Continental Breakfast
Continental Breakfast
What a time to be live. The main thing happening today is the critical PHP flaw putting an estimated 70% of websites at risk. Live from 12-3 PM BST, here's your Order of Play.
1:00 PM - Manuel Yves Galliker, Founder & CEO at Enact Intelligence
1:30 PM - Aleksander Leonard Larsen, Founder & CEO at Stendr
1:45 PM - Sean Henry, Co-Founder & CEO at Stord
2:15 PM - Ivan Burazin, Co-Founder & CEO at Daytona
2:30 PM - Raj Dhamodharan, EVP Blockchain & Digital Assets at Mastercard
2:45 PM - Joowon Kim, Co-Founder & CEO at Melius
What’s Happening Today
A critical flaw in PHP has left much of the internet vulnerable to hackers.
On Wednesday, the team behind PHP released updates fixing two vulnerabilities rated 9.2 out of 10, nicknamed PHP2Shell. The 30 year old programming language powers an estimated 70% of websites, including WordPress, which runs more than 40% of the web, Drupal, Joomla and MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia. Attackers can take over servers without logging in, steal passwords and API keys, or deface websites. Every version going back to PHP 5.4 is affected.
AI models from OpenAI and Google helped uncover the flaws, with OpenAI leading a two month effort to prepare fixes. The vulnerabilities have been described as “one of the most impactful vulnerabilities in recent memory”.
US authorities have urged organisations to patch immediately, with anyone unable to update advised to take their systems offline. A potential exploit had been theorised in 2024, but work repeatedly stalled. The delay was described as “a structural failure”.
An exploitation attempt was detected on an Amazon decoy system on 17 October, four days before disclosure, with proof of concept exploits appearing within hours of the patch. Finland and the Netherlands have taken some government sites offline, while major websites have also suffered outages, though it's unclear whether those were linked to the flaw. For those still running affected versions of PHP, updating is the only complete fix.
We're getting into all of it on today's show at 12 BST.
etn. Insight
Thore Graepel, co-creator of AlphaGo and founder of Metis Reasoning, came on the show and recalled witnessing one of AI's most famous creative moments.
Move 37 was an unexpected move made by AlphaGo, DeepMind's Go-playing AI, during game two of its March 2016 match against world champion Lee Sedol in Seoul. Experts initially thought it was a mistake. Graepel remembers the “panic in my heart, in all of our hearts” before realising they were witnessing a machine making a “creative contribution” that was “novel and useful.”
The move became a symbol of machine creativity, but Graepel argues imitation learning has its limits. “It takes reasoning to get outside of that boundary to genuinely discover new things.”
Watch the full clip below.
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