Deadline: end of WWDC 2026. The ex­act dates haven’t been an­nounced yet and this timer is based on the es­ti­mated sched­ule (June 9–13). I’ll up­date it when Apple con­firms the dates. They have un­til the con­fer­ence ends.

Deadline: end of WWDC 2026. The ex­act dates haven’t been an­nounced yet and this timer is based on the es­ti­mated sched­ule (June 9–13). I’ll up­date it when Apple con­firms the dates. They have un­til the con­fer­ence ends.

The iOS key­board has been bro­ken since at least iOS 17 and it’s some­how only got­ten worse. iOS 26 has been my break­ing point. Autocorrect is nearly use­less and of­ten hos­tile, that part I’m used to. But now the cor­rectly tapped let­ters aren’t even reg­is­ter­ing cor­rectly. This is­n’t just me.

iOS has bugs across the whole ecosys­tem. But hav­ing the key­board, the thing I in­ter­act with hun­dreds of times a day on my pri­mary de­vice, get pro­gres­sively worse with every up­date is ab­solutely mad­den­ing.

I ran­domly tried Android again for a few months last spring. Using a func­tion­ing key­board was rev­e­la­tory. But I came crawl­ing back to iOS be­cause I’m weak and the or­ange iPhone was pretty and the Pixel 10 was bor­ing and I caved to the blue bub­ble pres­sure. But the key­board on this beau­ti­ful phone is worse than ever.

So here’s the deal, Apple, if that’s even your real name: fix this bro­ken key­board, or at the very least pub­licly

ac­knowl­edge it’s bro­ken and com­mit to fix­ing it in iOS 27 or ear­lier. If that count­down hits zero with­out ei­ther of those things hap­pen­ing, I’m switch­ing to Android for good. (Good = at least 2 cal­en­dar years)

I know los­ing one cus­tomer means ab­solutely noth­ing to your bot­tom line. But I’d like to think it should mean some­thing to the en­gi­neers, UX de­sign­ers, prod­uct peo­ple, and who­ever else had a hand in build­ing this thing.

You were the “it just works” com­pany. Now you’re just a fruit that I used to know.

MonoSketch is an open-source pro­ject li­censed un­der the Apache License 2.0.

If you find this pro­ject use­ful, please con­sider star­ring the repos­i­tory on GitHub. Contributions are also wel­come through pull re­quests or by open­ing is­sues on GitHub.

If you would like to sup­port the pro­ject fi­nan­cially, you can do so by be­com­ing a GitHub Sponsor or con­tribut­ing via Kofi.

A free browser game that chal­lenges you to press “No Tip” while dark pat­terns try to trick you into tip­ping. From tiny but­tons and guilt-trip modals to fake load­ing screens and rigged slid­ers — can you es­cape the tip screen?

Skip the Tips is a satir­i­cal take on mod­ern tip­ping cul­ture. Every check­out screen has be­come a guilt ma­chine. This game lets you prac­tice say­ing no — if you can find the but­ton.

Features over 30 dark pat­terns in­spired by real-world tip­ping screens, pro­gres­sive dif­fi­culty, and a timer that keeps shrink­ing. Play free in your browser — no down­loads, no sign-ups, no tip re­quired.

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OpenAI, the maker of the most pop­u­lar AI chat­bot, used to say it aimed to build ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence that “safely ben­e­fits hu­man­ity, un­con­strained by a need to gen­er­ate fi­nan­cial re­turn,” ac­cord­ing to its 2023 mis­sion state­ment. But the ChatGPT maker seems to no longer have the same em­pha­sis on do­ing so “safely.”

While re­view­ing its lat­est IRS dis­clo­sure form, which was re­leased in November 2025 and cov­ers 2024, I no­ticed OpenAI had re­moved “safely” from its mis­sion state­ment, among other changes. That change in word­ing co­in­cided with its trans­for­ma­tion from a non­profit or­ga­ni­za­tion into a busi­ness in­creas­ingly fo­cused on prof­its.

OpenAI cur­rently faces sev­eral law­suits re­lated to its prod­ucts’ safety, mak­ing this change news­wor­thy. Many of the plain­tiffs su­ing the AI com­pany al­lege psy­cho­log­i­cal ma­nip­u­la­tion, wrong­ful death and as­sisted sui­cide, while oth­ers have filed neg­li­gence claims.

As a scholar of non­profit ac­count­abil­ity and the gov­er­nance of so­cial en­ter­prises, I see the dele­tion of the word “safely” from its mis­sion state­ment as a sig­nif­i­cant shift that has largely gone un­re­ported — out­side highly spe­cial­ized out­lets.

And I be­lieve OpenAI’s makeover is a test case for how we, as a so­ci­ety, over­see the work of or­ga­ni­za­tions that have the po­ten­tial to both pro­vide enor­mous ben­e­fits and do cat­a­strophic harm.

OpenAI, which also makes the Sora video ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence app, was founded as a non­profit sci­en­tific re­search lab in 2015. Its orig­i­nal pur­pose was to ben­e­fit so­ci­ety by mak­ing its find­ings pub­lic and roy­alty-free rather than to make money.

