Agency News Weekly

Cloudflare Turns the Tables on Unauthorized AI Scrapers

• Last, week, Cloudflare launched AI Labyrinth, an innovative defense system against unauthorized AI crawlers.
• Labyrinth uses pre-generated content stored in their high-performance R2 network to confuse AI crawlers and waste their resources.
• At the same time, Labyrinth works like a honeypot, identifying bots through their interaction with this hidden content no human would naturally access
• Normal visitors and legitimate crawlers continue to see the website’s actual content.
• Activating Labyrith requires just one toggle in the Cloudflare Dashboard toggle.
• It is available now to all Cloudflare customers, including those on free plans: go to Security > Settings > and look under Configuration in the sidebar.

What’s Coming in WordPress 6.8

• The next major version of WordPress (possibly the only release for 2025) is scheduled for release on April 15.
• Tomorrow, Release Candidate 1 will be available for download and testing.
• Last week, Birgit Pauli-Haack published the WordPress 6.8 Source of Truth on the Gutenberg Times website, providing the full list of features that will be included.
• Items listed as priority for WordPress 6.8 include:
  • Global Styles available on the main site editor sidebar
  • Swifter hiding and showing the template
  • Style Book
  • Zoom Out View
  • Design Tools
• A number of core blocks will also get improvements, along with additions of the Support for and the usual mop ups for bugs and accessibility.
• If you are not using the Site Editor, it’s unlikely you’ll notice many significant changes.
  • A number of core blocks will get some improvements.
  • Developers will appreciate new features from the Interactivity API and Block Hooks API.
  • A conservative implementation of Speculative Loading will also come to core in 6.8.
• Perhaps the most notable change for the average user is a behind-the-scenes move to bcrypt for password hashing.
  • Bcrypt is a more powerful replacement for the aged MD5 hashing that currently protects user passwords.
  • The change should be transparent for users, with the move to bcrypt happening automatically the next time a user logs in.

Visua11y Wins Cloudfest Hackathon by Bringing A11y to Infographics

• Infographics are all over the web, from a visual representation of a process discussed in a blog post, to a clothing size chart on an Amazon listing.
• They are a ubiquitous way to communicate information quickly… to sighted people. Unfortunately, they are almost always inaccessible to screen readers.
• Visua11y, a project led by Anne-Mieke Bovelett solves this problem by using an AI tool to OCR the image and return the information it contains for review.
• A simple 2-click process replaces the laborious task of coding the information manually.
• The game-changing tool was created in just 3 days by Bovelett’s team as part of last week’s Cloudfest Hackathon where it was declared the winner.
• Bovelett plans to add Visua11y to the WordPress plugin directory soon.
• Read the full story on The Respository.
  

Worth a Look

• Speaking of Anne-Mieke Bovelett, here’s her excellent white paper on How to Identify Accessibility Charlatans.
• The AI search startup Perplexity wants to buy TikTok and open source its algorithm “to build the best search experience in the world.”
• SEO platform BrightEdge has found that more than 80% of Google’s AI Overview citations come from deep content pages (two or more clicks away from the homepage).
• The Beaver Builder team has released 2.9, with several interesting improvements.
• A Shift from Traffic to Influence – Jamie Marsland summarizes a talk from Rand Fishkin that explains how “attention is the new currency.”