18 October, 2024
WordPress.org bans WP Engine, blocks it from accessing its resources
WordPress drama went up another notch on Wednesday after WordPress.org, the open-source web hosting software, banned hosting provider WP Engine from accessing its resources.
In a post on WordPress.org, WordPress co-creator and Automattic CEO, Matt Mullenweg, wrote that pending their legal claims, WP Engine will not have access to the platform’s resources, such as themes and plug-ins.
“WP Engine wants to control your WordPress experience, they need to run their own user login system, update servers, plugin directory, theme directory, pattern directory, block directory, translations, photo directory, job board, meetups, conferences, bug tracker, forums, Slack, Ping-o-matic, and showcase. Their servers can no longer access our servers for free,” he said.
“WP Engine is free to offer their hacked up, bastardized simulacra of WordPress’s GPL code to their customers, and they can experience WordPress as WP Engine envisions it, with them getting all of the profits and providing all of the services,” Mullenweg wrote.
As a result of this block, sites using WP Engine’s solutions cannot install plug-ins or update their themes.
Today in Matt destroys the WordPress community: you can't add plugins directly from the .org repo if you have a WP Engine site. And I can confirm that this is happening.https://t.co/vRd7jliVsM pic.twitter.com/9XGAtXhUoN
— Jacob Martella (@ViewFromTheBox) September 25, 2024
I want to share: https://t.co/CmCwbcxZfD has blocked @wpengine customers from updating and installing plugins and themes via WP Admin—disrupting essential work for #WordPress users, agencies, freelancers, and plugin developers.
Please read: https://t.co/cE45rmvnqW
— Brian Gardner (@bgardner) September 25, 2024
Not being able to do @WordPress updates because of the @photomatt/@wpengine fight is infuriating.
For a small nonprofit, being caught in the middle of this could be costly if we need to migrate our sites to a new host. That money/time should be used for our mission.
— Michael Geheren (@mgeheren) September 25, 2024
As several WordPress developers and advocates pointed out, the ban also prevents WP Engine customers from accessing security updates, leaving them vulnerable.
WP Engine acknowledged this issue and said the company is working on a fix.
“WordPress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from updating and installing plugins and themes via WP Admin. There is currently no impact on the performance, reliability, or security of your site, nor does it impact your ability to make updates to your code or content,” an update from WP Engine read.
The WP Engine vs Automattic fight
It’s important to understand that WordPress powers nearly 40% of the websites on the internet through different hosting providers, which include Mullenweg’s Automattic and WP Engine. Users can also take the open-source project and run the websites themselves, but a lot of people choose to go with plug-and-play solutions.
The fight began last week when Mullenweg criticized WP Engine publicly at a conference and on his blog for profiteering and called it a “cancer to WordPress.” He also alleged the company doesn’t contribute as much as Automattic does to the WordPress community despite both of them making about a half-a-billion dollars in revenue annually.
This spurred WP Engine to send a cease-and-desist letter to Mullenweg and Automattic, asking them to withdraw their comments. The letter alleged that Mullenweg and Automattic had threatened to adopt a “scorched earth nuclear approach” if WP Engine did not comply and pay Automattic a percentage of its gross revenue.
In reply, Automattic sent its own cease-and-desist letter to WP Engine, alleging infringement of the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks.
Separately, the WordPress Foundation, a charity created by Mullenweg to maintain WordPress as an open source project, told TechCrunch that WP Engine has violated its trademarks.
“WP Engine has indeed breached the WordPress Trademark Policy. The Policy states that no one is allowed to use the WordPress trademarks as part of a product, project, service, domain name, or company name. WP Engine has repeatedly violated this policy and the Cease and Desist letter sent to them by Automattic provides examples of some of the many violations,” the foundation said in an email.
The policy was updated yesterday to include an example of WP Engine. Notably, the policy doesn’t cover “WP” as a trademark.
You can contact this reporter at [email protected] or on Signal: @ivan.42
Matt Mullenweg calls WP Engine a 'cancer to WordPress' and urges community to switch providers
Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg unleashed a scathing attack on a rival firm this week, calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress.”
Mullenweg criticized the company — which has been commercializing the open source WordPress project since 2010 — for profiteering without giving much back, while also disabling key features that make WordPress such a powerful platform in the first place.