To raise the money that de­vel­op­ing its AI mod­els would re­quire, OpenAI, un­der the lead­er­ship of CEO Sam Altman, cre­ated a for-profit sub­sidiary in 2019. Microsoft ini­tially in­vested US$1 bil­lion in this ven­ture; by 2024 that sum had topped $13 bil­lion.

In ex­change, Microsoft was promised a por­tion of fu­ture prof­its, capped at 100 times its ini­tial in­vest­ment. But the soft­ware gi­ant did­n’t get a seat on OpenAI’s non­profit board — mean­ing it lacked the power to help steer the AI ven­ture it was fund­ing.

A sub­se­quent round of fund­ing in late 2024, which raised $6.6 bil­lion from mul­ti­ple in­vestors, came with a catch: that the fund­ing would be­come debt un­less OpenAI con­verted to a more tra­di­tional for-profit busi­ness in which in­vestors could own shares, with­out any caps on prof­its, and pos­si­bly oc­cupy board seats.

In October 2025, OpenAI reached an agree­ment with the at­tor­neys gen­eral of California and Delaware to be­come a more tra­di­tional for-profit com­pany.

Under the new arrange­ment, OpenAI was split into two en­ti­ties: a non­profit foun­da­tion and a for-profit busi­ness.

The re­struc­tured non­profit, the OpenAI Foundation, owns about one-fourth of the stock in a new for-profit pub­lic ben­e­fit cor­po­ra­tion, the OpenAI Group. Both are head­quar­tered in California but in­cor­po­rated in Delaware.

A pub­lic ben­e­fit cor­po­ra­tion is a busi­ness that must con­sider in­ter­ests be­yond share­hold­ers, such as those of so­ci­ety and the en­vi­ron­ment, and it must is­sue an an­nual ben­e­fit re­port to its share­hold­ers and the pub­lic. However, it is up to the board to de­cide how to weigh those in­ter­ests and what to re­port in terms of the ben­e­fits and harms caused by the com­pany.

The new struc­ture is de­scribed in a mem­o­ran­dum of un­der­stand­ing signed in October 2025 by OpenAI and the California at­tor­ney gen­eral, and en­dorsed by the Delaware at­tor­ney gen­eral.

Many busi­ness me­dia out­lets her­alded the move, pre­dict­ing that it would usher in more in­vest­ment. Two months later, SoftBank, a Japanese con­glom­er­ate, fi­nal­ized a $41 bil­lion in­vest­ment in OpenAI.

Most char­i­ties must file forms an­nu­ally with the Internal Revenue Service with de­tails about their mis­sions, ac­tiv­i­ties and fi­nan­cial sta­tus to show that they qual­ify for tax-ex­empt sta­tus. Because the IRS makes the forms pub­lic, they have be­come a way for non­prof­its to sig­nal their mis­sions to the world.

In its forms for 2022, and 2023, OpenAI said its mis­sion was “to build gen­eral-pur­pose ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence (AI) that safely ben­e­fits hu­man­ity, un­con­strained by a need to gen­er­ate fi­nan­cial re­turn.”

That mis­sion state­ment has changed, as of OpenAI’s 990 form for 2024 — which the com­pany filed with the IRS in late 2025. It be­came “to en­sure that ar­ti­fi­cial gen­eral in­tel­li­gence ben­e­fits all of hu­man­ity.”

OpenAI had dropped its com­mit­ment to safety from its mis­sion state­ment — along with a com­mit­ment to be­ing “unconstrained” by a need to make money for in­vestors. According to Platformer, a tech me­dia out­let, it has also dis­banded its “mission align­ment” team.

In my view, these changes ex­plic­itly sig­nal that OpenAI is mak­ing its prof­its a higher pri­or­ity than the safety of its prod­ucts.

To be sure, OpenAI con­tin­ues to men­tion safety when it dis­cusses its mis­sion. “We view this mis­sion as the most im­por­tant chal­lenge of our time,” it states on its web­site. “It re­quires si­mul­ta­ne­ously ad­vanc­ing AI’s ca­pa­bil­ity, safety, and pos­i­tive im­pact in the world.”

Nonprofit boards are re­spon­si­ble for key de­ci­sions and up­hold­ing their or­ga­ni­za­tion’s mis­sion.

Unlike pri­vate com­pa­nies, board mem­bers of tax-ex­empt char­i­ta­ble non­prof­its can­not per­son­ally en­rich them­selves by tak­ing a share of earn­ings. In cases where a non­profit owns a for-profit busi­ness, as OpenAI did with its pre­vi­ous struc­ture, in­vestors can take a cut of prof­its — but they typ­i­cally do not get a seat on the board or have an op­por­tu­nity to elect board mem­bers, be­cause that would be seen as a con­flict of in­ter­est.

