This Week in WordPress #387

[00:00:03] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 387 entitled, how to Talk Friesian. It was recorded on Monday, the 2nd of November, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I am joined by Taco Verdonschot, by Robert Abela and by Ivana Cirkovic.

We talk about WordPress. We get a lot into AI, the doomer stuff that AI can bring.

We talk about the fact that in the WordPress space, and not just the WordPress space, in the wider security space, there seems to be a deluge of things going on. So do we have to worry about the security, not just of WordPress, but of the internet in general.

We also talk about upcoming things in WordPress. So for example, 7.1.4, the AI team putting things into WordPress 7.2 and 7.3 in the near future.

We also talk about the fact that last week's episode apparently went on for 249 or 6 billion years, something like that.

Other big numbers are the fact that akismet has saved over 500 billion messages from landing in your spam folder. That's quite nice.

A lot of time was spent on events, so we talked about things like WordPress Credits, and the educational initiatives going on in WordPress. But also two of our panellists this week went to PressConf, so we get into that as well.

GeneratePress, MainWP different plugins and their updates are featured as well, and it's all coming up next on this week in WordPress.

Hello,

[00:01:42] Robert Abela: hello, everyone?

[00:01:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, very much. Hello? so many hellos. It's episode number 387 of, this week in WordPress. We're not far away from 400 actually, by coincidence. 'cause sometimes it doesn't align. 'cause sometimes I do one show and not another. I'm nearly 500 on that one. I'm about the same number away from 500 on the regular podcast as this.

Oh, that's nearly 900 episodes. That's nuts.

[00:02:09] Taco Verdonschot: That's a lot.

[00:02:10] Robert Abela: Wow.

[00:02:11] Nathan Wrigley: I've done with my life.

[00:02:14] Taco Verdonschot: So what does the 500 episode look like? Is

[00:02:19] Robert Abela: that

[00:02:19] Taco Verdonschot: gonna be

[00:02:19] Robert Abela: exactly the

[00:02:19] Taco Verdonschot: same as all the others Person, party

[00:02:23] Robert Abela: life

[00:02:23] Nathan Wrigley: events? I dunno. Okay. Alright, let's get into that. Should it be different?

[00:02:28] Robert Abela: Yes, should.

[00:02:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:02:30] Robert Abela: definitely should. You should come on.

You should invite some people and have a live studio somewhere. Oh, okay. So it should be,

[00:02:36] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I should invite every single guest

[00:02:39] Robert Abela: on day. Oh, that, that would be, if that, what if that can happen? That's great. Yeah,

[00:02:43] Nathan Wrigley: no, I don't know if that can happen. That's an interesting idea though. Yeah. Gosh. Yeah. Okay.

Anyway, that's still 12 weeks away or something. So we'll get through. Chris, will I get through Christmas? I'll get through Christmas and then I can think about it. Anyway, 387 of this show. I'm so glad that we've got a full panel. MKU was supposed to be joining us today, but he woke up not feeling very well, so I posted a few times on social.

if you are here to see Mku has changed so much. It doesn't look at all like he did last time. I saw him. Ivana stepped, it's improved so much

[00:03:20] Taco Verdonschot: from going to press conf.

[00:03:23] Nathan Wrigley: It was only a few days ago. Yeah, we'll get, but Ivana stepped into the breach at the 11th hour, so I'm very grateful for that.

But let's go round the houses and just introduce all the people that you can see. as always, I've got a, a co-host, which today is the wonderful Tacho. How are you doing Tacho?

[00:03:44] Taco Verdonschot: pretty well actually. Yeah.

[00:03:46] Nathan Wrigley: Good. that, that sounded like there was more coming.

[00:03:49] Taco Verdonschot: No, looking forward to, the end of the year.

Basically. It's, I mean it's now November, but that's skip month. And then we have December, which is one big party.

[00:03:58] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. Yeah. Okay. The skip month, I quite, we have a thing in November, we have a big, annual, it's not really a holiday 'cause nobody takes the day off. We have this thing called Guy Forks, where small children celebrate by burning a man.

[00:04:15] Robert Abela: Yes. And in, in Scotland they burn each other's bins. 'cause I remember

[00:04:21] Nathan Wrigley: that

[00:04:21] Robert Abela: they go around, people used to hide theirs because, you would go, used to go around in some neighbourhood and burn

[00:04:27] Nathan Wrigley: and just burn all the bins. Yeah,

[00:04:29] Robert Abela: bins. Yeah.

[00:04:29] Nathan Wrigley: we had this guy called Guy Forks who tried to burn the houses of Parliament down, which, by some measure of we've been quite a good thing, but didn't say that.

but anyway, we celebrate by every 5th of November we light bonfires, great big fire, fireworks and light a bonfire, and then throw an effigy of this person, on the top. And then, gleefully clap and all of that. Watching another human being burnt alive. It's a bit mediaeval really, isn't it?

You think about it. That comes up every November.

No,

Moving on.

[00:05:02] Taco Verdonschot: Maybe it's a good thing you're left to you.

[00:05:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. Oh, although that climate seems to be changing. There's a lot of talk in the press at the minute about rejoining. Dunno if that will be the case, but we've got a new leader. But anyway, let's do tacos.

A bio, when you're looking for opinions, search no more. Tacho has them, usually they're loosely held, so don't hesitate to bring your arguments to at your online. That's a URL, your online. He's a part of the YOLO and the AI and growth department of the company in WordPress. he's just around all the time while nobody really knows what he does.

Yeah. What, what do you do? But I think they keep him around because he sometimes says sensible things. Let's pray for that today. We hope for the good. T

[00:05:53] Taco Verdonschot: maybe. No promises there.

[00:05:56] Nathan Wrigley: I appreciate it. Thank you very much for coming on and, and giving us your opinions today. Really appreciate it.

Robert's also joining us from MELA Press. How you doing Robert?

[00:06:04] Robert Abela: I'm doing great. Thanks for asking.

[00:06:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you are absolutely fine. And, Robert, as you may, I've already said, is the founder and CEO of Mela Press. over there they develop plugins for user visibility, security, and management on WordPress websites.

Go and check them out, mela press.com if you want to find out more. So

[00:06:28] Robert Abela: thank you.

[00:06:29] Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome. And lastly, but by no means, least as I said, MKU was not able to join us, and so literally about an hour ago I sent Ivana a, an email and she said yes. So I'm extremely grateful. Thank you very much for joining us, Ivana.

Yeah, I was only here last week, and hopefully, you won't get too sick of us. Ivana in her bio has written press com for WordPress news content marketing, SEO WP credits. That's, how is that how you want it to be introduced? I'm not sure it is, but that's what I've got.

[00:07:03] Ivana Cirkovic: I, made a mistake, like just, name the topics I can

[00:07:07] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see, in which case can I hand you to do your bio? Do you wanna just read it out yourself, if

[00:07:14] Ivana Cirkovic: Oh, okay. So I'm a marketing specialist at WP Bakery. Just the best and easiest, page builder out there. Nice. I'm in charge in, organic marketing and social media strategy and can, turn business goals and business stories into relatable stories that matter to our audience and clients.

I am and here to talk about topics like, weekly news in WordPress, press Con, WP Credits, ai, SEO, and everything in between.

[00:07:48] Nathan Wrigley: Beautiful. Saved. Beautiful. Saved. Yeah. Nicely done. Segue. that was well done. Thank you. Okay, so there we are. if you, would like to join us, obviously you can't join us on the screen, but if you've got something you'd like to share, feel free to use the commenting system.

If you're over at the, the regular url, which we normally promote, which is, this one, wp builds.com/live. If you're at that one, then you've got two choices. You can either use the, Google comments, YouTube comments. It's in a separate box. if you're on desktop, it's on the right. If you're on a mobile, it's underneath the video.

that's where most people comment. But if you don't like having a Google account, you can actually click a button inside the player little black button. It says Live Comments or something like that. And you can comment there without being logged into anything. So it's up to you which way you wanna do it.

Anywhere else that you comment. We don't get 'em, we don't get, like if you're on LinkedIn, they don't come through if you're on Twitter X and all that. They don't, they just don't come through. Those platforms are just really flaky and in many cases they've just shut their APIs for those sort of things down.

go to that URL, which is right under Robert's nose. yeah. Oh, nice. Look at that. He's a pro. so go there. Thank you. and if you want to give us a comment, we'd really appreciate that. for example, the webinar that says, Hey, beautiful people. Don't call me. Beautiful. it's been a while since I was there.

Last. Glad to be here today. Oh, that's so nice. Thank you. It's really great to have you back. Equalise digital. I'm guessing it's amber. I guess it could use

[00:09:25] Ivana Cirkovic: me else,

[00:09:25] Nathan Wrigley: but

[00:09:26] Taco Verdonschot: Yep.

[00:09:26] Nathan Wrigley: Let's assume it's Amber. That's really nice. Courtney, it's been a while. Courtney and I were on quite a few calls last week. Happy B Happy birthday.

[00:09:35] Ivana Cirkovic: Happy birthday Taco.

[00:09:36] Nathan Wrigley: What? What's going on here?

[00:09:38] Ivana Cirkovic: When was it?

[00:09:39] Taco Verdonschot: yeah, I think most of you celebrated it. So did we. That's fine. Yeah. Okay, so my birthday's on Halloween.

[00:09:46] Ivana Cirkovic: Oh,

[00:09:47] Taco Verdonschot: explains the face.

[00:09:49] Nathan Wrigley: Like that's a good thing and a bad thing because I guess you get a bits like Christmas day kind of birthday.

It's a bit, oh, everybody else is doing other stuff.

[00:09:58] Taco Verdonschot: So the thing is that Halloween never was a thing in the Netherlands, and it's slowly coming across the big bonds from the us. Yeah. so it, it doesn't bother me.

[00:10:11] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. Yeah. Alright. anyway, happy birthday. There we are. Happy birthday. How many happy related birthday?

Many. How many of those year things have you got in, your now? 35?

[00:10:22] Ivana Cirkovic: 35

[00:10:22] Nathan Wrigley: 20 today. So

[00:10:24] Taco Verdonschot: I,

am a very experienced 25-year-old.

[00:10:28] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. We'll leave it with that. Yeah, that's good. I like it. Amber Hines a switched account, so we now know what she looks like. she's, he's back. nice to see. Tacho and Robert, I will see you.

Oh, that's in two weeks. Oh, you'll

[00:10:43] Robert Abela: see me

[00:10:43] Ivana Cirkovic: as well.

[00:10:44] Robert Abela: Yes. If one, I'll be there. Yeah. As well. Yeah.

[00:10:45] Ivana Cirkovic: Yeah.