For context, WordPress powers more than 40% of the web, and while any individual or company is free to take the open source project and run a website themselves, a number of businesses have sprung up to sell hosting services and technical expertise off the back of it. These include Automattic, which Mullenweg set up in 2005 to monetize the project he’d created two years previous; and WP Engine, a managed WordPress hosting provider that has raised nearly $300 million in funding over its 14-year history, the bulk of which came via a $250 million investment from private equity firm Silver Lake in 2018.
Speaking this week at WordCamp US 2024, a WordPress-focused conference held in Portland, Oregon, Mullenweg pulled no punches in his criticism of WP Engine. Taking to the stage, Mullenweg read out a post he had just published to his personal blog, where he points to the distinct “five for the future” investment pledges made by Automattic and WP Engine, with the former contributing 3,900 hours per week, and the latter contributing just 40 hours.
While he acknowledged that these figures are just a “proxy,” and might not be perfectly accurate, Mullenweg said that this disparity in contributions is notable, as both Automattic and WP Engine “are roughly the same size, with revenue in the ballpark of half-a-billion [dollars].”
Mullenweg has levelled criticism at at least one other big-name web host in the past, accusing GoDaddy of profiteering from the open source project without giving anything meaningful back — more specifically, he called GoDaddy a “parasitic company” and an “existential threat to WordPress’ future”.
In his latest offensive, Mullenweg didn’t stop at WP Engine, he extended his criticism to the company’s main investor.
“The company [WP Engine] is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102 billion in assets under management,” Mullenweg said. “Silver Lake doesn’t give a dang about your open source ideals, it just wants return on capital. So it’s at this point that I ask everyone in the WordPress community to go vote with your wallet. Who are you giving your money to — someone who’s going to nourish the ecosystem, or someone who’s going to frack every bit of value out of it until it withers?”
In response to a question submitted by an audience member later, asking for clarity on whether Mullenweg was asking WordPress users to boycott WP Engine, he said that he hoped every WP Engine customer would watch his presentation, and when it comes to the time when they’re renewing their contracts, they should think about their next steps.
“There’s some really hungry other hosts — Hostinger, Bluehost Cloud, Pressable, etc, that would love to get that business,” Mullenweg said. “You might get faster performance even switching to someone else, and migrating has never been easier. That’s part of the idea of data liberation. It’s, like, one day of work to switch your site to something else, and I would highly encourage you to think about that when your contract renewal comes up, if you’re currently a customer with WP Engine.”
‘A cancer to WordPress’
In response to the brouhaha that followed the talk, Mullenweg published a follow up blog post, where he calls WP Engine a “cancer” to WordPress. “It’s important to remember that unchecked, cancer will spread,” he wrote. “WP Engine is setting a poor standard that others may look at and think is ok to replicate.”
Mullenweg said that WP Engine is profiting off the confusion that exists between the WordPress project and the commercial services company WP Engine.
“It has to be said and repeated: WP Engine is not WordPress,” Mullenweg wrote. “My own mother was confused and thought WP Engine was an official thing. Their branding, marketing, advertising, and entire promise to customers is that they’re giving you WordPress, but they’re not. And they’re profiting off of the confusion.”
Mullenweg also said that WP Engine is actively selling an inferior product, because the core WordPress project stores every change that is made to allow users to revert their content to a previous version — something that WP Engine disables, as per its support page.
While customers can request that revisions be enabled, support only extends to three revisions, which are automatically deleted after 60 days. WP Engine recommends that customers use a “third-party editing system” if they need extensive revision management. The reason for this, according to Mullenweg, is simple — saving money.
“They disable revisions because it costs them more money to store the history of the changes in the database, and they don’t want to spend that to protect your content,” Mullenweg contends. “It strikes to the very heart of what WordPress does, and they shatter it, the integrity of your content. If you make a mistake, you have no way to get your content back, breaking the core promise of what WordPress does, which is manage and protect your content.”
TechCrunch has reached out to WP Engine for comment, and will update here when we hear back.
Boeing’s Starliner overcomes leaks and engine trouble to dock with 'the big city in the sky'
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft has successfully delivered two astronauts to the International Space Station, a key milestone in the aerospace giant’s quest to certify the capsule for regular crewed missions.
