Last August, NASA's contracted a company to boost the Swift space telescope.

But the rescue mission had control and positioning problems, and the whole thing was called off.

I hope that another mission succeeds for Hubble (and perhaps Swift?)

Last December, a client of 8 years informed me that they no longer have the traffic that generates revenue to justify spending money on my services.

The web site is a reference to some well known software, and documents all the intricacies of how to use it. They relied on ads because they had a lot of traffic when someone searches for the name of the software and a feature of it.

That traffic plummeted because "AI is killing content web sites" (their words).

So I totally believe Reddit on this, and many other sites will follow in the next year or two.

It's been a decade and a half. Just because a person knows how to compile a kernel doesn't mean they can't also be a Luddite at the same time.

Well that escalated quickly.

(Disclaimer: Written with an AI collaborator, because human editors were apparently too busy copy-pasting to proofread.)

Speaking of slop, notice how the summary ends by repeating the exact same sentence twice:

"It's hard to compete against things like the DALL-E image generator."
"Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 quips that maybe 'It's hard to compete against things like the DALL-E image generator...'"

When humans publish duplicate-riddled writeups without reading them, it really raises the question of whether "human slop" is even setting a higher bar than "AI slop."

I was going to complain about the exact same repetition that they did in the summary.

A couple of weeks ago, I submitted an article about Canadian researchers recommended that if/when daylight savings time is abolished, we should go back on standard time, and not permanent summer time. That is because politicians almost everywhere are hell bent on switching to year round summer time.

The editors massacred my submission, removing the information above.

And the ensuing discussion was totally derailed, missing the main point.

These points are all flawed, and if I thought you wrote them, or even understood them yourself, I'd bother writing a full rebuttal.

Not half as violent as allowing obsolete approaches and flawed architecture to remain out of some weird combination of concern for backwards compatibility and sentimentality.

Python 2 users were supported for more than a decade after 3 came out, and there was a LOT of migration tooling released. CIOs may not want to be forced to upgrade too often, but if they think upgrading once every 10 years is too much, then they need to quit and get into something more aligned with their expectations. Perhaps blacksmithing.

Actually, the .12 had fixes for other PHP CVEs.
But it was a .13 that did fix the CVEs in question (which are remote code executions).

The repositories were being hammered and the fix was delayed for most people.

Excerpt:

Changes for php8.3 (php8.3-zip php8.3-xml php8.3-readline php8.3-opcache php8.3-cli php8.3-phpdbg php8.3-mysql php8.3-mbstring php8.3-gd php8.3-fpm php8.3-dev php8.3-curl php8.3-cgi php8.3-bcmath php8.3-common) ---
php8.3 (8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.13) noble-security; urgency=medium

    * SECURITY UPDATE: Remote RCE via state corruption issue
        - debian/patches/CVE-2026-109618_109619.patch: Avoid state corruption via
            bailout in Zend/tests/bug40770.phpt, Zend/tests/bug54268.phpt, ...
        - CVE-2026-109618
        - CVE-2026-109619

  -- Marc Deslauriers Mon, 19 Oct 2026 11:16:58 -0400

Although it says Monday 19 Oct, it was not available in the repositories (embargoed) until 10 am Eastern Wednesday 20th of Oct.

But the repository being under load delayed that for most people.

If you are using a distro with long term support (LTS), like I am, they backport the patch to the version that they have.

I am on Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS, and the change was from

8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11
To
8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12

So, .11 to .12.

This should have been posted before 10 am EDT.

Ubuntu LTS (26.04, 24,04, and 22.04) got the fix yesterday, as patches to the existing PHP version.

This is from 24.04:

Upgraded:
        php8.3-bcmath:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-cgi:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-cli:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-common:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-curl:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-dev:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-fpm:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-gd:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-mbstring:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-mysql:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-opcache:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-phpdbg:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-readline:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-xml:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-zip:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12

There is now a PHP2Shell.

... an attacker without a login can run code on Magento 2.4.9, WordPress 7.1.2, Drupal 11.4.3, Joomla 6.1.4, MediaWiki 1.46.2, Roundcube 1.7.4, phpMyAdmin 5.2.3, Nextcloud 35.0.1, Laravel 13.11, Symfony 8.1 and WHMCS. The exploit tool PHP2Shell, credited to Calif, combines both bugs into one attack that needs no login.

There will be lots of hacked sites in the coming days and weeks.

Man, I'd love to be that blissfully ignorant and naive.

You know, there just might be ways to structure our society so that businesses can be profitable without destroying the whole planet. But I guess that's commie talk.

Holy idiotic assumption from hell batman. And a huge side helping of whatabboutism garnished with the biggest lump of straw man I've ever seen.

That's a SHITLOAD of stupid in one reply. I'm honestly impressed.

Also, MBA don't violently protest, but they absolutely DO lobby government to send in the military to do their bidding. Which as far as violence goes is worse than a riot.