Month: February 2022

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Millions of WordPress sites have received a forced update over the past day to fix a critical vulnerability in a plugin called UpdraftPlus.

The mandatory patch came at the request of UpdraftPlus developers because of the severity of the vulnerability, which allows untrusted subscribers, customers, and others to download the site’s private database as long as they have an account on the vulnerable site. Databases frequently include sensitive information about customers or the site’s security settings, leaving millions of sites susceptible to serious data breaches that spill passwords, user names, IP addresses, and more.

Bad outcomes, easy to exploit

UpdraftPlus simplifies the process of backing up and restoring website databases and is the Internet’s most widely used scheduled backup plugin for the WordPress content management system. It streamlines data backup to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, and other cloud services. Its developers say it also allows users to schedule regular backups and is faster and uses fewer server resources than competing WordPress plugins.

Enlarge / Whoa, there are cards at the bottom of the Google homepage! (credit: 9to5Google)

Check out this totally wild Google homepage experiment spotted by 9to5Google: the search page suddenly has a row of cards at the bottom. If this design is widely adopted, it would easily be the biggest google.com design change ever.

In the experiment, Google.com has a row of six cards at the bottom of the page. There’s weather, trending searches, “what to watch,” a stock card, local events, and COVID news. Clicking on a card will either expand it or load a search-results page. There’s also a “hide content” switch, which will turn the cards off. All of this seems very similar to the Google.com app, which has a scrollable list of “discover” cards.

One of the reasons Google Search initially became popular was because the search page was plain and easy to use. The competition at the time included search engines like Yahoo and Alta Vista, which presented users with a massive wall of ads and content. Google’s starkness was a major differentiator in the early days, and it’s interesting to see the company toy with moving a little closer to the days of Yahoo, even if it’s presenting a more modern take on the idea.

Enlarge / The future is now. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Anyone who has been on Twitter in recent weeks is probably intimately familiar with the grids of Wordle solutions clogging up everyone’s timelines. But those tweets give more information than it would seem. Collecting and analyzing data from millions of these Wordle result tweets can give us some interesting insights into aggregate play patterns and the relative difficulty of daily Wordle puzzles.

The Wordle Stats Twitter account has done a lot of the heavy lifting here. Since January 7, the bot account has used the Twitter API to sort through the public timeline for every tweet formatted as a Wordle result, tracking the total number of players and how many guesses each player needed to complete the puzzle. That account shared its underlying data with Ars to power a deeper analysis of daily play patterns.

#Wordle 242 2022-02-16
289,721 results found on Twitter.
10,740 hard mode players.

1: 1%
2: 🟩 4%
3: 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 20%
4: 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 31%
5: 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 26%
6: 🟩🟩🟩 15%
X: 🟩 3%#Wordle242

— Wordle Stats (@WordleStats) February 17, 2022

This isn’t a perfectly random sample of Wordle players, of course—it’s limited to the group of players who use Twitter and choose to share their results publicly. The vast majority of what The New York Times said were millions of daily players at the end of January are not reflected here.

Enlarge (credit: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto)

Since filing whistleblower complaints against Facebook last year, Frances Haugen hasn’t been sitting still. A report today says the Facebook (now Meta) whistleblower has filed two new complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission that allege the company internally acknowledged it was struggling with misinformation even while telling investors it had a handle on the problem.

Meta made “material misrepresentations and omissions in statements to investors” regarding its attempts to fight misinformation on its platforms, according to redacted complaints that a congressional staffer shared with The Washington Post and other news outlets.

“Some investors simply will not want to invest in a company that fails to adequately address such misinformation and then engages in misstatements and omissions on the topic,” one complaint says.