The OpenAI Foundation now has a 26% stake in OpenAI Group. In ef­fect, that means that the non­profit board has given up nearly three-quar­ters of its con­trol over the com­pany. Software gi­ant Microsoft owns a slightly larger stake — 27% of OpenAI’s stock — due to its $13.8 bil­lion in­vest­ment in the AI com­pany to date. OpenAI’s em­ploy­ees and its other in­vestors own the rest of the shares.

The main goal of OpenAI’s re­struc­tur­ing, which it called a “recapitalization,” was to at­tract more pri­vate in­vest­ment in the race for AI dom­i­nance.

It has al­ready suc­ceeded on that front.

As of early February 2026, the com­pany was in talks with SoftBank for an ad­di­tional $30 bil­lion and stands to get up to a to­tal of $60 bil­lion from Amazon, Nvidia and Microsoft com­bined.

OpenAI is now val­ued at over $500 bil­lion, up from $300 bil­lion in March 2025. The new struc­ture also paves the way for an even­tual ini­tial pub­lic of­fer­ing, which, if it hap­pens, would not only help the com­pany raise more cap­i­tal through stock mar­kets but would also in­crease the pres­sure to make money for its share­hold­ers.

OpenAI says the foun­da­tion’s en­dow­ment is worth about $130 bil­lion.

Those num­bers are only es­ti­mates be­cause OpenAI is a pri­vately held com­pany with­out pub­licly traded shares. That means these fig­ures are based on mar­ket value es­ti­mates rather than any ob­jec­tive ev­i­dence, such as mar­ket cap­i­tal­iza­tion.

When he an­nounced the new struc­ture, California Attorney General Rob Bonta said, “We se­cured con­ces­sions that en­sure char­i­ta­ble as­sets are used for their in­tended pur­pose.” He also pre­dicted that “safety will be pri­or­i­tized” and said the “top pri­or­ity is, and al­ways will be, pro­tect­ing our kids.”

At the same time, sev­eral con­di­tions in the OpenAI re­struc­tur­ing memo are de­signed to pro­mote safety, in­clud­ing:

A safety and se­cu­rity com­mit­tee on the OpenAI Foundation board has the au­thor­ity to “require mit­i­ga­tion mea­sures” that could po­ten­tially in­clude the halt­ing of a re­lease of new OpenAI prod­ucts based on as­sess­ments of their risks.

The for-profit OpenAI Group has its own board, which must con­sider only OpenAI’s mis­sion — rather than fi­nan­cial is­sues — re­gard­ing safety and se­cu­rity is­sues.

The OpenAI Foundation’s non­profit board gets to ap­point all mem­bers of the OpenAI Group’s for-profit board.

But given that nei­ther the mis­sion of the foun­da­tion nor of the OpenAI group ex­plic­itly al­ludes to safety, it will be hard to hold their boards ac­count­able for it.

Furthermore, since all but one board mem­ber cur­rently serve on both boards, it is hard to see how they might over­see them­selves. And the mem­o­ran­dum signed by the California at­tor­ney gen­eral does­n’t in­di­cate whether he was aware of the re­moval of any ref­er­ence to safety from the mis­sion state­ment.

There are al­ter­na­tive mod­els that I be­lieve would serve the pub­lic in­ter­est bet­ter than this one.

When Health Net, a California non­profit health main­te­nance or­ga­ni­za­tion, con­verted to a for-profit in­sur­ance com­pany in 1992, reg­u­la­tors re­quired that 80% of its eq­uity be trans­ferred to an­other non­profit health foun­da­tion. Unlike with OpenAI, the foun­da­tion had ma­jor­ity con­trol af­ter the trans­for­ma­tion.

A coali­tion of California non­prof­its has ar­gued that the at­tor­ney gen­eral should re­quire OpenAI to trans­fer all of its as­sets to an in­de­pen­dent non­profit.

Another ex­am­ple is The Philadelphia Inquirer. The Pennsylvania news­pa­per be­came a for-profit pub­lic ben­e­fit cor­po­ra­tion in 2016. It be­longs to the Lenfest Institute, a non­profit.

This struc­ture al­lows Philadelphia’s biggest news­pa­per to at­tract in­vest­ment with­out com­pro­mis­ing its pur­pose — jour­nal­ism serv­ing the needs of its lo­cal com­mu­ni­ties. It’s be­come a model for po­ten­tially trans­form­ing the lo­cal news in­dus­try.

At this point, I be­lieve that the pub­lic bears the bur­den of two gov­er­nance fail­ures. One is that OpenAI’s board has ap­par­ently aban­doned its mis­sion of safety. And the other is that the at­tor­neys gen­eral of California and Delaware have let that hap­pen.

Brussels is go­ing head-to-head with so­cial me­dia plat­forms to change ad­dic­tive de­sign.

The find­ings laid out a week ago mark the first time the Commission has set out its stance on the de­sign of a so­cial me­dia plat­form un­der its Digital Services Act. | Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images

The European Commission is for the first time tack­ling the ad­dic­tive­ness of so­cial me­dia in a fight against TikTok that may set new de­sign stan­dards for the world’s most pop­u­lar apps.

