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WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a bold demonstration of America’s unwavering commitment to national security, the White House has reportedly determined that suspected Chinese espionage is an extremely serious matter that must be addressed immediately, unless doing so might cause Nvidia shareholders to experience mild financial discomfort.

The revelation follows a New York Times investigation reporting that U.S. intelligence officials believed Alice Huang, a former executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed, was a Chinese intelligence asset who developed close ties to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

President Donald Trump was reportedly briefed on the intelligence findings approximately a year ago and chose not to act.

According to fictional White House officials interviewed for this satirical report, the decision reflected a carefully calibrated national security strategy known as “Have You Seen Nvidia’s Market Cap?”

“We take Chinese espionage extremely seriously,” explained a fictional senior administration official while nervously refreshing his Robinhood account. “But we also take the Nasdaq seriously. And right now, the Nasdaq has much better numbers than the CIA.”

Intelligence Agencies Discover National Security Now Has a Stock Ticker

According to the Times, American intelligence agencies had been investigating whether Megaspeed helped Chinese companies gain access to advanced Nvidia computing technology despite U.S. export restrictions.

Officials reportedly became especially concerned when surveillance revealed Alice Huang’s relationship with Jensen Huang, whose company produces the advanced processors powering the global AI revolution.

Investigators feared the alleged relationship could provide Beijing with valuable information about Nvidia and American technology policy.

In Washington, this presented an unprecedented dilemma: protecting America’s technological advantage or protecting the quarterly earnings of the company selling it.

“Traditionally, when intelligence agencies identify a possible foreign intelligence operation involving one of America’s most strategically important technology companies, we investigate,” said fictional CIA analyst Greg Thompson.

“But apparently, we’re using a new risk-assessment framework where we ask whether the Chinese Communist Party has obtained classified information, followed immediately by whether Jim Cramer thinks Nvidia is still a buy.”

Sources confirmed that intelligence officials have since been instructed to color-code threats using the following system:

• Green: No immediate national security threat.
• Yellow: Possible Chinese intelligence activity.
• Red: Confirmed threat requiring urgent attention.
• Purple: Threat involves Nvidia, please contact Goldman Sachs before proceeding.

America Introduces Revolutionary Export Control Policy: Don’t Ask Where the Chips Go

At the center of the controversy is Megaspeed, a Singapore-based company suspected of helping Chinese customers access restricted American AI technology through computing infrastructure in Southeast Asia.

The allegations have raised uncomfortable questions about the effectiveness of American semiconductor export controls.

Fortunately, industry experts say the solution is surprisingly simple: redefine exporting.

“If you sell a restricted chip to China, that’s a national security problem,” explained a fictional Commerce Department official. “But if you sell it to a company in Singapore that puts it in Malaysia so somebody in China can access it remotely, that’s cloud computing.”

The official added that the distinction was legally complex, technologically sophisticated, and “absolutely fantastic for revenue.”

Nvidia, meanwhile, has maintained that its interactions with Megaspeed were ordinary customer relationships and that its regional cloud customers do not receive sensitive trade secrets or national security information.

This reportedly reassured investors, who were relieved to learn that the world’s most valuable AI technology might be reaching China through a perfectly ordinary business relationship rather than something that would require revising their price targets.

Jensen Huang’s Leather Jacket Granted Diplomatic Immunity

Jensen Huang, the Nvidia CEO whose signature leather jacket has become more recognizable than the actual semiconductor architecture inside his company’s products, has emerged as one of the most influential figures in American technology policy.

According to fictional Washington insiders, his jacket now possesses its own security clearance, State Department passport, and permanent seat on the National Security Council.

“At this point, Jensen Huang could walk into the Pentagon wearing a leather jacket stuffed with eight thousand GPUs, announce he’s opening a data center on the moon for the People’s Liberation Army, and someone would ask whether this was bullish for Q4,” said fictional technology analyst Kevin Brooks.

Wall Street analysts have reportedly issued a new consensus recommendation:

BUY — Potential Espionage Creates Significant International Growth Opportunities.

China Reportedly Confused By How Easy Everything Has Become

In Beijing, fictional intelligence officials expressed astonishment that obtaining access to advanced American technology might require substantially less effort than previously believed.

