Imgur users have flooded the image-hosting site's front page with pictures of John Oliver giving the middle finger to parent company MediaLab AI. The revolt follows staff layoffs that eliminated human moderators and the breakdown of core site functions including video playback for non-logged-in users and failed image uploads. A former employee confirmed MediaLab AI laid off Imgur's moderation team without notice and reassigned remaining staff to other projects. The company acquired Imgur in 2021 after founder Alan Schaaf departed. MediaLab AI faces lawsuits from Schaaf and other former site owners over allegedly withheld acquisition payments.

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A central Japanese town wants to limit smartphone use for all its 69,000 residents to two hours a day, in a move that has sparked intense debate on device addiction. From a report: The proposal, believed to be the first of its kind in Japan, is currently being debated by lawmakers after being submitted by Toyoake municipal government in Aichi earlier this week. Toyoake's mayor said the proposal -- which only applies outside of work and study -- would not be strictly enforced, but rather was meant to "encourage" residents to better manage their screen time. There will be no penalties for breaking the rule, which will be passed in October if approved by lawmakers. "The two hour limit... is merely a guideline... to encourage citizens," Toyoake Mayor Masafumi Koki said in a statement. "This does not mean the city will limit its residents' rights or impose duties," he said.

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U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced that the Department of Commerce will begin publishing GDP statistics on the blockchain, touting it as part of President Trump's push to make America a "crypto government." CoinTelegraph reports: Lutnick made the announcement during a White House cabinet meeting on Tuesday, describing the effort as a move to expand blockchain-based data distribution across government agencies. Speaking to US President Donald Trump and other government officials, he said: "The Department of Commerce is going to start issuing its statistics on the blockchain, because you are the crypto president, and we are going to put our GDP on the blockchain so people can use it for data and distribution." Lutnick said the initiative will begin with GDP figures and could expand across federal departments after the Commerce Department finishes "ironing out all of the details" for the implementation.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Credit reporting giant TransUnion has disclosed a data breach affecting more than 4.4 million customers' personal information. In a filing with Maine's attorney general's office on Thursday, TransUnion attributed the July 28 breach to unauthorized access of a third-party application storing customers' personal data for its U.S. consumer support operations. TransUnion claimed "no credit information was accessed," but provided no immediate evidence for its claim. The data breach notice did not specify what specific types of personal data were stolen. In a separate data breach disclosure filed later on Thursday with Texas' attorney general's office, TransUnion confirmed that the stolen personal information includes customers' names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers. [...] It's not clear who is behind the breach at TransUnion, or if the hackers made any demands to the company.

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Anthropic will start training its AI models on user data, including new chat transcripts and coding sessions, unless users choose to opt out. The Verge: It's also extending its data retention policy to five years -- again, for users that don't choose to opt out. All users will have to make a decision by September 28th. For users that click "Accept" now, Anthropic will immediately begin training its models on their data and keeping said data for up to five years, according to a blog post published by Anthropic on Thursday. The setting applies to "new or resumed chats and coding sessions." Even if you do agree to Anthropic training its AI models on your data, it won't do so with previous chats or coding sessions that you haven't resumed. But if you do continue an old chat or coding session, all bets are off.

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Every breath people take in their homes or car probably contains significant amounts of microplastics small enough to burrow deep into lungs, new peer-reviewed research finds, bringing into focus a little understood route of exposure and health threat. The Guardian: The study, published in the journal Plos One, estimates humans can inhale as much as 68,000 tiny plastic particles daily. Previous studies have identified larger pieces of airborne microplastics, but those are not as much of a health threat because they do not hang in the air as long, or move as deep into the pulmonary system. The smaller bits measure between 1 and 10 micrometers, or about one-seventh the thickness of a human hair, and present more of a health threat because they can more easily be distributed throughout the body. The findings "suggest that the health impacts of microplastic inhalation may be more substantial than we realize," the authors wrote.

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Solo entrepreneurs now launch 35% of all startups, double the rate from a decade ago, yet venture capital funding patterns remain virtually unchanged, according to an analysis by venture capitalist Sajith Pai. Carta's equity management data reveals that while solo-founded companies grew from 17% of 2,600 startups in 2015 to 35% of 3,800 startups in 2024, their share of VC funding barely moved from 15 to 17%. "Valley VCs don't like solo founders," Pai, who is a partner at India-based venture firm Blume, writes in his analysis. Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan confirmed the accelerator's practice of persuading solo founders to find partners after acceptance.The bias persists despite prominent solo-founded successes including Amazon, SpaceX, and Zoom. Pai notes that "most unicorn startups have cofounders" but questions whether this reflects genuine risk differences or simply that cofounded startups receive five times more funding opportunities. "The bias against solo founders is so strong," Pai observes, that it appears repeatedly in founder complaints and venture capitalist commentary, even as other Silicon Valley biases against women and non-elite universities gradually ease.

