Recode Daily: A leak-peek at Apple’s new iPhone before its Sept. 12 event

Programming note: Recode Daily will take a break for the U.S. Labor Day weekend, so there will be no newsletter in your email on Monday morning — we’ll see you back here on Tuesday. Thank you for reading, and enjoy the holiday!

Apple will unveil new iPhones, iPad Pros and maybe a larger-screen Apple Watch on Sept. 12 at the Steve Jobs Theater at its Cupertino HQ. Media invites went out with the cryptic tagline “Gather round,” which may be a reference to the home button, the company’s forthcoming AirPower wireless charging device or “The Lord of the Rings.” Leaked images of a new iPhone have popped up — insiders say it will be called iPhone XS and will come in 5.8-inch and 6.5-inch models, with a gold-finish option — and here’s a peek at what may be called the Apple Watch Series 4. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett likes what he sees at Apple — his Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate just upped his already large stake in the company to 252 million shares, worth more than $50 billion. [Zac Hall / 9to5Mac]

The city of Santa Monica announced that four companies — Bird, Lime, Lyft and the Uber-owned Jump — will receive permits for bikes and scooters. And San Francisco announced that only two scooter companies — Scoot and Skip — will get the coveted permits to participate in a one-year, powered-scooter-share pilot program. The San Francisco news comes as a rebuke to hometown ride-hail companies Uber and Lyft, both of which are expanding beyond cars in an effort to become one-stop mobility shops. It’s also a snub to startups Bird and Lime, the two largest shared-scooter operators in the world; each is valued at over $1 billion. [Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge]

Meanwhile, Uber is quietly building its own electric scooter, racing to play catch-up in a market already flush with billion dollar startups. The project is being overseen by Jump Bikes, which Uber acquired in April for more than $100 million. The ubiquitous two-wheelers have become a tech industry fixation since Bird, a Santa Monica-based startup run by a former Uber employee, launched a scooter-sharing service last fall. [Joshua Brustein / Bloomberg Businessweek]

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey will testify at a Sept. 5 hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee about social media companies’ responses to foreign influence operations. Alphabet CEO Larry Page has also been invited to the hearing, although the company has not yet committed to sending him. Meanwhile, Twitter said it will begin requiring some organizations that purchase political ads on topics such as abortion, health-care reform and immigration to disclose more information about themselves to users. [Tony Romm / The Washington Post]

Taking on Trump’s huffy-puffy attacks on big tech, Kara Swisher says that the president’s tweeted allegations that Google and Twitter are rigging their platforms against him are “both wildly untrue and mostly easily proved false in all kinds of ways.” And in the Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal says there is a reason why Google doesn’t rank right-wing news outlets highly — mainstream media organizations are better-resourced, do far more reporting than smaller, explicitly politicized sites, and “are the ones reporting the state of the world best.” At Axios, Mike Allen says Trump’s attacks on social media seem to be working. [Kara Swisher / The New York Times]

Your long-weekend beach read: For nearly a decade, tech billionaire Vinod Khosla has been fighting in court to keep pesky fellow citizens off his sand-lawn. The venture capitalist didn’t just buy a beach house south of Half Moon Bay, Calif. — he bought an entire beach village, forming a limited liability company that owned the land beneath about 47 cottages, a little shop that at one point sold ice cream — and the only viable public path to the sand. The case has wound itself to the Supreme Court, and Khosla, who co-founded Sun Microsystems, says he is willing to keep litigating this for the rest of his life — if he wins, he could reshape the laws that govern 1,100 miles of California shore. [Nellie Bowles / The New York Times]

TRUMP WATCH: No tweets this morning! ELON WATCH: From last night, “Can Steve Bannon please insult me some more? Best PR I’ve had in a while.”

Here’s how Burning Man has evolved over three decades.

And wherever you spend Labor Day, here’s how to make your crappy iPhone photos beautiful.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.