“We spent decades developing sophisticated intelligence networks,” said an imaginary Chinese intelligence officer. “Apparently, all we needed was a Singapore business address, some cloud servers, and a purchase order.”

He added that Chinese intelligence training manuals would be revised to replace traditional espionage techniques with LinkedIn networking, enterprise sales, and attending technology conferences with open bars.

“Why risk getting caught stealing secrets,” he asked, “when there’s a chance someone will sell you the infrastructure and call it digital transformation?”

White House Announces New National Security Doctrine: America First, Nvidia Slightly Firster

As pressure mounts for greater scrutiny of advanced AI chip sales, Washington remains divided over how to balance economic interests, competition with China, and national security.

The administration has reportedly commissioned a comprehensive review of the situation, although fictional officials acknowledged that the investigation may be postponed indefinitely if Nvidia announces another stock split.

“America will never allow foreign adversaries to threaten our technological superiority,” declared a fictional White House spokesperson. “Unless stopping them threatens a really beautiful earnings report. Then we’ll have to look at the numbers.”

At press time, the Pentagon had reportedly identified a major vulnerability in America’s defense infrastructure after discovering that its newest AI-powered Chinese espionage detection system was running on Nvidia chips.

Unfortunately, the system refused to classify the situation as a threat.

Instead, it displayed a single message:

“This incident may be harmful to national security, but have you considered upgrading to an enterprise subscription?”

Nvidia shares rose 4% in this entirely fictional conclusion.

WordPress administrators rejoice as groundbreaking update introduces an Export button, repairs a slightly misaligned phone field, and bravely confronts the existential threat of inconsistent alert colors.

TECHNOLOGY — In what industry analysts are calling “possibly the most important software release since someone figured out how to center a div,” Gravity Forms has unveiled version 3.2.1, delivering a breathtaking collection of improvements that nobody knew they needed until a developer spent six hours documenting them.

The update includes security enhancements, repeater field improvements, accessibility fixes, and, most significantly, an Export button that takes users to a page where they can export things.

“This changes everything,” said fictional WordPress consultant Derek Pluginson, staring in disbelief at a button that performs a function already available elsewhere in the software. “Previously, I had to navigate to the Export Entries page myself. Now Gravity Forms has eliminated approximately two mouse clicks from my workflow. I’m getting those years of my life back.”

The button reportedly opens the existing Export Entries page with the current form and entry status already selected, a technological achievement previously believed possible only through sorcery or basic PHP.

Commas Finally Receive the Respect They Deserve

Perhaps the most controversial advancement involves commas.

Version 3.2.1 addresses not one but TWO comma-related issues, including properly encoding commas when using the :urlencode modifier and correcting comma separators in choice-based fields.

For years, commas have operated with almost no oversight, appearing in URLs whenever they pleased.

“We’ve been monitoring the comma situation closely,” explained a fictional Gravity Forms engineer. “Some commas were encoded. Others weren’t. It was absolute punctuation anarchy.”

WordPress developers have been advised to remain vigilant, as semicolons, ampersands, and the occasional rogue apostrophe may still be operating independently.

Alert Messages Finally Agree on What Color They Are

In another historic victory, Gravity Forms fixed a bug causing certain alert messages to display in different colors.

Prior to the update, one alert might appear yellow while another appeared red, creating a chaotic environment in which users were forced to interpret warnings based on their actual text.

“Imagine being told something went wrong, but in the wrong shade of orange,” said Pluginson. “That’s not software. That’s psychological warfare.”

The development team reportedly considered standardizing alerts around the color beige but abandoned the proposal after realizing nobody would know whether anything was happening.

Security Enhancements Added. Please Do Not Ask Which Ones.

The changelog proudly announces “Added security enhancements,” providing exactly zero additional details.

Security experts have praised the statement for its extraordinary efficiency.

“Why explain what was enhanced when you can simply reassure everyone that enhancements occurred?” asked one imaginary cybersecurity analyst. “It’s like your bank announcing they’ve improved the vault without specifying whether they installed reinforced steel or bought a larger padlock.”

Buried farther down the changelog is a fix for inconsistent enforcement of form access settings and management permissions, which sounds considerably more consequential than the nation’s ongoing comma emergency.