Brussels has told the com­pany to change sev­eral key fea­tures, in­clud­ing dis­abling in­fi­nite scrolling, set­ting strict screen time breaks and chang­ing its rec­om­mender sys­tems. The de­mand fol­lows the Commission’s de­c­la­ra­tion that TikTok’s de­sign is ad­dic­tive to users — es­pe­cially chil­dren.

The fact that the Commission said TikTok should change the ba­sic de­sign of its ser­vice is “ground-breaking for the busi­ness model fu­eled by sur­veil­lance and ad­ver­tis­ing,” said Katarzyna Szymielewicz, pres­i­dent of the Panoptykon Foundation, a Polish civil so­ci­ety group.

That doesn’t bode well for other plat­forms, par­tic­u­larly Meta’s Facebook and Instagram. The two so­cial me­dia gi­ants are also un­der in­ves­ti­ga­tion over the ad­dic­tive­ness of their de­sign.

The find­ings laid out a week ago mark the first time the Commission has set out its stance on the de­sign of a so­cial me­dia plat­form un­der its Digital Services Act, the EU’s flag­ship on­line-con­tent law that Brussels says is es­sen­tial for pro­tect­ing users.

TikTok can now de­fend its prac­tices and re­view all the ev­i­dence the Commission con­sid­ered — and has said it would fight these find­ings. If it fails to sat­isfy the Commission, the app could face fines up to 6 per­cent of an­nual global rev­enue.

It’s the first time any reg­u­la­tor has at­tempted to set a le­gal stan­dard for the ad­dic­tive­ness of plat­form de­sign, a se­nior Commission of­fi­cial said in a brief­ing to re­porters.

“The find­ings mark a turn­ing point [because] the Commission is treat­ing ad­dic­tive de­sign on so­cial me­dia as an en­force­able risk” un­der the Digital Services Act, said Lena-Maria Böswald, se­nior pol­icy re­searcher at think tank Interface.

Jan Penfrat, se­nior pol­icy ad­viser at civil rights group EDRi, said it would be “very, very strange for the Commission to not then use this as a tem­plate and go af­ter other com­pa­nies as well.”

The Digital Services Act re­quires plat­forms like TikTok to as­sess and mit­i­gate risks to their users. But these risks are vaguely de­fined in the law, so un­til now it had been un­clear ex­actly where the reg­u­la­tor would draw the line.

Two years af­ter the TikTok probe was launched, the Commission has opted to strike at the heart of plat­form de­sign, claim­ing it poses a risk to the men­tal health of users, par­tic­u­larly chil­dren. The Commission’s other con­cerns with TikTok were set­tled am­i­ca­bly be­tween the two sides.

At a brief­ing with re­porters, EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen said the find­ings sig­nal that the Commission’s work is en­ter­ing a new stage of ma­tu­rity when it comes to sys­temic risks.

Facebook and Instagram have been un­der in­ves­ti­ga­tion over the ad­dic­tive­ness of their plat­forms since May 2024, in­clud­ing whether they en­dan­ger chil­dren. Just like TikTok, the de­sign and al­go­rithms of the plat­forms are un­der scrutiny.

Meta has mounted a staunch de­fense in an on­go­ing California case, in which it is ac­cused of know­ingly de­sign­ing an ad­dic­tive so­cial me­dia that hurts users. TikTok and Snap set­tled the same case be­fore it went to trial.

TikTok spokesper­son Paolo Ganino said the Commission’s find­ings “present a cat­e­gor­i­cally false and en­tirely mer­it­less de­pic­tion of our plat­form and we will take what­ever steps are nec­es­sary to chal­lenge these find­ings through every means avail­able to us.”

The Commission could even­tu­ally agree with plat­forms on a wide range of changes that ad­dress ad­dic­tive de­sign. What they de­cide will de­pend on the dif­fer­ent risk pro­files and pat­terns of use of each plat­form — as well as how each com­pany de­fends it­self.

That likely means it will take a while for TikTok to make any change to its sys­tems, as the plat­form re­views the ev­i­dence and tries to ne­go­ti­ate a so­lu­tion with the reg­u­la­tor.

In an­other, sim­pler DSA en­force­ment case, it took the Commission more than a year af­ter is­su­ing pre­lim­i­nary find­ings to de­clare Elon Musk’s X was not com­pli­ant with its oblig­a­tions on trans­parency.

TikTok may pur­sue a se­ries of changes and may push the Commission to adopt a lighter reg­u­la­tory ap­proach. The video-shar­ing gi­ant likely won’t “get it right” the first time, said EDRi’s Penfrat, and it may take a few tries to sat­isfy Brussels.

“It could be any­thing from chang­ing de­fault set­tings, to out­right pro­hibit­ing a spe­cific de­sign fea­ture, or re­quir­ing more user con­trol,” said Peter Chapman, a gov­er­nance re­searcher and lawyer who is as­so­ci­ate di­rec­tor at the Knight-Georgetown Institute.

He ex­pects the changes could be dif­fer­ent for each plat­form — as while the find­ings show the Commission’s think­ing, in­ter­ven­tions must be tar­geted de­pend­ing on how de­sign fea­tures are used.

