Getting the blog spammers to hang up their affiliations
October 31, 2020
Affiliate schemes have been described as a good way to earn money without lifting a finger. Say you’re a classic car enthusiast and create an interesting website about them: you’ll attract like-minded visitors who might be interested in buying spare parts. You…
Since Tuesday, running a personal website has become a privacy minefield for people using .uk domain names. A recent rule change by Nominet, the company which manages the .uk registry, means that domain name owners whose home addresses were previously kept private may now be…
Turkish court bans Richard Dawkins website
October 31, 2020
A Turkish court has banned internet users from viewing the official Richard Dawkins website after a Muslim creationist claimed its contents were defamatory and blasphemous.
Adnan Oktar, who writes under the pen name of Harun Yahya, complained that Dawkins, a fierce critic of…
So what’s the mission statement for Automattic / WordPress and how has this changed over time?
Automattic’s mission has always been very aligned with WordPress itself, which is to democratise publishing. Basically what I found after a few years of doing WordPress…
More than 11,000 websites using the WordPress blogging platform have been blacklisted by Google, after they were infected by the “SoakSoak” malware.
Security firm Sucuri, which first reported on the blacklisting, claims that the malware’s impact could be far wider…
Could WordPress be the next Tumblr?
October 30, 2020
Giant media and internet companies keep scooping up social-media services: among others, MySpace went to News Corp, YouTube to Google, Instagram to Facebook, and now Tumblr to Yahoo. For the young founders and their investors, the trajectory in each case has been 1) create a…
WordPress pulls interview with anti-gay group Straight Pride UK
October 30, 2020
WordPress has removed an interview with the “homophobic” campaign Straight Pride UK after the group used US copyright law to issue a takedown notice.
In an interview posted on his WordPress blog, student Oliver Hotham published an interview with the group…
After a two-year legal battle, journalist Oliver Hotham and Automattic, owners of blogging service WordPress.com, have emerged victorious against an attempt to use an American copyright law to shut down criticism of a short-lived pressure group call “Straight Pride…
WordPress makes a stand for open source morality
October 29, 2020
Matt Mullenweg, the 23-year-old who is the founding developer of the open source blogging software WordPress, woke up in March to find that disaster had struck. “A cracker gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers WordPress.org,” he later…