Security researchers using an OpenAI model have uncovered two stunning security flaws in PHP,  the software that underpins nearly 70 percent of all websites on the internet. 

The flaws are so catastrophic that all websites using PHP — all untold millions of them — are advised to immediately take their servers down and apply the latest patch, which was released Wednesday. Vast swathes of the internet, following the news, have gone dark. Some that went offline for a time include Wikipedia, Steam, and even government websites.

Many organizations, however, may not have the time, resources, and personpower to swiftly implement the patch, making them potential sitting ducks until they do. According to the New York Times, the information released on the vulnerability can be used to reverse engineer the attack and take control of victim’s servers and steal information. The best course of action if you can’t patch your website, the National Security Agency advised, is dramatic: keep your site offline and don’t turn it back on.

Just as extraordinary as the breadth of the threat was how it was identified. The flaws were discovered by researchers at the cybersecurity firm Calif by using OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol model, as part of a collaboration with the AI company. It then reported the flaw to the PHP Foundation back on August 11. 

The Google-owned security firm Wiz independently found the flaws, too, and made a report on August 24. Wiz called it one of the “most severe vulnerabilities discovered in PHP, and arguably in software history.”

Adding to the alarm presented by the exploits, there have been concerns raised over OpenAI’s role in how they were identified.

The flaws have been present in versions of PHP dating backing to 2004. But through OpenAI’s “Patch the Planet” program, and by using its flagship GPT-5.6 Sol model, Calif found it in only a matter of days. In a sense, these exploits only exist because of current powerful AI models. And moreover, OpenAI encouraged their discovery through its programs.

The messy disclosure of the vulnerability doesn’t help matters. OpenAI followed standard responsible practices, but some of the details around the hack leaked a day before it was officially scheduled to be announced.

Even if no leaks occurred, though, the damage caused by the mere knowledge that the vulnerabilities exist — which again, is largely thanks to AI — would still be catastrophic. It was the inevitable next chapter in all the bluster around AI companies revealing their agentic models’ hacking prowess. A headline in The Atlantic proclaimed that the “AI-Hacking Apocalypse Began Last Night.” OpenAI will tout the discovery as undeniable proof of its AI’s capabilities, while the rest of the world picks up the pieces of a shattered internet.

More on AI: AI Experts Already Doomsday Prepping for When AI Takes Out the Entire Financial System

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Vibe coding is the act of telling an AI what you want to program and letting it write all the code for you. When it was first adopted, it was supposed to embody the sort of care-free optimism that was running in AI circles at the time, high off the possibilities of the tech. AI models had become so powerful that you could build an app using the same conversational language that you deploy while confiding in ChatGPT.

But the “vibes” are different now. Programmers were quickly forced to grapple with the new reality that AI coding tools brought to their profession. Now that everyone’s using AI to churn out code, you have to crank out even more work to keep up and meet your boss’s quota. It may be more “efficient” — and even that’s contested, since someone needs to do the hard work of verifying all that AI pablum — but it hasn’t exactly made people’s jobs easier. Meanwhile, everyone with a Claude subscription and a half-baked app idea fancies themselves a bona fide programmer, too.

In sum, vibe coding has gone from a novelty to something viewed as a necessary evil, or worse, as an object of suspicion. It’s no longer something to brag about. A recent tweet making the rounds in tech circles perhaps encapsulates this shift, joking about using the term “cuck coding” instead of vibe coding “because you just sit in a chair and watch.” Even posters on r/ClaudeCoding found the humor in it.

Vibe coding can churn out marvelous work, but it’s hard to divorce the optimism around it from the clueless bosses who are forcing their employees to heavily use AI to code. Epic Games, the game developer behind the mega hit shooter Fortnite, reportedly went the extra step of basically mandating actual vibes-based coding, telling employees that there would be “no more hand-written code” and that the unnamed game they were working on should be “generated with full AI workflows.” Epic was later met with waves of mockery for bragging that it “vibe coded” its game launcher to be faster than its competitor Steam.

As vulgar as the term sounds, maybe “cuck coding” is indeed the term that more accurately reflects what’s actually going on. You watch and burn… lots of tokens.

More on AI: Major Data Center Developer Rents Floating Prison Barge to House Contract Construction Workers

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Donald Trump’s Twitter clone, Truth Social, is in serious trouble.

The company has weathered bad news before, hitting all-time low stock prices on multiple occasions over the past year. But those days now look balmy in comparison, with the social network’s shares sliding more than 7.5 percent on Monday alone and setting a new rock bottom of just $6.40. Zooming out doesn’t paint a prettier picture, either: over the past month, the company’s stock has fallen a stomach-churning 29 percent.

It’s easy to empathize with any investors looking to ditch the company. It never had much of a raison d’être beyond “funnel some money to Trump,” and the president’s declining political fortunes — not to mention looming midterms that are likely to undermine his remaining power — have weakened even that grift-era pitch.