[00:10:46] Nathan Wrigley: I'm the only one. I'm Billy. No way. You should come. Nathan. You need to

[00:10:50] Ivana Cirkovic: change that.

[00:10:51] Nathan Wrigley: Plenty of tickets available. It's literally like I could get on the ferry, which is like an hour's drive from where I live.

I live on the east coast of the uk. Could get on the ferry. I could sleep overnight and I could be there in the morning. I'm not, I was

[00:11:05] Robert Abela: holding you back last, yeah, this June. This June it took me less time for me to go from home in the Netherlands to the world camp, to the, London Meetup than it took Tim to come from Yorkshire to the London Meetup.

[00:11:19] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. That's insane.

[00:11:20] Robert Abela: Yeah. Oh

[00:11:21] Nathan Wrigley: my God. Okay. All right. I've got no excuse except

[00:11:23] Ivana Cirkovic: yes. So you'll need to come. yeah, that's

[00:11:25] Nathan Wrigley: done. Jackson's joining us. He says, ccia. I dunno if I've said that right, but that's what I'm saying. da Let's have a look. See if I've got anything else. Da Patricia saying things is can, if you guys wanna help me in the co is there anything in that comment system that's,

[00:11:42] Taco Verdonschot: yeah.

Amber said Christmas is worse.

[00:11:46] Nathan Wrigley: Christmas is, oh yeah. Is your birthday on Christmas day, Amber?

[00:11:50] Taco Verdonschot: No. No, but you said it's like being, having your birthday on Christmas.

[00:11:54] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah. I had a friend, yeah, Paul Taylor. His birthday was on Christmas day and it was just brutal. It was absolutely brutal.

nobody paid him any attention at all. Even in his own family, he was marginalised. So they just made it up and put it in the middle of July. And, and he was delighted 'cause he got to go outside and do things instead of, there

[00:12:13] Ivana Cirkovic: is only one, different date that is worse than Christmas. And I would say it's the leap year.

[00:12:20] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yes.

[00:12:21] Ivana Cirkovic: February night.

[00:12:23] Taco Verdonschot: my sister and my grandma turned 18 in the same year. So

[00:12:30] Ivana Cirkovic: my oldest son is born on the February 29th, 2000. Oh, that is brutal.

[00:12:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. One of my, one of my, one of my daughter's classmates was the same and he, she turned 12 and he was three.

[00:12:44] Ivana Cirkovic: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:12:45] Nathan Wrigley: It's so great. I love that though. welcome. Come to I'll, yeah. Yeah, you need to. I'm just gonna move right along.

That would be lovely. I would absolutely love that. January the sixth. Oh yeah. We don't talk about January the sixth. We don't do politics here except sometimes, oh, okay. yeah. Oh, hang on. January the sixth. Oh yeah. It's that insurrection day. We don't do politics here. Let's move on. So we're here to, we're here to talk about WordPress things.

So I'll raise a few bits and pieces on the screen. please interject with your comments like you've been doing already so far. It's absolutely lovely. It really does keep the show rolling forwards. firstly, a few bits of self-promotion. this is os wp builds.com. was sponsored by. I'm still not good at promoting it.

there's a thing I built with Dan, May called Show fm. It's what we've been using to make this podcast happen. And, and it's available now. sadly, you have missed. I know. I'm so bad. T it's

[00:13:52] Taco Verdonschot: not a thing. Nathan, this is your Epic project. It really is epic because, as well, its software for podcasters.

I know. I'm it's not a thing.

[00:14:02] Nathan Wrigley: Come on. I'm so bad at this. I'm so bad. I'll take some support. Only the best

[00:14:05] Ivana Cirkovic: management software or tool stack for podcasts.

[00:14:10] Nathan Wrigley: This out of the horse's mouth. There you go. They've been using it. anyway, we are sponsored by them. show fm if anybody wants to look around, seriously, if you want to look around, please just DM me, leave me a comment or something.

'cause I'm at that point where I'm so happy using it now. I'm like, I'm, so familiar with it that I could tell you exactly what it does in a, few minutes, really. So if anybody wants to hop on a call, let me know. Just gimme a message or something like that. I'll show you around. But, we're sponsored by them and this is our, PO website.

Put your name in here, or your email, I should say. And we'll send you a couple of emails each week to let you know when we've got new podcast content. Speaking of which most recent episode was with me and Leslie Sim, talking about event coi, which is her not really new anymore, but it's her plugin. And we talked about the trials and tribulations of having a plugin in the year 2026 and what she's been developing over there.

So you could go and check that out. this is the episode. Oh, that's a neat player. I wonder, wonder, where that player got embedded from. Oh, look. Yeah, that's nice. moving on the, the other thing that I'm gonna mention is that we have a Black Friday deals page. If you've got a product or service in the WordPress space, we list them for free.

If you just scroll down here and click add a deal, we'll put your, list, listing on there. It gets quite busy. So what we've done is we've got like a searching, searching and filtering system. So hopefully if somebody, wants to type in the name of your product or any of these categories, you can, do that whilst you're setting it in.

If you, wanna go pride of place. This, this one's actually been taken. We've got Elementor comment on board. So there's three of those spots left. If you want to, if you wanna have your product or service, listed on there. And that way, everybody sees it as they load up this page for the first time.

That's the self-promotional bit out the way. global law, Tacho has brought a piece of, I allow all the guests to bring something if they want to. Tachos shown us a GitHub repository called Global Law, which I confess, I don't really know the nature of, so fill in the blanks.

[00:16:28] Taco Verdonschot: It's, something that I ran into last week and, the maintainer of this GitHub repo has been working to collect all the laws from older countries around the world.

No. So for example, if you go to the Netherlands.

[00:16:46] Nathan Wrigley: Do I do that with an N or

[00:16:48] Taco Verdonschot: a T? Yes. Yes. With an N.

[00:16:50] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:16:52] Taco Verdonschot: net. There we go.

[00:16:52] Nathan Wrigley: Netherlands. You'll see.

[00:16:53] Taco Verdonschot: It's not just, the national. Yeah, because we don't have any other subdivisions. And you have to click once more. Yep. And then you can see it's not just criminal law.

It's all the laws that we have in the Netherlands. All the tax laws, all the, everything is in there. Health insurance, law, everything is there.

[00:17:23] Nathan Wrigley: I'm just gonna say that when I saw that one, I, didn't see it in that order.

[00:17:29] Taco Verdonschot: You're not alone.

[00:17:30] Nathan Wrigley: My head totally pauses that the

[00:17:31] Taco Verdonschot: wrong way around. It's, financial law.

[00:17:34] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:17:35] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. But yeah. and in those days, for every country or virtually every country, if one is missing, then by all means submit a pull request. but. I don't know what the use of this is gonna be for me person. It doesn't matter. It's, but there will be a moment where I'm gonna need, a law in random country, X, y, Z, and then exist.

Oh, yeah.

[00:18:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Like I imagine you've got like a web shop or something and somebody comes after you fulfilment or something. And you need to know, the law in that particular country. Yeah. can I just say, is that a real word? Is that actually a word? Yes.

[00:18:22] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. This is, basically labour law.

[00:18:25] Nathan Wrigley: Say it for me. I wanna

[00:18:26] Taco Verdonschot: about some ade

[00:18:27] Robert Abela: a It's similar to German, which, means, labour conditions.

[00:18:33] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Oh yeah, of course. Okay. And this one, can we hear this one?

[00:18:37] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. Wow. Your language is so great. about, what's the,

[00:18:48] Robert Abela: it's about the, the incarceration. Incarceration,

[00:18:50] Taco Verdonschot: yeah. Exactly. Yes.

[00:18:52] Nathan Wrigley: and this one is something to do with fast food.

I take it, burger, like, oh, okay. No, Web hooks for burgers. That's what I'm saying. Civil

[00:19:02] Taco Verdonschot: rights.

[00:19:03] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. Sorry. I shouldn't, I just, I do, you know what, whenever I see some other languages where the words are really long, it always perplexes me like what it would be like at school. 'cause it, just, whenever I see Dutch, and Welch in particular, if you ever look at Welsh words, yes.

They're just huge. And I always think, gosh, imagine when you're a child, trying to get those into your head. But, yeah, this is really cool. I'm gonna, I'm gonna have a little bit of a play. I'm imagining this is really for ai, I would've thought.

[00:19:35] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, definitely. I, yeah, definitely makes sense to, to use it with ai.

Yeah. But for example, if you need something specific and you want to compare European, Union law to one of the member states, because there could be slight deviations. This is your repo.

[00:19:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:19:52] Robert Abela: Yeah. And as I'm sure Nathan, as you're experiencing with show that fm, especially when you build that us, it'd be surprised how many different laws there are, especially when it comes to where to store data, etc.

For different countries. Yeah. Even though DU has some sort of umbrella loss, every country, individual country has its own thing. So Yeah. When dealing with sus, this will come in handy for sure.

[00:20:12] Nathan Wrigley: I'm now

[00:20:12] Ivana Cirkovic: Yeah. And make them more approachable, more searchable, more trackable. So for both software and, AI to learn, this is really amazing.

[00:20:22] Robert Abela: Yeah.

[00:20:23] Nathan Wrigley: I'm now currently searching for the Vatican law. That's, they, have a, population, not one. How many, how many, laws can there be? Turns out there's only four, or at least four sections of law, one of which is data so far.

[00:20:38] Ivana Cirkovic: and this is five days ago.

[00:20:40] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, yeah. Look at that.

Yeah. It's just literally updated all the time. Yeah, I can well imagine that if you've got a web shop or something like that, this would be really useful. But also if you are like you getting your AI to create some kind of, I don't know, terms of service or something like that.

[00:20:55] Robert Abela: Yep.

[00:20:56] Nathan Wrigley: You could see if you're in alignment with the things that are allowed in that particular country.

I'm, to be honest with you, attack, I'm surprised that didn't exist already, but what a labour of love that must be.

[00:21:05] Taco Verdonschot: I'm not sure. It didn't exist before, but

[00:21:08] Nathan Wrigley: I

[00:21:08] Taco Verdonschot: just ran into this one and I loved it.

[00:21:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And, Amber says that's a project. Yeah. That is a project. Yeah. Isn't it incredible what people do online?

It's absolutely,

[00:21:16] Robert Abela: it is. Especially when you consider, like the UK law is un codified or however it's called. There's no,

[00:21:22] Nathan Wrigley: oh, I don't know. What does that

[00:21:23] Robert Abela: mean, unco?

[00:21:24] Nathan Wrigley: What,

is it?

[00:21:25] Robert Abela: It means like, the Netherlands, they have you can actually get a book, a series of books where you have all the law, right?

and the, in the uk there's no such thing. You have Yeah. You have like different laws, different. It's common law.

