news
Web Browsers/Web Servers: WebAudio, Automattic/WordCamp/WordPress Become Slopfest, Looking at "geolocation" in HTML
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Tom Ritter: webaudio fingerprinting on alibaba
There's a popular post going around about Alibaba doing WebAudio fingerprinting and in the process, mucking around with the author's Bluetooth headphones. Here's the tl;dr: browser fingerprinting is a far-too-pervasive method of tracking users across the web, but at least for WebAudio specifically, it's not very effective. Firefox has largely eliminated this fingerprinting vector.
I work on Firefox. Chrome, Brave, Safari probably have defenses against this. I'm pretty sure Chrome's WebAudio code was made approximately constant (like ours) many years ago. It probably still leaks CPU architecture though.
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Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)
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WordPress ☛ AI Creates Opportunity While Artists Ship at WordCamp US 2026 [Ed: Automattic jumping the shark with slop plagiarism and charlatans - this can repel more WordPress users than it can attract]
WordCamp US (WCUS) 2026 just wrapped up after 4 days at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona. Over 1,100 people from around the world registered to attend, and thousands more watched online through livestreams.
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Standards/Consortia
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Andy Bell ☛ A look at the geolocation HTML element and how it works
The <geolocation> HTML element does exactly what you might think it does. It’s a dedicated element that gets the user’s location, either once or continuously. The options are set using HTML attributes instead of JavaScript, but JavaScript is still needed. However, <geolocation> requires fewer lines of JavaScript and also offers superior error and permission handling. In fact, the <geolocation> element started off as an all-purpose <permission> element, but is now dedicated to handling geolocation.
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