MacRumors (CNN, Hacker News): Apple on late Thursday into Friday removed the popular messaging and social media apps WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and Threads from its App Store in China at the request of the Chinese government, The Wall Street Journal reported. […] In a statement shared with several media outlets, Apple said China’s national internet regulator ordered the removal of the apps from the App Store in the country due to unspecified “national security concerns.” Apple said it is “obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree.” However, it’s A ..read more

VideoLAN (via Hacker News): App Stores were a mistake. Currently, we cannot update VLC on Windows Store, and we cannot update VLC on Android Play Store, without reducing security or dropping a lot of users… For now, iOS App Store still allows us to ship for iOS9, but until when? VideoLAN: If you do wonder why we don’t update VLC on the Windows Store or why VLC/iOS can’t connect properly to OneDrive shares, it’s because Microsoft Kafkaïesque bureaucracy refuses to help us. We’re only trying to contact someone since 2years… VideoLAN (Anisse, Hacker News): If you wonder why we can’t update t ..read more

Alan Baradlay et al.: We made our fast JSON stringifier work for unicode characters. We also analyzed profile data carefully and made JSON.parse faster than ever. […] We took the release of the new Speedometer 3.0 benchmark as an opportunity to adjust inlining heuristics based on data collected in modern Apple silicon Macs with the latest JavaScriptCore. […] Prior to the opportunistic task scheduler, incremental sweeping in JavaScriptCore was automatically triggered by a periodically scheduled 100 ms timer. This had the effect of occasionally triggering incremental sweeping during asynchronou ..read more

Katie Hafner (via Hacker News): In 1986, Mr. Lynch decided to hold a workshop to train vendors and developers to configure equipment for routing traffic through the internet. The point was to make different manufacturers’ equipment work together and demonstrate the uses the internet could have for businesses. The first event, attended by 300 vendors, was run largely by volunteers, who snaked cable through the room and programmed specialized computers called routers, which were just becoming commercially available, to communicate with one another. “His brainstorm was that you couldn’t be there ..read more

Niko Kitsakis (tweet): Why is San Francisco not the best typeface for a user interface? After all, Apple has gone through quite some trouble designing it in-house. Do a search on the matter and you will find articles and videos for deve lo pers, where the people from Apple explain their thinking. They talk about optical sizes, different use-cases, space efficiency, expressiveness and so forth. It all sounds very professional. […] Apple’s San Francisco falls into the same category as the Japanese sword: It might, from a technical standpoint, be a very well designed typeface, but it’s the wrong ..read more

Sammy Steele: The data revealed that some of our tables, containing several terabytes and billions of rows, were becoming too large for a single database. At this size, we began to see reliability impact during Postgres vacuums, which are essential background operations that keep Postgres from running out of transaction IDs and breaking down. Our highest write tables were growing so quickly that we would soon exceed the maximum IO operations per second (IOPS) supported by Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS). Vertical partitioning couldn’t save us here because the smallest unit of parti ..read more

Juli Clover: A lawsuit targeting Apple’s refusal to allow apps to support cryptocurrency transactions was today tossed out by a San Francisco judge, reports Reuters. The lawsuit, which was filed by Venmo and Cash App customers, claimed that Apple drove up the fees charged by Venmo and Cash App by not letting payment apps facilitate cryptocurrency transactions. The plaintiffs alleged that Apple curbed competition in the mobile peer-to-peer payment market with its App Store guidelines. No option for cryptocurrency has supposedly caused Venmo and Cash App to raise prices for transactions and ser ..read more

Joe Rosensteel (Mastodon): Jason didn’t get that speed boost from an Apple-made wireless router, because Apple got out of making those long ago. He didn’t get that speed from a wireless router currently for sale at the Apple Store because the only two options are the Linksys Velop AX4200 WiFi 6 Mesh System, and AmpliFi Alien Router (with optional mesh extenders). Linksys does make a version of their Velop mesh network with 6E, but it’s not for sale through Apple. Jason used an Eero 6E router, and wasted half a day trying to change his network topology to allow for it so he could see that spee ..read more

Mike Wuerthele and Malcolm Owen (via Ric Ford): An issue preventing some external drives from mounting onto a Mac running macOS Sonoma has plagued users for months, and it probably was caused by changes Apple made to drive handling. […] Unlike the Windows-preferred NTFS or Apple’s APFS, exFAT can be read from and written to by both Macs and Windows PCs without requiring any extra software assistance. In a multi-platform environment, it’s almost always the best formatting option for external drives. […] Shortly after the introduction of macOS Sonoma, complaints started to surface on Apple’s Co ..read more

Google (via Hacker News): To improve on this, we are introducing Jpegli, an advanced JPEG coding library that maintains high backward compatibility while offering enhanced capabilities and a 35% compression ratio improvement at high quality compression settings. […] When images are compressed or decompressed through Jpegli, more precise and psychovisually effective computations are performed and images will look clearer and have fewer observable artifacts. […] While improving on image quality/compression density ratio, Jpegli’s coding speed is comparable to traditional approaches, such as lib ..read more