[00:21:37] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah.

[00:21:38] Robert Abela: Yeah.

[00:21:38] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I didn't know that. it's,

[00:21:39] Robert Abela: oh, you cannot get, fairly

[00:21:41] Nathan Wrigley: lawless over here.

[00:21:44] Taco Verdonschot: It's based on precedent instead of written rules.

[00:21:48] Robert Abela: Exactly.

[00:21:49] Nathan Wrigley: this is how much I know about my own country.

I didn't know any of that. So there's no one book. I can't get the book of law of the uk. Okay. That's why those lawyers get paid so much. They need to carry around like 12 books instead of just one book.

[00:22:04] Ivana Cirkovic: The whole library behind them.

[00:22:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

To go. They do, they always have a whole library.

Not like in the Netherlands. You can just flick through the little pamphlet. It, anyway, let's move on. That's fascinating though. Thank you for sharing that to us. That's interesting, right? This is not, this is definitely not in my, domain of expertise. Let's pop this on the screen. tacho brought this to our attention.

I imagine Robert, given his background, will be able to flesh it out a little bit. Tacho, do you just want to give us the, skin as to why you raised this one? It's A CVE. Yes. But it's about the Linux kernel, I think this one,

[00:22:38] Taco Verdonschot: right? yeah. So basically it's the software running on most of the internet servers.

and that has a, a flaw in it, in how it handles new visitors. And that means that there is a tiny split second window, when the server opens a new connection. And if you time your attack perfectly, then you can exploit that blind spot to bypass all security and take full control of a server without needing a password.

[00:23:11] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know, I had heard about this, but I'd forgotten about it, okay, Robert?

[00:23:16] Robert Abela: Yeah.

[00:23:16] Nathan Wrigley: Over to you.

[00:23:18] Robert Abela: yeah. It's, a type of what they call, replay attack. So basically it's when the system, in this case, the operating system, relies on a number of, things to do something. And the attacker can check that, in fact, in, in the latest update of WordPress as well.

7.2 0.1 I think, or, there was something similar where people, because when, there is an updated, sorry, it's not replace, sorry. risk condition attack. when we're pre, when you update WebPress score, those files actually first represented as a zip file. It extract them in the directory, which is, WP content slash upgrade.

And it relies on having those files there and then getting them to upgrade the core. If someone can in, interject or, intrude that process and something there, they can, yeah, they can achieve remote contact execution. And it's the same with Linux, but this, is even worse because WebPress, you're talking just about WebPress,

[00:24:14] Nathan Wrigley: right?

[00:24:15] Robert Abela: Linux, you're talking about

[00:24:17] Nathan Wrigley: everything.

[00:24:17] Robert Abela: I don't know the numbers, but the majority of web servers, the majority of devices, even this, these small devices like Asberry, they, all run some, some version of Linux. So yeah,

[00:24:26] Nathan Wrigley: it's quite So is this, though, upon a reboot? Do you have to time it upon Linux rebooting?

[00:24:34] Taco Verdonschot: no. This one knows.

[00:24:34] Robert Abela: No,

[00:24:35] Taco Verdonschot: it's literally visiting a website.

[00:24:38] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I

[00:24:38] Taco Verdonschot: see. Making a connection to the server as a visitor of a website or requesting data from that server.

[00:24:46] Nathan Wrigley: Wow. Okay.

[00:24:48] Taco Verdonschot: Good thing though is, it, this is, severity goes, in a scale from one to 10.

[00:24:57] Nathan Wrigley: 10, yeah.

[00:24:57] Taco Verdonschot: And this is a 9.8.

[00:24:59] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:25:00] Taco Verdonschot: So it's about the most severe kind of issues that we have.

[00:25:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:25:06] Taco Verdonschot: but it's quite hard to exploit, luckily. so that ensures that we're not all screwed right away. But the topic says that they have an exploit built by, Claude that can actually abuse this.

[00:25:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:25:28] Taco Verdonschot: More.

[00:25:28] Robert Abela: Yes, because yeah, because what you need to do is basically send, 'cause it's over the network layer.

you need to send a crafted IP version for packets, which has a certain payload, and that can actually, crash the, the current, it can lead to a denial of service, to the kernel or member corruption. And then if, exploited successfully, then the attacker gets full remote code execution. So basically they can update everything and execute anything they want on the server and affect not just the websites on that server, anything which has a made server, it has database.

Yeah. They can affect everything.

[00:26:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think I'm gonna go and live in a whole

[00:26:09] Robert Abela: or some,

[00:26:09] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, it just seems like we, okay, just for a bit of context, I've been doing this show, what, whatever we said 200 and however many episodes, lots and lots of episodes. And so every week I sit down and I compile the WordPress news and a little bit of the tech news more broadly in two various categories.

And for the, almost right at the beginning, I decided that security was gonna be one of those sections. Now I don't have the expertise to talk about security, but I do have the capacity to, find links. And if I think they're interesting and curious, I can put them into the newsletter for years and years then maybe be one a week.

and, in, in many cases they would be, real like strange things that you'd never heard of and nobody was worrying about. and then, over the years, some subjects became really popular, like mergers and acquisitions and buying other plugins, those kind of things. More recently, ai, but now every single week by far, for the last month, the biggest section is security.

oh yeah. We're not

[00:27:14] Taco Verdonschot: even scratching the surface.

[00:27:15] Nathan Wrigley: No, I've put about six stories in the security section of the newsletter. They're not all in the stuff we are gonna talk about, but I probably left out a dozen, because I couldn't really work out how they impacted WordPress and what have you. What I'm basically trying to say is that it's the, thing of our time, security and I largely, I think it's AI's capacity to discover things at scale, which have been there forever in many cases.

But nobody's had the temerity or the, the tenacity and to sit down and figure out, now you're pointing AI at it. And, I'm, gonna guess I have no knowledge, but maybe Robert can fill me in. Did you, say this was discovered by an ai? you said,

[00:28:02] Robert Abela: I'm not sure. I'm not sure.

[00:28:03] Nathan Wrigley: No. Okay.

Yeah.

[00:28:04] Taco Verdonschot: And dropping,

[00:28:06] Robert Abela: but,

[00:28:07] Nathan Wrigley: found,

[00:28:07] Robert Abela: okay, this type of vulnerabilities, it's almost impossible to discover. there are so many parameters at play and stuff, right? It's almost,

[00:28:15] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:28:16] Robert Abela: Yeah. And so much automation needed that it's almost impossible

[00:28:19] Nathan Wrigley: to, yeah. So anyway, that's why I'm gonna go and live in a hole in 2027 because, in the, I was reading something the other day and Tacho had a conversation with me before we hit go, in fact, before the pair of you, joined the call and we were talking about isolating things on our local network.

So I, I, for example, have got loads of these little sort of internet of things plugs, and I've just disconnected them all because I don't know what the heck is in that machine, in this little box. clearly there's some operating system in there. I bought it a couple of years ago. It was fairly cheap at the time.

I doubt it's had a patch or has any capacity to be patched, and yet there it is sitting on my network so that I can, from a phone switch, a light on, it's like, just go over and turn the light on your lazy, thing. So anyway, I'll be able to switch my lights on from my whole in the 2027. But thi this was a piece of advice I got this week from a security, journal that I read, was basically, if you don't have an additional network for your iot devices, turn 'em off.

and let's just see how this all plays out.

[00:29:30] Robert Abela: yeah.

[00:29:30] Nathan Wrigley: Anyway,

[00:29:31] Robert Abela: they should be completely disconnected from the internet. You should have some sort of D mz or, yes.

[00:29:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I reckon that's now disconnected from the internet. Least I hope if that's connected to the internet, I really want my body back.

[00:29:45] Taco Verdonschot: But this is a, a, a real problem because, last week I was at the blood bank and having a conversation with one of the, employees there.

And she said, because I jokingly said, I'm glad your, machines to withdraw bloods are not connected to the internet. And she says, not yet because we're planning to do that so that they can easily upload all the donation data right away. I'm like, huh, I'm not sure that a device that could potentially kill me if it went wrong should be connected to the internet in this day and age, or ever.

But especially now.

that's,

[00:30:30] Robert Abela: hospitals, have many more, devices that are more health critical sensitive that are connected to the internet already.

[00:30:38] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah.

[00:30:39] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. That's why I try not to go there.

[00:30:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. I try not to go there 'cause I don't like hospitals. The internet is not necessary for me to dislike hospitals.

But yeah. No, but I totally get what you mean. I think we've all been be like, the security posture was basically until very recently. It's probably gonna be all right now. It feels like the security community are saying the exact opposite. It's probably not gonna be all right for you to connect a random thing, And if, like me, this little plug, which I haven't a clue what the heck is on that little plug, probably it's better to disconnect it. Now Robert, I don't know if I'm overdoing that or taking advice from the wrong people. What would you say about a, a cheap probably made in China? Yeah, there it is.

Made in China. Little plug Internet of Things thing connected to my regular network. 'cause I don't have a separate network for IO ot. Would you be pulling that at this point?

[00:31:39] Robert Abela: Yeah, I would. whatever I have is, everything that I have is, can be updated and can, has and has some sort of admin panel and it's secured kind of thing.

Anything that's like automated default usually kinda a problem. Although House Network, if it's behind the route or you have a switch, it, really depends. but you can still, you can never say if someone spots it, but, and target it. but yeah, I would avoid these things in general.

'cause it nowadays, and as you're saying, like we're seeing a lot of security updates. The problem is that we're seeing what used to take decades to happen, number of changes, everything has happened within just weeks. Like for example, usually a vulnerability like this, yeah, it's only once in a, now in the last two weeks we had the PHP to share.

We have this one, we have so much going on, so many big vulnerabilities. Only those that come to the, mainstream news, they're much more going on. And so we're moving very, fast. It's, impressive. The speed. So we're experiencing changes that we cannot even handle ourselves.

[00:32:44] Ivana Cirkovic: Yeah. On a daily basis.

It's insane.

[00:32:47] Nathan Wrigley: How, how does it make you feel, Robert? I, know that's a bit of a bizarre question. Do you feel like you're an industry? Okay, let me rephrase all of this. It feels like you are in an era where your expertise is going to be more required than ever before. So that's, there's a bit of you which you're thinking, oh, that's good, but equally, are you just as deluge, like deluged and overwhelmed and, it's freaky and worrying you and all of that.

Yeah.