“Multiple plat­forms use sim­i­lar de­sign fea­tures” but they serve dif­fer­ent pur­poses and carry dif­fer­ent risks, said Chapman, point­ing to the ex­am­ple of no­ti­fi­ca­tions that try to draw you back in. For ex­am­ple, no­ti­fi­ca­tions for mes­sages carry a dif­fer­ent risk of ad­dic­tion to those alert­ing a user about a livestream, he said.

United States Customs and Border Protection plans to spend $225,000 for a year of ac­cess to Clearview AI, a face recog­ni­tion tool that com­pares pho­tos against bil­lions of im­ages scraped from the in­ter­net.

The deal ex­tends ac­cess to Clearview tools to Border Patrol’s head­quar­ters in­tel­li­gence di­vi­sion (INTEL) and the National Targeting Center, units that col­lect and an­a­lyze data as part of what CBP calls a co­or­di­nated ef­fort to “disrupt, de­grade, and dis­man­tle” peo­ple and net­works viewed as se­cu­rity threats.

The con­tract states that Clearview pro­vides ac­cess to “over 60+ bil­lion pub­licly avail­able im­ages” and will be used for “tactical tar­get­ing” and “strategic counter-net­work analy­sis,” in­di­cat­ing the ser­vice is in­tended to be em­bed­ded in an­a­lysts’ day-to-day in­tel­li­gence work rather than re­served for iso­lated in­ves­ti­ga­tions. CBP says its in­tel­li­gence units draw from a “variety of sources,” in­clud­ing com­mer­cially avail­able tools and pub­licly avail­able data, to iden­tify peo­ple and map their con­nec­tions for na­tional se­cu­rity and im­mi­gra­tion op­er­a­tions.

The agree­ment an­tic­i­pates an­a­lysts han­dling sen­si­tive per­sonal data, in­clud­ing bio­met­ric iden­ti­fiers such as face im­ages, and re­quires nondis­clo­sure agree­ments for con­trac­tors who have ac­cess. It does not spec­ify what kinds of pho­tos agents will up­load, whether searches may in­clude US cit­i­zens, or how long up­loaded im­ages or search re­sults will be re­tained.

The Clearview con­tract lands as the Department of Homeland Security faces mount­ing scrutiny over how face recog­ni­tion is used in fed­eral en­force­ment op­er­a­tions far be­yond the bor­der, in­clud­ing large-scale ac­tions in US cities that have swept up US cit­i­zens. Civil lib­er­ties groups and law­mak­ers have ques­tioned whether face-search tools are be­ing de­ployed as rou­tine in­tel­li­gence in­fra­struc­ture, rather than lim­ited in­ves­tiga­tive aids, and whether safe­guards have kept pace with ex­pan­sion.

Last week, Senator Ed Markey in­tro­duced leg­is­la­tion that would bar ICE and CBP from us­ing face recog­ni­tion tech­nol­ogy al­to­gether, cit­ing con­cerns that bio­met­ric sur­veil­lance is be­ing em­bed­ded with­out clear lim­its, trans­parency, or pub­lic con­sent.

CBP did not im­me­di­ately re­spond to ques­tions about how Clearview would be in­te­grated into its sys­tems, what types of im­ages agents are au­tho­rized to up­load, and whether searches may in­clude US cit­i­zens.

Clearview’s busi­ness model has drawn scrutiny be­cause it re­lies on scrap­ing pho­tos from pub­lic web­sites at scale. Those im­ages are con­verted into bio­met­ric tem­plates with­out the knowl­edge or con­sent of the peo­ple pho­tographed.

Clearview also ap­pears in DHS’s re­cently re­leased ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence in­ven­tory, linked to a CBP pi­lot ini­ti­ated in October 2025. The in­ven­tory en­try ties the pi­lot to CBP’s Traveler Verification System, which con­ducts face com­par­isons at ports of en­try and other bor­der-re­lated screen­ings.

CBP states in its pub­lic pri­vacy doc­u­men­ta­tion that the Traveler Verification System does not use in­for­ma­tion from “commercial sources or pub­licly avail­able data.” It is more likely, at launch, that Clearview ac­cess would in­stead be tied to CBP’s Automated Targeting System, which links bio­met­ric gal­leries, watch lists, and en­force­ment records, in­clud­ing files tied to re­cent Immigration and Customs Enforcement op­er­a­tions in ar­eas of the US far from any bor­der.

Clearview AI did not im­me­di­ately re­spond to a re­quest for com­ment.

Recent test­ing by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which eval­u­ated Clearview AI among other ven­dors, found that face-search sys­tems can per­form well on “high-quality visa-like pho­tos” but fal­ter in less con­trolled set­tings. Images cap­tured at bor­der cross­ings that were “not orig­i­nally in­tended for au­to­mated face recog­ni­tion” pro­duced er­ror rates that were “much higher, of­ten in ex­cess of 20 per­cent, even with the more ac­cu­rate al­go­rithms,” fed­eral sci­en­tists say.