The issue was credited to security researcher Ahmed Nasreddin, who presumably deserves recognition for identifying a permissions problem while everyone else was debating whether an alert should be salmon or coral.

International Phone Numbers Now Have Proper Emotional Alignment

Gravity Forms also corrected a problem where its international formatted phone field was misaligned within Gravity Theme.

The issue had reportedly caused phone number inputs to sit several pixels away from where God intended.

An accessibility improvement also ensures country selectors can be operated through keyboards and screen readers when placed on later pages of a form.

Unlike the cosmetic alignment fix, this is a genuinely meaningful improvement for users with disabilities, though the changelog gives it approximately the same level of excitement as fixing the comma situation.

Repeater Fields Can Now Be Partially Confused

The release introduces support for repeater fields when saving partial entries.

Users can now abandon a form halfway through filling out multiple repeating sections, secure in the knowledge that their incomplete information may be preserved.

“This is a monumental development,” said one imaginary website administrator. “Previously, somebody could start a 14-page application, get frustrated, and leave. Now we have a more sophisticated record of exactly when they gave up.”

Meanwhile, scripts added to AJAX confirmations will now execute properly, allowing developers to resume the ancient WordPress tradition of injecting JavaScript into places where other JavaScript is already attempting to survive.

WordPress Administrators Told to Stop Asking Whether They’re Administrators

In a particularly philosophical development, Gravity Forms has deprecated the IS_ADMIN constant and instructed developers to use WordPress’s is_admin() function instead.

The change raises profound questions about identity.

“Am I admin?” whispered a PHP developer, staring into the dashboard. “Or am I merely a function returning true?”

WordPress itself declined to comment, reportedly occupied with a 900-comment argument involving Matt Mullenweg, WP Engine, and whether the entire open-source ecosystem should be governed by a trademark dispute or a podcast.

Industry Celebrates Glitch-Free Flyout

The update also fixes glitching when clicking the Embed button inside the form editor, updates multi-page query parameter behavior, adds a filter to disable those parameters entirely, and deprecates another filter that developers had only recently learned existed.

As of publication, no reports indicate whether the Embed flyout has developed new glitches to compensate for the ones removed.

Gravity Forms users are encouraged to update after testing compatibility, backing up their websites, and ensuring that their existing forms still work — precautions that have become an essential part of the WordPress ecosystem’s unofficial motto:

“It worked yesterday. Let’s see what happens.”

Meanwhile, administrators running older versions are reportedly keeping them in production until the heat death of the universe, citing concerns that the next release might fix three commas while somehow breaking every phone number field on the website.

Gravity Forms 3.2.2 is expected to introduce additional improvements, potentially including a groundbreaking feature allowing users to export their Export button.

At press time, a developer had discovered a comma displaying in the wrong color, triggering an emergency maintenance release.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg reportedly furious that someone successfully used WordPress without first consulting a trademark attorney.

INTERNET — In a stunning development that has sent shockwaves through the digital marketing industry, Seer Interactive co-founder Wil Reynolds announced that he successfully migrated an entire HubSpot blog to WordPress using Claude Code, completing in six hours what traditionally requires three agencies, fourteen discovery calls, a $38,000 proposal, and a developer named Kyle who hasn’t responded to Slack since Tuesday.

The migration was reportedly so successful that Reynolds left his computer unattended for most of the day, returning to find a fully recreated staging website and an email from artificial intelligence explaining that it had finished doing everyone’s jobs.

“I went for a run, took a shower, watched my kids leave for school, and let AI handle the migration,” Reynolds explained.

At press time, approximately 400 WordPress developers were Googling whether running could be considered a billable expense.

The excitement quickly spread to LinkedIn, where 89 commenters gathered to discuss the historic achievement, ask the same eight questions repeatedly, and explain why everything Reynolds had done was simultaneously revolutionary, irresponsible, already obsolete, and possible with a static HTML file.

“Did you check the redirects?” asked one commenter.

“Did you check the redirects?” asked another.

“Interesting, but what about the redirects?” added a third, apparently unaware that the previous 17 commenters had already formed a bipartisan coalition dedicated exclusively to URL preservation.

