President Donald Trump, today in the Oval Office alongside his “very good friend” Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, after ABC News reporter Mary Bruce had the temerity to pose a question regarding Mohammed having ordered the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018:

People are wise to your hoax. ABC, your company, your crappy company, is one of the perpetrators. And I’ll tell you something, I think the license should be taken away from ABC because your news is so fake, and it’s so wrong. And we have a great commissioner, a chairman, who should look at that.

Also from Trump, regarding Khashoggi’s murder:

A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen.

Things happen, indeed.

Disney (ABC’s owner), a year ago settled a lawsuit Trump filed against ABC News — a lawsuit most experts agreed ABC would have won — for $16 million, in what clearly amounted to a bribe.

Yours truly, last month, in a post on Apple’s capitulation to Trump regarding the ICEBlock app for iOS:

When you give a bully your lunch money, they always come back for more.

I think Bob Iger gets that now. “Fuck you, make me” remains the correct response to these threats.

Mark Gurman, in his (paywalled, alas) Power On column for Bloomberg over the weekend:

The next major update didn’t arrive until 2023, when Apple finally transitioned the desktop to in-house chips with the M2 Ultra Mac Pro. Two years later, that model remains largely unchanged. And it’s been overshadowed by the Mac Studio, which received the M3 Ultra chip earlier this year while the Mac Pro stayed put.

Now here’s the bad news: That doesn’t look set to change anytime soon. There’s no longer an M4 Ultra in the works (a Mac Pro to support it was also nixed), and the next high-end desktop chip will be the M5 Ultra. So far, Apple is only focused on a new Mac Studio for the processor. That suggests the Mac Pro won’t be updated in 2026 in a significant way.

From what I’ve heard inside the company, Apple has largely written off the Mac Pro. The sentiment internally is that the Mac Studio now represents both the present and future of Apple’s professional desktop strategy.

Here’s a comparison of the now-two-year-old M2 Ultra Mac Pro with the M3 Ultra and M4 Max Mac Studios. I’d love to see Apple pursue some sort of M# Extreme chip that goes above and beyond the M# Ultra variants, but unless they do, there’s not much point to a 32-pound suitcase-sized enclosure that offers little more than the Studio’s small 8-pound enclosure. The difference mostly comes down to the Pro’s internal PCI Express expansion slots, but those slots don’t support third-party GPUs from Nvidia or AMD — and likely never will.

See also: Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica.

Cloudflare suffered an hours-long global outage, starting around 12pm UTC / 7am ET, which brought down an enormous chunk of the Internet. This included, humorously, Down Detector. It also included (not so humorously to me) Daring Fireball, which has been routed through Cloudflare since 2018. My apologies if you tried to reach the site while it was down. (DF was back up by the time I woke up this morning.) As of this writing, Cloudflare still hasn’t determined exactly what happened, but they’ve been updating their status report for the incident a few times per hour. The most recent update:

We continue to monitor the system through recovery and we are seeing errors and latency return to normal levels. A full post-incident investigation and details about the incident will be made available asap.

London Centric:

Sam was walking past a Royal Mail depot in south London in January when his path was blocked by a group of eight men.

“I tried to move to let them pass, but the last guy blocked the path,” the 32-year-old told London Centric. “They started pushing me and hitting me, telling me to give them everything.”

The thieves took Sam’s phone, his camera and even the beanie hat off his head. After checking Sam had nothing else on him, they started to run off.

What happened next was a surprise. With most of the gang already heading down the Old Kent Road, one turned around and handed Sam back his Android phone.

The thief bluntly told him why: “Don’t want no Samsung.”

This, despite the fact that the iPhone-Android market share split is around 50-50 in the UK. It’s that the iPhone overwhelmingly attracts people who care about their phone. Android attracts the people who don’t care. It’s the same reason why the Mac has, for decades now, dominated the profit share of the PC industry while garnering only about 10 percent unit-sale share. It’s also why it’s major news that Tesla is testing CarPlay support, and not news at all that they’re not testing Android Auto support. “Don’t want no Samsung” indeed.

SpamSieve 3.2.2 is a maintenance release of my Mac e-mail spam filter. SpamSieve 3.2 had a bunch of changes to deal with Microsoft’s plan to sunset Legacy Outlook on November 1, however in early October they announced a new plan to keep supporting Legacy Outlook for another year. I think this was the right decision, […]