The test­ing un­der­scores a cen­tral lim­i­ta­tion of the tech­nol­ogy: NIST found that face-search sys­tems can­not re­duce false matches with­out also in­creas­ing the risk that the sys­tems fail to rec­og­nize the cor­rect per­son.

As a re­sult, NIST says agen­cies may op­er­ate the soft­ware in an “investigative” set­ting that re­turns a ranked list of can­di­dates for hu­man re­view rather than a sin­gle con­firmed match. When sys­tems are con­fig­ured to al­ways re­turn can­di­dates, how­ever, searches for peo­ple not al­ready in the data­base will still gen­er­ate “matches” for re­view. In those cases, the re­sults will al­ways be 100 per­cent wrong.

Specification: SBOM 1.0 (Sandwich Bill of Materials)

Status: Draft

Maintainer: The SBOM Working Group

License: MIT (Mustard Is Transferable)

Modern sand­wich con­struc­tion re­lies on a com­plex graph of tran­si­tive in­gre­di­ents sourced from mul­ti­ple reg­istries (farms, dis­trib­u­tors, mar­kets). Consumers have no stan­dard­ized way to enu­mer­ate the com­po­nents of their lunch, as­sess in­gre­di­ent prove­nance, or ver­ify that their sand­wich was as­sem­bled from known-good sources. SBOM ad­dresses this by pro­vid­ing a ma­chine-read­able for­mat for de­clar­ing the full de­pen­dency tree of a sand­wich, in­clud­ing sub-com­po­nents, li­cens­ing in­for­ma­tion, and known vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties.

A typ­i­cal sand­wich con­tains be­tween 6 and 47 di­rect de­pen­den­cies, each pulling in its own tran­si­tive in­gre­di­ents. A “simple” BLT de­pends on ba­con, which de­pends on pork, which de­pends on a pig, which de­pends on feed corn, wa­ter, an­tibi­otics, and a farmer whose field has­n’t flooded yet. The con­sumer sees three let­ters, but the sup­ply chain sees a di­rected acyclic graph with cy­cle de­tec­tion is­sues (the pig eats the corn that grows in the field that was fer­til­ized by the pig).

The 2025 egg price cri­sis was a cas­cad­ing fail­ure equiv­a­lent to a left-pad in­ci­dent, ex­cept it af­fected break­fast. A sin­gle avian flu out­break took down the en­tire egg ecosys­tem for months. Post-incident analy­sis re­vealed that 94% of af­fected sand­wiches had no lock­file and were re­solv­ing eggs to lat­est at as­sem­bly time.

An SBOM doc­u­ment MUST be a JSON file with the .sbom ex­ten­sion, af­ter YAML was con­sid­ered and re­jected on the grounds that the sand­wich in­dus­try has enough prob­lems with­out adding white­space sen­si­tiv­ity.

Each sand­wich com­po­nent MUST in­clude the fol­low­ing fields:

surl (required): A Sandwich URL uniquely iden­ti­fy­ing the in­gre­di­ent. Format: surl:type/​name@ver­sion. Follows the same con­ven­tion as PURL but for food. Examples:

name (required): The canon­i­cal name of the in­gre­di­ent as reg­is­tered in a rec­og­nized food reg­istry. Unregistered in­gre­di­ents (e.g., “that sauce from the place”) MUST be de­clared as un­ver­i­fied-source and will trig­ger a warn­ing dur­ing sand­wich lint­ing.

ver­sion (required): The spe­cific ver­sion of the in­gre­di­ent. Tomatoes MUST use cal­en­dar ver­sion­ing (harvest date). Cheese MUST use age-based ver­sion­ing (e.g., ched­dar@18m). Bread fol­lows semver, where a MAJOR ver­sion bump in­di­cates a change in grain type, MINOR in­di­cates a change in hy­dra­tion per­cent­age, and PATCH in­di­cates some­one left it out overnight and it’s a bit stale but prob­a­bly fine.

sup­plier (required): The ori­gin reg­istry. Valid reg­istries in­clude farm://, su­per­mar­ket://, farm­ers-mar­ket://, and back-of-the-fridge://. The lat­ter is con­sid­ered an un­trusted source and com­po­nents re­solved from it MUST in­clude a best-be­fore in­tegrity check.

in­tegrity (required): A SHA-256 hash of the in­gre­di­ent at time of ac­qui­si­tion.

li­cense (required): The li­cense un­der which the in­gre­di­ent is dis­trib­uted. Common li­censes in­clude:

MIT (Mustard Is Transferable): The in­gre­di­ent may be used in any sand­wich with­out re­stric­tion. Attribution ap­pre­ci­ated but not re­quired.

GPL (General Pickle License): If you in­clude a GPL-licensed in­gre­di­ent, the en­tire sand­wich be­comes open-source. You must pro­vide the full recipe to any­one who asks. Pickle ven­dors have been par­tic­u­larly ag­gres­sive about this.

AGPL (Affero General Pickle License): Same as GPL, but if you serve the sand­wich over a net­work (delivery apps), you must also pub­lish the recipe. This is why most restau­rants avoid AGPL pick­les.

