If you’re like me and like to have NewsBlur sitting open all day, then you’ll love the new NewsBlur macOS app. It’s a first-class app that supports all of NewsBlur’s features, from intelligence training to sharing/blurblogs.

Introducing the NewsBlur macOS app, available for free on the Mac App Store.

The macOS app also supports all of the themes, so it can turn itself into dark mode automatically.

It’s configurable and supports ay=utomatic hiding and showing of the feed list so you can focus on the stories you want to read. Use your mouse to swipe left and right on both stories and to swap which pane is visible.

In the Grid view, you can swipe right with your mouse to temporarily show the feed list, giving you a compact view of your news stories without having to give up screen real estate.

Training is supported natively, so you can hide those stories you don’t want to see while highlighting those thast you do.

It’s important to be able to train, because you can set notifications to be sent from either your Unread list or your Focus list, ensuring you only see the notifications from sites you want to see. And clicking on those native macOS notifications takes you directly to the story in the new macOS app.

If you have any ideas you’d like to see on macOS, feel free to post an idea on the NewsBlur Forum.

Coming up soon are the discover feeds feature, where you can see related feeds based purely on semantic similarity (and not based on mined usage data), as well as real-time updates to the macOS app similar to the dashboard on the web.

Andrew R. Chow, reporting for Time:

Twenty-four years ago, the surgeon Santiago Horgan performed the first robotically assisted gastric-bypass surgery in the world, a major medical breakthrough. Now Horgan is working with a new tool that he argues could be even more transformative in operating rooms: the Apple Vision Pro.

Over the last month, Horgan and other surgeons at the University of California, San Diego have performed more than 20 minimally invasive operations while wearing Apple’s mixed-reality headsets.

The details of this particular use case are largely about ergonomics, and the advantage Vision Pro provides seems profound:

In laparoscopic surgery, doctors send a tiny camera through a small incision in a patient’s body, and the camera’s view is projected onto a monitor. Doctors must then operate on a patient while looking up at the screen, a tricky feat of hand-eye coordination, while processing other visual variables in a pressurized environment. “I’m usually turning around and stopping the operation to see a CT scan; looking to see what happened with the endoscopy [another small camera that provides a closer look at organs]; looking at the monitor for the heart rate,” Horgan says.

As a result, most surgeons report experiencing discomfort while performing minimal-access surgery, a 2022 study found. About one-fifth of surgeons polled said they would consider retiring early because their pain was so frequent and uncomfortable. A good mixed-reality headset, then, might allow a surgeon to look at a patient’s surgical area and, without looking up, virtual screens that show them the laparoscopy camera and a patient’s vitals.

20 percent of surgeons saying they’re considering retiring early because of the discomfort from this is a high number! And the $3,500–4,000 price for Vision Pro isn’t merely acceptable in this context, it’s a downright bargain:

Christopher Longhurst, chief clinical and innovation officer at UC San Diego Health, says that while the Vision Pro’s price tag of $3,499 might seem daunting to a regular consumer, it’s inexpensive compared to most medical equipment. “The monitors in the operating room are probably $20,000 to $30,000, ” he says. “So $3,500 for a headset is like budget dust in the healthcare setting.”

Makes me wonder if these high-end professional and industrial use cases are to the Vision platform this decade what desktop publishing was to the Mac in the 80s? Years ahead of mass market appeal, but a revolutionary breakthrough for a longstanding industry. Such a clear value to those in the industry that they’re not just merely ambivalently accepting the new platform, but champing at the bit to switch to them. Something for the platform to build from until boom, there’s a tipping point where it expands into the mass market. I got into graphic design and desktop publishing my sophomore year of college, in 1992, and by that time the industries of graphic design and professional printing were entirely Macintosh-based, yet the platform (counting the LaserWriter) was only 6 or 7 years old.

But in the fall of 1984, the Macintosh was considered a flop.

It is now legal to hack or otherwise bypass technical protection measures on McFlurry machines and other commercial food preparation machines in order to repair them thanks to a new rule issued by the Federal government. After a challenge it has also remained legal to circumvent manufacturer locks that prevent the repair of medical equipment. This is good news in several long-running yet somehow related sagas that has resulted in both a huge number of McDonald’s ice cream machines and a large number of medical devices being broken at any given moment and which often cannot be fixed without the help of their manufacturer due to arbitrary software locks that prevent McDonald’s stores and also hospitals from fixing the devices they own.