[00:33:13] Robert Abela: Yeah. You mentioned you would like to hide in a hole. I was joking last week at press conference, like, if, somehow I leave or whatever my workers business, I'm most probably, I would just open a bar rather than start another. It, i, it in general, it's moving to, fast. Not by the way, not just security even more, but in general, if I tried for a few months to follow the news newsletters from all the major AI providers, ev every, every week there's something new.

Each of them, they're doing something new, something different. I'm not talking about security, just a functionality. What they're, what can you do? It's, pretty much overwhelming. It is. It is. And it, we already had a, if you look back, we already had a problem. Now finally, after decades, not just in web by the way, everywhere around the world, we're somehow accepting a bit more to fa and using a bit more, having more awareness about passwords, for example, now that we're almost at the first steps, we just got into this phase where there's so much going on security, right?

So

People, even us who work in this industry, I was speaking to Oliver from as well at, press golf. It's, there's so much going, even for us, it's difficult to keep up and to imagine what is coming next, let alone for the average Joe who works. No, not an it, I dunno. They work at a bank, they have a mobile phone, they access the bank system, they have no technical knowledge, expertise, and they're handing people this money and stuff.

It's, scary. It's very

[00:34:38] Nathan Wrigley: scary. It, is almost like the perfect science fiction plot, isn't it? In, a way we got into it a bit last week, it is a bit like that sort of Terminator thing where we, we didn't see AI coming and all of the internet connected things. It all just seemed like a really neat thing to do.

but now that there's this sort of spectre on the horizon where maybe some of that will be our undoing, yeah, I'm imagining scenarios or I'm thinking, what would it take me to do basic stuff without the internet? And I was thinking, just like filling up the car with fuel or going shopping and the, all the transportation network that relies on all of that, and internet being connected for delivery and things like that.

Yeah, it's fascinating.

[00:35:19] Robert Abela: the banks without internet came over basically. many other things, supermarkets and stuff, Ataco can say in, internet and, was it the Albert High issue? Was it two weeks ago when they had Yeah,

[00:35:30] Taco Verdonschot: it was, three weeks ago.

[00:35:32] Robert Abela: Yeah. they had, they suffered some cyber attack and they,

oh,

[00:35:36] Robert Abela: is this the

[00:35:36] Nathan Wrigley: fridges?

[00:35:37] Robert Abela: no. Another one, they lost track. they couldn't, keep on the supply chain. So, many supermarkets ended up without products, with empty shelves. It's, yeah, it's, just crazy. And. It's dangerous because as I said, like if you have a banker, whatever, like who are dealing with sensitive data yet have no technical expertise, it's much, it's very dangerous for them.

I think ta highlighted the notes. There was another one. The trust graft from, cloud waste. There was another issue. Yeah,

[00:36:05] Nathan Wrigley: there was. Should we put that on the screen now? Let me see.

[00:36:07] Robert Abela: That is basically about session hijacking. I spoke about this during World Camp s it's basically exploits the trust.

You could be easily, tricked into clicking some link and you have to work present, someone hijacks your session basically. and the same can happen with bank workers, for example, in the future, which

[00:36:30] Nathan Wrigley: is, let's come back to that one 'cause I just can't find the link. Yeah, no worries.

No worries. I will find the link, I'm sure. Yeah. yeah. So anybody all just come and live at my house in my hole? Yeah, it's, be a little bit down in the winter, but we can, warm each other up. It'll be fine. join me. Amber says never connect appliances to the internet. yeah, Indeed. Like

[00:36:55] Ivana Cirkovic: we put so much trust into something that, as general population we know nothing about.

[00:37:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yes.

[00:37:01] Ivana Cirkovic: So basically if we are, we would need to have each our own security guy or girl to handle these attacks or misunderstandings on or whatnot because at, the speed of things going out, it's really reckless to be so comfortable around it.

[00:37:21] Nathan Wrigley: And

[00:37:21] Taco Verdonschot: yet we, and it's not, yeah, it's not just the speed of new issues being found, it's also the speed with which they are actively abused.

[00:37:30] Robert Abela: Yes.

[00:37:31] Ivana Cirkovic: That,

[00:37:31] Taco Verdonschot: yes. So where in the past you'd have weeks to protect yourself from a newly found vulnerability. We're now talking minutes.

Yes.

[00:37:41] Robert Abela: The,

[00:37:41] Taco Verdonschot: or in some cases even negative minutes.

Like they're already exploited before the CVE is out.

[00:37:48] Robert Abela: Yeah. I've said the last PHP to, sorry, go. The last one from last week From WordPress, PHP to Shell, the PHP, not WordPress, it's just PHP some vendors reported seeing, mass exploitation. After nine minutes it was announced, which is crazy.

[00:38:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's, I, so I've said it before and I'm gonna say it again. If, you are in any way connected with this hacking. Stop it. Just have a think and go and sit on the naughty step. just have a pivot. And if you've deployed any ai, stop that as well. It's not doing anybody any good. And also just, seriously though, like what?

Like what is the benefit of this stuff?

[00:38:32] Ivana Cirkovic: Oh,

[00:38:33] Nathan Wrigley: is it always about 6 billion mining this week, Bitcoin? Is it about stealing wealth? Or is it, are we increasingly in the era of let's just mess with people,

[00:38:46] Ivana Cirkovic: until they are accustomed to So we can do what we planned initially, right? Yeah. Yeah. I'm heading too deep into dark side.

But yeah,

[00:38:57] Robert Abela: yeah, it, some people do it for money, some people it's, in all fairness, it's also rewarding if you did the fact that you said something in your head and you achieve it. So for some people actually it's, an addiction and it's a challenge.

[00:39:11] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, darn, darn. If stop being so curious that in that case, you'd just be less curious.

All of you.

[00:39:18] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. If they need, really need a challenge, go learn to play the violin.

[00:39:22] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. Yeah. Or learn Dutch.

[00:39:24] Robert Abela: I see. Learn Dutch. Learn Dutch. Yeah.

[00:39:28] Taco Verdonschot: Learn. That's so easy. My 6-year-old can do it.

[00:39:32] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. With a bit of ai. Patricia's made a comment, which we'll no doubt come into our system in a moment, but it, there's usually a little bit of a lag.

I don't know, 30 seconds to a minute or something. Patricia says, let's move on to an auten autonomous, self-sustaining farm off the grid in the Swiss Alps. Who wants to buy it with me? I'm in Patricia.

[00:39:53] Robert Abela: I'm in,

[00:39:54] Nathan Wrigley: I'll bring my whole and, yeah. So Ivana's coming. It's gonna be great. we can read old, we can read books and sit by the fire.

[00:40:04] Ivana Cirkovic: Yes.

[00:40:04] Nathan Wrigley: And, never plug anything into anything ever. this is a technology podcast.

We've done it to ourselves. Let's move on. let's put something back on the screen. We will actually return to security, 'cause that wasn't supposed to be there, but we smuggled it in. This is more about press conf. So last week, the first European edition of Press Conf happened, it's been in, Phoenix, Arizona twice so far.

I suspect it's coming back to Phoenix at some point, in 2027. But the first version happened in Barcelona last week, and, two of our panellists were in attendance. Katie, Keith, who, Is on the screen. she wrote a tweet about it, and we'll come to the broader point of that tweet in a moment. But both Robert and, Ivana went.

I guess all I'm gonna ask is either of you, did you enjoy yourself? Was it nice? Was it rewarding? A bit different from a word camp. Just give us your appraisal of press. Oh,

[00:41:03] Ivana Cirkovic: completely different. Any, other WordPress related event? I was both an attendee and a speaker there, and it was very revealing.

And very rewarding at the same time. Nice. Because you get to have, to experience the event in very, intimate, environment, far less people, and the talks weren't recorded. So you had the freedom to, be more open and more vulnerable to share some things, knowing that it won't be shared, externally.

So learned a lot, came back with a lot of knowledge, a lot of inputs, and looking forward to unwrapping those. yeah.

[00:41:47] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So I thoroughly, yeah, thoroughly positive experience from Ivana. That's nice. Robert,

[00:41:54] Robert Abela: I share the same views mostly because first of all, Ivana said nothing is recorded, so people speak a bit more freely.

It's much smarter. 54, 56 people, I think. and also I think at, least based on my experience at WordCamp, we go to network, not necessarily just for the business, but yeah, to network and reach out to people, et cetera. While at press co, at least for me, I went there to learn not

[00:42:19] Ivana Cirkovic: to,

[00:42:20] Robert Abela: we didn't need to wear a branded t-shirt or whatever, because in fact, very few people did.

It's just to learn. there was more. Business talk in terms, yeah, WebPress plugins, the were preco system, even just business, in terms of taxes and countries. And so it was, yeah, and what I liked about it as well is that it was contained, the checkout summit was the same, so there was one track.

So it's not like you have a lot of options. So most people sit in the same talk and for breakfast, the hotel, they're the same people. Everyone ha hang out at the bar in the evening. So it's, a small number of people and content in one place, so you get much more talking than one-to-one, et cetera.

[00:42:59] Nathan Wrigley: It's interesting that you mentioned, checkout Summit obviously similar vibe. I'm imagining, everybody's in the same hotel and it's much smaller. That obviously is aligned with Yes. WooCommerce or E-commerce more generally. I wonder if we'll see a rise of more of this, a, a higher ticket item, the accommodations thrown in.

Everybody's all in the room, same hotel, everybody has breakfast together and all of those kind of things. I wonder if we'll see a rise in those. It'd be interesting to see if that's,

[00:43:27] Robert Abela: it makes it more per, is it,

[00:43:29] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:43:29] Robert Abela: Personalised, but yeah, it, is.

[00:43:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think, I wonder what the, capacity for the community to consume those is.

'cause obviously, everybody's used to the low ticket cost of Yes. Things like WordPress, but it sounds like you've got value out of it, even though the tickets are, I don't know what the accurate answer is. 10 times more, 15 times more or something than a Word camp ticket.

[00:43:50] Robert Abela: It's something along those, yeah, it's something

[00:43:52] Nathan Wrigley: along those

[00:43:52] Robert Abela: 506, something along those lines.

[00:43:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So no,

[00:43:54] Robert Abela: it's not the 50 euro.

[00:43:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. Okay. Interesting. okay. Now the, the purpose of that tweet though was twofold. Firstly, to mention Press Con, but also Katie, Keith is the author of this tweet and she said, the things that she learned, or key things that she learned at Press Con for Europe.

Number one, nearly everybody's sales are down similar to mine. we're talking about Bond two plugins. Number two, we all need to accept things have changed and adapt. Number three, grok bot is better than I realised. Number four, some people think that I'm married to James Kemp. Gosh. number four, after the disturbing instant with goats cheese, chicken foot hanging over my cocktail.

