Web

Fanworks hub Archive of Our Own is no stranger to downtime, but an as-yet-unexplained outage of potentially up to a month — announced on the site’s status page — is going to send a lot of fanfic writers scrambling:

Discord acknowledges that long-form conversations that can be popular on message boards, like help posts and theory crafting, have moved to Discord where they’re “inaccessible to the wider internet.”

Developer Charlie Gerard has released a fun Chrome extension that makes digital plants grow over your tabs when you’re not actively looking at them, at a timescale of your choosing. Once a page is more than 5 percent overgrown, you can’t click, select, or drag anything until you clear the vines.

Blackburn (R-TN) said the updated terms “indicate Meta is attempting to exploit American creators and businesses by granting itself sweeping authority to scrape content from any website associated with Facebook ​and Instagram business accounts,” according to Reuters.

CEO Matthew Prince says the company saw thousands of attempts to exploit the PHP vulnerability across the Cloudflare network in the 10 hours before the issue was publicly announced. That jumped to “hundreds of thousands” of attacks in the 2 hours after the disclosure, and “millions” by last night. Yikes.

TechCrunch reports that layoffs have hit the company’s “communications team, social team, WordPress.com, and its VIP enterprise business.” It’s unclear how many have been laid off.

As announced last year, Chrome will now show a warning when you visit public websites without an encrypted HTTPS connection. The new warnings will appear the first time you visit a site without a secure connection. If you continue to the site, Google won’t present the warning for another two weeks.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s free browser extension is now available on Safari version 26.5 and later, along with other browsers like Firefox and Chrome. EFF says it’s working on bringing Privacy Badger to Safari for iOS, too. Earlier this month, EFF also shared some new guides with more online privacy tips and browser suggestions.

It shared a prototype demo for “seamless updates” that wouldn’t require you to restart your browser. That feature’s still in development, but in the meantime Microsoft also says Edge users can opt-in for “Restart to update on idle,” which was previously called “Instant Updates.”

It would open the door for shorter handles, like “steviebonifield.bsky” rather than “steviebonifield.bsky.social.” But it might be a long wait before that’s an option — Bluesky CEO Toni Schneider said in a post that the application could take 18 to 24 months to go through.

The video game decompilation movement has done it again. Not only do we have 128 player Halo across Windows, Linux, and Android , you can also just fire it up in a web browser thanks to OpenHaloCE and immediately start campaign or a huge multiplayer match. It’s not just one dev: lots of people made this happen.

Staffers don’t know whether the site will shut down — but managing editor Derrek Lee confirms to The Verge that all remaining staff were laid off today. EIC Shruti Shekar confirms she’s been laid off, senior editor Harish Jonnalagadda and senior content producer Nicolas Sutrich wrote they’d been laid off, and senior editor Namarah Saud Fatmi also appears to be gone.

The campaign compares the Mozilla Foundation’s accomplishments with the work done by Big Tech, as reported earlier by Business Insider. One poster puts Mark Zuckerberg next to Mozilla Foundation fellow Iara Cunha Passos, saying: “Mark gets into eyeware. Gives creepers peepers. Iara builds local AI. Exposes political violence. The powerful shouldn’t choose what we see.”

Earlier this month, the board of WordPress.com’s owner put its CEO, Matt Mullenweg, on paid leave in an effort to oust him. Two days later, he was back at the helm. And now, two weeks after the failed coup, the board has been replaced.

If you need an alternative to all the soul-destroying news filling your feeds all day long you can point your browser to Changelog.earth which is a variation on video game patch notes that instead highlights all the positive progress our planet is making. Believe it or not, good things are still happening.

There’s a truly wild report today from Futurism about a trio of brothers who have built a content empire filled with fakery, including completely fabricated writers with huge credentials. Apparently they’re getting massive web traffic from this scheme. Maybe it’s a good thing Google is going to zero.

Following a very Sam Altman-ish arc, TechCrunch reports that Mullenweg’s return as CEO of the parent company for WordPress has come with the departure of the board that had voted to put him on a paid leave of absence.

The privacy-focused browser will now let users create decoy addresses to sign up for services. Brave will still forward messages from those services to your primary email, so you won’t miss out on important updates. But it adds a layer of protection, making it harder for big tech to track you.

Rewatching We’re All Going to the World’s Fair had me thinking about internet lore, creepypastas, and urban legends. Personally, I’m a sucker for a good haunted videogame like Ben Drowned or Petscop. But I want to know what weird and creepy internet rabbitholes you think are worth diving down.

Nvidia’s cloud gaming service can now stream more than 5,000 PC games directly in the Mozilla browser, joining existing support for Chrome, Safari, Edge, and Opera GX. It’s the latest effort to get GeForce Now onto as many screens as possible, following its expansions to Linux and Amazon Fire TV this year.

Nearly two years after the YouTuber’s first video accusing PayPal’s Honey browser extension of ripping off customers, affiliated creators, and even retailers, he’s back.

The flight-tracking site claims Kalshi is using its data to “run gambling markets on flight cancellations” even after it asked the prediction market platform to stop. “Kalshi instead accessed FlightAware’s data without authorization and then represented to customers that market outcomes were ‘verified from FlightAware,’” the lawsuit states.

Microsoft recently announced its Edge browser is dropping support for Manifest V2 extensions, but uBlock Origin will keep working on other browsers like Firefox.

As spotted by 9to5Google, you can change the background to different colors and images, including uploading your own, and set the background to refresh everyday, like on the desktop version of Chrome. The new backgrounds are under “Customize new tab page” in Chrome’s three dots menu.