Technology moves fast. Context matters. Independent by design ↗
vnunet.
Explore topics

Find your next rabbit hole.

Explore the collection, or type to search.

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.

Press Esc to close

Topic

Google & the web

The web of the 2000s was a churn of portals, home-page builders, wikis and search engines. Some became the infrastructure we use daily; others, like GeoCities, closed and took millions of pages with them.

Timeline

  1. 1999Yahoo buys GeoCities.
  2. 2001Wikipedia is launched.
  3. 2004Google goes public and launches Gmail.
  4. 2009Yahoo closes GeoCities in the US.

Explainers