fidzu : computers

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Website admins, brace yourselves. Fixes for what are believed to be uncommonly severe vulnerabilities are scheduled to drop in a little more than 12 hours for PHP, a programming language that powers websites and Web applications everywhere. PHP maintainers said Monday that they planned to release patches for two vulnerabilities, both with severity ratings of 9.2 out of a possible 10. "All PHP users are encouraged to prepare now so they can upgrade as soon as the release is available," the advisory stated. "We reserve the right to release earlier should details of either vulnerability become public, or should evidence of active exploitation appear in the wild." The maintainers published the advisory following the leaking of purported details, which have yet to be confirmed. The report showed a video of an exploit tool dubbed PHP2Shell executing code on webservers running WordPress 7.1.3, MediaWiki 1.46.2, phpBB 3.3.17, Magento 2.4.9, Joomla 6.2.0, Laravel 13.36.0, Laravel 8.83.29, Symphony 8.1.9, Drupal 11.4.10, and WHMCS 9.0.9, all of which use PHP. A video depicting the tool has been reposted here. Attempts to locate the unconfirmed report were unsuccessful, but security firm watchTowr said it claimed to affect every PHP version from PHP 5, released in 2004, onward. The security firm went on to say it has confirmed that the vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, are real. Researchers from separate security firm Sansec said they "expect mass attacks to start within 15 minutes of the release." A third security firm, Webfence, also urged admins to prepare now. Huntress has also issued an advisory.

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21 Oct 2026 3:00pm GMT

Mike Flanagan defies the odds with a re-imagining of Stephen King's classic that is well worth watching.

21 Oct 2026 11:19am GMT

Flipping through the highlights in and around Pinball Expo 2026.

21 Oct 2026 11:00am GMT

Elon Musk says a merger between Tesla and SpaceX is under active consideration, with special committees at both companies evaluating a deal that could combine businesses valued at roughly $3.5 trillion. "Do I think it would be a good idea? Yes," Musk said during a call with financial analysts over the quarterly business results of SpaceX on Tuesday. The BBC reports: While Musk noted the certainty of such a merger should not be assumed, and it would need shareholders' support, he said special committees within both companies have been formed to examine the move. "The special committees have not reached agreement on terms of any transaction and there's no guarantee that they will," Musk added. "But I do think there is a lot of merit to merging and a lot to be gained." [...] The company, which builds space rockets and Starlink internet satellites, is now expanding into offering cloud compute capacity for other tech companies, like Anthropic and Google. That line of business has become the most profitable part of SpaceX, bringing in $7.5bn according to the latest quarterly results (PDF). Starlink also tallied revenue of $5.2bn. SpaceX as a whole, however, is not profitable and has lost $1.1bn so far this year. [...] Musk said on Tuesday a full merger between the two companies would make sense for the work each is doing around chips, artificial intelligence, software and more. He described himself as a "conflicted party" as the chief executive of Tesla and of SpaceX. Even commenting on the possibility of a merger between the two companies, Musk compared to "tap dancing through a minefield." He added a merger would ultimately be decided by shareholders. At least 50% of Tesla's shareholders would need to approve the merger, which Musk described as "quite a high hurdle to achieve."

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21 Oct 2026 11:00am GMT

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from TWZ: A Russian satellite, Kosmos 2612, may have passed within approximately 85 feet (26 meters) of a U.S.-registered satellite belonging to commercial imagery provider ICEYE. This would be an extraordinarily close and potentially dangerous pass-by for two objects in space traveling at thousands of miles per hour. For weeks beforehand, ICEYE-X36, which would be of special interest to Russia, had already found itself in increasingly close orbital alignment with its pursuer. The two satellites now look to be drifting further and further apart, but the episode has been a clear sign of what is to come as the potential for conflict in space only continues to grow. Publicly available space tracking data from the satellitemap.space and orbitalradar.com websites show that Kosmos 2612 (also written sometimes Cosmos 2612 and abbreviated K2612) and ICEYE X36 had their especially close encounter at approximately 16:07 UTC today. Private space services company LeoLabs also told TWZ today that it could not "confirm or contradict what other data sources have stated publicly," but that it has "high-confidence that the objects came within approximately [emphasis in the original] 500 meters [1,640 feet] of each other." Kosmos 2612 had been making progressively closer passes by ICEYE X36 in recent days. "This is the most advanced and potentially dangerous uncooperative RPO we've observed," Adam Marsh, LeoLabs vice president for technical solutions, separately told Breaking Defense. "It's important to note that 'red' on 'blue' engagements, such as this, are relatively uncommon in Low Earth Orbit (LEO)," LeoLabs' report points out. At the same time, "this was not a routine conjunction or 'fly by.' The sequence included a controlled approach, changes in relative position, close-proximity loitering, additional small maneuvers, and a controlled departure. The behavior is consistent with sophisticated rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO)." "We can only speculate about the operation's goal, but it could have been anything from simply intimidation to outright destruction or sabotage of a U.S.-registered satellite," CSIS' Clayton Swope told TWZ. "Perhaps the operation is on hold. There are, however, several other satellites that shadowed ICEYE X36 back in May that could be brought in[to] action too."