I can eat goat cheese, any, I can't eat goats cheese anymore. Back to number one and two, nearly everybody's sales are down similar to mine. And we all need to accept things that have changed. Katie is one of the, how to describe this, she's very good. Most open. Yeah. Yeah. Like very good at being honest, even when it's honest in a way, which doesn't.

pretend her business is doing well, when she's doing well. She says how well with numbers, which is really unusual. And then she also says, how badly, that's probably the wrong word. How, how it's changed again with numbers. And she's been on, Twitter lately in various other social platforms, just sharing her experience and the fact that, maybe Shopify's an angle that they're gonna lean more into, but there's this systemic feeling at the moment that, sales are down, nobody's got an answer to it.

What do you do? Do you come more hyperfocused on the thing? Do you go deeper and offer a bigger challenge? I dunno if any of you have got any commentary on that. If you heard the same story, tacho may be, just out there in the broader community.

[00:45:45] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, I, wasn't at Press Con, but seeing Katie's messages over the last couple of weeks and months already and now, the confirmation that it's not just her business, but it's all of them, makes me extra happy that we sold our business earlier this year.

[00:46:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. That's interesting. Yeah. were you, sell Yeah. Yeah. No, you would be delighted, wouldn't you? If you got out? It's if you sell your house at the top of a, when your house prices is like this and you sell it, and,

[00:46:20] Taco Verdonschot: it's only something, in hindsight,

[00:46:22] Nathan Wrigley: right?

[00:46:23] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, so yeah, I think that was, yeah, that's something that it does for me. And at the same time, so many of my friends in WordPress, our friends, I can safely say in WordPress have their own plugin business. And yeah, I hope for them that these two will pass and it will get better.

[00:46:44] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know, what's interesting is that I have real moments where I look at everything and I think, gosh, we're in a real moment where we've gotta reimagine what WordPress is, and I worry about it, and I worry about collapse, and I worry that it won't be like this sort of linear line.

It'll be more like steady decline and then at some point, woo, off the edge it goes. Because suddenly a lot of people at once all figure out, wait, there's no future here. But then I go inside a WordPress and start playing around and I think, God, this platform's so great, I can get this stuff for free.

And then now we're worrying about AI and the, the threats that it may bring from the security side and a possible backlash against AI and a yada I, dunno which way to jump,

[00:47:31] Robert Abela: I think based on the talks we've seen at press conference as well, and, yeah. WebPress Indeed is an amazing platform.

It's a great community. However, when before, let's put this, it was much easier before to sell, way easier. things are changing, not just in WebPress, but in WebPress as well. Things are changing and we need a scale set. We need to reevaluate ourselves and see, before it was very easy to start.

A plugin and reach the hundred K kind of thing a year. Nowadays it is becoming way more difficult. Yeah. Speaking with Katie, I never, I'm not like Katie, I don't publish things online, but I speak to a lot of other founders and we do myself. I've been vocal about it in person. Yes. We're the same since we actually started early, in 2024 since, in terms of revenue, the company is very healthy because of course we have renews, but this new sales, the number of new sales were coming down.

2025 was the same. we're lucky. Of course we've done a lot of changes, not just one change. So I cannot pinpoint one change. 2026 is much better. We have to have fade. Pregnancy is really growing fast actually, and double break the rock. At least we stabilised it. It's no longer going down. but yeah, it, is a struggle and yeah, things are changing and we have to, see and there's no answer.

There's no one fix or answer. We just have to. Everyone has to, analyse what they're doing and see how they can do it. I think it was a good talk from Mark Weisbrot. Mark from Great. Yeah. Which explained this idea of, blue ocean and Red Ocean basically. And Red Ocean is where you have a bunch of players competing for the same thing and you need to find your blue ocean where you can have, something that is quite unique that there are not many competitors even in WebPress.

There are still these, these spaces For sure. It just, of course, we have to dig much deeper

[00:49:19] Ivana Cirkovic: to niche down, as he said, and to, find bigger problems and charge more because the market is not you wanting to sell. It's the demand. And I'm reading the literal quote from his.

[00:49:32] Robert Abela: Nice. That's good. Yeah, that's good.

Yeah. Yeah. In fact, once I read it's, which is quite eyeopening, I know it's so common sense, but once you read it, I was seeing this documentary about, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, they like, these guys have 24 hours like usana. The difference is they are solving problems that people are happy to pay much more for them than the problems you're solving.

Yeah. It's just as simple as that.

[00:49:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:49:54] Ivana Cirkovic: And have much more manpower behind them to do so.

[00:49:57] Robert Abela: Yeah. But when they started, they were solving problems. That's the idea. They were solving problems that people were more willing to pay for basically.

[00:50:03] Ivana Cirkovic: Exactly. Yeah. True.

[00:50:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. just going off piece slightly, James is, because, keeping it keep, keep keeping it real, Echo's voice, reminds him that he needs to go and grab a few stroop waffles from the, local.

So keep on talking.

[00:50:22] Taco Verdonschot: That's never a bad decision.

[00:50:23] Nathan Wrigley: That's never a bad decision. Those things are so good. Yes. Those things are in

[00:50:27] Ivana Cirkovic: 10 days. Yes.

[00:50:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. I love comments like that. The more bizarre they are, the better. Yeah. So the bit, of this whole jigsaw puzzle that I don't get is I just don't know where the actual wisdom is.

And what I mean by that is, you hear the comments and obviously the things that you just mentioned, Devana, which Robert then said he was there and he heard it, or I wasn't there. I don't know that person. Or you know what the wisdom is there. I'm just not too sure who to listen to at the minute.

I just don't know where the genuine wisdom lies. If it's a little bit of sort of putting your finger in the air and hoping for the best and trying to figure it out week by week, month by month, hour by hour. and, we haven't had that, have we, like Robert said, you put a half decent plug in together, solve a little problem, and you can probably make that your career.

And it now feels, I think Katie would back this up. It now feels that if you have got a simple plugin that does a simple thing, then an AI can do that. Exactly. So that whole beachhead is gone. and so there's that whole, broader ripple effect of that. If all of those jobs go away, are there enough people left next year or the year after to keep the community going so that the pop platform's popular and, it's that whole thing where, it just slowly declines and then all at once, I hope not.

I really do hope not.

[00:51:54] Robert Abela: In fact, one thing,

[00:51:56] Ivana Cirkovic: oh,

[00:51:56] Robert Abela: sorry. Go ahead, Yvonne.

[00:51:57] Ivana Cirkovic: No, I just wanted to chime in. that's why, pro initiatives like WP Credits exist to bring more new people, more young people to strengthen the community, to give, new perspectives to help WordPress change and evolve to the desires of today's market.

[00:52:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:52:17] Ivana Cirkovic: hopefully.

[00:52:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I agree. I, I, in fact, we've got a piece about that, so we'll come to that in a moment. we'll, move on quickly anyway, thank you Katie, for your, tweet there. That's nice. back to specifically WordPress things. 7.1 0.4, is a security release. This kind of gets into what we were saying earlier.

Look, here we go. So here's the security updates. I think in the past you would've seen one or two line items, but look, it's like 22, maybe

[00:52:44] Robert Abela: 22,

[00:52:45] Nathan Wrigley: 22, 22 security items in this latest version of WordPress. go and, if you haven't already, make sure you are patched, but that was the whole point of that.

Yeah.

[00:52:55] Taco Verdonschot: and to be fair, if you haven't already at this point for a security release. That's plain irresponsible.

[00:53:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Switch the, switch the auto updates. Auto updates,

[00:53:08] Taco Verdonschot: definitely.

[00:53:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:53:08] Taco Verdonschot: Or at least be on top of them.

[00:53:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. it's probably common sense to us, but we have a few people listening to this who I, get the impression that they're fairly new to WordPress sometimes.

'cause some of the things I get, if you go into WordPress, you can not only the core product itself, you can, enable auto updates. You tick a box and click save. And then for versions of WordPress like this, it will just, as soon as it receives a an update notification, it will update itself.

And typically that's not gonna cause you any worries the following morning. you won't get that white screen to death. It's possible, but it's unlikely. But you can do the same for plugins and themes. You just go to the plugin screen, opt, just check, check, you click on the Enable auto updates for themes.

It's a little bit more affy. You have to actually go into the theme in appearances theme, click inside the little preview, and you have to do it inside there. But it's not hard. You've probably only got, a handful of those in there. so get all that stuff auto updated would be my,

[00:54:13] Taco Verdonschot: or if you have a decent hosting, company, they can actually do this for you.

[00:54:19] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. and we'll talk about a platform Maine WP in a minute that handles a lot of that sort of stuff as well. Okay. WordPress AI team lays out ambitious. We are talking about, disconnect all the things. Let's go live in a hole. Then, and then, WordPress core agent ready is gonna be receiving.

let's read what it says here. WordPress AI team lays out ambitious four part plan to make WordPress agent ready by 7.3. So 7.3, I actually forget the date of 7.3, but anyway, not tremendously far away.

[00:54:56] Taco Verdonschot: December 8th.

[00:54:58] Nathan Wrigley: There you go. December 8th Q. Okay. the WordPress, AI team wants every WordPress user to be able to connect their site to the AI agent of their choice for the simple sign in.

And it's aiming to make that happen in WordPress 7.3. By the way, I'm reading from the repository. Thank you Ray.

[00:55:15] Taco Verdonschot: And, I'm lying by the way. 7.2 is on.

[00:55:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yes, that's right. Yes. Yes, of course. You're right. So it'll be 2027. So this,

[00:55:21] Taco Verdonschot: yeah, this will be March,

[00:55:23] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:55:23] Taco Verdonschot: Ish.

[00:55:24] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. Adam, who is the automatic sponsored AI team rep, his name's Adam.

sorry. Jason Adams, the proposal splits the work into four areas, MCP, abilities, OAuth, author, authentication, and end-to-end user experience. And the idea really is that you would, be able to just log in, without the need for some third party dependency. There's a lot of plugins out there at the moment where you can do a lot of this kind of work, but you, obviously rely on that plugin.

The idea of what, you'd just be able to log in with something like OAuth. so you wouldn't have to bring over a, I don't know, use a, an application style password or something like that. You'd just be able to go to Claude, log in with OAuth. Everything should just happen. So to make it as seamless as possible and then that will be bound to the abilities API, which is getting a lot of work so that you'd be able to, make 12 websites every seven minutes.

that's kind of the goal, I think. okay, so anyway, that's all coming, in presumably, I dunno, early 20, 27. Anybody else wanna comment on that? Oh, okay. this is the article in question that if you wanna read the, from the horse's mouth, as it were, Jason Adams, this was on the 28th of October. It's called WordPress for it, the Agentic Web.