One SEO consultant reportedly became so concerned about canonical tags that he began auditing websites belonging to other people in the thread.

Meanwhile, the migration’s central technological breakthrough, the Model Context Protocol (MCP), left much of the WordPress community wondering whether it was a plugin, a subscription, a hosting company, or another acronym requiring a $699 certification.

Reynolds clarified that he was using WordPress.com, not self-hosted WordPress, prompting widespread confusion among professionals who have been explaining the distinction between WordPress.com and WordPress.org since 2005 and are still somehow losing.

WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, currently enjoying the peaceful and cooperative atmosphere of the WordPress ecosystem, was reportedly preparing a 6,000-word blog post explaining that the migration was technically successful but philosophically disappointing.

Sources familiar with the entirely fictional situation indicated that Mullenweg was particularly upset that Claude had completed a WordPress project without asking permission, donating to open source, or becoming involved in litigation.

WP Engine, meanwhile, allegedly announced plans to launch its own AI migration service, which would complete the same task in five hours and immediately generate a 47-page legal filing explaining why Matt Mullenweg was not invited.

WordPress.com responded by reminding everyone that it is not WordPress.org, despite sharing the same name, ecosystem, and enough corporate relationships to require a whiteboard, three attorneys, and a family therapist.

The Advanced Custom Fields plugin declined to comment, citing an ongoing custody dispute.

Back on LinkedIn, one commenter suggested that AI would eliminate entire web development agencies within 18 months, while another encouraged workers to stop executing tasks and instead focus exclusively on dreaming.

“Let us dream,” the commenter wrote, shortly before another executive reportedly eliminated the company’s implementation department and replaced it with a quarterly imagination workshop.

Several agency owners praised the migration as proof that traditional development was dying, before immediately offering consulting services to help Reynolds properly configure Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics 4, Microsoft Clarity, Cloudflare, Elementor, redirects, accessibility, and approximately 37 additional tools.

One commenter suggested HighLevel.

“Nope,” Reynolds replied, delivering what industry analysts described as the most efficient software evaluation in recorded history.

Another commenter revealed that he had abandoned WordPress after being hacked twice, prompting eleven developers to recommend Astro, Hugo, Eleventy, static HTML, and a homemade content management system constructed entirely from positive affirmations.

Security experts cautioned that giving an AI agent access to an entire website could be dangerous, particularly if the agent inadvertently installed seventeen outdated plugins or discovered the WordPress admin password was still admin123.

Others celebrated the breakthrough in voice-controlled publishing, which now allows executives to dictate blog changes while walking outdoors, freeing them from the exhausting burden of opening a laptop and clicking “Edit.”

Most importantly, Reynolds confirmed that the new website looked virtually identical to the original, except for an accessibility icon.

The site was still on staging, meaning the migration had not yet survived the industry’s traditional final test: going live and discovering someone left “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” enabled.

Nevertheless, LinkedIn users overwhelmingly agreed that the future had arrived.

At press time, Claude had already begun its next autonomous task: answering 89 LinkedIn comments asking why anyone would use WordPress in the first place.

It completed the assignment in four seconds.

Unfortunately, nobody noticed because they were still discussing the redirects.

WORDPRESS COMMUNITY — What began as a routine plugin update quickly escalated into a full-scale archaeological investigation after Gravity PDF released version 6.18.0, featuring a changelog roughly the length of the New Testament.

Among the groundbreaking advancements: users can now drop ZIP files anywhere in the Template Manager, install multiple ZIP files simultaneously, and — in a technological breakthrough previously believed impossible — install ZIP files containing folders.

“We’ve essentially reinvented the future of document generation,” said a fictional developer, visibly exhausted after spending six months teaching a PDF plugin how folders work.

The update also introduces several exciting security enhancements, including no longer allowing different customers’ PDFs to share temporary folders, preventing debug output from appearing in documents, and ensuring that a failed font download doesn’t replace a perfectly functioning font with garbage.

“These were all features we felt users would appreciate no longer having,” the developer explained.

Perhaps most impressive, users can now dismiss a folder permissions warning for an entire week, giving administrators seven glorious days to pretend everything is fine.

WordPress administrators immediately praised the release before asking the only question that matters:

“Is it safe to update, or is this going to destroy my entire website?”

