All things AI, tech and finance.
Joined October 2026
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I FACT-CHECKED THIS LIST. EVERYTHING I CHECKED HOLDS UP.
Japan's PM Takaichi really did post on X asking for urgent PHP patching. Onamae really shut down Desktop Cloud with up to 26,739 servers hit. One eMudhra CA key really was the number 4, and Mozilla, Google and Apple are now blocking those certificates.
Two details worth adding. Amazon saw the first PHP2Shell attempt on its honeypots on October 17, before the bugs were public. And in the AI hacking story, 1,200+ was the number of sites attempted. More than 100 companies were actually breached, Deere and Cummins among them.
The fix for the PHP part is still the same: 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 or 8.2.35.
🚨 Do you understand what happened in the last 48 hours..
> PHP, the code behind 69% of all websites, got 2 holes rated 9.2 out of 10, and the US, the UK and Japan told site owners to patch or go OFFLINE.. 4 days after hackers had already started trying the flaw..
> Japan's Prime Minister posted the request late at night.. the Finance and Health ministries pulled pages, MUFG Bank and JR West went into emergency maintenance, and Onamae shut ALL Desktop Cloud plans after malware hit up to 26,739 customer servers..
> India's eMudhra was caught with 8 intermediate certificate keys so weak one of them was literally the number 4.. the 60,000,000+ certificates it has issued can't be trusted..
> GitLab disclosed a 10.0 severity hole in every version since 2014.. the maximum score there is..
> criminals were caught using a literal AI hacking tool on 1,200+ sites.. it broke into more than 100 companies including John Deere and Cummins..
> LiteLLM, an AI tool with about 23,000,000 downloads a week, was secretly poisoned with a password stealer.. the bad version sat on PyPI for about 2 hours..
> State Bank of India, the country's biggest bank, confirmed 3,897 customer records on the dark web..
> WIRED now calls the PHP flaw "broadly exploited".. nearly 55,000,000 web properties still run PHP..
every single government on this list told PHP site owners the same thing within the last 48 hours.. patch it or take it offline..
all of this.. 48 hours..
if you're not following me you're finding out about this 48 hours late from someone who read my post..
it's only getting crazier from here..
62K people saw "PHP 8.5.12 security patch is incomplete." Fewer read the bottom of his own screenshot: both PHP2Shell CVEs are genuinely fixed.
The claim is about three other paths that may still work on 8.5.12. He says it needs validation, and PHP hasn't confirmed anything yet.
It has happened before. In 2012 PHP had to ship a second fix after its first patch for a critical PHP-CGI bug didn't hold.
So don't roll back. Patch now and watch for the next release.
Leaving this here, PHP 8.5.12 security patch is incomplete. ( needs further validation )
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The PHP 8.5.12 release fixes the two specific CVEs (via state/bailout changes) detailed in official advisories; referenced "surviving paths" (e.g. var_destroy UAF) are separate pre-existing unserialize issues unrelated to this patch.
php.net/archive/2026.p…
github.com/php/php-src/se…
github.com/php/php-src/se…
github.com/dinosn/php-8.5…
THIS IS F*CKING INSANE: AI models from OpenAI and Google helped find PHP bugs that sat there for over a decade and let an attacker run code on a web server with one request and no login. PHP runs an estimated 75 to 80% of all websites.
The bugs are CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, now known as PHP2Shell. Both are rated critical, CVSS 9.2, and the PHP team shipped fixes on October 21.
How it leaked
On the morning of October 20 a Hacker News post claimed two critical PHP vulnerabilities were about to go public. The post was deleted, but screenshots were already spreading. watchTowr confirmed the leak and said disclosure had been planned for Thursday at 11am ET.
A few hours later the PHP security team moved the release up a day, to Wednesday 14:00 UTC, and said it could ship even earlier if details came out or attacks started. Patches landed around 9:30am ET on October 21.
What the bugs do
Both come from PHP leaving memory in a broken state when a request ends abnormally. One is in how PHP handles running out of memory while it sets up a request. The other lets state from one request survive into the next request on the same worker after its memory was freed. Either can end in code execution as the web server's worker account.
Wiz says nearly every PHP version is affected, going back to PHP 5.4. Every PHP install that serves web requests is in scope: PHP-FPM, Apache with mod_php, php-cgi, FrankenPHP and LiteSpeed. The PHP team calls mod_php the highest risk, because the attack can fire before any application code runs. Clean WordPress or Laravel code won't save you here.
The AI part
Wiz Research found the first bug on August 19 and reported both to the PHP team on August 24. Wiz says it used Gemini 4 Argon and GPT-5.6 Sol throughout, and credits Gemini with a big part of finding the flaws, building the exploit and validating the patch. OpenAI says GPT-5.6 Sol found one of the flaws as part of its Patch the Planet program. It coordinated the fix with PHP's maintainers, Wiz, Cloudflare and US agencies including CISA. Calif researchers are credited too.
OpenAI calls this a "Defender's Window": AI seems to have found the bugs before attackers did. Wiz adds that frontier models cut the effort needed to chain bugs and adapt an exploit, so flaws that used to be impractical to exploit no longer are. OpenAI expects more findings like this in the coming months.
OpenAI has published a PHP version checker on GitHub and committed $1 billion in subsidized access for defenders with limited resources.
