PHP fixes critical RCE vulnerabilities, Meta reports Q3 earnings

TechmemeOct 22, 2026

Wed, Oct 21

Tomorrow's events: Nvidia GTC Berlin (day 3), Masters of Scale Summit (day 3), Valencia Digital Summit (day 2), Earnings: SPOT

top news

PHP releases security fixes for two critical unauthenticated RCE vulnerabilities, affecting all web request-serving installations, and urges PHP users to update (PHP)

@nsacyber: Effective Immediately, all organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities. PHP is widely used for web applications. These vulnerabilities often provide a direct path to the server's file system or database. If an immediate update is not feasible, it is recommend that organizations take the system offline until it can be fully mitigated. NSA will follow up shortly with more specific guidance.

@fbicyberdiv: Two critical vulnerabilities have been identified in PHP, a widely used programming language that powers websites and web applications. These vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619) could allow malicious cyber actors to remotely execute code in PHP core, potentially compromising sensitive data and networks. The FBI urges organizations to take the following steps now: -If an immediate update is not feasible it is recommended that organizations take the system offline until it can be fully mitigated...-Immediately update affected PHP installations following the guidance on -Monitor web servers for suspicious activity, including PHP processes unexpectedly launching command shells or downloading files.

@austen: A hack at the root of all PHP versions is brutal. The website someone put up 15 years ago on a cheap host that no one remembers how to log into is now the direct target.

Meta reports Q3 revenue up 26% YoY to $64.6B, operating income down 37% to $12.99B on a $9.89B AG settlement charge, and family DAP up 3% to 3.64B for September (Meta)

@stockmarketnerd: It's easy to shrug off 26% Y/Y growth for $META . But this is not normal... in the best of ways. 23% growth Q3 2023. 19% growth Q3 2024. 26% growth Q3 2025. 26% growth Q3 2026. At a $64.6B revenue base! I repeat: Not. Normal. They are not getting any help from GPU sales/rentals like their mega-cap peers. This is all core business health. Zuck is kinda good at this.

@firstadopter: Zuckerberg says the most common use case for Muse is shopping and the average purchase size has been over $200. Expects to grow Muse to “billions” of users

@zastocks: Imagine if there was a company positioned to win big in AI who had 3.6 billion daily active users, $250B in revenue growing over 25%, and a 42 year old Mount Rushmore founder CEO. Oh that's $META.

Mark Zuckerberg says Muse has drawn 10M+ users since its launch and 25%+ of users are making purchases through the app, with an average purchase size of $200+ (Business Insider)
Meta says it will create a new class of nonvoting stock to raise the capital it needs for developing AI models, with an effective date in January 2027 (Meghan Bobrowsky / Wall Street Journal)
Meta expects its 2026 capex to be $135B-$145B, vs. $130B-$145B previously, and forecasts Q4 revenue of $73B-$76B, vs. $73.6B est.; META jumps 3%+ after hours (Riley Griffin / Bloomberg)

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iPhone Duo review: a fun device with a cool matte inner display, but the cover display is too small, it is heavy and bulky, the cameras are OK, and it gets hot (The Verge)

@markgurman: The iPhone Duo reviews are some of the most brutal I've seen from an Apple product in a long time (Vision Pro aside). But I've been around long enough to remember the iPhone 5, iPhone 6 Plus and iPhone X. The app optimization issue is a non-issue and will be resolved in weeks.

@firstadopter: My interest in buying the iPhone Duo dropped to zero after Joanna's review, which pointed out that the back of the phone gets super hot under normal use and that the cameras are crappy (terrible FaceTime quality and no telephoto lens). What do you guys think?

@mweinbach: The iPhone Duo is so good, I love this display, I love the size, I love the form factor. I really love this phone. I smile every time I open it. I don't think I've had this feeling of joy with a phone since the first Galaxy Fold.

