Tumblr is being sold to WordPress parent company Automattic for a reported price of "less than $3m," a substantial decline from the $1.1B Yahoo paid for the company in 2013 (Yahoo subsequently sold Tumblr and several other startups it had overpaid for and then ruined to Verizon for more than $4b). Read the rest

Automattic (beloved parent company of WordPress) is buying Tumblr from Verizon (loathesome parent company of Oath, a division named because its users are generally angry enough to swear at it), at a price "well below" $20m (which is well below the $1.1b Yahoo paid in 2013). No word as to whether Automattic will get rid of Tumblr's world-beatingly-terrible pornography filter. (via Bruce Sterling's Tumblr) Read the rest

Automattic -- the company behind WordPress -- has a fantastic teleworking policy that lets workers chose whether to come into offices in Portland, MN, Capetown, South Africa, and San Francisco, or to spend up to $250/month on a co-working space near them, or to work at any coffee shop with a stipend to pay for the coffee. Read the rest

When you're having a conference in an awesome spot like Irvine you can play host to a speaker who refuses to prepare!

I'll be kicking off WordCamp this Saturday morning, someplace in the lovely planned community of Irvine. Get there early if you want to catch me.

Not even I have an idea what I'll say -- I've been asked to regale the folks who attend with tales of my decade-plus working with wonderful things. We can all be surprised!

Most notably, I got taught a lesson about not fucking around when people send you silly interview questions! It appears this bio is the output of my flippant responses.

While we have a lot of fun, don't be looking to Boing Boing for best practices!

WordCamp OC will be held someplace behind the Orange curtain this weekend.

Image via u̶͛͗̽ n̵͇ͨ g̵̼͂ l̵᷅ t̵̄ c̵̃͘ h̵͚ m̵͇͑e͔ Read the rest

Wordfence, a security research company, discovered that the reason Algeria is the country most often seen in attacks on WordPress blogs is that the country's largest ISP distributes home routers that are locked in an insecure state, with an open port that lets attackers seize control of them and use them to stage attacks on higher-value targets. Read the rest

Ned Desmond shares the scary story of how a small site he managed that advertised fishing expeditions ended up with 565,192 scam pages. He also suggests five ways to avoid the same fate. Read the rest

WordPress has gone to bat for its users in court, joining in two lawsuits over fraudulent DMCA claims that used copyright claims as a means of censoring critics. Back in August, a British anti-gay group called Straight Pride UK used a copyright claim to censor the publication of an on-the-record interview with one of the group's spokesmen. And in February, disgraced cancer researcher Anil Potti used copyright claims to censor Retraction Watch, a science watchdog that had reported on the journals that retracted Potti's papers.

Wordpress was the host for both of these sites, and at the time, it cooperated with the takedowns (the law does not require WordPress to honor takedowns that it deems to be bogus, but if it does not honor a takedown, it can be named as a party to any eventual lawsuit over the alleged infringement). But when the users went to court to fight for their right to publish, WordPress got their backs -- bravo! Read the rest

Good news, everybody! We've just upgraded our site software, installed new hardware, and moved our antiquated comment system to Disqus, replete with modern features. The site itself is otherwise unchanged; the grueling task of making everything look and work the same on a completely new platform fell to our lead developer Dean Putney and sysadmin Ken Snider. Both have worked tirelessly for weeks, and deserve many thanks. Thanks, guys!

Your current comment login will work on the new system, but you'll need to reset your password. Fire any bug reports to bugs@boingboing.net and we will stamp on them ASAP.

Also, the Submitterator will be in drydock for its own upgrades for a short while; in the meantime, submit via the private form. Read the rest