And it does make the point about the, the logging in process being as straightforward as possible. The idea really is that anybody with a, let's say a clawed account can, do all of this work without necessarily, having a great deal of expertise. You would literally say to Claude, my website is this domain, can you connect to it?

And it will go out, figure out it's WordPress and go, yeah, sure we can do that. how are we gonna do it with OAuth? that's fine. We can do that too. Great. And so in that way, there's no, there's no plugin standing in the way or setting screen or anything like that. Have I got that about right?

Robert, is that the intention? I think

[00:57:26] Robert Abela: yes. The idea is, as you said at the moment, you need, an MCP plugin to have an MCP and use application passwords, which people copy and paste. So it's a bit, yeah. Security, et cetera. Or you use your API or, or stuff like that. So the idea is to have, instead of having to instal these third parties, you would have native support.

so WebPress will have an MCP server in it, and you can use oat, which is, way more secure of course. Type of authentication.

[00:57:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:57:57] Robert Abela: So you don't have to deal with third parties or do anything or instal anything. It's just outta the box. Yeah.

[00:58:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. lovely. Cami's joining us from an aeroplane.

It's what?

[00:58:07] Robert Abela: Ooh. Okay.

[00:58:09] Nathan Wrigley: Isn't that amazing? we were talking about safe travel, disconnect the plug, but yeah, join, join us from, what a crazy world we live in. This literally was science fiction.

[00:58:21] Ivana Cirkovic: yeah. And we had someone last week also from the airport.

[00:58:25] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah, that's right. Tuning

[00:58:26] Ivana Cirkovic: in. Yes.

[00:58:27] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe that's where our audience is.

Who knows? They're all waiting to board flights and things like that.

[00:58:31] Ivana Cirkovic: Digital nomads.

[00:58:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I never asked the question, where are you? Or, what, where are You that, but that's really interesting. But thank you for that. Camie, that's Camie. McNamara. Love it. Absolutely love it. Joining us from a plane.

Okay. Very quickly, another piece on the repository. I'm not gonna talk too much about this 'cause we've used up quite a bit of the time. WordPress 7.2 beta, so that's out now. ships with abilities, API update service, side, data, view, field and actions. it speaks for itself there.

ba blah, baba, blah. The only one thing I would mention is that Anne McCarthy, who is, I didn't know this was her role. I dunno when she got this role, but she's being described here as automatics auto automatic.

That's gonna, why would gonna haunt me. We're gonna

[00:59:24] Taco Verdonschot: clip this one.

[00:59:27] Nathan Wrigley: I knew you'd say that. I knew you'd say that. automatics, architecture and open source director. Congratulations Anne. If that's a new, job, by the way. she said, she was re-sharing the call for testing in post data this week, saying we're not getting feedback on the changes despite them being a big deal.

So there's a lot of changes coming in. WordPress 7.2, you can read this article of Raise, but that doesn't seem to be a great deal of feedback. So it's a bit like guesswork, for the teams over there if they don't get actual, meaningful, data. And if you've got plugins which are touching the abilities API or data views, so you're looking at, I don't know, you've got form plugin and it's showing all the forms in a list view and all that kind of stuff.

Maybe, hop in, to this post and read about it. There's a lot more.

[01:00:18] Taco Verdonschot: Yes.

[01:00:18] Nathan Wrigley: But,

[01:00:19] Taco Verdonschot: especially for every plugin that, interacts with the sidebar.

[01:00:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:00:24] Taco Verdonschot: So if you have a plugin Yes. That does anything with the sidebar in the post or page editor.

[01:00:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.

[01:00:31] Taco Verdonschot: Test this release. Please and give feedback.

[01:00:35] Nathan Wrigley: It's,

really if memory serves it's different because it feels a bit more, more like view transition is that it?

It's like, instead of it being a re a full reload, it feels like you've, when you click on an item, it almost feels like you're in an app or something. things scroll and appear and fade in Yes. And fade out and all of that.

[01:00:59] Taco Verdonschot: and it looks, it's mostly that the underlying technology is changing, right?

So if you have that integration, you need to verify that it still works.

[01:01:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. And there's a load of work being done on the client side. Media processing. We talked about this the other week, but, there's work to be done on that as well. yeah. Anyway, I won't get into that because time is running short.

So let's, I'm in fact, I might just clip through a few things quickly. This is Ann talking about exactly that, this actually, not exactly that, but this is Anne also saying she would like help with the release roadmap for, November, 2026. that will be in the show notes if you've got the capacity to look at that.

now I talk rather a lot as you probably, if you come, ah, if you come on this show, often you'll notice I just drone on and on my, I'll tell you a story very quickly. When I was very small, I was about five years old or something like that. We had a friend over, my parents' friend came over and they thought it would be nice if, if take Nathan out and you can, he can help you wash the car.

Apparently about an hour later they came back in looking like they'd been hit by a bomb and all they could say was, he talks a lot, doesn't he? And, anyway, Ross, wink, Winkle, discovered this week that I really do talk a lot. 'cause look, this is the, this is last week's, this week in WordPress video, which has been going on for this many hours.

Thank you, Ross. He did the calculation last week's of this week in WordPress episode, according to Google, where you can play it on YouTube, was 246 billion late billion years long.

[01:02:41] Robert Abela: Not bad.

[01:02:43] Nathan Wrigley: How did it make that mistake? what a random number that is. I think that's great. Thank you Ross. really appreciate it.

I love stuff like that. Okay. Here we go. This is the bit that Ivana was talking about. this is dear to my heart. I love all this sort of side of things. If we are worried about WordPress and we're worried about his future, then a good credible way of making it sustainable is tap the youth.

and we hear the arguments all the time. They're into ai, they wanna try all these other things. Yeah, I'm sure that's true, but if they've never heard a WordPress, they sure as heck aren't gonna try it. and so a lot of these initiatives are really about capturing very young people and giving them a chance to play with WordPress in a setting which feels credible, which gives them the opportunity to learn something either in a university context or in a school context, and be able to say, okay, this is real.

This is what people actually do for a living. and so Puja, Deery has put together the, the monthly education report for September, 2026, which sounds like the article's outta date, but it's not because it covers September. So it needed to be written, in October. So there were 13 Campus Connect events, which were held.

Check this out, like all this is going on in WordPress and we never talk about it. India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Costa Rica, Spain, AGM and Surat. 64, of 138 community events on the 2026 calendar were of this format. So of all the WordPress community events, of which there were 138, basically half of them were to do with WordPress Campus Connect.

So if you're used to attending Word camps and thinking that's what WordPress does for a community, it's not really anymore. That's shifted. and now it's very much, changed. WordPress, campus Connect be nova will be happening, sorry, happened on the 12th of September. There was one in Costa Rica, which happened a week later.

This whole article is just jam packed full of stuff that people did to try and keep this community alive. And then look, you just get, look at it. Look at this. Yeah. How great is all this? Isn't that brilliant? Yeah. anyway, there we go. And I know that this is dear to your heart as well, Ivana. So was there anything you wanted to add to that?

[01:05:24] Ivana Cirkovic: Yeah, I, really love seeing those numbers as you, I'm always, deeply moved by, by anything that has to do with education. And I think that just by seeing this, we are now at the point where we need to translate those numbers into stories, into people behind those numbers. Because as you said, everything is being done in the background and we need more light into it.

who are the students? What are they contributing at? Are they staying after the contribution? How are they, involvement changes WordPress for the better? What changes in their lives in their university, in their local communities? Like those are stories that are impactful, that can really mean a lot, and that can reach out to more people, more businesses.

while highlighting all that, we can also examine maybe those bigger problems and issues and come back with some highly usable solutions, products, plugins that we discussed earlier. yeah. We, definitely need to shed more light into it because we have a fantastic material in the background. We just need to push it forward.

[01:06:39] Nathan Wrigley: so James has got an interesting comment on that. He says, I, don't know if sharing the nuances of the WordPress technology will inspire the youth. I think the movement of owning your own voice, again, not through in its truncated social media platforms, is needed first. Yeah, that's a really curious thing.

I, I would agree. I think the two can go hand in hand. However, I am, I remember being at school and some like teacher just showing me some random thing and then my life was derailed for a year when I just got really into that random thing. So I'm not sure. I don't know. it certainly looked from what we were seeing on the screen there that some people went, put boots on the ground, sat, got educated.

So I, agree with you though, James. I think if we can unpick the damage that social media's done, that would be a boom. but these, all this, the bit that I keep trying to get across is all this stuff is going on. it's God's work. I feel. maybe I'm overdoing it, but do you know what I mean? There's just something it feels when I joined Open Source software, it feels like those events feel a little bit more like what they were when I joined.

There's a little bit less of the, I dunno, I yeah, I dunno where I'm going with that, so I'll just stop. But, yeah. and then there's some thing in Dutch language. Friesian,

[01:08:06] Taco Verdonschot: Ian Friesian. It's not Dutch.

[01:08:08] Nathan Wrigley: What does he say?

[01:08:10] Taco Verdonschot: happy birthday.

[01:08:11] Nathan Wrigley: Oh. Oh, okay. There you go. thank you. Reka, if you're a bit bored, would you write me a really long unpronounceable sentence so that Tacho can read it out in Yeah, in Friesian.

[01:08:24] Taco Verdonschot: If you ask him that, he will do it in Friesian. And I don't know enough about Friesian to properly do it, so I will struggle as much as you do. In fact, it might even be easier for you to pronounce Ian. It is for me.

[01:08:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. and then Tachos replied, sorry, you couldn't be there. Aw. Okay. Let's move on.

where are we at now? I have such respect for this developer. It's not just the developer now. it's now more of a, there's a team going on there, but generate anything, generate press, generate blocks, generate one, and now generate ai. I just like stuff that this person puts out.

His name's Tom Osborne. and I dunno how soft achi he's got on the platform anymore, whether he still makes all the decisions or whatnot, but I, really do have a lot of time for the way that he does his business and manages it. And, so when something like this comes along, maybe you could say a little bit later, the party generate press ai.

That makes me think, I wonder why it's linked to the party. I wonder if it's because there's been a lot of thought put into it anyway. It's a thing if you're using generate press generate blocks, they now have an ai so you can build your website. A apparently this website was built with, I mean this isn't a perfect example because it's just a blog post, but apparently the Generate press website has now been built with this AI platform.