Is anyone exploiting it
Cloudflare's CTO said they were already seeing early attacks on both flaws before the patches shipped. Huntress had not seen exploitation across its partners as of 10am ET on October 21. Kevin Beaumont called it one of the biggest vulnerabilities in years and expects a wave of incidents.
VirusTotal estimates more than 5.1 million PHP hosts are exposed online.
What governments said
The UK's NCSC told organisations to find every PHP install, internet-facing ones first, and update. If that can't happen fast, take the system offline until it's fixed and check it for signs of compromise. Reuters reports that an EU agency also warned some websites may need to go offline.
What to do today
1. Update to PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 or 8.2.35. For 7.4, 8.0 and 8.1 there are minimal source backports, but those branches no longer get regular updates, so plan the upgrade.
2. Check everything that bundles PHP: CMS hosting, cPanel and Plesk, vendor appliances. Apply their patches as they come out.
3. If you install from rpms.remirepo.net, it had no updated packages on release day. Use your distro's packages or build from source.
4. If you can't patch right now, PHP's advisory lists temporary mitigations, but a PHP core developer said none of them fully blocks the attack. Cloudflare pushed WAF rules to all customers, free plan included.
5. Watch for spikes in HTTP 500 errors, unexplained PHP worker restarts, workers spawning shells or download tools, and new files in the web root.
The installs nobody remembers will be the hard part. Hal Pomeranz pointed out how many embedded PHP setups will never get patched at all.
If you host anything on PHP, run php -v on every server today.
Sources: Wiz, OpenAI, NCSC, Huntress, BleepingComputer, Help Net Security
It is becoming f*cking dangerous.
Claude built me a space museum site that goes from 0 km to 11,000 light-years in 24 seconds.
Real NASA 3D models. A Z-2 spacesuit, Perseverance, Ingenuity, Juno and Cassiopeia A, the cloud left behind by a star that blew up about 11,000 light-years away.
Each one scans in from a hologram, spins 360° and gets its own fact card. Between objects the stars stretch into a warp jump. At the end the camera flies straight into the supernova.
Viktor's math checks out. A year ago this was a 3D artist, a dev and two weeks of work.
I didn't open Blender once.
It is becoming f*cking dangerous
a 23-year-old dev from China ran 300 Claude Code agents at once, per this post. the part worth copying is the split. one model writes, a cheaper one checks every claim against the source, until nothing fails.
how many would you run?
THIS IS PURE F*CKING GOLD
REA's course did 2.4M views. I checked its examples against the real source code.
Windows Calculator: 200 + 10% = 220. lines 98 to 110 of scifunc.cpp. Chrome's dino: speed 6, +0.001 a frame, caps at 13.
5 claims, 5 match. what should I check next?
10²⁵ vs 10²⁶ FLOPs. that one exponent is the whole fight.
10²⁵ is ~640 GB300s for 3 months, 10²⁶ is ~6,400. the EU used the first line, US rules used the second.
I checked every number here. 3 hold up, 2 are only reported, 1 needs the bill text, which isn't public yet.
Is 10²⁵ FLOPs Still the Frontier?
A new Anthropic-written safety bill is circulating on Capitol Hill. Some of its ideas could be reasonable if limited to true frontier companies. As written, however, it will eventually sweep in most of Silicon Valley, damaging the startup ecosystem.
The bill defines the “frontier” as any model trained on 10²⁵ FLOPs — the EU standard from 2023. Biden’s executive order, California’s SB 53, and New York’s RAISE Act used 10²⁶ (ten times more). 10²⁷ is where the frontier actually is today (e.g., GPT-6 Astra).
Astra was reportedly trained on 100,000+ Grace Blackwell GPUs. A 10²⁵ model can be trained on as few as several hundred GB300 chips in three months. That is not frontier in 2026.
The definition is also cumulative: it adds FLOPs from fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, or other material modifications. In practice, that captures almost all meaningful post-training — work that is becoming commonplace in the enterprise.
The enterprise trend is toward thousands of smaller custom models built for specific workloads. These pose no frontier risk. Treating them as frontier systems would impose large compliance costs across corporate America for no safety gain.
Dario has claimed that Anthropic designs rules to disadvantage frontier companies like his own while advantaging smaller competitors. This definition does the opposite.
A stale 2023 cutoff favors incumbents who already clear the bar and can absorb the costs. It hobbles the open model ecosystem that threatens Anthropic’s pricing power.
The frontier keeps moving. Any definition meant to track risk should move with it.
Anthropic should clarify if they really believe 10²⁵ FLOPs represents the frontier.
88 million people watched this. the video never shows what's under the panels.
so I had Opus 5.5 take it apart from frames of this clip. any part no frame shows got marked unknown.
10 parts traced, 4 unknown, including whatever lifts it.
what should it take apart next?
Everyone’s looking at the demo. Look at the real shift:
Procure-to-Pay, ledger, approvals, audit log: all generated from one data model.
When the app costs hours instead of months, the moat in SaaS isn’t the software anymore. It’s the data and distribution.
Who gets repriced first: SAP-style incumbents or mid-market ERPs?
Holy sh*t, they just made business software build itself…
ERP.AI just dropped “Headless SaaS”
Steve Papa, Chairman:
“Nobody wanted to wait a year or two.”
So they built the opposite:
→ AI agent Proto builds the app - hours, not months
→ One data model. No integrations. No per-seat pricing.
→ Agents get the same permissions as people
→ 1/10 the cost across 187 real business tasks
You tell the software how to run your business.
Not the other way around.