Starliner safely docked at 10:34 AM Pacific Time. After taking some time to equalize pressure between Starliner and the station, the hatch opened at around 12:46 PM. The astronauts, spaceflight veterans Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, entered the ISS to cheers and hugs from the seven crew members already aboard. This is their third time each visiting the station, but the first time any human has done so using a Boeing Starliner capsule.
Boeing and NASA are currently in the middle of what will end up being a roughly 10-day test mission of the Starliner spacecraft, which has been beset by numerous delays and technical issues. The two astronauts will spend eight days on the ISS before re-boarding Starliner and returning home for a parachute-assisted landing somewhere in the southwestern United States.
Though successful, the mission was not without its problems. The vehicle experienced three helium leaks, one of which was identified before the spacecraft even left Earth, though Boeing says the leaks are not a safety issue for the crew or the vehicle. In addition to those, five of the 28 maneuvering thrusters on the spacecraft’s propulsion system failed, though Boeing and NASA were able to bring four of them back online after conducting hot-fire tests — essentially turning them off and on again. These thrusters are critical, as they make the minute shifts to the capsule’s trajectory as it approaches the station.
The thruster problem forced the two astronauts to stop Starliner less than 1,000 feet from the ISS and put docking on hold. They were clear to dock a few hours later after troubleshooting the issue.
“Nice to be attached to the big city in the sky,” Wilmore said to Mission Control. “It’s a great place to be.”
#Starliner hatch opening confirmed!
The momentum was definitely building for this epic moment! But it was worth the wait to see the grand entrance of @NASA_Astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore to the @Space_Station.
Welcome aboard Starliner crew!! pic.twitter.com/8FQ13B6a4a
— NASA's Johnson Space Center (@NASA_Johnson) June 6, 2024
Starliner launched aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket on Wednesday, marking the first time the capsule has delivered astronauts to space. This mission is the critical final step before Starliner can be certified for regular astronaut transportation missions with NASA. As of right now, SpaceX is the only provider for that service, using its Crew Dragon capsule.
AI-powered search engine Perplexity AI, now valued at $520M, raises $73.6M
As search engine incumbents — namely Google — amp up their platforms with GenAI tech, startups are looking to reinvent AI-powered search from the ground up. It might seem like a Sisyphean task, going up against competitors with billions upon billions of users. But this new breed of search upstarts believes it can carve out a niche, however small, by delivering a superior experience.
One among the cohort, Perplexity AI, this morning announced that it raised $73.6 million in a funding round led by IVP with additional investments from NEA, Databricks Ventures, former Twitter VP Elad Gil, Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke, ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch. Other participants in the round included Nvidia and — notably — Jeff Bezos.
Sources familiar with the matter tell TechCrunch that the round values Perplexity at $520 million post-money. That’s chump change in the realm of GenAI startups. But, considering that Perplexity’s only been around since August 2022, it’s a nonetheless impressive climb.
Perplexity was founded by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski — engineers with backgrounds in AI, distributed systems, search engines and databases. Srinivas, Perplexity’s CEO, previously worked at OpenAI, where he researched language and GenAI models along the lines of Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 3.
Unlike traditional search engines, Perplexity offers a chatbot-like interface that allows users to ask questions in natural language (e.g. “Do we burn calories while sleeping?,” “What’s the least visited country?,” and so on). The platform’s AI responds with a summary containing source citations (mostly websites and articles), at which point users can ask follow-up questions to dive deeper into a particular subject.
“With Perplexity, users can get instant … answers to any question with full sources and citations included,” Srinivas said. “Perplexity is for anyone and everyone who uses technology to search for information.”
Underpinning the Perplexity platform is an array of GenAI models developed in-house and by third parties. Subscribers to Perplexity’s Pro plan ($20 per month) can switch models — Google’s Gemini, Mistra 7Bl, Anthropic’s Claude 2.1 and OpenAI’s GPT-4 are in the rotation presently — and unlock features like image generation; unlimited use of Perplexity’s Copilot, which considers personal preferences during searches; and file uploads, which allows users to upload documents including images and have models analyze the docs to formulate answers about them (e.g. “Summarize pages 2 and 4”).