So if you're a subscriber, it's there already and it can do the generate press things. It's not like some broader ability. So if you want that, I think you might have to go elsewhere. But if you want do things inside of generate press, it's all available. so go and check it out and if you want a little bit more, updating on how it all works, Kyle, didn't capture him at his, I didn't pause that at the best moment there.

but Kyle's done a, how long is it? It's a 15 minute video where he, he talks about why he likes it. So if, if video is more your thing, you can go and check that out as well. Probably nobody's got anything to say about that. I'll just pause and see if anybody has. Okay. Nope. Okay. All right.

we often have Mark Zaca on the show. Mark represents, main WP released something, which I thought was quite cool this week. If you are using main wp, it's like a, a platform which enables you to, I don't know, update things on your WordPress client sites and things like that. In order to do that, you have to instal a child plugin on all of the websites.

they shipped an update to the child plugin, which means that you can now handle backups. So you it at no cost. there's the cost of the, the service that you need to use the backup with. for example, they go with, there was Dropbox, there was, AWS, there was various other providers.

I can't actually find it now. but there was a whole, the usual smorgasbord of things, but apart from that is totally free. and a nice feature that they shipped is that once a week they will actually test the backup for you. So they'll try to, I dunno how that works, but they'll in some way try to reinstall the backup and if something fails, they're gonna notify you.

So if you're using main WP backups, just appear to have dropped for free as far as I can work out, which I think's, pretty cool thing. but yeah, it's not, wrapped up with a service, so you're not paying them to put it somewhere on their cloud. But I can't actually find where all the services are, but it's,

[01:12:05] Robert Abela: they are, Amazon S3, CloudFlare R two, Backblaze B two, or any other S3 compatible service, Google Cloud storage, Dropbox, or any sftp.

[01:12:16] Nathan Wrigley: So there's a few. There's a few. Does Google Cloud services, does that include Google Drive? I don't think it does, it? That's

[01:12:23] Robert Abela: Google Cloud Storage is a bit different, isn't developer. It's

[01:12:25] Nathan Wrigley: different, isn't

[01:12:26] Robert Abela: it? I'm mistaken it in the developer platform. More

[01:12:28] Nathan Wrigley: of a developer thing personally.

[01:12:29] Robert Abela: Yeah. Yes.

[01:12:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

Okay. Anyway, there you go. Bravo. Thought that was a neat update. Anybody wanna do that? Okay. No, alright, my last week's episode was 246 billion years long. however, I feel a bit annoyed because a kismet of this week got a bigger number. how dare they? I thought I was doing quite well.

a kismet turns 21. That's not the big number. That's quite a small number just in case you're not very good at maths. but 570 billion, that's the piece, that's the number of pieces of spam that apparently a kismet has saved people throughout the, throughout the earth and its solar system. That's quite a lot when you think about it.

You imagine how much time they've saved collectively. And I know it's not a particularly, yeah, it's not a groovy subject, is it? Saving people time, but that's a lot of spam saved, you'll never know it happened. 'cause it'll probably have hit the bin before you even saw it. But, anyway, there you go.

So bravo, for saving us all a bit of time. Yeah. anybody on that?

[01:13:41] Robert Abela: Imagine how much internet traffic that is.

[01:13:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. What a waste,

[01:13:46] Ivana Cirkovic: and what a career like grown. They're fully grownups now. And to think that internet has changed dramatically, but spam didn't go away. On the contrary, these numbers are like.

And they doing it to clean it up. That is really impressive.

[01:14:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. That, it is sad that we need these services, isn't it? There'll be a moment in the future, like maybe it'll be in a hundred years or something, when people will just look back, open up their history books and just think what, why are you doing, why, just what were they doing? Like they were just sending meaningless, environmentally destructive packets of information About what? For no reason. Yeah. For no reason.

[01:14:28] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. To watch cats. No,

[01:14:30] Nathan Wrigley: that's right. To watch cats sum it off perfectly.

[01:14:37] Taco Verdonschot: the, the thing is, someone made a comparison I think last week or so, comparing anti-spam solutions to the ocean cleanup.

[01:14:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:14:51] Taco Verdonschot: the ocean cleanup has been cleaning oceans that literally contain tonnes and tonnes of plastic, which is the physical version of spam.

[01:15:01] Ivana Cirkovic: Spam.

[01:15:02] Taco Verdonschot: It's slowly killing us.

[01:15:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. It, yeah, it is. And it's insane, isn't it? We have this, oh, we're a curious species, aren't we? speaking of species, and cleaning things up, do you, do any of you watch, the blue planet, the BBC do this documentary about, it's about nature and the blue planet is all about the oceans.

Yesterday they launched, the Blue Planet three and oh my goodness me, it was a study like my jaw was just on the floor, the wonderful stuff that's in nature and then the consequences of global warming on things like Coral. but there was this beautiful moment, speaking of cleaning things up, just watch the bit about the, about the whale and the little fish that swallows around cleaning up its waste.

it was like, but quite marvellous to watch. At the same time, nature has a way humans do not. Okay. Let's move on. Okay. This was the piece that Robert was mentioning earlier. I dunno if we need to reintroduce it, but Robert, you were talking about this trust graph, a fake cloud player check that instals a backdoor through your own browser.

This is that timing thing, is it?

[01:16:18] Robert Abela: Yeah, it's ba no, this is a bit different. This is basically session hijacking. So it's, if you are logged into your WebPress website and someone, convinces you to click a link, open a new page or whatever, there might be a malicious Java script, which basically hijacks our session and they can take over.

They don't need to guess on a password. They don't need to fa not nothing of that. Can protect you against station hijacking. And from then onwards, in this particular case, they were installing, because of course they had admin access, they were installing, a fake cloud fair maintenance plugin, which was a backdoor, with station.

Hi. Again, going back to AI and how things, how fast things are moving, we have a lot of things. We have firewalls, ritual pitching. all of this is, very important. However, more than ever, education and awareness is important way more than ever, like in this case. unfortunately everyone can be tricked.

so yeah, it's very important that people are aware. Anyone who works, somehow the computer should be at least aware of what different types of ad text there can be, and that's why companies should invest in training their teams. It's very

important.

[01:17:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, So this one's weird though, isn't it?

Because this one, you don't need to know your password. You are literally hi, hijacking the set. So you are, taking somebody who's legitimately logged in and you are, able to take their cookies. Let's go for that word. you are able to not even fake that you are them in effect as far as the browser is concerned.

You are them. So if you can capture the details of somebody that's logged in as an administrator of a WordPress website, you can then be logged in as if you were at the terminal and you just barged them out the way and sat in their chair. Is that kind of summing it up? Yeah,

[01:18:14] Robert Abela: no, exactly. You all you need is the, are their cookies.

yeah, they don't even notice. You will remain locked in. If you are locked into a website and your session is hijacked, you will remain locked in. In fact, in most cases, people just instal back door and they leave UP so you don't even realise that you've been hacked. So yeah, that's what it is, just the way it works and that's why, yeah, user education is really, important.

[01:18:37] Nathan Wrigley: And in this case, they're masking the whole thing behind what looks like a CloudFlare sort of verify that your human thing that we're seeing all over the internet now. So you might be forgiven for thinking, okay, why is that there? yeah, I've seen those before. That's normal. Okay. Yeah.

[01:18:54] Robert Abela: By the way, this is not just a web position per se, right?

the, concept of cookie sessions such as the way, it's just the way web applications work. So even if you look at Facebook, that's how they work. However, certain services, certain SaaS platforms, since certain web applications have more controls and checks and balances when it comes to sessions, none of them are a hundred percent.

Secure when it comes to hijacking. However, WebPress still needs, we still need to do a much more when it comes to these things. In fact, I was talking during Word can be West, I was talking with John Black Blackburn, He's the head of WebPress security. So we're talking in fact, about this 'cause they are looking into some, see how sessions can be better managed somehow, or Oh, okay.

Okay. There can be some more alerts. Yeah. For users it's still way behind, but yeah, it's always, a good start. It's never too late.

[01:19:48] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. thank you and thanks for explaining that and the moment we've all been waiting for. Yeah, there you go. I

[01:19:54] Robert Abela: saw it. Yeah.

[01:19:57] Nathan Wrigley: Let me try. I think it's got something to do with butter and and sizzling things and, and I think fries.

so, it's fried, fried butter and fries

[01:20:10] Taco Verdonschot: like that. The, the thing is, what it says is, if you can pronounce, if you cannot pronounce this, then you're not a real frisian.

[01:20:19] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[01:20:20] Taco Verdonschot: I can read that and Remus would laugh his ass off if I tried to pronounce it, so I'm not gonna do it.

[01:20:29] Ivana Cirkovic: I ask AI how

[01:20:29] Nathan Wrigley: to pronounce ai, just so that, Tako just, so that we're clear.

That's, actually what I thought it said as well. Yeah, of

[01:20:39] Taco Verdonschot: course. Yes. No, I got that.

[01:20:42] Nathan Wrigley: thank you. wow, that's a lot of,

[01:20:46] Taco Verdonschot: and, I see in the comments a no and a yes I would and I'm pretty sure the yes I would is to him laughing, his ass off and the, no, I'm not sure. we

[01:20:59] Nathan Wrigley: need you next time.

No, I don't think it's got to do with butter and fries would be

[01:21:02] Ivana Cirkovic: my guess. Butter bread and green cheese.

[01:21:05] Nathan Wrigley: Exactly. That's exact

[01:21:07] Robert Abela: butter.

[01:21:08] Nathan Wrigley: Ivana, we rice tacos. Just making stuff off. Absolutely. Yes, definitely food related. Have you seen how

[01:21:15] Robert Abela: big the first part is definitely

[01:21:17] Nathan Wrigley: loads of food goes in that chap. I'm gonna get in trouble for that

[01:21:24] Ivana Cirkovic: and not vegetarian kind of food, but

[01:21:26] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

Proper food. Okay. So we've done this one about the WordPress security fix. We did this, this is, another one. We don't really have time to cover it, but I'll just mention that. essentially it's about WordPress core, the security, the core security initiative. the way these charts work, it, does make it feel like, how to describe it.

The WordPress team and this new initiative, which started about a month or so ago, does seem to have made an, a, a difference. It definitely has slowed the rate at which WordPress is being exploited. There's a chart on the screen now, showing, various data. So the, the orange line is, new vulnerabilities.

The blue line is the, total, actually, I think I've got the wrong chart. I probably am thinking about the previous chart. Anyway, time's run out. We won't have time to look at that, but, go and read that for yourself. I'll just hand it to you quickly. Robert, was there anything in there that you did want to get out?

[01:22:30] Robert Abela: As you said, they're making big efforts to make sure to try solve as much as they can. And they're using AI as well to make sure,

[01:22:36] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, it's like AI versus the ai and it seems that in the last month they've made a big difference. yes. So it's nice to know that this stuff is out there to combat that.