BSD (Bread, Sauce, Distributed): Permissive. You can do what­ever you want as long as you keep the orig­i­nal bak­er’s name on the bread bag, and also a sec­ond copy of the bak­er’s name, and also don’t use the bak­er’s name to pro­mote your sand­wich with­out per­mis­sion. There are four vari­ants of this li­cense and no­body can re­mem­ber which is which.

SSPL (Server Side Pickle License): You may use this pickle in your sand­wich, but if you of­fer sand­wich-mak­ing as a ser­vice, you must open-source your en­tire kitchen, in­clud­ing the weird drawer with all the take­away menus. Most cloud sand­wich providers have stopped serv­ing SSPL pick­les en­tirely.

Proprietary: The in­gre­di­en­t’s com­po­si­tion is not dis­closed. Common for “secret sauces.” Consumption is per­mit­ted but re­dis­tri­b­u­tion, re­verse-en­gi­neer­ing, or ask­ing what’s in it are pro­hib­ited by the EULA you agreed to by open­ing the packet.

Public Domain: The in­gre­di­en­t’s cre­ator has waived all rights. Salt, for ex­am­ple, has been pub­lic do­main since ap­prox­i­mately the Jurassic pe­riod, though sev­eral com­pa­nies have at­tempted to re­li­cense it.

Sandwich as­sem­bly MUST re­solve de­pen­den­cies depth-first. If two in­gre­di­ents de­clare con­flict­ing sub-de­pen­den­cies (e.g., sour­dough re­quires starter-cul­ture@wild but the pro­sciut­to’s cur­ing process pins salt@hi­malayan-pink), the as­sem­bler SHOULD at­tempt ver­sion ne­go­ti­a­tion. If ne­go­ti­a­tion fails, the sand­wich en­ters a con­flict state and MUST NOT be con­sumed un­til a hu­man re­views the de­pen­dency tree and makes a judge­ment call.

Circular de­pen­den­cies are per­mit­ted but dis­cour­aged. A sand­wich that con­tains bread made with beer made with grain from the same field as the bread is tech­ni­cally valid but will cause the re­solver to emit a warn­ing about “co-dependent sour­dough.”

All SBOM doc­u­ments SHOULD be scanned against the National Sandwich Vulnerability Database (NSVD). Known vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties in­clude:

CVE-2024-MAYO: Mayonnaise left at room tem­per­a­ture for more than four hours. Severity: Critical. Affected ver­sions: all. No patch avail­able; mit­i­ga­tion re­quires re­frig­er­a­tion, which the spec­i­fi­ca­tion can­not en­force.

CVE-2023-GLUTEN: Bread con­tains gluten. This is not a bug; it is a fea­ture of wheat. However, it must be dis­closed be­cause ap­prox­i­mately 1% of con­sumers will ex­pe­ri­ence ad­verse ef­fects, and the re­main­ing 99% will ask about it any­way.

CVE-2025-AVO: Avocado ripeness win­dow is ap­prox­i­mately 17 min­utes. Version pin­ning is in­ef­fec­tive. The work­ing group rec­om­mends ven­dor­ing av­o­cado (i.e., buy­ing it al­ready mashed) to re­duce ex­po­sure to ripeness drift.

CVE-2019-SPROUT: Alfalfa sprouts were found to be ex­e­cut­ing ar­bi­trary bac­te­ria in an un­sand­boxed en­vi­ron­ment. Severity: High. The ven­dor dis­putes this clas­si­fi­ca­tion.

Each in­gre­di­ent MUST in­clude a signed prove­nance at­tes­ta­tion from the sup­plier. The at­tes­ta­tion MUST be gen­er­ated in a her­metic build en­vi­ron­ment and MUST NOT be gen­er­ated in a build en­vi­ron­ment where other food is be­ing pre­pared si­mul­ta­ne­ously, as this in­tro­duces the risk of cross-con­t­a­m­i­na­tion of prove­nance claims.

For farm-sourced in­gre­di­ents, the at­tes­ta­tion chain SHOULD ex­tend to the seed or an­i­mal of ori­gin. A toma­to’s prove­nance chain in­cludes the seed, the soil, the wa­ter, the sun­light, the farmer, the truck, the dis­trib­u­tor, and the shelf it sat on for a pe­riod the su­per­mar­ket would pre­fer not to dis­close.

Eggs are worse, be­cause an egg’s prove­nance at­tes­ta­tion is gen­er­ated by a chicken that may it­self lack a valid at­tes­ta­tion chain. The work­ing group has de­ferred the ques­tion of chicken-or-egg prove­nance or­der­ing to ver­sion 2.0.

A sand­wich MUST be re­pro­ducible. Given iden­ti­cal in­puts, two in­de­pen­dent as­sem­blers MUST pro­duce bite-for-bite iden­ti­cal sand­wiches, which in prac­tice is im­pos­si­ble. The spec­i­fi­ca­tion han­dles this by re­quir­ing as­sem­blers to doc­u­ment all sources of non-de­ter­min­ism in a sand­wich.lock file, in­clud­ing:

Whether the as­sem­bler was “just eye­balling it” for condi­ment quan­ti­ties

Reproducible sand­wich builds re­main as­pi­ra­tional. A com­pli­ance level of “close enough” is ac­cept­able for non-safety-crit­i­cal sand­wiches. Safety-critical sand­wiches SHOULD tar­get full re­pro­ducibil­ity.

