A group of 30 companies that own more than 200 local newspapers have formed a coalition against Google and Facebook in a newly consolidated antitrust lawsuit, alleging the tech giants have manipulated the digital ad market to the detriment of local news. The Charleston Gazette-Mail, a small West Virginia newspaper, was the first to file…
WordPress Core Contributor Konstantin Kovshenin has released a new page caching plugin called Surge. Searching the WordPress plugin directory, you will find hundreds of caching and cache purging plugins, but this one stands out from competitors in that it requires no configuration. The plugin starts working as soon as it’s activated, and there are no…
In October 2021, the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) initiated a lawsuit against Vizio, an American TV manufacturer, for shipping products with copyleft licenses but refusing to provide the source code after multiple attempts at contact since 2018. The lawsuit is historic in its approach, because it focuses on consumer rights conferred by copyleft licenses and…
Gravatar is fielding questions today after “Have I Been Pwned,” a data breech checker service, tweeted “New scraped data: Gravatar had 167M profiles scraped in Oct last year via an enumeration vector. 114M of the MD5 email address hashes were subsequently cracked and distributed alongside names and usernames.“ It claims 72% of these email addresses…
Open Source Initiative, the organization that stewards the Open Source Definition, has launched a new survey on the usage of open source, in collaboration with OpenLogic by Perforce. The survey takes a broad look at the trends and challenges organizations and users experience when adopting open source software today. “In the 2022 State of Open Source…
At the end of November, prominent members of the PHP community formed a new PHP Foundation as a non-profit organization, “to ensure the long life and prosperity of the PHP language.” The founding members include Automattic, Laravel, Acquia, Zend, Craft CMS, Private Packagist, Tideways, PrestaShop, Symfony, and JetBrains—a group of companies with products that rely…
WordPress 5.9 beta 1 is now available for testing. With just eight weeks remaining until the official release lands, the team is focusing on testing, an important part of the development process that will keep 5.9 on track. Due to the great many interconnected parts of full-site editing (FSE) that will make their debut in…
The Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) marketing team at Delicious Brains kicked up a sandstorm over the weekend after it emailed its lifetime license holders, asking them to consider signing up for a discounted subscription. Despite Delicious Brains’ explicit promise that they would never be required to pay for ACF updates in the future, the sales…
Last week WordPress 5.9’s release leads found a consensus for delaying the release after missing the deadlines for Beta 1 due to significant blockers. At that time they proposed a schedule for moving forward, and that is now confirmed. Beta 1 is planned for November 30, 2021, with subsequent betas in December. RC 1 is…
In a disclosure to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that was published today, GoDaddy announced a data security breach impacting its WordPress managed hosting customers. The company discovered unauthorized third-party access to its hosting environment on November 17, 2021, through an exploited vulnerability. GoDaddy’s initial investigations show the attacker gained access using a…
WordPress 5.9 has been delayed due to significant blockers that could not be resolved in time for Beta 1, which was previously scheduled to be released November 16. The 5.9 release team came to the decision after a lengthy deliberation on the impact a delay will have on users and contributors. Robert Anderson, Editor Tech…
The upcoming BuddyPress 10.0.0 beta 1 release was scheduled for November 20, but contributors have decided to postpone the beta by two weeks, due to lack of time for adequately testing recent improvements to the planned features. The stable release has been rescheduled for December 24. This version will require WordPress >= 5.4. The delayed beta…
Some new data from a recent Core Web Vitals (CWV) technology report produced by the HTTP Archive shows WordPress sites running newer versions have lower CWV pass rates. The original report was published in July by Rick Viscomi, one of the maintainers of the HTTP Archive. The site provides a permanent repository of web performance…
WordPress executive director Josepha Haden Chomphosy announced today that the 2021 State of the Word will be held on December 14, between 5 and 7 pm ET/10 – 12 am (December 15) UTC. For those who are new to the WordPress community, this event is where Matt Mullenweg reviews the milestones and progress of the…
GoDaddy has acquired managed WordPress hosting company Pagely to expand the company’s expertise in hosting WooCommerce stores. Pagely, co-founded by Joshua and Sally Strebel, has been in business for 18 years, offering hosting for businesses and enterprises at the higher end of the managed hosting market. “We will be working closely with the amazing team…