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21 Oct 2026 7:00am GMT

Unconfirmed report claims PHP2Shell exploit remotely executes code on PHP sites.

21 Oct 2026 2:12am GMT

Early 2025, I wrote about how I think macOS' UNIX certification was basically a lie. It required so many convoluted and cumbersome changes to macOS that literally nobody applies to their system that it the certification had kind of become a farce. At the end of the article I wondered for how much longer Apple would be playing this little charade to hammer macOS through a meaningless UNIX-shaped hole, and it turns out the answer was "about 18 months". When you go to the Open Group's website and the list of certified UNIX operating systems, macOS is no longer listed. For the past few weeks, it was still listed if you drilled down specifically to the UNIX 03 certification, but that, too, has now been removed. Assuming macOS 27 doesn't return in the near future with a brand new certification, we can safely say that Apple got tired of paying a few employees to get its desktop operating system certified. With one more operating system gone from the list, there's now only one UNIX operating systems left: AIX. While the registry also lists HP-UX, z/OS, and UnixWare/OpenServer, those either only conform to really old UNIX certifications (from the '90s), or simply aren't developed anymore (HP sunset HP-UX at the end of last year). Only one operating system version conforms to the latest version of the certification, UNIX 07, and that's AIX 7.2 TL5 "and later", which possibly includes AIX 7.3, the most recent version of AIX. Not that any of this really matters.

20 Oct 2026 9:41pm GMT

Hot on the heels of Wine being ported to OpenBSD, we now have the release of OpenBSD 8.0. It adds hibernate support for arm64, switches the sparc64 toolchain to LLVM, and updates the DRM graphics drivers to Linux 6.18.53, which also adds support for Intel Arc A-Series (DG2/Alchemist) graphics cards. There's a whole bunch of improvements, fixes, and changes for RISC-V and ARM in general, of course, as well as to the various Wi-Fi drivers. On top of that, it also comes with new versions of OpenSSH and LibreSSL, as well as a massive list of other improvements and fixes. If you've never installed OpenBSD before, be sure to read this detailed guide to know what to do once everything's installed, while listening to the official release song, of course.

20 Oct 2026 5:50pm GMT

Apparently, macOS 27 comes with a small mystery people are trying to figure out. Recently, while troubleshooting a PATH issue, I noticed an entry for /pkg/env/global/bin. At first, I worried that something had gone horribly wrong. Turns out, this is part of macOS 27.0… though no one is sure what it's for yet. In a post about how macOS's boot volume structure has been updated, Howard Oakley explains that the pkg directory was added to the Data volume in macOS 26.4, but not added to the root of the Signed System Volume until 27.0. He also notes that this is sort of a big deal. The weird thing is, as far as I can tell, no one seems to know what this new directory is for! It's odd that Apple would update their filesystem structure, add it to everyone's PATH, and there not be some explicable reason. ↫ Gavin Anderegg I guess we'll find out eventually, but this does highlight something that I find extremely unsettling about this. With proprietary software like macOS, you literally are at the mercy of whatever Apple decides to do to "your" operating system. You install an update, and aside from all the documented changes, there's going to be changes you simply have no idea what they're for, or why they're there. Don't get me wrong, there's obviously not something nefarious going on in this particular case, but it still feels wild to me that people just willingly accept this. In the open source world, stuff like this simply does not happen. You're not going to install a bunch of Fedora updates one day and find a mysterious, undocumented folder in your PATH. Such a change will be documented, but even in the unlikely event it's not, you can just go through the commit history and find out exactly why the new folder is there, and what its intended purpose is or is going to be. Considering the state of the world and the people corporations like Apple really answer to, I would not be comfortable with letting them dictate even something as simple as my PATH.

19 Oct 2026 10:26pm GMT