We won't have time for that. oh. If you are in, in the, the, mood to go to, the new flagship event, which is Word Camp India, the, the city has been announced, I dunno if this is the official place where it did get announced, but it's certainly the place that I saw it first. a men are bad,

[01:23:07] Taco Verdonschot: Erba.

[01:23:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you. Is that Friesian or is that

[01:23:11] Taco Verdonschot: No, they had a work camp a couple years ago that I attended,

[01:23:15] Nathan Wrigley: so did that. Oh, neat. Yeah. Huh.

[01:23:18] Taco Verdonschot: It's a lovely city and I would love to go back.

[01:23:21] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice. so anyway, November, literally a year from today, it's gonna be held the first flagship word, camp India.

so anyway, now you know where it is. So you could start making plans for that. I presume that there was a whole vetting process and maybe multiple cities put their, hat in the ring and what have you. Anyway, they're the victors. So congratulations

[01:23:43] Taco Verdonschot: also more so than a beautiful city. It's a fantastic community in Erba.

So

[01:23:48] Nathan Wrigley: nice.

[01:23:49] Taco Verdonschot: That alone is a reason to go.

[01:23:51] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that is good to know. and, similar part of the world, if you are gonna be heading to Malaysia. for Word Camp Asia 2027, there is now, the option to, suggest a speaker or a topic. So if slightly different from, suggesting yourself for a topic or, yourself for a speaking slot.

In this case you can nominate what you would like to hear about, which is quite a nice way of doing it. That page went up on the 29th of October, so I will link to it in the show notes, so you can do that if you wish. And. Yeah, so

[01:24:33] Taco Verdonschot: to be specific, that is to nominate someone else. So thank

[01:24:37] Nathan Wrigley: you.

[01:24:37] Taco Verdonschot: You've described it better

[01:24:39] Nathan Wrigley: than I haves. Yeah. Thank

[01:24:40] Taco Verdonschot: you. Yeah, it's really nominate someone else, someone you would love to see on stage at esia or a topic you'd wanna see.

[01:24:47] Nathan Wrigley: I recommend that, all of our panellists recommend them. I dunno if they'll, if you

[01:24:53] Taco Verdonschot: pay for travels, I'll

[01:24:55] Nathan Wrigley: happily speak. That'd be nice.

Okay. A bit of a rta. did you know that HTML tags are 35 today? it's not today. That's not true. It was the 29th of October. So the following tags, 18 of them, I won't list them all, but, they didn't exist on the 28th of October, 1991. By the 29th of October, they were officially codified. such notable things as the, the P tag, the very much used p tag, the, the very much used a tag, the very much underused next ID tag, which I confess, I can't actually remember using that much.

The HP one tag not used all that much. the IS index anyway, you get the idea. HTML some of the foundational stuff is now 35 years old. And, it only took us 35 years to go from the HT ML tags to killing ourselves with ai.

[01:25:56] Ivana Cirkovic: what a con contrast.

[01:25:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. What

[01:25:59] Ivana Cirkovic: contrast? Yeah, like ht ML is still alive, not reinventing themselves every six months.

And there we are discussing ai, cps, and whatnot.

[01:26:10] Nathan Wrigley: It's, also real, it's amazing that, if you think about it, I'm, I don't know if this is a too grandiose statement, but it feels like we're living in a time where the rate of change is truly off the scale. I know it's mostly happening inside of computers and we can't actually see it.

So it's not like the landscape in front of us is changing, but boy, are things changing quickly. My life is, so different. and the, things that are now convenient and readily available at the end of a phone, man,

[01:26:46] Taco Verdonschot: the fact that we're here talking to each other right now, being watched by people from all over the world says it all right?

Yeah.

[01:26:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's

[01:26:54] Ivana Cirkovic: not, isn't, that's

[01:26:55] Nathan Wrigley: not, yeah. and it's all done largely with HT ml and a bit of JavaScript. So happy birthday HT ML tags. I bait you a cape, but I don't think you're gonna notice, frankly, you're a bunch of tags. Have we got any more time? Oh yeah, of course, We have time.

We have to talk about the fridges. it's been too long since we talked about fridges, frankly. what the heck is happening over in your part of the world? I think,

[01:27:25] Taco Verdonschot: yeah, six. it's close to you as well. Ireland was one of the six companies that was hit today.

[01:27:35] Nathan Wrigley: this is today?

[01:27:36] Taco Verdonschot: This is today.

Yes. Yes. Today, six European countries have had, supermarkets, where freezers and fridges have been hacked, where their temperature was raised to the point that food went bad.

[01:27:57] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just say it again? Stop it. Just stop it. There's no need for that. That's just wasteful. Your parents would be very disappointed if they knew you'd been a part of that.

what the heck? And also, dear Supermarket, just disconnect them. Just plug them into the normal plug on the wall. You don't need them. Or do they? Maybe they do. I dunno.

[01:28:21] Taco Verdonschot: So for the Dutch companies that were hit today, the advice would be change the default password. Yes.

[01:28:30] Nathan Wrigley: Oh no, really? The fridge is of all kind.

Default password. Is it fridge

[01:28:37] Taco Verdonschot: or something like that? Or 1, 2, 3, 4. I didn't know. But change it.

[01:28:41] Nathan Wrigley: Can I

[01:28:42] Ivana Cirkovic: recommend that? Plus education because we can never

[01:28:45] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah.

[01:28:45] Ivana Cirkovic: Educate people enough. And hire people who know security. Yeah.

[01:28:51] Nathan Wrigley: Here's the deal, right From now on, everybody go to MKU and get a password in Friesian

[01:28:59] Ivana Cirkovic: in Yeah.

[01:29:00] Nathan Wrigley: A long sentence, which is, that's an idea. Announcable like that in Friesian, that's the solution. Seriously, they plugged in the fridges with the default password. Okay. you're asking for trouble, but

[01:29:13] Robert Abela: I wouldn't be sur I wouldn't be sur surprised.

[01:29:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I wanna know what the default password is. I wanna know if it's fridge or if it's, password.

Oh, now I

[01:29:19] Ivana Cirkovic: remembered, on last year I was doing a research, like surface level security type of research to see random 100 sites to try to get into their like admin and login passes. You would be surprised to the amount of, businesses and websites that use admin as a username and

[01:29:44] Robert Abela: Yeah. Go, to, have i ibm point.com.

There are the statistics of the type of passwords that are leaked around. Yeah. It's sad. It's sad when you think about it.

[01:29:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:29:54] Robert Abela: We're not even there. That's why I was saying we're not even there yet,

[01:29:57] Nathan Wrigley: let alone No, That's

[01:29:58] Robert Abela: where we

[01:29:58] Nathan Wrigley: can't even get everybody to use random passwords. Yeah. Yeah. okay.

And really, honestly, it's not enough to have one fridge story, just a thank the lord. we've got another one. got another story about fridge. Is this the same story wrapped up? Yeah, same

[01:30:17] Taco Verdonschot: story. Different countries.

[01:30:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. There you go. There the fridges are empty because of the password on the fridge.

Yeah. Why do this? Seriously, why does the fridge need a password? what is it that they want to be able to do remotely? Is it that they want temperature, control? It's

[01:30:33] Robert Abela: temperature. It's just, there is this, there with supermarkets, there are these whole systems, that are re systems and distribution systems and depending on the weather outside the temperature of the supermarkets, the fridges, how, many times they're open, et cetera.

There's a whole, it's one big system.

[01:30:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:30:49] Robert Abela: yeah.

[01:30:50] Nathan Wrigley: My, my mother, bless her, she would, she's Irish. she would say, you just have to find a wee man. Get a wee man. You just get a little chill, too

[01:31:01] Ivana Cirkovic: horrible.

[01:31:01] Nathan Wrigley: go to the screwdriver, change the temperature.

[01:31:06] Robert Abela: talking, This is

[01:31:06] Nathan Wrigley: what we're getting back to.

We're gonna have to get back to this.

[01:31:09] Robert Abela: Yeah. Talking about rapid change. when I was a kid growing up in Malta, it wasn't common, but I was still going to some groceries where they still didn't have fridges. They had cheese just stuck in, in some ice and stuff.

[01:31:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[01:31:20] Robert Abela: I'm talking about 40 years ago, just in 40 years.

Went from there to fridges, connected to the internet.

[01:31:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. and it old enough, enough to

[01:31:29] Taco Verdonschot: remember 40 years ago, Robert,

[01:31:32] Nathan Wrigley: I, I don't, his grandpa

[01:31:34] Ivana Cirkovic: told him the story, yeah,

[01:31:37] Nathan Wrigley: I don't believe a word of this taco. I don't think you are older than HML tags. Don't. It is true. You don't, look a day over 34.

I appreciate

[01:31:47] Taco Verdonschot: that, but you're

[01:31:47] Nathan Wrigley: so

[01:31:48] Taco Verdonschot: wrong.

[01:31:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:31:49] Taco Verdonschot: I can barely remember the day I turned

[01:31:52] Nathan Wrigley: 34. okay, I think that's all we've got time for. Oh, just one last one very, quickly. if you're, if you've been a user at any point of CSS tricks, you'll know that it got bought, by Digital Ocean many years ago, and then basically got nothing happened.

It didn't go anywhere, but it was a website that I loved for many, years. it's back, it's been bought by Jeff Graham. and he's hoping to make it a success with sponsorship. So if you, that's your thing and you wanna support them, you can now go back to CSS tricks and hopefully that website will come back with a vengeance.

Nice. Speaking of coming back with a vengeance, we'll be back next week. That was the terrible segue, wasn't it? we will be back next week 'cause we finished this episode. So if you want to join us, then I'm not entirely sure who is on, but it will be me and three other people. and so all that it remains for me to do is, we'll do the hand wavy thing in a minute, but, yeah.

Sorry. Tech are I, it's all a bit too quick. sorry. But we'll be back next week with a panel of different guests. So super duper thank you to Tako for joining us today and Robert for joining us today and at the very last minute, Ivana, as well. Yeah. Thank you. That's great. thank you, MKA, I hope that you are feeling, better.

yeah.

[01:33:15] Taco Verdonschot: he got to talk Friesian into us, so he must be

[01:33:17] Nathan Wrigley: feeling better. that's right. Yeah. We could have had him on the actual show talking Friesian next time. Mku next time, In which case we'll do our hand wavy thing, if that's all right with you guys. Da That's great. By the way, last week, I've prepared this whole thing and then never did anything with it.

Let's see if I can find it. Look, I had this whole thing ready.

Oh, I'm glad I got to use it at least once. There we go. So we'll be back this time next week. Take care. And if you three want to hang out for a bit after this, that would be lovely. Sure. We will. See you next week. Take it easy. See you next week. Bye bye-Bye. Bye-bye.