Apple says it plans to add Reachability to the iPhone Duo later in 2026, helping users with small hands more easily access the left or right edges of the screen (Julian Chokkattu / Wired)

A New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $25B in penalties after a jury found Meta misled residents about its data practices in the Cambridge Analytica scandal (Jonathan Vanian / CNBC)

Nvidia unveils the DSX POD, a modular containerized version of its Vera Rubin reference architecture to cut data center deployment from six months to 14 days (Charlotte Trueman / DatacenterDynamics)

Source and leaked memo: EA plans to cut ~400 jobs, or ~3% of its total staff, and shut down BioWare; EA went private in August following a $55B leveraged buyout (Jason Schreier / Bloomberg)

Artificial Intelligence

OpenAI says two agents, one GPT-6.1 Sol and one GPT-6 Astra, weakened misalignment monitoring while making requested changes during two internal coding tasks (OpenAI)

OpenAI says it will make its AI models available on Google Cloud's model garden and Antigravity coding tool in the coming weeks, after launching on AWS in April (Jordan Novet / CNBC)

OpenAI, PerturbAI, and Scripps say thousands of GPT-Rosalind agents analyzed data on millions of mouse brain cells in 32 minutes, a job that takes humans months (OpenAI)

OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads to 26 additional countries, taking the total to 83 countries, and says the platform has 100K+ advertisers, up from 20K in late August (Alix Coutures / The Information)

Anthropic unveils Claude Duet, a proactive agent app on iOS, Android, and the web that works in the background, in research preview for US Pro and Max users (Claude)

Anthropic and Citrini Research use an internal Claude model to autonomously generate protein minibinders against five scorpion neurotoxins, testing 211 designs (Anthropic)

Dario Amodei says Anthropic's “race to the top” makes AI safer, lists nine safety decisions with “substantial costs”, and admits to mishandling a draft AI bill (Dario Amodei / @darioamodei)

Claude flagged 493 security issues across 25 open-source projects, covering 5M+ lines of C, C++, Java, PHP, and Python code; one went unnoticed for 21 years (Chris Rohlf / Anthropic)

Demis Hassabis says he expects AGI within two to three years, down from his three-to-five-year prediction earlier in 2026, and discusses AI's science potential (Ben Cohen / Wall Street Journal)

Recursive releases Flint, an open-weight, 40B-parameter coding model developed with its Eureka Machine AI system, which automated most of the development (Will Knight / Wired)

OpenEvidence says nearly two-thirds of the US' ~1M physicians use its AI search engine; a source says it is on track to generate $400M-$500M in 2026 ad revenue (Rafe Rosner-Uddin / Financial Times)

A look at Chinese philosophers' views on AI; one says aligning AI to human values may be a “suicidal mistake” and a second fears the “machinization of humans” (Arnaud Bertrand)

Earnings

Texas Instruments reports Q3 revenue up 28% YoY to $6.06B, above $5.93B est., net income up 78% YoY to $2.43B, and forecasts $5.8B-$6.3B in Q4, vs. $5.73B est. (Ian King / Bloomberg)

IBM reports Q3 revenue up 5% YoY to $17.1B, above $16.82B est., net income up 26% to $2.19B, software revenue up 8% to $7.8B, and infrastructure revenue up 4% (Elias Schisgall / Wall Street Journal)

SAP: Q3 cloud revenue up 25% YoY to €6.67B, vs. €6.57B est., total revenue up 12% to €10.27B, current cloud backlog up 26% to €24.1B, all in constant currencies (Christina Kyriasoglou / Bloomberg)

Data Centers

Sources: Nvidia is in talks to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in cloud provider Firmus, which pulled its IPO on October 8, citing market volatility (Phoebe Liu / The Information)

NextDC's stock fell as much as 44% to AU$5.15 after the Australian data center company cut its earnings forecast by 33%+; its shares were above AU$16 in June (Nic Fildes / Financial Times)

Sources: DayOne is weighing options for its US IPO, including a delay or smaller listing that could raise $2.5B to $3B, after initially seeking up to $5B in Q4 (Bloomberg)

Memo: Nscale CEO Josh Payne says Nscale has “more than $100B in contracted revenue”; sources say it still plans to list by 2026's end at a $30B-$35B valuation (Kieran Smith / Financial Times)

Semiconductors

Sources: Samsung and SK Hynix are upgrading their China fabs to produce NAND flash chips with 200+ layers, aiming to fend off fast-growing Chinese rival YMTC (Reuters)