As the Daily Beast reported last week, not even its users are sticking around, with analytics data suggesting that its daily traffic has cratered by more than 30 percent over the past year. For a company that was already posting huge losses every quarter, that’s grim news — and it sounds like the company’s remaining investors may now be seeing the writing on the wall.

As its fortunes have soured, Truth Social has tried a series of eyebrow-raising pivots into gambling and crypto that failed to gain traction. It also moved to merge with a nuclear fusion company and started selling early access to Trump’s messages on the platform, in a move that was widely derided as an attempt to profit off his position as president.

So far, none of those moves have showed any signs of turning around the company’s fortunes. Add it all up, and it’s hard not to wonder whether Truth Social will survive as long as Trump’s second administration.

More on Truth Social: Trump’s Failing Truth Social Was Doing Much Better Under Biden

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A retired professor was handcuffed and arrested last week, for the crime of standing on the sidewalk in front of a delivery robot.

According to local channel 6ABC, 78-year-old Carolyn Marvin was arrested in Philadelphia’s Center City, after planting her feet in the path of an oncoming Avride delivery robot. Marvin, a retired communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told local reporters she was protesting the robots due to the threat they pose to local delivery workers.

“I know they’re taking the jobs of human delivery workers,” Marvin told 6ABC, “and so I have been protesting them whenever I saw them by standing in front of them and preventing them from going forward.”

The “confrontation” — if you can call it that — attracted a small crowd, who watched as police ordered Marvin to move out of the robot’s path. When she refused, citing protected speech, she was arrested and charged with one count of disorderly conduct, which she reportedly plans to dispute in court.

It wasn’t Marvin’s first time passively protesting Philadelphia’s growing fleet of delivery robots, and it probably won’t be her last. Asked by 6ABC whether she plans on continuing her demonstrations, she replied that “I do. Why not?”

“I think it’s my First Amendment right to publicly demonstrate on a sidewalk to protest against delivery robots,” Marvin continued.

In a separate interview with KYW Newsradio, the retired professor said she was protesting the “ruthless way that rich corporations are casting aside human workers — and here, we’re talking about the humble delivery folks — in order to enrich their bottom lines.”

The incident raises a valid legal question around delivery bots: if the privately-owned devices need unimpeded access to public infrastructure to work, who’s responsible for making sure they have room to roam?

More on robots: Walmart Running Into Trouble as Its Super-Expensive Robots Can’t Handle the Realities of Warehouse Work

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A biodiversity research team journeying into the incredibly diverse subtropical forests of China’s Ailaoshan Mountains took a strange companion with them: a robotic dog.

The robot, a Lynx M20S developed by DEEP Robotics, assisted the team on a trip organized by the China Association for Scientific Expedition, China’s state-run tabloid the Global Times reported. Photos of the expedition show the researchers using the robot like a pack mule to carry field and imaging supplies, though the unit reportedly also assisted with other tasks like route scouting, image recording, and data collection.

At one point, the robot was even used to capture footage of a rare parasitic plant known as Monotropa uniflora, as well as forest gibbons (though, to be fair, these are tasks a human scientist could surely perform just as well.)

Whether the expedition amounts to a practical deployment or a frivolous gimmick probably depends on how you view commercial robots as a whole. Though it can carry a load of about 220 pounds, the battery life on the Lynx M20S lasts just 2.5 to 3.5 hours, likely putting a decent burden on any researchers who have to lug replacement batteries up the Ailaoshan Mountain range or figure out a way to charge them in situ.

At the same time, it makes for a pretty effective product demo. The Ailaoshan Mountain range and its surrounding area are notoriously treacherous, with navigation of ravines and dense primeval forests complicated by extreme outbursts of precipitation. In 2021, a rapid change in weather on the range resulted in the deaths of four experienced geological researchers — an illustrative example of the kinds of conditions one can expect on the Ailaoshan Mountains.

As a device designed for challenging outdoor terrain, the Lynx M20S’s apparently successful participation in this trek seems to validate the company’s engineering efforts.

Elsewhere, DEEP robotics’ robo-hounds have reportedly assisted with underground tunnel excavation, patrolled urban streets during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, and helped firefighters extinguish blazes.

More on robots: Chinese Startup Shows Off Robot Horse You Can Actually Ride

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Amazon has officially surpassed a fleet of 1 million robots, an arsenal of mechanical arms, Roomba-like floor loaders, and hulking pallet sorting machines.

Each robot is a node in an intricate web allowing the corporation to speed up delivery times and lower overhead. But for the over 1.5 million full- and part-time workers relying on Amazon wages to pay their bills, the company’s bot army represents rising competition — not just metaphorically, but physically.

