Check out this great account from former NeXT employee Chris MacAskill. He talks about how a phone call he made behind then-NeXT CEO Steve Jobs’s back (as you do) to Intel CEO Andy Grove probably played a role in Apple eventually buying NeXT. It’s a long story with lots of anecdotal details about working at NeXT and the things that were happening there in the lead-up to Apple buying the company. I love this stuff, I love the lore and the behind-the-scenes stories of how things happened. Mr. MacAskill isn’t taking all the credit for Apple buying NeXT, but he played a (hidden) role. If you like Apple history, this is a must-read. Here’s just a tiny taste:

The thing I loved most about working in developer relations at NeXT was how Steve could call anyone.

He would burst in my office and say, “I’m gonna call Bill about TrueType,” and gesture for me to follow. A minute later he’d have Bill Gates on the speaker phone with me in fly-on-the-wall mode.

“BUT BILL! You ripped off Adobe and made John cry.” (John Warnock was the CEO of Adobe.)

“Steve, we didn’t want to get into the font business. It’s a nightmare. But Adobe wouldn’t open their fonts until they had competition.”

The White House is working on a proposal for an American GDPR. Over the past month, the Commerce Department has met with representatives of over 80 companies, trade associations, and consumer groups.

The government’s goal is to release an initial set of ideas this fall that outlines Web users’ rights, including general principles for how companies should collect and handle consumers’ private information, the people said. The forthcoming blueprint could then become the basis for Congress to write the country’s first wide-ranging online-privacy law, an idea the White House recently has said it could endorse.

A spokesperson for President Trump said that the administration wanted to achieve “the appropriate balance between privacy and prosperity.” Here’s the Orr Translation: Corporations will continue to erode our privacy with Trump’s blessing.