U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA has confirmed that hackers are now actively exploiting a pair of critical security vulnerabilities in the widely used PHP web software and has ordered civilian federal agencies within the U.S. government to fix their systems within the next three days. The urgent new warning to patch comes less than a week after the makers of the decades-old PHP web programming language rolled out patches for the two bugs, which allow hackers to remotely break into a vulnerable system over the internet without the need for passwords. The PHP software is reportedly used by some 70% of web-facing servers, putting major websites and applications at risk. The severity of the bugs prompted some governments and big companies to take their sites offline to fix them. While the bugs are rated critical, meaning they can be highly damaging if exploited, security researchers said that developing a working exploit to hack into vulnerable systems was initially challenging ' but not impossible. Confirmed in-the-wild exploitation now puts extra pressure on organizations to patch their systems to prevent malicious compromises, disruption, and data breaches....

My previous post dealt with one vision of socialism, a society where people work for the fun of it and give away what they produce. It exists in the real world on a small scale embedded in a market society. My family will be hosting a meetup in our house in about three weeks at which we will provide all comers with food, drink and space for conversation, all at no cost. We will make most of the food ourselves ' we like cooking ' but with purchased ingredients. We bake our own bread but do not grow our own wheat or grind our own flour nor do we know anybody who does and is happy to give us some. The centralized form of voluntary socialism appeals to my imagination less but comes closer to working.1 Israeli kibbutzim range in size up to a thousand inhabitants. The oldest is more than a century old and monasteries, an earlier version of the same model, have lasted much longer. There are at least three reasons. The first is ideology, religion for the monasteries, socialism for the kibbutzim. That is a reason for people to donate their labor and money to the project but also a constraint on how the institution is run. Celibacy and poverty were important elements in the ideology of many monasteries but made them less attractive to many potential recruits. Equality of income was central to the socialist ideology and policies of the original kibbutzim but the source of a variety of problems for them....

Helion and Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) received awards totaling $260 million from the Department of Commerce under the CHIPS and Science Act, the 2022 law that funds domestic semiconductor development, to develop advanced semiconductors used to help power and control their reactors. Helion landed $175 million, while CFS reeled in $85 million. But as with many recent government awards, these come with strings attached. Helion and CFS have agreed to give the government non-voting shares in return. With these awards, the fusion industry is finally getting the government's attention, though maybe not the sort it envisioned. In the past, government support for a startup meant non-dilutive capital, meaning money that doesn't shrink existing investors' ownership percentages, while giving the company a bigger war chest. Investors loved the deals because it meant their startups got more money without them having to pony up. The government doled out the cash to boost American innovation, though it also meant that, in most cases, the government didn't directly benefit when it picked a winner....

It's been about two months since I published a post about how I write about day-to-day politics less than I used to, but that every month or so all the foul news emanating from the Trump administration and its supporters builds up to a sufficiently high level to trigger a disgust response from me that seeks outlet in writing and publishing some form of rant. I'm grateful I've been able to hold out for two whole months since my last rant. It's not that Trump and his allies have been on their best behavior. On the contrary, as the midterm polls have gotten bleaker, they've been acting out more and more in desperation. That's how I choose to understand, though certainly not excuse, the ad that Republican gubernatorial nominee in Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy, released on October 19 about his opponent, Democrat Amy Acton. That ad'and even more so, the defenses of it from Ramaswamy himself as well as Vice President JD Vance and President Donald Trump'mark a new low in the seemingly endless downward moral spiral of the MAGA movement. I'm hardly the only person to be arguing this. Over the past few days, in fact, it seems that every pundit I follow and respect has published a column condemning the ad and the decision of the Ramaswamy campaign and the Trump administration to embrace and champion it....