As George Mason University professor of business Brad Greenwood told Ars Technica in a recent interview, Amazon’s warehouse robots aren’t just helping Amazon cut costs on labor, but are literally boxing humans out of workspaces in the company’s facilities.

“For the last 100 years, most of the automation that we’ve seen usually happens away from workers,” Greenwood explained. “You’re taking that high-risk task away from the worker, and you’re doing so in a way that is not physically proximate.”

Yet the growth of Amazon’s robot fleet “really changes that dynamic for two reasons: one is that it is physically proximate, and two, the robot has the ability to dictate the pace of work,” Greenwood continued.

That shifting terrain is great for Amazon’s bottom line. The robots help decrease friction across the company’s vast logistics empire, increasing speed and strengthening the company’s bottom line. And by allowing robots to “dictate the pace” of work, as Greenwood put it, Amazon is also loosening its need for human labor, disempowering workers both on an individual basis and in any potential collective bargaining arrangements.

Beyond the shop floor, Amazon’s robots also serve as a near-constant source of buzzy PR, as exciting achievements in automation overshadow the more mundane but widespread reality of workplace injuries. It’s especially convenient for Amazon, as conditions in the company’s facilities appear to become more dangerous as more robots roll out to the floor (and that’s to say nothing of the impact of AI-mediated human resources).

As director of strategic research at the trade union coalition Strategic Organizing Center, Joan Moriarty, told Ars: “Amazon likes to talk about its latest robots because it doesn’t want to talk about the tens of thousands of Amazon workers who are injured every year due to Amazon’s obsession with maximizing speed and minimizing costs.”

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Police in Cologne, Germany, have seized a humanoid robot after a pair of livestreamers used it to sexually harass a teenage girl.

According to a police statement released Monday, the robot “allegedly touched a 16-year-old girl on the buttocks and performed thrusting motions against” her.

There’s not much “alleged” about the incident, though, since the IRL streamers recorded everything that happened while live on Twitch.

The robot’s owner is 16-year-old German IRL streamer Agaamuza. For the past few weeks, according to 404 Media, he’s been filming himself and his friends wandering the streets of Cologne while accompanied by a humanoid robot from the company Unitree, which they dress in a ridiculous outfit and have fixed with a mustache. They spend a lot of the time using the robot, which they’ve nicknamed Ahmed, to bother and outright harass strangers, most of them women.

In clips of the recent incident circulating online, the robot encounters a group of girls standing on the street at night. Then, it just so happens that the robot, after having no problems walking down a busy sidewalk, plows directly into one of the girl’s behind.

“Oh my god stop,” one of her friends says.

Agaamuza and his crew act as if they’re shocked by the robot’s actions, but ask the girls if they want to meet the robot. When she and her friends say no, the robot starts thrusting its hips provocatively in front of them. The girls, repulsed, move away.

This is just one example, though. In plenty of other videos, Agaamuza tricks unsuspecting women into being friendly with the robot before it suddenly springs into doing something pervy, like humping a woman as she’s hugging it, or making masturbatory gestures. Then Agaamuza’s posse play dumb and pretend to be appalled by what’s happening.

Make no mistake: these robots aren’t autonomous and everything they do is controlled by a human operator. Those hip thrusts and other gross gestures are pre-programmed moves, not something that’s happening spontaneously.

Nonetheless, the German police statement added an unnecessary air of mystery to who was responsible for these actions, saying that it’s now “investigating how the robot was operating at the time of the incident and whether someone was deliberately controlling its movements.”

This is unfortunately another example of how men looking for clout are using the latest gadgets to target women. Plenty of other livestreamers and Instagram “pick up artists” are using Meta smart glasses to film themselves harassing girls on the street and record them without their consent.

More on robots: Walmart Running Into Trouble as Its Super-Expensive Robots Can’t Handle the Realities of Warehouse Work

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When it comes to hardware, Amazon’s strategy has historically been to throw spaghetti at the wall and pray it sticks.

There was the Amazon Fire Phone in 2014, a $170 million flop with a gimmicky 3D camera system. Then came the Amazon Tap, a clunky, Echo-style home assistant device that did away with voice-activation, instead requiring users to press a physical button. And of course, who could forget those silly Amazon Dash Buttons?

They all build context for Amazon’s latest gadget: an always-on wearable microphone that constantly listens in to your conservations.

Called the “Bee,” Amazon’s new hardware platform spans two devices, which are basically just a large language model (LLM) packed onto a watch-sized microphone, as Gizmodo reported. Customers can currently buy the “Bee Frontier” wearable version, which comes with a watch strap, for $75. Or Amazon aficionados can hold out for the “Bee Eclipse,” a $100 plastic puck that fits onto the back of your phone.

And when we say these gadgets are always listening, we mean it. Don’t take our word for it — in its press release announcing the new devices, Amazon explained that the Bee Frontier has a seven-day battery life, allowing it to “stay with you through a full week without interruption.”