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Typepad, which launched in 2003 to make it easier for the masses to start their blogging journey, is shutting down. From a blog post: We have made the difficult decision to discontinue Typepad, effective September 30, 2025. After September 30, 2025, access to Typepad -- including account management, blogs, and all associated content -- will no longer be available. Your account and all related services will be permanently deactivated. Please note that after this date, you will no longer be able to access or export any blog content.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Over half of the British public are worried about the impact of AI on their jobs, according to employment unions, which want the UK government to adopt a "worker first" strategy rather than simply allowing corporations to ditch employees for algorithms. The Trades Union Congress (TUC), a federation of trade unions in England and Wales, says it found that people are concerned about the way AI is being adopted by businesses and want a say in how the technology is used at their workplace and the wider economy. It warns that without such a "worker-first plan," use of "intelligent" algorithms could lead to even greater social inequality in the country, plus the kind of civil unrest that goes along with that. The TUC says it wants conditions attached to the tens of billions in public money being spent on AI research and development to ensure that workers are supported and retrained rather than deskilled or replaced. It also wants guardrails in place so that workers are protected from "AI harms" at work, rules to ensure workers are involved in deciding how machine learning is used, and for the government to provide support for those who euphemistically "experience job transitions" as a result of AI disruption.

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What’s the evidence behind rat infestation warnings? And farewell to wet wipe island

Apple has warned that "EU-style rules" proposed by the UK competition watchdog "are bad for users and bad for developers." From a report: It says EU laws -- which have sought to make it easier for smaller firms to compete with big tech -- have resulted in some Apple features and enhancements being delayed for European users. It argues the UK risks similar hold-ups if the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) pushes ahead with plans designed to open up markets the regulator says is too dominated by Apple and Google. [...] The CMA wants UK app makers to be able to use and exchange data with Apple's mobile technology -- something called "interoperability." Without it, app makers cannot create the full range of innovative products and services, it argues. Apple claims under EU interoperability rules it has received over 100 requests -- some from big tech rivals -- demanding access to sensitive user data, including sensitive information Apple itself cannot access. It argues the rules are effectively allowing other firms to demand its data and intellectual property for free.

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The Sixteen Thirty Fund, a liberal dark money organization, is paying Democratic influencers up to $8,000 monthly through its Chorus Creator Incubator Program, Wired reports. Contracts prohibit participants from disclosing their payments or identifying funders, the publication added. The program launched last month includes over 90 creators with a collective audience exceeding 40 million followers. Influencers must attend advocacy trainings and messaging check-ins while Chorus retains approval rights over political content made with program resources. The Sixteen Thirty Fund distributed over $400 million to left-leaning causes in 2020.

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Everyone has heard of WordPress, right? I'm going to be introducing a very weird idea about WordPress, one that's going to bend your mind a lot, especially if you're a member of the WordPress community, but also if you're a developer who has used WordPress in an application sometime in the last 20 years, or a user who has used it to keep a blog, or to run a business website, or just someone who hangs around the web. It's famous, but not in the way I'm going to present it. I'm going to ask you to see WordPress the same way you think of Mastodon or Bluesky. It's a way of storing realtime text and graphics, and arrange them by time, and read and write them, subscribe to people, comment on what others have written, communicate with other people you find on a twitter-like network. If you look at the actual sofware, you'll see that WordPress and the other two systems have very similar features. They all store messages. And arrange them chronologically and in relation to other messages and people. But WP does it better.

Steve Jobs asked you to think differently about computers.

I'm going to ask you to think differently about WordPress.

I'm not going to make you wait to hear what it is. I want you to see WordPress as comparable to Bluesky or Mastodon.

I've done this before -- asked people to think differently about things, like public writing, with blogging. In the 90s I was running around the Vallley trying to explain to everyone that blogging was going to change everything, all I got was blank stares from people who said "we don't do that." They of course eventually did do it. But at first the ideas seemed foreign, unreasonable.

I did it with RSS and podcasting. We needed to seed these things, get the ideas in front of people with actual products, with real utility for users. And eventually they came around.

