Web

A report about how much money these websites are making found that 62 of the 85 websites it examined had hosting or content delivery services provided by Amazon and Cloudflare. Google’s sign-on system was also used on 54 of the websites, alongside several other services and payment systems provided by mainstream tech companies.

Archive of our Own went down for a few days over the 4th of July weekend, upsetting the holiday fanfiction reading plans of the site’s millions of users before service was restored. AO3 goes down occasionally for all sorts of issues, but the reason for this outage was special and hilarious.

Thanks to Metafilter for introducing me to The Box. Wearable technology for women will never be the same.

The tool, which is built into DuckDuckGo’s browser, displays a warning message when you click on potentially dangerous sites. In addition to blocking phishing sites, malware, and common online scams, DuckDuckGo has expanded the tool to protect against fake online stores, phony crypto exchanges, and those obnoxious sites that falsely claim your device has a virus.

This whole Trevor Noah / Jon Stewart pod is a good listen. But there’s a big chunk — starting about 13 minutes in — that turns into a really great chat about how we experience the internet. And Stewart makes a comparison I truly love:

Following a slew of complaints from editors, a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson confirmed to 404 Media that it’s pausing the two-week test, which began on June 2nd.

The New York Times surveyed the ecosystem of disinformation around the LA anti-ICE protests, and the results are striking for looking... pretty much exactly like the pre-AI world: old recirculated photos, fabricated quotes, and a shot from an ‘80s action movie. The Washington Post did its own social media look-around and found mostly people supporting dueling narratives with real footage. There’s still time for generated fakes to cause problems, but at the moment, reality seems to be eye-catching enough.

The company, which runs WordPress.com, paused contributions to the WordPress open-source project in January, citing the “significant time and money” it spent due to its ongoing legal battle with WP Engine.

Mary Hubbard, the executive director of WordPress.org, said the group will work on “accelerating and coordinating artificial intelligence projects across the WordPress ecosystem.” The team will also maintain a public roadmap of its AI plans and plugins, which it will share on its new page for “Core AI.”

After announcing its second browser, Dia, last year, the company stopped developing new features for original breakout Arc. Now CEO Josh Miller explains why, and admits he considered either selling or open-sourcing the software. Neither is on the table right now (because it would require giving up their custom development kit, or “secret sauce”), but “that doesn’t mean it’ll never happen.”

Do you mourn the old world dying? Will you celebrate the new world’s struggle to be born? Write (or, in a few months, read) about it.