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ExplainerPHP2Shell: the two PHP flaws that put most of the web at riskIn October 2026 two critical memory-safety bugs in PHP itself, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, leaked before the fix was ready. They let an attacker with no account run code on servers running PHP versions going back to 5.4.ExplainerFrom morphing to Sora: a short history of AI videoIn 1991 a few seconds of faces melting into each other in a Michael Jackson video took a specialist studio weeks. Thirty-odd years later a sentence typed into a browser produces a moving clip. This is how computers learned to make video, from hand-placed morph lines to GANs, deepfakes and text-to-video models such as Sora.ExplainerThe eMudhra key compromise: when a certificate authority’s keys could be guessedIn October 2026 a researcher showed that eight intermediate certificate authority keys belonging to India’s eMudhra were so weak they could be recovered in under a second. Browsers blocked them within hours, and eMudhra quit the global TLS certificate business.ExplainerAI and security: faster bug hunting, faster attacks and new targetsAI models now find serious flaws in core internet software, and attackers use the same tools to exploit them within hours. What October 2026’s run of disclosures shows about the risks, and what defenders can do.ExplainerYahoo closes GeoCities: how the web lost millions of home pagesYahoo bought GeoCities for billions in 1999 and switched it off a decade later. The closure became a turning point for web preservation.

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Topics

Every explainer, guide and tool on vnunet belongs to one of these topics.

Security

Worms, botnets, phishing, DRM fights and the people who chased them.

11 explainers

Open source

Linux, licences and the long argument about who owns software.

3 explainers

Browsers

From Internet Explorer’s dominance to Firefox and the second browser war.

1 explainer

Microsoft

Windows, Office, antitrust and the company’s changing view of the web.

2 explainers

Apple

The Mac’s comeback, the iPod years and the hardware that set trends.

2 explainers

Google & the web

Search, portals, Web 2.0 and the services that came and went.

2 explainers

Mobile

Phones, networks and the health and privacy scares that followed them.

3 explainers

Hardware

Laptops, netbooks, chips and the reviews that tracked them.

2 explainers

Green IT

Energy use, recycling rules and greener devices.

UK government IT

Large public-sector IT projects, identity cards and digital policy.

1 explainer

Software

File formats, utilities and the downloads people relied on.

2 explainers

Enterprise IT

Servers, outsourcing, storage and how businesses bought technology.