Amazon is currently experiencing “high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1,” causing a massive outage for sites, apps, and services across the web. The AWS service health dashboard was also temporarily affected by the outage. Amazon says it is working at repairing S3 and that they believe they have identified the root cause. Care to…
Linux creator Linus Torvalds joined Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, on stage at the Open Source Leadership Summit for a candid conversation on maintaining open source projects. After 25 years of maintaining the Linux kernal, Torvalds has developed a network of trust that enables the project to iterate quickly with its 2.5…
In 2016, Acunetix, a UK-based security firm, found that 33% of websites and web apps are vulnerable to XSS. This number is down 5% from the company’s findings for the previous year, but it’s still one of the most common vulnerabilities. In fact, every WordPress security release for the past year has included patches for…
Kevin Wang and his team at FOSSA have carved out a niche for themselves in the open source product space with the launch of their license compliance and dependency analysis tool. The company announced a $2.2 million seed round this week after completing a year-long private beta period with Fortune 500 companies. FOSSA continuously scans…
Discourse is free, open-source discussion software created by Jeff Atwood in 2013. In addition to celebrating its fourth birthday, the team announced the Discourse Encouragement Fund. The fund allows the development team to pay contributors for critical work. In the course of a year, Discourse has paid 16 different developers a total of $17,000 to work…
Cloudflare, a content distribution network used by many popular sites, published detailed information about a security vulnerability that leaked user information, some of which was private, including passwords, private messages, etc. The vulnerability was discovered by security researcher Tavis Ormandy, a member of Google’s Project Zero team. The issue stems from a memory leak in…
Online harassment is a hot topic right now, as Twitter’s perennial battle with trolls heats up, forcing the company to develop new features to combat abuse. Technology companies are scrambling to create solutions that will make their communities safer for users and now Google is taking on the challenge of online harassment as part of…
WordPress contributor teams are getting ready for the next Community Summit, which will be held in Paris leading up to WordCamp Europe on June 13-14. This is the first time the event will be held outside the United States, making it more accessible to European community members who may have been unable to attend previous…
In October 2016, Zerif Lite was suspended from the WordPress Themes Directory after failure to comply with the Theme Review Team’s guidelines. The suspension left 300,000 users (including those using Zerif Lite child themes) without maintenance and security updates. After five months of fixes and several rounds of review, Zerif Lite has returned to the…
BuddyPress 2.8 “San Matteo,” was released last week, led by long-time BuddyPress contributor Slava Abakumov. The release was named for San Matteo Panuozzo, an NYC pizza restaurant that specializes in panuozzo, a more portable pizza-sandwich hybrid. Following suit with the previous release, 2.8 focuses on improvements for developers and site builders, the project’s new target…
This post was contributed by guest author Peter Suhm. Peter is a web developer from the Land of the Danes. He is the creator of WP Pusher and a huge travel addict, bringing his work along with him as he goes. In the last few years, a wave of virtualization technologies have swept through…
When Disqus announced it would be releasing new, subscription-based versions later this year, users didn’t expect to have the new advertising model injected into their sites without notice. Disqus CEO Daniel Ha said the company would release finalized pricing and provide more details well in advance of its planned March release, but users are reporting…
The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Leadership Summit is happening in Lake Tahoe, CA, February 14-16, 2017. The invitation-only event brings together open source technology leaders to collaborate across different projects and share best practices. The organizers will be live streaming all of the keynote sessions for free throughout the three-day event for a total of…
It has been nearly two weeks since the WordPress security team disclosed an unauthenticated privilege escalation vulnerability in a REST API endpoint in 4.7 and 4.7.1. The vulnerability was patched silently and disclosure was delayed for a week to give WordPress site owners a head start on updating to 4.7.2. Last week hundreds of thousands…
10up launched ElasticPress.io this week, its new Elasticsearch SaaS product with plans starting at $299/month. Elasticsearch is an open source, distributed search engine that speeds up searching by using JSON documents to store data in indices. The indices store mapping fields to the corresponding documents and the engine searches the index instead of a site’s…