If the experience sounds comparable to Google’s Bard, Microsoft’s Copilot and ChatGPT, you’re not wrong. Even Perplexity’s chat-forward UI is reminiscent of today’s most popular GenAI tools.
Beyond the obvious competitors, the search engine startup You.com offers similar AI-powered summarizing and source-citing tools, powered optionally by GPT-4.
Srinivas makes the case that Perplexity offers more robust search filtering and discovery options than most, for example letting users limit searches to academic papers or browse trending search topics submitted by other users on the platform. I’m not convinced that they’re so differentiated that they couldn’t be replicated — or haven’t already been replicated for that matter. But Perplexity has ambitions beyond search. It’s beginning to serve its own GenAI models, which leverage Perplexity’s search index and the public web for ostensibly improved performance, through an API available to Pro customers.
This reporter is skeptical about the longevity of GenAI search tools for a number of reasons, not least of which AI models are costly to run. At one point, OpenAI was spending approximately $700,000 per day to keep up with the demand for ChatGPT. Microsoft is reportedly losing an average of $20 per user per month on its AI code generator, meanwhile.
Sources familiar with the matter tell TechCrunch Perplexity’s annual recurring revenue is between $5 million and $10 million at the moment. That seems fairly healthy… until you factor in the millions of dollars it often costs to train GenAI models like Perplexity’s own.
Concerns around misuse and misinformation inevitably crop up around GenAI search tools like Perplexity, as well — as they well should. AI isn’t the best summarizer after all, sometimes missing key details, misconstruing and exaggerating language or otherwise inventing facts very authoritatively. And it’s prone to spewing bias and toxicity — as Perplexity’s own models recently demonstrated.
Yet another potential speed bump on Perplexity’s road to success is copyright. GenAI models “learn” from examples to craft essays, code, emails, articles and more, and many vendors — including Perplexity, presumably — scrape the web for millions to billions of these examples to add to their training datasets. Vendors argue fair use doctrine provides a blanket protection for their web-scraping practices, but artists, authors and other copyright holders disagree — and have filed lawsuits seeking compensation.
As a tangentially related aside, while an increasing number of GenAI vendors offer policies protecting customers from IP claims against them, Perplexity does not. According to the company’s terms of service, customers agree to “hold harmless” Perplexity from claims, damages and liabilities arising from the use of its services — meaning Perplexity’s off the hook where it concerns legal fees.
Some plaintiffs, like The New York Times, have argued GenAI search experiences siphon off publishers’ content, readers and ad revenue through anticompetitive means. “Anticompetitive” or no, the tech is certainly impacting traffic. A model from The Atlantic found that if a search engine like Google were to integrate AI into search, it’d answer a user’s query 75% of the time without requiring a click-through to its website. (Some vendors, such as OpenAI, have inked deals with certain news publishers, but most — including Perplexity — haven’t.)
Srinivas pitches this as a feature — not a bug.
“[With Perplexity, there’s] no need to click on different links, compare answers or endlessly dig for information,” he said. “The era of sifting through SEO spam, sponsored links and multiple sources will be replaced by a more efficient model of knowledge acquisition and sharing, propelling society into a new era of accelerated learning and research.”
The many uncertainties around Perplexity’s business model — and GenAI and consumer search at large — don’t appear to be deterring its investors. To date, the startup, which claims to have 10 million active monthly users, has raised over $100 million — much is which is being put toward expanding its 39-person team and building new product functionality, Srinivas says.
“Perplexity is intensely building a product capable of bringing the power of AI to billions,” Cack Wilhelm, a general partner at IVP, added via email. “Aravind possesses the unique ability to uphold a grand, long-term vision while shipping product relentlessly, requirements to tackle a problem as important and fundamental as search.”
Green search engine Ecosia launches a cross-platform browser
Ecosia, the search engine that funds tree-planting initiatives with a portion of its search ad profits, has launched a new cross-platform browser to grow its online footprint.
The new browser, available for Mac, Windows, iOS and Android, is built on top of Google’s open source browser project Chromium, which explains why there aren’t many differences to Google’s own Chrome browser. While the desktop versions are new launches, mobile versions replace older search products.
