Jake Adelstein (author of Tokyo Vice) on his blog Tokyo Paladin:

For decades, Japan’s Oreos weren’t made by Nabisco at all. They were produced domestically by Yamazaki Biscuits, under a licensing arrangement with what eventually became Mondelez International. This was, by most accounts, a reasonable arrangement. The cookies were local. The quality was consistent. Nobody was complaining.

Then Mondelez did what corporations do when things are working fine. The license expired, and Mondelez moved production of the Oreos it sells in Japan to China, exporting them to Japanese wholesalers and retailers. A cost decision. A spreadsheet decision. The kind of decision made in a room with no windows and a very good projector.

Sensitive Japanese consumers noticed quickly — the taste had changed. Into that opening stepped the Noir, inheriting the flavor the old Oreo had left behind.

Yamazaki Biscuits launched Noir in December 2017 as the successor nobody had officially asked for and everybody apparently wanted.

I have a great affinity for Newman-O’s, which I’ve previously described as “the cookies Oreos pretend to be”. Turns out though I’ve mostly sung the praises of Newman-O’s on my podcast and social media, not here on Daring Fireball. I love Newman-O’s, never tire of them, and will fight any man who argues that Oreos taste better. In fact, late last night, when a friend texted me with a link to this story from Adelstein, I was by sheer happenstance eating a few Newman-O’s. True story.

But now I’m fascinated by the existence of these Japanese rivals. A spite Oreo called Noir. They look and sound delicious, but they seem difficult to obtain in the U.S.

Link: tokyopaladin.substack.com/p/the-japanese-oreo-noir-kills…

There is a persistent misconception among sighted developers: if an application runs in a terminal, it is inherently accessible. The logic assumes that because there are no graphics, no complex DOM, and no WebGL canvases, the content is just raw ASCII text that a screen reader can easily parse.

The reality is different. Most modern Text User Interfaces (TUIs) are often more hostile to accessibility than poorly coded graphical interfaces. The very tools designed to improve the Developer Experience (DX) in the terminal—frameworks like Ink (JS/React), Bubble Tea (Go), or tcell—are actively destroying the experience for blind users.

↫ Casey Reeves

The core reason should be obvious: the command-line interface, at its core, is just a stream of data with the newest data at the bottom, linearly going back in time as you go up. Any screen reader can deal with this fairly easily, and while I personally have no need for such a tool, I’ve heard from those that do that kernel-level screen readers are quite good at what they do. TUIs, or text-based user interfaces, made with modern frameworks are actually very different: they’re “2D grid[s] of pixels, where every character cell is a pixel. [They] abandons the temporal flow for a spatial layout.”

It should become immediately obvious that screen readers won’t really know what to do with this, and Reeves gives countless examples, but the short version is this: the cursor jumps all over the place with every screen update, which makes screen readers go nuts. Various older TUIs, made in a time well before these modern TUI frameworks came about, were designed in a much more terminal-friendly way, or give you options to hide the cursor to solve the problem that way. Irssi, for example, uses VT100 scrolling regions instead of redrawing the whole screen every time something changes.

I had never really stopped to think about TUIs and screen readers, as is common among us sighted people. The problems Reeves describes seem to stem not so much from TUIs being inherently inaccessible, but from modern frameworks not actually making use of the terminal’s core feature set. I really hope this Reeves’ article shines a light on this problem, and that the people developing these modern TUIs start taking accessibility more seriously.

The Federal Communications Commission has announced that Netgear has been given conditional approval that effectively exempts it from a previous ban on foreign-made networking routers. The conditional approval gives the company a de facto — though potentially temporary — monopoly on the selling and servicing of new consumer routers in the US.

"We're pleased to share that Netgear is the first retail consumer router company to receive conditional approval from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as a trusted consumer router company," Netgear CEO CJ Prober said in a statement. "As a US founded and headquartered company, Netgear is aligned with the vision for a more secure digital future for our customers. For the last thirty years, we have been, and continue to be, committed to leading the consumer router category for the United States and setting the bar for quality, performance, innovation and security."

Both Netgear's lines of Nighthawk and Orbi mesh routers are covered by the approval until October 1, 2027, which appears to mean that the company can continue to offer software updates to both lines and presumably release and sell new models in the future.

The FCC dramatically expanded the Covered List, a collection of communications equipment seen as posing a risk to national security, to cover all foreign-made routers in March 2026. The decision prevents companies who make routers outside of the US from introducing new foreign-made models, and pushing certain software updates to existing models after March 1, 2027. Confusingly, though, it doesn't require anyone to replace their existing router or prevent those companies from selling routers they've already made. Receiving conditional approval is the definitive way companies can get off the list, but part of the FCC's requirements for approval is the company offering a plan to bring some or all of its manufacturing to the US — a theoretically costly decision.

Engadget has contacted Netgear for information about the US manufacturing plan it included in its application for conditional approval. We'll update this article if we hear back.

The vast majority of router companies, even ones that are headquartered in the US like Netgear, build their routers in Asia. It's not clear what makes Netgear's currently foreign-made routers safer than, say, an Amazon Eero 7 or a Google Nest WiFi Pro. Until other companies are given conditional approval, though, Netgear is in a unique position.

XChat is now on the App Store, where its listing says that it’s expected to be available for download on April 17. This isn’t the same IRC app from the early aughts, which you may remember if you’re of a certain age. This is a messaging app specifically for X users. X chief Elon Musk first talked about rolling out a new version of his social network’s direct messaging feature in mid-2025. In a series of posts back then, he said the new version would be encrypted and would feature a “whole new architecture.” He also said all X users were getting XChat in June last year, but Musk is pretty infamous for being overly optimistic about timelines.

Now, instead of an upgraded DM feature on X, users are getting a standalone app. It allows them to chat with anybody on X and call each other across devices. The app is end-to-end encrypted and will let users edit and delete their messages for all participants in the conversation. It will also allow users to block screenshots and enable disappearing messages if they want the sensitive details they send in-chat to vanish within five minutes. The app allows users to create massive group chats with up to 481 members, as well. X promises in the App Store listing that XChat will not have ads and will not be tracking users.

Users can now pre-order XChat for iPhones and iPads so that it automatically downloads on their device when it comes out.