Apple today introduced the News Partner Program, a new slate of initiatives to expand Apple’s work with and support for journalism. The News Partner Program aims to ensure Apple News customers maintain access to trusted news and information from many of the world’s top publishers, while supporting publishers’ financial stability and advancing efforts to further media literacy and diversity in news coverage and newsrooms.

Apple says the program is designed for publications that provide their content in Apple News Format and are subscription services. There are several criteria that must be met to be in the program—you can apply starting today.

Jason Snell, on the news that iOS 15 will launch with iCloud Private Relay as an option, defaulting to off:

It seems like Apple’s slowing this roll-out down, at least in part, because there are lingering compatibility issues with some websites—most notably sites that are displaying the wrong region-specific content, or getting confused when signing in. There are some fairly easy remedies web developers can do to make these issues go away, but getting the web to adjust to any new feature takes time, and Apple appears to have erred on the side of caution.

John Gruber, from this Daring Fireball post:

This is what happens in mid-to-late August each year: some features announced at WWDC get postponed for subsequent dot releases throughout the year (15.1, 15.2, etc.), and occasionally something will ship with the .0 public release, but with the “beta” label.

And:

Here’s my concern about iCloud Private Relay compatibility, though: if web publishers want to make sure their sites are compatible with iCloud Private Relay, they can make it work. They might just need more time. But everyone knows there are sites that aren’t interested in your privacy. That’s the whole reason Apple even made this feature. For a lot of websites, if the answer to an iCloud Private Relay compatibility issue is “Disable iCloud Private Relay”, that’s fine by them. For a lot of privacy-invasive web publishers, their goal, I suspect, is to break iCloud Private Relay, not fix their shit-ass websites to work with it.

There’s also the possibility that iCloud Private Relay has some bugs that make it not ready for prime time, in addition to the issues Jason raised above. Is the return of iCloud Private Relay as an on-by-default feature inevitable? Is it a battle against privacy foes who benefit from knowing your IP address, etc.?

José Adorno, 9to5Mac:

One of the features Apple announced during the WWDC21 keynote with iCloud+ was the ability to customize email domains. After two months, you can now do that on iCloud’s beta site.

Here’s how to get started:

• Open beta.icloud.com.
• Click on the Account Settings link just below the Good Morning text.
• Scroll down to the “Custom Email Domain” section and tap the Manage button

The rest depends on your existing setup. Reminder: This is a beta. I’d start off with an unused domain, one that won’t be impacted if Apple decides to make a major change or pull the feature altogether.

Adam Engst, TidBITS:

In many parts of the US, it has long been possible to make local calls with just the seven-digit phone number; the three-digit area code was implicit for calls between numbers using the same area code. Last year, however, the Federal Communications Commission decided to establish 988 as an easy-to-remember three-digit phone number for Americans to use to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in times of crisis.

And:

Since some areas that use seven-digit dialing also use 988 as the first three digits of the number, the FCC is requiring all carriers to implement ten-digit dialing in those areas, with 24 October 2021 as a cutoff date.

10-digit dialing started becoming common in the US in the 1990s, with the ability to only dial 7 digits within an area code slowly getting chipped away. This is the final nail.

Here’s a link to the 10-digit-dialing Wikipedia page.

And here’s a link to the current list of area codes that still support, at least in part, 7-digit dialing.