AI's fracking moment

Pennsylvania kicked one fracking company out of the area for more than a decade. It just couldn't keep it out for good. The Texas-based company, now named Coterra, came back in late 2023, and by the next year, it was running lines beneath dozens of homes in Dimock, Pa., including the one where local resident Victoria Switzer, a former schoolteacher, paints. The noise from the construction and truck traffic kept her up at night. "They are cutting up the valley like Swiss cheese," she told Mother Jones. "We came here to enjoy nature, and this has just torn our lives apart."

The gas-rich rock under Dimock, called the Marcellus shale, also runs under New York towns just over the state line. New York spent years deciding whether to let fracking companies drill it the way Coterra drilled Dimock, but in December 2014, it said no. The state's ban has been in place since June 2015.

Now New York is freezing the construction of big data centers. On July 14, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order telling the Department of Environmental Conservation to shelve state permit applications for data centers that use 50 megawatts or more.

New York spent years deciding on fracking, and its ban has held ever since. Hochul moved much faster on data centers, freezing permit applications while the studies were still underway.

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PHP, the programming language behind most of the world's websites, released fixes on Wednesday for two flaws that could let attackers take over a site's server without a password. Researchers found the flaws with help from AI.

The flaws affect every version of PHP released in the past decade, according to cloud security company Wiz Research. Wiz said PHP runs about 70% of websites, including those built with the popular site-building tools WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla.

Wiz's researchers said attackers could pull passwords and the digital keys software uses to connect to other services straight from a server's memory. Both flaws stem from how PHP behaves when a program crashes, particularly when it runs out of memory. Because the problem sits inside PHP itself, even the simplest site running an affected version can be vulnerable.

Using Google's Gemini 4 Argon and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol, one of the researchers found and tested the flaws in just a week. Wiz said a world-class team would've needed months. Security firm Calif found the same flaws on its own in August, when researcher Ryan Austin used GPT-5.6 Sol to review PHP's code during an audit OpenAI paid for.

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