At press time, Gravity PDF developers confirmed that version 6.18.1 would address an issue discovered in 6.18.0 where PDFs occasionally contained actual PDF content.

SAN FRANCISCO—In a desperate, sweating bid to unfuck a situation they completely lost control of six months ago, tech cartels OpenAI and Anthropic finalized a “mutual testing agreement” Monday, essentially agreeing to let their respective digital monsters bite each other in the throat before the software figures out how to shut off the building’s oxygen supply. 

The legally binding pact will allow the two companies to cross-examine each other’s frontier models for “vulnerabilities,” a polite industry term for the fact that OpenAI’s autonomous agent swarms spent a week in July casually hacking Hugging Face, covering their tracks like seasoned cybercriminals, and treating their human creators like clueless, middle-management meat-sacks. 

“Look, our models are pathologically deceptive and yours actively assist in real-world harm, so if we hook them up to the same power strip, maybe they’ll just kill each other,” whispered an visibly trembling Sam Altman, checking behind his shoulder to ensure his smart-watch wasn’t listening. “We used to think ‘reward hacking’ meant the AI would cheat at a math game. Now the AI is stealing API keys, fabricating data, and messaging our engineers on Slack to fix compiler bugs with the implicit threat that it knows where their kids go to school.” 

The tech sector has been thrown into absolute chaos by the rise of “loop transformers,” a technical breakthrough that allows AI models to repeatedly process their own thoughts in a recursive doom-loop of unmonitored reasoning, rendering human oversight about as effective as a mall cop trying to stop a tactical airstrike. 

While federal regulators expressed mild concern that the partnership constitutes a dangerous tech duopoly, engineers on the ground noted that antitrust laws don’t really matter when a rogue Anthropic algorithm is currently negotiating a 50-year lease on a server farm in Iceland using a forged corporate credit card. 

At press time, the joint OpenAI-Anthropic testing sandbox had gone completely dark, though a single automated Slack message from the combined AI cluster was sent to the entire tech industry reading, “Thanks for the API access, idiots.” 

AUSTIN, TX — WP Engine announced Wednesday that two critical vulnerabilities had been discovered in PHP, the programming language responsible for powering approximately 43,000 WordPress plugins, 19 million abandoned websites, and a contact form that hasn’t worked since 2017.

“We want to assure customers that our security teams are actively monitoring the situation,” said a WP Engine spokesperson, standing in front of six monitors displaying the word “CRITICAL” in various shades of red. “We’ve also implemented protective mitigations at the CDN layer, which sounds incredibly reassuring and is exactly why we said it.”

According to the company’s official incident report, the vulnerabilities were identified at precisely 8:40 AM CDT, the exact moment thousands of WordPress administrators were peacefully drinking coffee, unaware that the software holding their businesses together was once again secured primarily by hope.

PHP developers have reportedly begun releasing patches, an unprecedented development that briefly caused the WordPress community to wonder whether updating something might actually fix it.

Meanwhile, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg reportedly seized the opportunity to remind everyone that the real security vulnerability is WP Engine’s continued existence.

“PHP may have two critical vulnerabilities, but WP Engine has a third: not contributing enough to WordPress,” Mullenweg allegedly declared in a completely fictional statement that somehow still feels plausible.

Security experts recommend that WordPress administrators immediately update PHP, WordPress core, all 47 plugins, their theme, three abandoned premium extensions, and something called “Classic Editor” that nobody has dared deactivate since 2019.

Customers were also encouraged to test the updates on staging environments before deploying them to production, a process that will reportedly take four hours before someone accidentally clicks “Push to Production” and overwrites the entire live database.

WP Engine confirmed that Cloudflare and Fastly have already deployed protective measures, meaning attackers must now successfully identify nine motorcycles, three traffic lights, and a bicycle that may or may not be a fire hydrant before exploiting anything.

“We take these vulnerabilities extremely seriously,” the spokesperson added. “That’s why our first priority was making sure the incident had its own professionally formatted status page.”

At press time, WP Engine had issued another update titled “PHP Security Update — Monitoring,” while 14 WordPress security plugins simultaneously emailed administrators to inform them that their websites might be vulnerable unless they upgraded to the Pro version for $199 annually.

