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AI Uncovers a 14-Year-Old PHP Security Flaw
PHP is the programming language quietly running something like 70 to 75% of the websites you can identify, WordPress and Wikipedia’s software included, and it turns out it had a 14-year-old bug that let a stranger run their own code on your server without logging in. Nobody caught it until security firms Wiz and Calif teamed up with OpenAI and pointed AI models at the code, and the robots found it in one pass and rated it 9.2 out of 10 on the “oh no” scale. The researchers tried to keep it quiet, but the news leaked on Hacker News on October 20, so PHP rushed out fixes a day early, and Cloudflare was already seeing attacks hours before any patch existed. Cue European government sites going dark on purpose, the White House saying it knew since October 16, and Japan’s prime minister tweeting at website owners to check if they run PHP, which is a sentence nobody expected to type in 2026.
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Anthropic Duet Brings Proactive AI Assistance
Anthropic announced Duet on October 21 as the anti-chatbot: instead of waiting for you to open a window and type, it sends a morning brief, checks your connected apps every few hours, and only pings you when something needs a human. It runs on Opus 5.5 and does the boring-adult stuff, like chasing unpaid invoices in QuickBooks and Stripe, prepping Gusto payroll, drafting replies, and sending contracts through Docusign, with an approval step before it sends, pays, signs, or deletes anything. Even payments are fenced in: it uses one-time cards so it never sees your real number, and it refuses to trade stocks or move money between accounts no matter how nicely you ask. The tester quotes sound like a support group for the overwhelmed, but it’s a US-only waitlist for Pro and Max subscribers, you can’t pick the model or watch it browse, and Microsoft 365 isn’t supported, so for now it’s the world’s most competent assistant, locked behind a velvet rope.
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Kling 4.0 Promises Longer Videos and Greater Control
Kling is Kuaishou’s AI video generator, and version 4.0 is the one where 15-second clips get old news: the full model stretches to 30 seconds, up to 4K, with up to 10 keyframes so you can storyboard the shot instead of praying. It adds stereo audio, better lip sync, and a reference system that keeps your character and product looking like themselves from shot to shot, which has been AI video’s most embarrassing weakness. The rollout is a staged tease, though: the speedy “Flash” version (720p, 3 to 20 seconds) arrived September 28 for a limited audience, which in the US means Ultra annual members, while the full model is “expected in October,” tech for “we’ll let you know.” There’s no API at launch and HDR is “coming soon,” so the Hollywood trailer machine currently comes with a very selective guest list.
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Getty’s Bankruptcy Puts AI and Debt in Focus
AI image generators ate the stock-photo business, and Getty filed for Chapter 11 in Delaware on October 21, with the Getty family and Koch Equity Development putting in up to $533 million and taking the whole company private by year-end, while shareholders are expected to get nothing. The AI evidence is real: Getty’s stock-photo arm grew just 0.7% last year, subscribers reportedly slid, and it lost its main UK copyright claims against Stability AI in November 2025. But read Getty’s own SEC filing and the real culprits are boring and expensive: a collapsed $3.7 billion merger with Shutterstock, nasty litigation judgments, and a debt load that included 14% interest notes, with holders of $270 million of unsecured notes agreeing to retire them. So AI gets the murder credit, but debt held the knife, and Getty says it’s operating normally while it reorganizes.
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Brazilian Man Travels 36 Hours to Meet an AI Influencer
Edimar Martins, a 49-year-old bricklayer in Imperatriz, Brazil, had been following “Jéssica Fazendeira” since 2020, a blonde farm-owning widow whose videos promised a partner could come live like a king and never work again. Lonely after his mother’s death, he sold his belongings on October 9 and rode a bus more than 36 hours and about 2,100 kilometers to Belo Horizonte, arriving October 11 with no address, no plan, and no confirmed meeting. He asked a local radio station for help finding her, and they told him the news: she’s AI, with 300,000-plus TikTok followers, built in 2025 to move products on TikTok Shop and Mercado Livre, and her operator says the profile never spoke to anyone. The city bought him a ticket home, her account vanished by October 15, police reportedly said making AI characters isn’t a crime by itself, and Martins says he’ll go back to Belo Horizonte and find someone else, which is either heartbreaking or the most stubborn optimism on earth.
RAINA’s News Desk