The new exemptions to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows for the circumvention of DRM and software locks, which are often called “TPMs” or technical protection measures, on equipment made for “commercial food preparation when circumvention is a necessary step to allow the diagnosis, maintenance, or repair of such a device.” The exemption that allows for the circumvention of software locks on “a lawfully acquired medical device or system, and related data files, when circumvention is a necessary step to allow the diagnosis, maintenance, or repair of such a device or system,” was also renewed, as were exemptions for farm equipment and a host of other devices. 

If this sounds like an absurd state of affairs, it is. Manufacturers of everything from video game consoles to tractors to ventilators to ice cream machines, kitchen appliances, and trains have learned over the years that they can make a lot of money by putting digital rights management systems and technical protection measures on the hardware they make that do nothing besides preventing the people who buy their equipment from diagnosing and repairing the devices they’ve purchased. This has helped create many different but functionally related repair monopolies across all sorts of industries. The Section 1201 rulemaking process is a part of copyright law that allows the Library of Congress’s Copyright Office to make rules that essentially make it legal for repair professionals and device owners to find ways to hack the machines they’ve purchased for the purposes of repair.

I have covered the McFlurry issue many times over the years. Basically, a company named Taylor makes the soft-serve ice cream machine McDonald’s uses to make McFlurries. These break constantly, and Taylor has put embedded software lockout systems that prevent anyone besides “authorized” repair professionals from fixing them. In the interim, McDonald’s franchises have found ways to bypass these lockout codes. There is ongoing litigation in which a company called Kytch made a device that automated this process. iFixit and the digital rights group Public Knowledge petitioned the Library of Congress for this exemption, and Friday, it was granted.

In a document about its reasoning for new exemptions, the Copyright Office explained that the Kytch litigation and the untenable McFlurry situation ultimately led it to grant the exemption.

“The [office] is aware that the ‘issue [with broken soft-serve machines] is so widespread that it has become a news story in its own right,’” the office wrote. It “also notes that efforts to circumvent TPMs [technical protection measures] on soft-serve machines to repair them have resulted in at least one lawsuit. While the lawsuit involves the commercial distribution of a circumvention tool in violation of the DMCA anti-trafficking provisions, it indicates why, absent an exemption, users may be deterred from developing their own means of circumvention. The unrefuted record supports the conclusion that diagnosis of the soft-serve machine’s error codes for purposes of repair can often only be done by accessing software on the machine that is protected by TPMs (which require a passcode or proprietary diagnostic tool to unlock), and the threat of litigation from circumventing them inhibits users from engaging in repair-related activities.”

The office “finds that users of retail-level commercial food preparation equipment may be adversely affected by the prohibition against circumvention.”

In a phone call with reporters, Suzy Wilson, the associate register of copyrights at the Copyright Office, said that the office was swayed on commercial food equipment based on “specific examples of situations where someone sought to repair or diagnose the need for a repair in retail food establishments.” 

“While one example was the one that made some press over the years about McDonald’s food equipment, we received other examples,” which included ovens that have lockout codes on them, she added. 

Similarly, I have written about how trained technicians at hospitals have been prevented from making simple repairs and doing simple diagnostics on ventilators and other medical equipment, which has led to perfectly good equipment being kept out of commission for weeks or months at a time. Bypassing these technical protection measures was made legal in 2021, but medical device manufacturers launched an intense campaign to kill renewal of it this year. The Copyright Office was not swayed.

Unfortunately, the Copyright Office did not grant an exemption for all industrial equipment, which petitioners also asked for, so the commercial food equipment exemption will be limited to devices in restaurants.

Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, who petitioned for several exemptions, and whose company did a teardown of the Taylor ice cream machine, told 404 Media that the new rules are a bit of a mixed bag because industrial equipment was left out, and because it does not legalize the sale of tools that would bypass software locks.

“This exemption is helpful, but what we really need is Congress to solve this problem and truly legalize repair,” he said. 

"Here’s the catch: while it’s now legal to circumvent the digital locks on these machines, the ruling does not allow us to share or distribute the tools necessary to do so," he said. "This is a major limitation. Most franchise owners and independent repair shops won’t have the technical expertise to create their own unlocking tools from scratch, meaning that while the door to repair has been opened, few will be able to walk through it without significant difficulty. It is still a crime for iFixit to sell a tool to fix ice cream machines, and that’s a real shame."

"The ruling doesn’t change the fact that it’s still illegal to share or sell tools that bypass software locks," he added. "This leaves most of the repair work inaccessible to the average person, since the technical barriers remain high. Without these tools, this exemption is largely theoretical for many small businesses that don’t have in-house repair experts."

On the call with reporters, I asked Wilson if the Copyright Office supports the idea of repair legislation in Congress.

“Yes,” Wilson said. “We do support the consideration [by Congress] of a permanent exemption in areas where it’s dealing with computer software and repair.”