Good news everyone! NASA’s Voyager 1 is answering again and sends useful data back to Earth. Due to a chip failure it stopped answering in November 23. That's what I call remote debugging - above the cloud.
Web platform news and articles:
Web bloat impacts users with slow devices in ways you may not know. Vercel also talk about important latency numbers. Microsoft's Edge team wants to improve text editing on the web and Airbnb released their JavaScript Style Guide.
Safari on iOS is often seen as a problem on the web and iOS404 is a gorgeous web site showing what it does not support. That said, the WebKit team is asking us to help implementing CSS Grid Level 3, aka “Masonry” layout. Remember masonry.js? Soon we can remove it.
Talking of removal, jQuery wants us to upgrade for a healthier web. Wordpress is one of the big reasons for a lot of its installs but it seems to decline, as PHP's usage numbers show (-40% in 2 years).
Some thoughts to ponder:
AI is eating the web as we know It, with content being released as part of a chat rather than documents. This also affects comments and discussions. Reddit already has a problem with 'Parasite SEO', AI generated comments that look like real ones. But then again, search engines have been optimised for ad display a long time ago as Edward Zitron explains in The Man Who Killed Google Search. What can we do? One thing people seem to be introducing is blockers for AI scripts scraping your web content. AI robots.txt is a list of all the AI crawlers out there.
And last but not least, Security news:
Linus Torvalds spoke out on Security, AI, Open Source and Trust following the xz incident. LLM4Shell shows that using LLMs in your applications can allow attackers to execute code remotely. All the details are in this paper. Michal Špaček explains how to steal session ids with phpinfo(). As GitHub allows file attachments in comments you can use legitimate GitHub URLs for Malware.
