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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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Open source

Open source went from a mailing-list movement to the default way much of the internet is built. Along the way it fought over licences, patents and whether governments and businesses could trust code nobody sells.

Start here for the licence changes, company deals and adoption debates that shaped free and open-source software.

Timeline

  1. 1991Linus Torvalds announces the Linux kernel.
  2. 1998The term “open source” is coined and Netscape releases its browser source code.
  3. 2006Microsoft and Novell sign a patent and interoperability agreement that alarms the free software community.
  4. 2007The GNU General Public License version 3 is published.

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