Now I'm going to ask you to think differently about WordPress, something you thought you already fully understood.

So now, the comparison.

Internally, the software, WordPress, Mastodon, Bluesky, do a lot of the same things. But because WordPress is so long-lived relative to the other two, it's more complete, scaled, it federates easily, lots of people do it.

It has important features the other two don't, although some Mastodon instances are more relaxed about character limits, linking, titles on posts and editing. These are important features. But because the mother ship doesn't support all of them, it's hard to represent it without the limits. This can be fixed easily, btw. Just being analytic about it. I like Mastodon and ActivityPub because they provide interop, and that's the name of the game. Make your product but don't lock users in. Interop is your way out if you need to get out. ;-)

WordPress has excellent support for RSS, esp using a little-known feature called rssCloud to perfection. It enables realtime notification of new or changed feed items. It's been around since 2009, and like all of WordPress, it's thorougly debugged and scaled. I use it in FeedLand and WordLand. If you look in the blogroll on scripting.com on the web, you'll see it in action. Or if you read news.scripting.com, leave it running and watch the new items show up in realtime without you having to do anything. That's rssCloud.

WordPress has a deep and powerful API, well designed, documented, and they don't break it. Developers who know me know that the last part is the most important. A platform must remain unchanging. That means you have to put in a lot of thought up front, and then live with your mistakes, provide continuity.

The API has barely been used by developers. Huge amount of potential there. In fact it almost fully defines the market that we're going to create together. (More on that in a bit.)

It's open source, of course. You can get a lot of help in setting up an instance.

And I, Dave Winer, am part of this now, have been for a couple of years, working relatively quietly, building out what I think WordPress needs to get started in this new direction.

I am going to help bootstrap a great developer community around all these capabilities. This is something people didn't count on. I have an incredible track record of establishing popular APIs and developer communities. I know how to do this. Done it many times, even wrote a guide to how to do it, which apparently has helped other developers create and work on open platforms.

I've done three things that will help the bootstrap.

• Apps. Like MacWrite and MacPaint, someone has to go first, to share basic ideas about how the user interface will work.
• A storage service where the user owns their writing, so it can be edited by any app they give permission to. This means that app developers don't have to be resellers of storage. This is the biggest economic limiting factor to a large innovative, truly entrepreneurial developer community. Every other network arrangement requires you to raise money or be fearful of having huge support and monetary overhead if you attract too many users. When the Mac market booted up it had none of these limits, the users bought the hardware, we made the software. The web has never had the equivalent runtime environment. I'm going to run the server for you to get the bootstrap going. My treat. Until we can get help from infrastructure owners to host the service. And if you want to host it for yourself, it's open source, so you will be able to, without anyone's permission.
• Content. We won't have to wait for new writers to start using my service. Thanks to RSS there will be plenty of feeds in a form that is surprisingly like the data that flows through the other systems. We will carry writing from Substack and Ghost, for example.

Finally, in the WordPress world I have to tell you how I feel about the 800-pound gorilla. Whatever you think of Automattic and Matt, they didn't lock you in. The community, which I'm just getting to know is very circumspect about everything and that's good and right. It's based on the reality that you never know when or how you're going to lose your freedom, so you always have to watch out. I have looked at this from the inside, from the API and the history, and I've gotten to know a few people at the company, and I trust certain things about them. I don't think they'll necessarily listen to you, or me -- and they can get in the way, but I'm willing to take a chance that they won't. They've kept their open source promise and they run a stable platform. Linux is that way, it offers that kind of stability, and so does WordPress. Much of the world, myself included, haven't paid much attention to WordPress and we have only used a small fraction of its potential. I'm going to try to build on and unlock for other developers, a whole new side of the platform.

One more thing you should know -- I'm not in it for the money. I just want to help the web heal from all the abuses it has taken over the years. They took paradise and blew big holes in it that users couldn't find a way out of. They undermined open formats and protocols. They lied to the users, all the time, over and over. Now I don't object to making money, but I'm putting it out there, you can compete with me, I want you to compete with me, as long as you don't try to cut off the interop. And I'm not naive, believe me, I expect that will happen.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple has removed the iPhone torrenting client, iTorrent, from AltStore PAL's alternative iOS marketplace in the EU, showing that it can still exert control over apps that aren't listed on the official App Store. iTorrent developer Daniil Vinogradov told TorrentFreak that Apple has revoked his distribution rights to publish apps in any alternative iOS stores, so the issue isn't tied to AltStore PAL itself.

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