Apple has discontinued the Mac Pro – but it’s just the first of the tower computers to go. The rest will follow soon.

Fruit-sniffers extraordaire 9-to-5 Mac got the news yesterday, complete with official confirmation from Apple itself. It’s official and it’s happened, but there have been warning signs for months – in November 2025, Bloomberg’s Matt Gurman said “The Mac Pro is on the back burner.”

The phantom fruit-flingers of Silicon Valley launched the seven-thousand-buck Apple Silicon-based Mac Pro in June 2023, with an M2 Ultra SoC. It sported seven PCIe slots – but the problem was that cash-rich customers couldn’t add the sorts of expansion that normally go into a PCIe slot… to the extent that Apple publishes a page about PCIe cards you can install in your Mac Pro (2023). Notably, the machine did not support add-on GPUs: only the GPU that’s integrated into the CPU complex along with the machine’s RAM and primary flash storage. The machine also had no RAM expansion whatsoever.

Presumably, this limited its appeal for many traditional buyers, and the machine never saw an M3 or M4 model, let alone the M5 SoC that The Register covered shortly before Bloomberg called the Arm64 cheesegrater’s fate.

Call me crazy, but I don’t think an official government app should be loading executable code from a random person’s GitHub account. Or tracking your GPS location in the background. Or silently stripping privacy consent dialogs from every website you visit through its built-in browser. And yet here we are.

The White House released a new app last week for iOS and Android, promising “unparalleled access to the Trump Administration.” A security researcher, who goes by Thereallo, pulled the APKs and decompiled them — extracting the actual compiled code and examining what’s really going on under the hood. The propaganda stuff — cherry-picked news, a one-tap button to report your neighbors to ICE, a text that auto-populates “Greatest President Ever!” — which Engadget covered, is embarrassing enough. The code underneath is something else entirely.

Let’s start with the most alarming behavior. Every time you open a link in the app’s built-in browser, the app silently injects JavaScript and CSS into the page. Here’s what it does:

It hides: Cookie banners GDPR consent dialogs OneTrust popups Privacy banners Login walls Signup walls Upsell prompts Paywall elements CMP (Consent Management Platform) boxes

It forces body { overflow: auto !important } to re-enable scrolling on pages where consent dialogs lock the scroll. Then it sets up a MutationObserver to continuously nuke any consent elements that get dynamically added.

An official United States government app is injecting CSS and JavaScript into third-party websites to strip away their cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login gates, and paywalls.

Yekaterina Chudnovsky, online biographies say, is a mother-of-four who “enjoys spending time with her family and teaching them the importance of giving back and helping others”. They add that Ukrainian-born Chudnovsky, known as Katie, finds sanctuary in walks on the beach.

In interviews, Chudnovsky has spoken warmly about her commitment to philanthropy, her dedication to supporting cancer research and her work as a lawyer for an unnamed global technology firm. Pornography is never mentioned.

Now, it may become unavoidable. After the death of Chudnovsky’s husband, Leonid Radvinsky, from cancer last week at the age of 43, she is now understood to have a controlling interest through a family trust in the London-based adult content site, OnlyFans.

Chudnovsky is set to have a crucial role in deciding what happens to the business that made her husband a billionaire before he turned 40. The family stake is valued at about $5.5bn (£4.1bn).

Chudnovsky’s views on pornography will determine the site’s future business model, and whether it continues to generate huge sums of money by taking a 20% cut from the earnings of about 4 million content creators globally, a large proportion of whom generate money for the business by undressing and performing explicit content on the platform.