All posts tagged: websites

Biggest news websites in the world for 2026 (any language)

Biggest news websites in the world for 2026 (any language)

Published by Sam Flores

The homepage of the BBC News website, on 6th May 2015. Picture: Chris Dorney/Shutterstock The BBC is the most-visited news website in the world in any language, according to Press Gazette’s new ranking of the world’s top online newsbrands. The UK broadcaster saw 894.7 million visits in May 2026 according to Similarweb, ranking it ahead of Japan’s Yahoo News with 815.4 million visits. The BBC has overtaken several publishers in the ranking since Press Gazette’s coverage in May 2025. However, Similarweb has since changed how its measures BBC traffic to account for the interaction between bbc.com and bbc.co.uk (which redirect users between two sites depending on their location). This means traffic for May 2025 has been revised from the originally reported 474.4 million visits to 912 million. Brazil’s Globo.com, the news portal of media group Globo, ranked third with 758.7 million visits. The US has the most news sites in the top 50, with 13 entries featuring. Its highest-ranking site was The New York Times, which listed in fourth place with 592.6 million visits in …

‘Poisoned’ AI: the ChatGPT shopping scams that lead to fake websites | Scams

‘Poisoned’ AI: the ChatGPT shopping scams that lead to fake websites | Scams

Published by Sam Flores

You want to buy a new bag and so you ask ChatGPT for help. You have always liked Russell & Bromley so you ask ChatGPT what is popular there at the moment. The artificial intelligence (AI) assistant gives you cross body, shoulder, casual and formal options with the prices listed beside them. You click through from the sources to what looks like the official Russell & Bromley site and buy your new bag, which is conveniently on sale. The item will never arrive, however. You have handed money over to a scammer and your bank details have been harvested through an elaborate fraud where fake sites are created to look convincingly like real retailers. ChatGPT search that shows a fake site as one of its sources Ask Silver, a scam-checking service, says cloned sites have been showing up in search results on ChatGPT. The ones it has seen are rip-offs of Russell & Bromley and the furnishings retailer Dunelm. Anna Jones of Ask Silver says it is possible that the large language model (LLM) that …

The internet gives a lot away for free and these websites prove it

The internet gives a lot away for free and these websites prove it

Published by skeptic

OSINT can absolutely sound shady if your first thought is people-search engines, leaked databases, or tools that promise to find anyone online. That’s the least interesting version of it to me. Open-Source Intelligence really just means using publicly available information, and the majority of that information has very little to do with digging into people’s private lives. The more exciting and useful side of OSINT is the public data that keeps the internet, transport networks, and infrastructure systems transparent. That can mean finding open Wi-Fi networks, IP routing, aircraft signals, and live weather maps, all of which reveal things by design rather than exposing what should be private. No accounts, no scraping, and no password dumps. Just genuinely useful information that all sits freely in plain sight, making the complex parts of the world around us feel more accessible and understandable. Related The 12 best deep search engines to explore the invisible web Most of the internet is hidden from your view unless you know how to search for it. WiGLE Yes, wireless networks are …

Websites Can Now Spy on You Through Your Hard Drive

Websites Can Now Spy on You Through Your Hard Drive

Published by skeptic

Over the decades, there has been no shortage of sites using clever techniques to covertly track visitors’ browsing histories, device fingerprints, and keystrokes and mouse movements in real time. Even Meta and Yandex were recently caught joining in the privacy-invasive free-for-all. Now sites have a new way to spy on their visitors: by measuring subtle interactions with their solid-state drives. The technique, named FROST (fingerprinting remotely using OPFS-based SSD timing), allows sites to monitor other sites a visitor is viewing and what apps are open on their devices. The technique, laid out in a research paper, exploits a side channel, a form of leak resulting from physical manifestations such as electromagnetic emanations, data caches, or the time required to complete a task. By measuring the manifestations, attackers can decrypt encrypted traffic and infer other confidential data. The attack that FROST uses is known as a contention side channel, which measures the interaction of various processes all using (or competing for) a given resource. By measuring the timing of certain I/O (input-output) operations of the SSD …

The White House’s Aliens.gov Site Brags That ICE Arrested More Than 700 US Citizens

The White House’s Aliens.gov Site Brags That ICE Arrested More Than 700 US Citizens

Published by skeptic

A space-themed White House website that mocks immigrants and compares them to extraterrestrials claims Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested almost half a million people in nearly 12,000 cities and towns in the United States. In 715 of the locations listed, the site identifies at least one of the people arrested as being born in the United States. In 83 of the locations, every single arrestee is reported to be an American. The White House unveiled the website, Aliens.gov, on Thursday after teasing the launch on X with a 10-second video captioned “They walk among us,” leading many users to suspect an announcement about UFOs—the subject of an ongoing Trump administration disclosure effort that produced two releases of declassified files earlier in May. The site turned out instead to be a piece of political theater aimed at dehumanizing immigrants and casting those the Trump administration has arrested as the secret extraterrestrial visitors of UFO conspiracy lore. The site includes information about arrestees’ alleged criminal offenses for each location. People in 3,159 locations are accused of …

