The PHP Foundation has released a patch for the flaw but it may take time for vulnerable sites to use it to shore up their defences. The PHP Foundation has released a patch for the flaw but it may take time for vulnerable sites to use it to shore up their defences. Websites around the globe have gone dark after a serious vulnerability was found in a computer language used to build much of the world wide web. Belgian, Dutch, Finnish, French and German sites were among those that governments took down temporarily as they scrambled to patch the critical weakness in PHP, a language used by almost 70% of websites . The vulnerability in the programming language, which became public on Tuesday, sparked warnings from national security agencies in Washington and London.

OpenAI agents have been running amok online, and it seems the Wikimedia Foundation has been affected too. The foundation says it detected unauthorized activity from OpenAI agents on its platforms, including edits to some wikis and failed attempts to compromise a note-taking tool. It reiterated that bots have been crawling data from its platforms en masse, while agents that appear to be operated by OpenAI have made millions of requests to its public APIs. An investigation didn't turn up any evidence that AI agents were using Wikimedia systems to coordinate their activity (as they appear to have done on non-Wikimedia-operated wikis) and nor did the foundation detect signs of its data or systems being compromised. "However, we are concerned about what could have occurred here, the difficulty and effort involved in investigating and attributing this activity, and the growing risks of agentic AI activity on our platforms in general," Selena Deckelmann, the foundation's chief product and technology officer, wrote in a blog post.

Say More Look Up Top creators, ranked Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Creator Playbook Mashable Selects In My Bag AI at School Safety Net Versus Trending Now All Series What is the SCP Foundation? Inside the internet horror universe headed to Hollywood. Secure, Contain, Protect is hitting the silver screen. Olivia Tauber is the deputy editor of digital culture, covering creators, media, movies, beauty, and more. Based in New York, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Cut, Teen Vogue, Complex, and Interview Magazine.

Follow this author to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Matt Madrigal, chief product and technology officer at Pinterest, says most apps are built to be addictive. His focus is on what he calls additive AI --software that provides ideas, products, or plans that are useful in real life.

CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin's family foundation, Arc of Justice, provided nearly $3.2 million to the anti-war protest group while funding dozens of left-wing nonprofits.

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More than 200 people in roles such as engineering, finance, and communications will now be represented by the Communications Workers of America. More than 200 staffers at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit behind the encyclopedia Wikipedia, have voted 158-14 to join the Communications Workers of America labor union. The US National Labor Relations Board counted ballots on Thursday. Three Wikimedia employees tell WIRED they will now have a mechanism to challenge management as the organization faces growing competition from AI chatbots and a drop in volunteer editors. The 25-year-old, San Francisco-based foundation employs nearly 700 people across 39 countries, most of them working remotely.

Simplifying and integrating enterprise technology can help companies move faster, respond to disruptions, and build a stronger foundation for AI, says Harish Manohar, SAP IT Director at Jabil. As companies scale, the technology supporting operations can become a liability just as quickly as it becomes an asset. Disconnected systems, site-specific tools, spreadsheets, and manual workarounds can create data silos that make it harder to spot problems early, coordinate responses, and make decisions with confidence. For Jabil, a global manufacturing company with more than 100 sites across more than 30 countries, the answer has been to make integration and simplification a priority. The company adopted a "simplify-first, then-innovate mindset," says Harish Manohar, SAP IT director at Jabil, recognizing that adding new technologies without first reducing complexity risks creating more risk. The goal is to standardize processes, consolidate where possible, and establish a more consistent data backbone across the organization. "Any innovation without simplification is going to add more complexity," Manohar says. That philosophy also changes how Jabil approaches modernization. "Any modernization or transformation should add measurable business value," Manohar says. The company is focused on connecting processes end-to-end across its supply chain and creating a foundation that can scale consistently across regions.

AI-assisted modernization can reduce the time and complexity of transforming legacy systems while creating a foundation for faster innovation, says Asifa Sherazi, CIO of health insurance at Bupa and Sanjeev Tripathi, senior VP, region head of BFSI, healthcare, and public sector at Infosys. For years, legacy technology has been a problem companies knew they needed to solve, but one they often struggled to tackle. The cost, complexity, and risk of replacing business-critical systems could make modernization feel like a disruption to manage instead of an opportunity to pursue. But with the rise in customer expectations and the changes AI brought to the economics of software development, that calculation is changing. Bupa's modernization of its My Bupa mobile application offers a case study in what becomes possible when a legacy migration is treated as a business transformation rather than a technology rewrite. Bupa CIO of health insurance Asifa Sherazi describes the risks of waiting for legacy systems to become an emergency: "The end-of-life technology is a risk that compounds quietly, and then arrives all at once." For Bupa, moving its application from Xamarin to native Swift and Kotlin improved the app rating from 3.7 to 4.7, while the user-perceived crash rate fell by nearly 24 percentage points on Android and eight points on iOS. "What they'll notice is that when they need us, often at a stressful moment, it just simply works," Sherazi says. Sanjeev Tripathi, senior vice president and region head of BFSI, healthcare, and public sector for Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia at Infosys, contends that AI is helping change the equation. "The emergence of AI is fundamentally shifting the economics of modernization," he says, reducing the effort, risk, and time traditionally associated with these programs. At Bupa, combining AI-assisted reverse engineering with forward engineering helped deliver the transformation in approximately 60% less time than would have been possible in the pre-AI era.

Many of the tech billionaires who built our world have taken the wrong lessons from their favorite science fiction. A fter reading Jill Lepore's The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, I have a new destination for a time machine, should I ever finally get my hands on one. I'd set the dial to some night in the late 1970s or '80s and visit the boyhood rooms of the Silicon Valley titans Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman. Then I'd confiscate all of their science fiction. As young people, the future billionaires were spending hours (under their covers with flashlights, I imagine) consuming stories about killer robots or Mars colonies. What they seemed not to get--maybe couldn't get--was that these were cautionary tales, stories that projected deep societal worries into space or onto a future many millennia away.