However, the Germany-based company sees that as a good thing, as users might be more tempted to switch if the experience they’re accustomed to is similar. Ecosia does allow the user to customize the landing page, and remove sections that aren’t to their liking, such as top sites or the climate impact widget.
Sustainability
Michael Metcalf, Ecosia’s chief product officer, told TechCrunch that the company expanded into browsers so that it could grow its sustainability pledge.
“The main reason we are building a browser is because we want to go where our users are and start to expand the footprint of where they can be sustainable,” Metcalf said. “Right now, our main use case is around search, but we want to expand into parts of browsing experiences.”
With this new browser, Ecosia is also starting an affiliate shopping program, meaning that users will see links to shopping sites such as Amazon, eBay and Decathlon under the sponsored links section. The company said all the money earned through affiliate revenues will go toward planting trees and backing similar green projects. Through this kind of investment, Ecosia has committed to generating 25Wh of clean energy per user each day.
Metcalf said that while the company promotes lower consumption, it’s acutely aware that consumers like to shop online. With the affiliate program, they have an opportunity to give back. In the future, the company also wants to improve the affiliate shopping interface, integrate its AI chatbot and introduce more customization to the browser.
Acknowledging that it’s tough to get users to switch browsers, the company is initially targeting its existing search engine user base of 20 million, while it will also increase its marketing targeted at consumers who already demonstrate an affinity with the “green” cause. The company said that it was happy with the retention rate in its early beta testing, but it wouldn’t share any data on the impact on Ecosia search traffic resulting from those using the new browser.
Ecosia made a few structural changes to its search engine last year. After years of using Bing as its sole search provider, the company started experimenting with Google Search in markets like Canada, New Zealand, Brazil and the Philippines. The company uses System1, an ad tech company that syndicates search results from Microsoft Bing, Startpage and Info.com.
Earlier this year, Ecosia also crossed the mark of planting more than 200 million trees across 95,000 locales globally.
Ecosia adds a train travel search tool powered by Omio
Danti's natural language search engine for Earth data soars with $5M in new funding
Danti, an artificial intelligence company building a superpower search engine for Earth data, has brought on prominent defensive tech investor Shield Capital as it looks to scale its technology for government customers.
Founded by Jesse Kallman in early 2023, Danti has developed a natural language search engine for data that has historically been highly siloed, like satellite imagery, collating it with other commercial and government sources to report back across multiple sources and domains.
For example, an analyst can pose a complex question in simple language, like “What are the latest tank movements in Eastern Ukraine?” and receive in turn straightforward answers collated across data sources.
The idea is to empower a single analyst to do more, Kallman said in a recent interview. While American adversaries are throwing manpower at the problem of analyzing huge amounts of data, Danti aims to help “one analyst do the work of 10 or 15,” he said. It means that a relatively straightforward question — where is a particular ship off the coast of Lagos, Nigeria, for example — can potentially be answered in seconds, rather than hours.
“We’re not replacing the analysts,” Kallman clarified. “We’re helping them do their work way faster, so that they can get to the part that humans are way better at, which is synthesizing and deciding, ‘What do I now do about this information? How do I want to report on it?’”
Among the startup’s early customers is the U.S. Space Force, which is using Danti’s product to help officers easily search and share data. The use of natural language models in the search engine means an intuitive, straightforward user experience; no doubt this is paramount in high-pressure situations where analysts must make complex decisions but have little time to trawl through reams of satellite or drone data.
Right now, Danti is squarely focused on government, though in the longer term it plans to roll out a version of its product for commercial industry. This version would focus on property records, parcel information, and risk data, to serve markets like electric utilities and insurance, Kallman said. Customers will also be able to connect their own information into Danti’s engine to use its natural language processing to query their own data.
The $5 million round was led by Shield Capital and includes participation from the startup’s existing investors Tech Square Ventures, Humba Ventures and Leo Polovets, Space.VC, and Radius Capital. Kallman said the startup looked deliberately for a defense-focused fund to lead their next round, particularly as the company looks to execute its government go-to-market plan and scale its engineering team.
Since last summer, when the company announced its $2.75 million pre-seed, the team has grown to over 20 people, and Kallman said the engineering team will grow even more with the new injection of funds.