How to Make Apps and Websites Remove Your Nonconsensual Nudes

How to Make Apps and Websites Remove Your Nonconsensual Nudes

Published by skeptic

Once someone submits a takedown request, a platform has up to 48 hours to determine whether it is valid. If it decides that it is, then it has to remove both the content reported and any identical copies. Several larger platforms say they use an industry tool called StopNCII, which uses matching algorithms to identify abusive images and videos and is maintained by a British nonprofit. People can open cases directly on the tool’s website to add to what the tool flags. Reddit, TikTok, Snap, Microsoft Bing, and Meta’s social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are all listed as participants on the tool’s website. Though many major platforms have dedicated forms to help guide the submission process, Alejandro Cuevas, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy who studied the impact of initial passage of the law on deepfake communities, has observed that some sites only offer an email address for people to submit takedown requests. Cuevas says in those cases, keeping good documentation, including links to the offending content, is especially …

Ofsted claims schools can’t predict inspection from websites

Ofsted claims schools can’t predict inspection from websites

Published by skeptic

Ofsted is ‘confident’ schools can no longer predict inspections based on downloads from their websites, despite a firm’s claim the practice still works. Schools Week exposed a loophole in 2023 that offered advance inspection notice to those who monitored downloads from their websites. Greenhouse School Websites provides a service which tracks activity patterns on hundreds of school websites to help predict when inspectors may visit. Source link

Beyond websites: People Inc grows digital revenue despite Google traffic collapse

Beyond websites: People Inc grows digital revenue despite Google traffic collapse

Published by Sam Flores

IAC chairman Barry Diller (picture: Shutterstock/rblfmr) and People Inc CEO Neil Vogel at Press Gazette Media Strategy Network USA event in March 2025 (picture: Press Gazette/Blaine Pennington) People Inc chairman Barry Diller believes the company has led the way on transitioning from Google dependence and is now building new revenue opportunities outside advertising and subscriptions. People Inc has seen traffic to its brands referred by Google fall by 63% over the past two years. But it is growing the amount of revenue that is not dependent on website visits. This includes: advertising revenue from social media, events, its own AI-powered ad targeting product D/Cipher+, licensing revenue from Apple News and other content licensing (including with AI platforms). This non-website income made up up 41% of People Inc digital revenue ($103m) in the first quarter of this year and saw 24% year-on-year growth in the first quarter of 2026. The publisher believes that will continue to grow “meaningfully” in the next quarters and years. Session-based website revenue, including traditional direct-sold display and programmatic advertising, fell by …

Someone planted backdoors in dozens of WordPress plug-ins used in thousands of websites

Someone planted backdoors in dozens of WordPress plug-ins used in thousands of websites

Published by skeptic

Dozens of plug-ins for the widely used open source web blogging software WordPress are now offline after a backdoor was discovered in them, used to push malicious code to any website that relied on the plug-ins. The backdoor was discovered after a new corporate owner bought these plug-ins. Anchor Hosting founder Austin Ginder sounded the alarm in a blog post last week describing a supply chain attack on a WordPress plug-in maker called Essential Plugin. Ginder said someone last year bought Essential Plugin and the backdoor was soon added to the plug-ins’ source code. The backdoor sat dormant until earlier this month when it activated and began distributing malicious code to any website with the plug-ins installed. Essential Plugin says on its website that it has over 400,000 plug-in installs and more than 15,000 customers. WordPress’ plug-in install page says the affected plug-ins are in over 20,000 active WordPress installations. Plug-ins allow owners of WordPress-based websites to extend the site’s functionality, but in doing so grant the plug-ins access to their installations, which can open …

March Google core update brings modest gains for news websites

March Google core update brings modest gains for news websites

Published by Sam Flores

Google search results for ‘Strait of Hormuz’ search including The Guardian, The Independent and ITV News on 10 April 2026 The Guardian, Money Saving Expert, Substack and The New York Times appear to have been the biggest winners from Google’s latest core update, according to new Sistrix data. But overall there was “little impact” on news websites, SEO consultant Barry Adams told Press Gazette. Google described the rollout as “a regular update designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites”, the standard wording for its core algorithm updates when there is not a specific behaviour being targeted. It rolled out between 27 March and 8 April, following quickly behind a separate update designed to target spam sites. Sistrix has now shared data showing how the search visibility index scores of major UK and US news websites changed during that period. In the UK, The Guardian saw the greatest absolute visibility gain of 9.014 points, rising to 228.076 – already by far the highest visibility score for a newsbrand. The …