Consumers SHOULD au­dit their full de­pen­dency tree be­fore con­sump­tion. A sbom au­dit com­mand will flag any in­gre­di­ent that:

Has not been up­dated in more than 12 months

Is main­tained by a sin­gle farmer with no suc­ces­sion plan (see also: goat farm­ing)

Has more than 200 tran­si­tive sub-in­gre­di­ents

Was sourced from a reg­istry that does not sup­port 2FA

Contains an in­gre­di­ent whose main­tainer has mass-trans­ferred own­er­ship to an un­known en­tity in a dif­fer­ent coun­try (see: the left-let­tuce in­ci­dent)

Early adop­tion has been mixed. The ar­ti­sanal sand­wich com­mu­nity ob­jects to ma­chine-read­able for­mats on philo­soph­i­cal grounds, ar­gu­ing that a sand­wich’s in­gre­di­ents should be dis­cov­er­able through the act of eat­ing it. The fast food in­dus­try has ex­pressed sup­port in prin­ci­ple but notes that their sand­wich­es’ de­pen­dency trees are trade se­crets and will be shipped as com­piled bi­na­ries.

The EU Sandwich Resilience Act (SRA) re­quires all sand­wiches sold or dis­trib­uted within the European Union to in­clude a ma­chine-read­able SBOM by Q3 2027. Sandwiches with­out a valid SBOM will be de­nied en­try at the bor­der. The European Commission has en­dorsed the spec­i­fi­ca­tion as part of its broader lunch sov­er­eignty agenda, ar­gu­ing that mem­ber states can­not de­pend on for­eign sand­wich in­fra­struc­ture with­out vis­i­bil­ity into the in­gre­di­ent graph. A work­ing pa­per on “strategic au­ton­omy in condi­ment sup­ply chains” is ex­pected Q2 2027.

The US has is­sued Executive Order 14028.5, which re­quires all sand­wiches served in fed­eral build­ings to in­clude an SBOM. The or­der does not spec­ify whether it means Sandwich or Software Bill of Materials. Several fed­eral agen­cies have be­gun sub­mit­ting both.

The Software Heritage foun­da­tion archives all pub­licly avail­able source code as a ref­er­ence for fu­ture gen­er­a­tions, and the Sandwich Heritage Foundation has adopted the same mis­sion for sand­wiches, with less suc­cess.

Every sand­wich as­sem­bled un­der SBOM 1.0 is archived in a con­tent-ad­dress­able store keyed by its in­tegrity hash. The archive cur­rently holds 14 sand­wiches be­cause most con­trib­u­tors can­not fig­ure out how to hash a sand­wich with­out eat­ing it first. A BLT sub­mit­ted in March was re­jected be­cause the toma­to’s check­sum changed dur­ing tran­sit. The Foundation sus­pects con­den­sa­tion.

Long-term preser­va­tion re­mains an open prob­lem. Software can be archived in­def­i­nitely on disk, but sand­wiches in­tro­duce ma­te­r­ial con­straints the spec­i­fi­ca­tion was not de­signed for. The Foundation has ex­plored freeze-dry­ing, vac­uum seal­ing, and “just tak­ing a re­ally de­tailed photo,” but none of these pro­duce a bit-for-bit re­pro­ducible sand­wich from the archive. The work­ing group con­sid­ers this a stor­age layer con­cern and out of scope for the spec­i­fi­ca­tion.

Funding comes from in­di­vid­ual do­na­tions and a pend­ing grant ap­pli­ca­tion to the EU’s Horizon pro­gramme un­der the call for “digital preser­va­tion of cul­tural food her­itage.” The ap­pli­ca­tion was re­jected once al­ready on the grounds that sand­wiches are not dig­i­tal, a char­ac­ter­i­za­tion the Foundation dis­putes given that every sand­wich un­der SBOM 1.0 is, by de­f­i­n­i­tion, a dig­i­tal ar­ti­fact with a hash.

This spec­i­fi­ca­tion is ded­i­cated to a small sand­wich shop on Folsom Street in SoMA that made the best BLT the au­thor has ever eaten, and which closed in 2019 with­out pro­duc­ing an SBOM or pub­lish­ing its recipe in any ma­chine-read­able for­mat.

This spec­i­fi­ca­tion is pro­vided “AS IS” with­out war­ranty of any kind, in­clud­ing but not lim­ited to the war­ranties of ed­i­bil­ity, fit­ness for a par­tic­u­lar meal, and non-con­t­a­m­i­na­tion. The SBOM Working Group is not re­spon­si­ble for any sand­wich con­structed in ac­cor­dance with this spec­i­fi­ca­tion that nonethe­less tastes bad.