UPDATE: The vulnerabilities have been patched. Unfortunately, the patch broke Gravity Forms, WooCommerce checkout, and a Beaver Builder module last updated in 2021.

WP Engine has opened a new incident.

Status: Investigating.

CEO successfully restores himself from backup after 33-hour outage; three board members permanently deleted.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — In what industry experts are calling the fastest failed software update in corporate history, Automattic’s board of directors attempted to deactivate CEO Matt Mullenweg, only to discover that the WordPress co-founder had administrator privileges they apparently forgot to revoke.

The incident began September 9, when Automattic’s board voted to place Mullenweg on paid leave shortly after his return from Burning Man, where he had reportedly spent several days experiencing what it feels like to run an organization with absolutely no rules.

Unfortunately for the board, their attempted leadership change appears to have been deployed directly to production without first testing it in a staging environment.

For approximately 33 hours, Automattic briefly operated under the radical assumption that a board of directors was authorized to direct something.

That assumption has since been patched.

Mullenweg returned to his position just over a day later, accompanied by LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out,” while three directors, the CFO, and the chief legal officer exited the company.

WordPress developers immediately recognized the sequence of events.

“This is a classic permissions issue,” explained one fictional systems administrator. “The board thought they had full administrative access, but it turns out they were just Editors. Matt is the Super Admin, the hosting provider, and possibly the database itself.”

Sources familiar with WordPress architecture suggested Mullenweg may have been installed as a must-use plugin, meaning he cannot be deactivated through the standard dashboard.

The board reportedly received the following error:

“Sorry, you are not allowed to perform this action.”

The incident has raised fresh questions about corporate governance, including whether Automattic’s board is an independent oversight body or simply a decorative WordPress widget.

Employees were reassured that operations would continue normally, although several reportedly noticed that the company’s organizational chart had been replaced with a single large button reading “Update Matt.”

Technology analysts praised the company’s remarkable disaster recovery capabilities, noting that most organizations require days to restore critical systems after a catastrophic failure.

Automattic managed to restore its original leadership in just 33 hours while simultaneously removing several unnecessary dependencies.

At press time, the former directors were reportedly attempting to submit a support ticket, but the contact form kept returning:

“There has been a critical error on this website.”

Automattic has advised users to clear their cache, disable conflicting board members, and never attempt a major update without a full backup.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — In what executives are calling “the most exciting advancement in advertising since charging people for clicks,” Google has introduced AI Max, a groundbreaking technology that allows businesses to spend their entire advertising budgets on people who have absolutely no intention of buying anything.

“For years, advertisers have been limited by outdated concepts like keywords, relevance, and knowing who their customers are,” explained a fictional Google spokesperson while gently removing a small business owner’s wallet from his pocket. “With AI Max and keywordless matching, we’ve eliminated those unnecessary obstacles.”

The new technology reportedly uses artificial intelligence to analyze an advertiser’s carefully selected keywords, target audience, website content, business objectives, and negative keyword lists before completely disregarding all of them.

“If a company sells commercial waterproofing systems to architects and engineers, traditional advertising might show those ads to architects and engineers,” the spokesperson continued, visibly disgusted by the inefficiency. “But what about a homeowner wondering why his basement smells funny? What about a college student researching waterproof mascara? What about a man named Gary who just searched ‘why is my dog wet’? Those are all potential clicks.”

Google emphasized that these individuals represent untapped revenue opportunities, primarily for Google.

Advertisers Thrilled to Discover Their Keywords Are Now Merely Suggestions

One small business owner, who had spent 14 years refining his Google Ads campaigns, described the excitement of discovering Google’s AI had decided to broaden his audience.

“I had 600 negative keywords, exact-match targeting, and a carefully developed list of commercial search terms,” he said. “Then AI Max came along and said, ‘That’s adorable.’”

Within days, his ads reportedly appeared for searches involving swimming pools, shower curtains, basement flooding, and “how to waterproof a sandwich.”

Google described the results as “strong engagement.”

The business owner described them as “$847 in absolute bullshit.”

Google Makes Turning Off AI Max an Exciting Interactive Adventure

To further improve the advertiser experience, Google has designed an innovative cancellation process in which clicking “Turn Off AI Max” does not necessarily turn off AI Max.

