Jacob Kastrenakes
The latest volley in the WordPress beef:
WordPress.org’s contributor login page now requires users to certify that they are “not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise.” 404 Media spotted the new checkbox.
Web
Jay Peters
iCloud.com finally gets dark mode.
You can also set a background color, see pinned notes, and more. MacRumors has the full list of updates.
Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge
Wes Davis
The shortcut to AI-generated smartphone-style photos.
As a reminder that AI image generators’ training data tends to include peoples’ regular smartphone photos, try entering an iPhone-like picture file name into the prompt field for Flux1.1 Pro, as this person did.
I got some similar results when I tried prompts like “IMG_4001.JPG” with its predecessor, Flux.1, a model that drives xAI’s Grok-2 image generation.
David Pierce
Wes Davis
Lego’s site was hacked to promote fake crypto.
An X post spotted by The Brick Fan flagged to the company yesterday that its online shop was displaying a “LEGO Coin” cryptocurrency banner.
Naturally, there is no such thing; Lego tells Engadget that the situation was quickly resolved and no user data was compromised.
Wes Davis
YouTube has almost reversed all the damage from a channel-deleting glitch.
After a bug “incorrectly flagged” some channels for spam and removed them, YouTube started working on getting the channels back. That’s done, the Team YouTube X account posted — now it’s just working to get the last few videos reinstated.
Wes Davis
Texas is suing TikTok for sharing minors’ personal data.
State Attorney General Ken Paxton alleges that TikTok has violated the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment Act by not giving parents control of their kids’ privacy and account settings, writes Reuters. TikTok denied the allegations in a statement to The Texas Tribune.
TikTok A federal judge blocked part of the act requiring large social networks to stop harmful content from reaching minors just prior to the law taking effect on September 1st.
The lines between the WordPress open-source project, the nonprofit backing it, and the commercial arm owned by Automattic are blurring.
Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Mozilla on the future of advertising and privacy.
In a blog post, Mozilla president Mark Surman writes about the organization’s plans to fix the “fundamentally broken” online advertising industry:
We have the beginnings of a theory on what fixing it might look like — a mix of different business practices, technology, products, and public policy engagements. And we have started to do work on all of these fronts.
You can read Mozilla’s full plan in the post linked below.
Jess Weatherbed
David Pierce
This is kind of a genius bookmarking strategy.
I had no idea you could do this! Joseph Basquin points out that you can manage bookmarks by treating them like files. The drag-and-drop strategy doesn’t work everywhere, but is solid in Chrome and Safari.
If you’re a Spotlight / Alfred / Raycast user on the Mac or the Start menu search on Windows, this might be the fastest possible way to get to a website.
The best browser bookmarking system is already built-in
[afewthingz.com]
Emma Roth
Wes Davis
Meta appears to own Threads dot com now.
DomainInvesting spotted the Whois-listed change yesterday.
Last year, threads.com was just the website for a Slack-like app — you can imagine the traffic it got when Meta launched its Twitter alternative. Shopify bought Threads-the-company in June, though, perhaps clearing the way for Meta to scoop the domain for Threads-the-platform. And just in time for its Connect event, no less!
Meta Acquires Threads.com Domain Name | DomainInvesting.com
[DomainInvesting.com]
The Browser Company cofounder thinks it’s time to modernize the browser and reinvent the web.
Nilay Patel
Sean Hollister
Facebook will face a labor court in Kenya after abruptly laying off 185 content moderators.
Meta tried to settle, and it tried to appeal, but former moderators and the Kenyan courts have now rejected both attempts according to The Associated Press. In the US, Meta settled with content moderators for $52 million in 2020, after some were diagnosed with PTSD.
Last year, Kenya also ordered Meta to provide mental health care to moderators.
Umar Shakir
Mozilla will shut down its Mastodon server on December 17th.
The company is ending its Mozilla.social Fediverse experiment in content moderation and will remove all content and accounts — but you still have time to move elsewhere:
At any point before Dec 17, 2024, you can migrate your account to another instance on Mastodon by following these instructions.
TechCrunch notes that Mozilla had about 270 active Mastodon users as of Tuesday. A tracker based on the Mastodon API reports about 8 million accounts and 1 million or so active users overall.
Mozilla Social FAQ | Firefox Help
[support.mozilla.org]
David Pierce
David Pierce
Barbara Krasnoff
Anthropic’s new chief product officer on the promise and limits of chatbots like Claude and what’s next for generative AI.
Nilay Patel
Adi Robertson
I’m so jealous of Michigan voters right now.
The democratic process is nice and all, but who could go back to normal “I Voted” stickers after this?
Michigan Department of State
Sean Hollister
Victoria Song
Jess Weatherbed
The kids are alright (at coding).
The creator of “One Million Checkboxes” has shared some heartwarming stories about the creative ways that teens interacted with the now-shuttered website. Check out the below video, this X thread, or Eieio’s blog for some feel-good Friday vibes about concealing URLs in binary and creating pixelated Rick-Rolls.
Jess Weatherbed