, reluctantly agreed.

Week by week, more cool apps arrived, available only to jailbroken phones. One day in October, Jobs read an article about some of the coolest ones.

“You know what?” he said. “We should build an app store.”

Forstall, delighted, revealed his secret plan. He had followed in the footsteps of Burrell Smith (the Mac’s memory-expansion circuit) and Bob Belleville (the Sony floppy-drive deal): He’d disobeyed Jobs and wound up saving the project.

The book is just under 600 pages, including a comprehensive index, and it isn’t padded. It is a veritable encyclopedia of Apple history. Just a remarkable, essential, and unique work. If you haven’t ordered a copy, you should, and if you do, here are some make-me-rich affiliate links:

• Hardcover:
  • Amazon
  • Bookshop.org
• E-book:
  • Kindle
  • Apple Books
  • Bookshop.org

Jason Snell, writing at Macworld, regarding joining the staff at MacUser back in 1993:

But as amazing and revelatory as the Mac was for me as a writer and editor of print and online publications, I rapidly discovered that the Apple of the period was a mess. My first day as a full-time employee, a copy editor popped his head over the cubicle wall and asked me if I had heard anything about layoffs. Welcome to the media, kid.

Back in March 1991, Saturday Night Live ran what I consider the best Apple parody ad ever made: “McIntosh Jr.” Siracusa and I talked about it on The Talk Show this week, celebrating Apple’s 50th anniversary, so I looked it up for the show notes. Alas, this appallingly low-resolution copy hosted on Reddit is seemingly the only free-to-watch copy of it available. (If you can find — or make — a better version, let me know.) If you have a Peacock account, you can watch it in much higher quality in their SNL archive: Season 16, Episode 16, starting at 7:30, just after host Jeremy Irons’s monologue. (It rolls right into a good “Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey”.)

We just recorded tomorrow’s episode of Dithering, and Ben asked me my favorite Apple commercial of all time. I was tempted to say this one, despite the fact that it isn’t real. The best parodies are the ones that hew the closest to the truth of their subject, that exaggerate the least. And the message of “McIntosh Jr.” is, at its heart, the actual purpose of the Macintosh, and of Apple writ large. Computers that enable you to do your best work. Bicycles for the mind. And, yes, the power to crush the other kids. That’s what drew me and Siracusa to Apple computers, and keeps us drawn to them today.

Update: Here’s a high-quality free-to-watch version on Rumble. Nice!