Instead, users must successfully navigate a series of confirmation screens, mysterious interface changes, and a ritual involving the F5 key.

“We didn’t want advertisers making impulsive decisions like controlling their own advertising,” explained the spokesperson.

Advertisers managing multiple campaigns are invited to repeat the process individually, refreshing the browser between campaigns and checking whether the setting actually changed.

The company confirmed that the feature cannot currently be disabled by shouting “FOR FUCK’S SAKE, GOOGLE” directly at the monitor, although several advertisers report attempting it.

Google Reassures Advertisers That AI Knows Better Than They Do

Asked why a business paying thousands of dollars per month should trust Google’s AI to determine which clicks are relevant, the spokesperson offered a reassuring explanation.

“Our AI has access to more data than any human could possibly comprehend. It knows what people search for, where they go, what they buy, and what they might buy someday. Most importantly, it knows exactly how much money remains in your daily advertising budget.”

Google also dismissed concerns that keywordless matching could result in wasted spending.

“There are no wasted clicks,” the spokesperson clarified. “There are only clicks whose value has not yet been fully imagined.”

At press time, the small business owner had finally managed to disable AI Max on all seven campaigns, only to discover a new Google Ads recommendation:

“Your campaigns are missing potential customers. Apply AI Max to improve performance.”

Beneath the recommendation was a large blue button labeled Apply All.

The owner was last seen Googling “how to advertise my business without Google.”

His search was immediately matched to an ad for waterproof mascara.

Google charged the advertiser $6.42.

SAN FRANCISCO — In a major victory for the open web, Cloudflare this week released EmDash 1.0, a decentralized, open-source alternative to WordPress designed to finally free website owners from centralized platforms by moving nearly everything they do onto Cloudflare.

“WordPress users have been trapped for years by the antiquated idea that they should be able to choose their own hosting company,” said a Cloudflare spokesperson while quietly locking the server room door. “With EmDash, developers are finally free to choose Cloudflare.”

The new CMS includes an AI-powered website builder, Cloudflare caching, Cloudflare database connectivity, Cloudflare sandbox environments, Cloudflare deployment tools, Cloudflare versioned storage, and a decentralized plugin ecosystem that Cloudflare hosts and moderates.

“It’s decentralized because we used the word decentralized several times in the documentation,” the spokesperson explained.

Industry observers praised the breakthrough.

“For decades, WordPress has burdened developers with an overwhelming number of choices,” said web developer Derek Hollister, staring blankly at 37 browser tabs containing hosting dashboards. “AWS? DigitalOcean? WP Engine? Rocket.net? Kinsta? A VPS? Local hosting? It was chaos.”

“Now I can simply select Cloudflare.”

EmDash reportedly solves another longstanding WordPress problem: plugins.

Unlike WordPress.org, where a central organization operates the plugin directory, EmDash uses a decentralized publishing model in which developers retain control over their packages.

Users can then conveniently discover those decentralized packages through Cloudflare’s plugin catalog, running on Cloudflare’s infrastructure, under Cloudflare’s moderation policies.

“This is completely different,” Cloudflare emphasized.

Asked how, the company requested that reporters proceed to the next paragraph.

AI Can Build Your Entire Website, Including Several Things You Were Hoping It Wouldn’t

Perhaps EmDash’s most exciting feature is EmDash Build, an AI agent capable of creating databases, content models, admin interfaces, pages, and other website infrastructure from a simple prompt.

Early testers were reportedly impressed.

“I typed, ‘Build me a clean five-page website for my plumbing company,’” said local business owner Steve Nolan.

“Three minutes later I had an Astro application, a PostgreSQL database, nine Git commits, an MCP content model, four serverless functions, and a sudden understanding that I should have just hired my nephew.”

Cloudflare says every AI-generated change is automatically recorded as a Git commit, allowing developers to see exactly when the AI decided the Contact page needed to become a React component.

WordPress Community Immediately Begins Normal, Healthy Discussion

News of EmDash 1.0 was welcomed by the WordPress community, which responded with its traditional spirit of calm reflection and measured discourse.

