Reading Room

CNBC reports a small Israeli startup has been linked to a string of incidents described as rogue AI hacks at OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta. Worth tracking, since this involves the kind of AI agents (AI systems that can act on their own in several steps) that could soon have real access to systems like yours.

This is worth fifteen minutes if you write anything in public, because it shows exactly what a real correction looks like instead of a quiet edit or a memory hole. John Gruber, who writes the tech blog Daring Fireball, retracted an entire article yesterday. The story he pulled had accused Apple of wrongly rejecting an astronomy app from the App Store, the kind of story that gets shared fast because it fits a familiar complaint about Apple being heavy handed with reviewers. It turned out the app in question was not an astronomy app at all, and Apple's rejection had been correct the whole time.

Gruber built the piece around a claim from developer Terry Godier. Godier wrote that his astronomy site, called Dark Hours, had been rejected by Apple on the grounds that it was astrology, even though it 'has no tarot function, no horoscopes, and nothing that I, or anyone else I've asked, would associate with astrology.' Gruber ran with that claim as fact, and Hacker News put his post on its front page, sending real traffic toward Godier's site before anyone caught the error. The truth, which surfaced only after Gruber's post was already live, was the opposite: the app Godier actually submitted to Apple, under the name 'Asterly,' not 'Dark Hours,' was entirely dedicated to astrology, and included a 'Tarot card of the day' feature. Apple's original rejection, and the App Review Board's decision to uphold it, were correct. Godier had only built an astronomy-only version and put it on the web under the new name Dark Hours in the week before Gruber's post, so it was never the app Apple had actually seen or rejected.

Gruber explains how he was misled, not just by Godier's public blog post, but in a private message exchange the day before publishing. Gruber is direct about why the story felt airtight to him: his own strong dislike of astrology, combined with his high opinion of Godier's earlier work, meant it never occurred to him that Godier might have actually built and submitted an astrology app, and would then act surprised that an astrology app got rejected for being one.

There is a second layer to the mess. An unrelated developer, Miguel Beher, already runs an open source astronomy planning tool called DarkHours, no space, and once Gruber's post pushed traffic toward Godier's similarly named site, Beher noticed the collision. In an exchange on Bluesky, Beher pointed out that Godier's web app had the same bug as his own: it was routing users to random locations in Mexico.

What makes this useful, not just gossip, is how Gruber handled being wrong. He did not delete the piece or quietly rewrite it. He names the exact mechanism of how he was fooled, not just that he was fooled, which is the harder and more useful thing to write down. That is the model worth stealing the next time you get something wrong in public.

Outside your usual reading: this is a small bet from 2011 that is really about whether anything you publish online will still exist years from now, which matters if you're building your own site and archive to last. On a site called Long Bets that collects public wagers about the future, Jeremy Keith bet Matthew A. Haughey about one specific question: would the web address for this very bet, longbets.org/601, still work eleven years later, in 2022?

Keith took the pessimistic side. He argued that link rot, meaning web pages disappearing or moving from their original addresses, is simply the default state of the internet. 'Cool URIs don't change,' Tim Berners-Lee wrote back in 1999, but in practice they do, constantly. Keith wrote that 'the probability of a web document surviving in its original location decreases greatly over time,' and that he suspected even eleven years, which sounds short, was too long for a typical web page to survive unchanged. He said he would love to be proven wrong.

Keith wasn't arguing from nothing: by 2011 his own oldest personal sites were already 13 years old, and he had kept their original web addresses alive that whole time using redirects, a technical trick that sends an old address automatically to wherever the content now actually lives. His point was that doing this takes deliberate, ongoing maintenance, the kind most sites and companies never bother with. The bet had real stakes attached: if Keith won, meaning the link broke, his prize money would go to the Bletchley Park Trust. If Haughey won, meaning the link survived, the money would go to the Internet Archive.

The bet's resolution condition was oddly specific and worth noting, because it shows how hard 'did the link survive' actually is to define. To count as a win for Haughey, on one specific day in February 2022, visiting www.longbets.org/601, with the www, had to return a page containing the exact sentence: 'The original URL for this prediction (www.longbets.org/601) will no longer be available in eleven years.' A redirect to a different address that still showed that sentence would also count. You are reading about this now, in 2026, years after the bet's deadline passed, which is itself a small piece of evidence either way: the page, at the address longbets.org/601, is still live and being read today. The material here doesn't state who technically won on the letter of the bet, so the honest answer is that isn't confirmed in what's in front of us. What it does show clearly is the underlying argument: keeping a single web address alive for over a decade takes active work, not luck, and most content online never gets that work.