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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.ExplainerGeoCities: the free home-page host that Yahoo bought and switched offGeoCities gave millions of people their first home page, sorted into themed “neighbourhoods”. Yahoo bought it for $3.57 billion in 1999 and shut it down in October 2009, taking at least 38 million pages with it.

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Topic

Green IT

As data centres and devices multiplied, energy efficiency and electronic waste became boardroom issues. Regulation and marketing both pushed the industry toward greener claims.

Timeline

  1. 2003The EU adopts its waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) directive.
  2. 2007Data centre energy use becomes a mainstream IT concern.
  3. 2009Samsung’s Blue Earth leads a wave of solar-powered phones; makers push lower-power chargers and PCs.

Explainers

Green IT3 min read

Samsung Blue Earth: the 2009 solar-powered phone

At Mobile World Congress in February 2009 Samsung unveiled the Blue Earth, a touchscreen phone with a solar panel on the back, a case made from recycled water bottles and a pedometer that counted the carbon you saved by walking.

THE 2009 STORY