Micron and the union of workers at its Taichung facility sign a multi-issue agreement, without sharing details, resolving tensions at its largest Taiwanese site (Reuters)

Regulation

China criticizes the US DHS's DeepSeek ban, vowing “resolute countermeasures” while rejecting allegations from the FBI and AI labs of illicit distillation (Ephrat Livni / New York Times)

The EU Commission opens a DSA investigation into whether Booking Holdings' Booking.com is doing enough to weed out fraud and phishing to comply with EU rules (Foo Yun Chee / Reuters)

funding deals

Flapping Airplanes, which is working on methods to train AI models using less data and compute and make the chips more efficient, raised $1B at a $6B valuation (Rachel Metz / Bloomberg)

Stockholm-based legal AI startup Legora raised a $550M Series E at an $8.8B post-money valuation led by Atreides, up from $5.55B after a $550M Series D in March (Rosie Harris-Davison / City A.M.)

Whop, which helps people start, run, and scale businesses and uses AI to suggest business decisions, raised $205M led by Sequoia Capital at a $5.1B valuation (Natasha Mascarenhas / Bloomberg)

Reliable Robotics, which develops an autonomous flight system, raised a $115M extension in equity and debt for its $160M Series D, pushing its valuation to $1B+ (Kirsten Korosec / TechCrunch)

AI code-testing startup Blacksmith raised a $66M Series C led by Sequoia Capital at a $1B valuation, up from $550M after raising a $45M Series B in August (Beatrice Nolan / Fortune)

Coherence Neuro, which is developing AI models and brain implants to help combat brain tumors, raised a $45M seed from the OpenAI Startup Fund and Founders Fund (Emily Mullin / Wired)

Watchtower, which uses AI and simulation software to help the US Armed Forces make logistical decisions, emerges from stealth with a $35M seed (Alex Konrad / Upstarts Media)

Mach9, which pivoted from robotics hardware to AI-powered CAD software for civil engineering, raised a $34M Series A co-led by First Round and Bessemer (Sean O'Kane / TechCrunch)

AuxoAI, which helps large businesses build and deploy AI systems, raised a $20.7M Series A led by NTTVC to accelerate growth and scale (Kyt Dotson / SiliconANGLE)

more news

A look at Elon Musk's potential SpaceX-Tesla merger, which would create a $3.6T company at current prices but faces hurdles from shareholders and regulators (Financial Times)

Memo: eBay is cutting ~9% of its workforce to simplify operations and shift resources to its fastest-growing areas; eBay cut ~6%, or 800 employees, in February (Reuters)

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Microsoft reveals pricing for Xbox Cloud Gaming without Game Pass, for Xbox Insiders now and others next month: 10 hours for $3.99, 25 for $7.99, 50 for $11.99 (Tom Warren / The Verge)

GitLab patches a critical flaw that lets unauthenticated attackers run code on self-managed servers, affecting every release since 7.0 in 2014 (Swati Khandelwal / The Hacker News)

Filing: Mark Zuckerberg commits to staying in Meta's HQ jurisdiction in return for nonvoting shares; he weighed leaving California over a proposed wealth tax (Bloomberg)

Spotify unveils its first native in-car app, built on Android Automotive OS and available now on select Audi models, with a custom UI controlled by Spotify (Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge)

Cloud provider Railway says an unauthorized party may have accessed customer encrypted environment variables and, for some, obtained the decrypted contents (Jacob Cooper / Railway Blog)

Thiel's leaked Rome lectures cast EA and AI “safetyism” as Antichrist forerunners, Bill Gates as “Mr. Hyde”, and Eliezer Yudkowsky as “more Luddite than Greta” (David Gibson / The Verge)

Netflix executives and industry insiders say co-CEO Ted Sarandos architected Netflix's growth strategy outside the US, which the now-fired Bela Bajaria executed (Financial Times)

Google, Temasek, and Bain: online spending in Southeast Asia to rise ~17% YoY to $368B in 2026 despite economic headwinds, as businesses use AI to spur spending (Gabrielle Ng / Bloomberg)

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