This being an Amazon device, e-commerce is an essential selling point: “whether it’s remembering the details of important meetings, taking note of the coffee plans you made in passing, or simply ensuring you purchase the dish soap you said you’d buy, Bee Frontier will remember the details for you,” the release enthused.

As you might expect by this point in 2026, you’re not getting away with a one-time purchase. In order to use some core features like “unlimited recent conversation summaries” and access to an Alexa-style “personal chat assistant,” Bee owners will need to subscribe to Bee Pro, which costs $12 a month. (New customers get a month of Bee Pro on the house.)

The device follows a growing trend among hardware brands to eschew physical interactivity in favor of AI-integrated monitoring devices. Meta has its AI Glasses, which have been found recording users even when they’re in sleep mode, while OpenAI is developing a screen-less smart speaker engineered by famed Apple designer Jony Ive.

Whether any of these devices catch on with consumers remains to be seen, but it seems unlikely. A YouGov poll from earlier this year found that some 61 percent of Americans feel it’s very important to limit who has access to their data — which isn’t a great sign for anybody selling what amounts to an AI-powered ankle monitor.

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Experts have long argued that our current obsession with humanoid robots may be at least a little bit misguided.

After all, the awkward form factor of a torso teetering on two spindly legs isn’t exactly the pinnacle of motor proficiency, let alone suitable for every job.

But what if we were to double the height of the humanoid robot and gave it terrifying hydraulic actuators that give it far beyond superhuman strength?

That’s precisely what Beijing-based company NeodraDynamics Robotics has done. At this year’s China International Industry Fair, the company showed off an imposing, 13-foot and 1.2-ton robot dubbed Neo1 — and it looks like it was yanked straight out of a pulpy sci-fi movie. Photos show the behemoth towering above the heads of convention goers.

Instead of relying on electric motors, the company opted for a “hydraulic-electric hybrid drive” that, according to a boisterous press release, “thoroughly eliminates robots’ power and environmental adaptation anxieties.”

In other words, it’s akin to a highly sophisticated excavator in the shape of a 13-foot giant. But unlike an excavator, the robot has “41 full-body active degrees of freedom” and can carry over 1,100 pounds in its beefy arms. It also has a claimed “repeated positioning accuracy” and fingertip precision of a single micrometer.

NeodraDynamics Robotics is envisioning its Neo1 mecha as the ultimate “sky, ground and sea” responder, assisting during “aerial inspection, underground mining, and deep-sea engineering.”

It can withstand “ultra-high underwater pressure to execute subsea equipment maintenance,” as well as shock and pollution, making it a candidate for “efficient demolition, clearance and hazard zone operations.”

But while we continue to gaze upon the mecha in awe, we’ll wait for an actual showcase before we render full judgment. After all, the Neo1 would be far from the first Chinese piece of vaporware that never turned into a reality.

Apart from the breathless press release, the company’s website doesn’t elaborate a whole lot either. Even more importantly, we have yet to see the robot in action.

In short, it’s a wild idea that may or may not usher in a new era in industrial mechanical engineering. And judging by its inspiring looks, it’d look pretty cool from afar at a construction site — as long as it never decides to turn against humanity, that is.

More on humanoid robots: Scientists Create New Humanoid Robot That Flinches in Fear When You Come Close

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As if Meta’s AI-smart glasses didn’t have enough privacy issues, a growing number of owners report the devices are spying on them without their consent.

According to reporting by Android Authority, several owners of the Meta glasses have reported their devices capturing conversations without ever being activated. In theory, a user has to say “Hey Meta” to “wake” the device from sleep mode, similar to other smart systems like Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri. But some owners say the Meta glasses are waking up and recording without that phrase ever being uttered — effectively monitoring their surroundings without express permission.

“I have observed the same behavior on THREE different pairs of Ray-Ban Meta glasses, including 2nd- and 3rd-generation models,” one user explained in a thread on Reddit.

“I believe this deserves a serious technical investigation,” the poster continued. “Customers should not have to wonder whether their private conversations are being captured when they have not intentionally activated their glasses’ AI assistant.”

Invasive as it is, the irony is hard to miss. Meta glasses have emerged as a preferred tool of sex creeps, bullies, and skeevy influencers the world over for their ability to record video discreetly — a feature which quickly earned them the nickname “pervert glasses.”

“Woah a company that makes money by invading your privacy is invading your privacy!” one Redditor joked in a separate thread about the issue. “Can’t trust anyone these days.”

In a vague response to the report, a Meta spokesperson told Android Authority that the issue “has been resolved.”

“People can manage, review and delete voice logs of their interactions with Meta AI via settings at any time,” the statement concluded.

Whether that boilerplate statement is enough to assuage Meta glasses users remains to be seen. If nothing else, maybe users will gain a new appreciation for what it feels like to be recorded without consent.

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