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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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Hardware

Hardware history is a story of trade-offs: weight against battery life, price against power. These explainers cover the product categories that rose fast and sometimes vanished just as quickly.

Timeline

  1. 2006Intel’s Core architecture replaces the Pentium 4 era.
  2. 2007Asus launches the Eee PC and starts the netbook boom.
  3. 2008Intel’s Atom processor and the MacBook Air arrive.
  4. 2010The iPad reshapes the low-cost portable market.

Explainers

Hardware2 min read

Dell in the 2000s: the direct-sales giant that had to change

Dell built the world’s biggest PC business by selling straight to customers. In the mid-2000s, customer-service anger, a battery recall, criticism of its advertising and a resurgent HP forced it to rethink.

THE 2004–2008 STORY
Hardware3 min read

The Lenovo IdeaPad S10e: the netbook built for schools

In early 2009 Lenovo relaunched its popular IdeaPad S10 netbook as the S10e, aimed at schools, with a 10.1-inch screen, a six-cell battery option and an instant-on Quick Start system. It was one of the best-reviewed netbooks of the boom.

THE 2009 STORY