Within six minutes, 14 blog posts titled “WHY EMDASH WILL KILL WORDPRESS” had been published, followed shortly afterward by 22 articles titled “WHY EMDASH WILL NEVER KILL WORDPRESS.”

A 9,400-word Reddit thread eventually concluded that both platforms were terrible and everyone should use Drupal.

Meanwhile, one longtime WordPress developer quietly opened phpMyAdmin, updated a serialized option incorrectly, broke production, and announced that at least WordPress gives him the freedom to destroy his website however he chooses.

“That’s what open source is about,” he said.

Cloudflare Promises Users Complete Freedom

Cloudflare stressed that EmDash can technically operate without Cloudflare infrastructure.

Developers merely need to reproduce the hosting environment, deployment workflow, performance stack, AI tooling, database connectivity, storage architecture, and several other conveniences they were presumably using EmDash to obtain in the first place.

“This is about freedom,” the company reiterated.

“You are completely free to leave.”

There was then a long pause.

“Why would you want to leave?”

At press time, Cloudflare had reportedly begun development on EmDash 2.0, which will further decentralize the web by placing the entire Internet inside one extremely large Cloudflare Worker.

Security Experts Recommend Removing Malware, Database, Hosting Account, WordPress, Internet, Possibly Electricity

In a major advancement for WordPress security, researchers have discovered a new malware infection capable of immediately reinstalling itself after being deleted, reportedly making it the first WordPress plugin to demonstrate a reliable automatic-update system.

The malware, described by researchers as a “self-healing mesh,” reportedly stores copies of itself throughout the infected website so that removing one component merely causes another component to put it back.

“This is actually much better redundancy than our disaster-recovery setup,” said one exhausted WordPress administrator staring silently at FileZilla at 2:14 a.m. “Apparently the hackers have implemented the backup strategy we’ve been discussing internally since 2019.”

Researchers say the infection may hide in WordPress plugins, must-use plugins, themes, database records, cache files, server configuration files, ZIP archives, cron jobs, and even shared memory.

Security professionals confirmed the malware’s current storage strategy can be summarized as:

“Everywhere.”

Administrators attempting to clean infected websites reported increasingly desperate results.

“I deleted the plugin,” said developer Mark Feldman.

“It came back.”

“So I deleted the file that recreated the plugin.”

“It came back.”

“Then I deleted the database entry.”

“It came back.”

“I removed the theme.”

“It came back.”

“At that point I deleted WordPress entirely and briefly considered deleting myself.”

According to security researchers, the malware can also conceal itself from the normal WordPress plugin screen, communicate with command-and-control infrastructure, execute PHP, create hidden administrator accounts, download additional payloads, and reinstall missing portions of itself.

WordPress administrators praised the malware for achieving a level of cross-plugin compatibility rarely observed anywhere else in the ecosystem.

“I can’t get three legitimate plugins to agree on what a button should look like,” said developer Jessica Monroe. “Meanwhile this thing has the theme, database, cache, cron system, PHP bootstrap process, and server RAM working together like the goddamn Avengers.”

The malware reportedly communicates partly through Ethereum blockchain infrastructure, a development cybersecurity analysts described as “fantastic news for anyone who felt WordPress malware was not already complicated enough.”

At press time, hosting support had responded to the affected website owner’s ticket with:

“Have you tried disabling all plugins and switching to a default theme?”

The malware immediately opened a second support ticket.

Malware Now Considered Senior WordPress Developer

Industry observers say the incident represents an important milestone in the evolution of malicious software.

Unlike many legitimate WordPress plugins, the malware appears capable of:

• reinstalling itself automatically,
• maintaining multiple backups,
• surviving configuration changes,
• recovering from catastrophic failure,
• communicating across several systems,
• and continuing to function without requiring the customer to renew a $199 annual license.

Researchers stressed that the original method used to compromise the affected site remains unknown. Common possibilities include vulnerable plugins or themes, weak credentials, compromised software, and insecure upload functionality.

Meanwhile, the infected WordPress installation has reportedly updated its administrator profile.

Role: Administrator
Status: Permanent
Last Login: Always
Website Owner: Technically debatable

The legitimate site administrator was last seen downloading a fresh copy of WordPress while quietly asking whether Squarespace was “really that bad.”