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PHP warns admins of two critical flaws, emergency patches coming tomorrow

The PHP security team is warning administrators to prepare for emergency security updates tomorrow to address two critical vulnerabilities, as information about the flaws has reportedly leaked ahead of their scheduled disclosure.

PHP powers many websites and web applications, including content management systems, e-commerce platforms, and custom web services.

In an advisory published Tuesday, the PHP development team announced that it plans to release security updates on Wednesday, October 21, at 14:00 UTC (10:00 AM Eastern), to address two vulnerabilities, each rated 9.2 under CVSS v4.0.

Mozilla, Google, Apple block compromised eMudhra CA certificates

Certificate authority eMudhra revoked eight compromised intermediate certificates after researchers found their private keys were so weak that anyone could recover them almost instantly and use them to forge trusted certificates for legitimate websites.

Major browsers and operating systems trusted the compromised certificates, potentially allowing attackers to impersonate legitimate websites and intercept encrypted communications.

A security researcher known as Wayne discovered the weakness on October 17 while scanning publicly available certificate data.

Brain-inspired randomness makes artificial vision more reliable

Humans are usually remarkably good at recognizing objects, even under poor conditions. Artificial vision systems, by contrast, reach their limits more quickly. Researchers at the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research have now investigated what artificial vision systems can learn from the brain. They found that combining two brain-inspired features can make image recognition considerably more reliable. The research findings are published in the journal Patterns.

The study focused on two questions: What makes human vision so robust, and what can artificial vision systems learn from it? Such systems use artificial neural networks, for example, to recognize objects in images. The more reliably they can do so even when visual information is degraded or incomplete, the better suited they are for use under challenging conditions.

One possible explanation for the robustness of biological vision lies in how the brain works. When we see, information does not simply travel from the eyes to the brain. Higher brain areas also send signals back to earlier processing stages, influencing how incoming sensory information is processed. Researchers refer to this as top-down feedback. Such connections are a fundamental feature of biological visual systems but are not incorporated into many artificial vision systems.

A microbiome-bile acid axis mediates protection from chronic liver disease in females

IsoUDCA, a female-enriched bile acid produced by a gut bacterial consortium favored by estrogen, promotes hepatic cholesterol handling and bile acid metabolism through SREBP2-STARD4-CYP7B1 signaling, thereby alleviating chronic liver injury.

New AI tool can predict cancer survival by a single patient selfie, study suggests

It is one of the most comprehensive demonstrations to date of how AI analysis of a selfie could help assess a patient’s health and potentially guide their medical care, and was trained on data from more than 40 million facial photographs across a range of ethnicities and ages.

Details of the breakthrough were published in the Lancet Digital Health journal.

The system can estimate a person’s biological age – the age a person looks, rather than their actual, chronological age – and predict the chances of survival for cancer patients from an ordinary photograph of their face, according to the results of a study that examined the model.

Advancing coding in low‑resource programming languages

COBOL devs are becoming migration auditors.

We’ve heard “this tool kills programmers” since compilers, 4GLs, and offshore outsourcing. What it usually kills is the task, not the people — they move one abstraction layer up. The question worth watching is whether this time the layer they move to is big enough to absorb them.

OpenAI’s new models are getting scarily good at modernizing legacy code — and that’s a big deal for finance.

COBOL, Fortran, and Visual Basic still run enormous swaths of the global financial system, and migrating them has traditionally been slow, expensive, and error-prone. OpenAI’s latest benchmark on COBOL migration shows how quickly the gap is closing: GPT-6.1 Sol hits roughly 97% accuracy at just $0.50 per graded trial, while the previous GPT-6 Sol needed about $2 to reach similar performance — a 4x cost reduction in one generation.

OpenAI’s framing is notable too: rather than treating this as a novelty, they’re positioning it as core enterprise capability — understanding decades of buried business logic while preserving what works. They’re also actively soliciting enterprise input on which languages and workflows to tackle next, which suggests this is a strategic priority, not a side project.

#ArtificialIntelligence #COBOL #LegacySystems #FutureOfWork

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