Security personnel around the world are on high alert Tuesday following the discovery of eight TLS certificates with private keys so weak they could allow anyone to mint trusted browser and app credentials for any site on the Internet.

As of late morning Tuesday, browser makers and some major apps and programming languages had blocked all eight of the intermediate certificates. There are no reports of certificate transparency logs, which track the issuance of all browser-trusted certificates, showing the compromised keys being used maliciously. The threat remains far from over, however, because it will be hard and time-consuming to update other key parts of the Internet, such as Linux distributions and embedded and Internet of Things devices.

One word: bonkers

The eight intermediate certificates belong to India-based certificate authority eMudhra Limited. An informal advisory published to emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com over on Tuesday posted the message “We have a problem here - Wayne.” The words were digitally signed using the private key of one of the eMudhra certificates. With proof that the reporting party had control of the key, defenders scrambled because the same key could be used to sign unauthorized certificates that would be trusted by millions of servers worldwide.

“This will be a massive cleanup job, bigger than Heartbleed,” Filippo Valsorda, a cryptography engineer and a cryptography maintainer for the open source Go programming language, told Ars. “There will be a very, very long tail, IoT devices, Docker containers, forgotten Linux machines, unmaintained CLI tools that shipped their own copy of the roots (which is common in some ecosystems, like Python). Also, Linux distributions are still rolling out updates, some of them are not ready yet, and then system administrators will need to apply them to a lot of machines.”

Heartbleed is the name of a critical vulnerability in the OpenSSL cryptography library. In 2014, it came under mass exploitation. Exploits let many unaffiliated hackers decrypt TLS-protected exchanges between parties. They also recovered private TLS certificate keys, session cookies, and passwords. The attacks compromised thousands of servers, some belonging to large companies and government agencies around the world.

Recovery required a long series of steps that took years. Steps included patching OpenSSL on all affected devices, reissuing millions of TLS keys, revoking old certificates, rotating passwords and session tokens and updating embedded devices and other forgotten systems—something that was extremely time- and resource-intensive, especially at Internet scale.

“Every time you need a lot of different people in different contexts to do something, it will take a long time,” Valsorda explained. “This time it’s worse because there’s more contexts, more people, and more heterogeneity.”

The compromised eMudhra keys were defective at a level that’s challenging the imagination of many of the engineers studying the incident. A normal size for a NIST P-384 elliptic curve cryptography private key contains roughly 384 bits of entropy, a size allowing almost 2³⁸⁴, or a number with 116 digits, different possibilities. The private key sizes of the compromised keys ranged from 3 to 8 bits. Astonishingly, the private keys were 4, 56, 66, 115, 155, 156, 230, 237.

“That is extremely in the ‘this should not be possible’ category,” Valdorda said. “Maybe some horribly dangerous key generation interface has a ‘size’ parameter and they set it to 1 by mistake???”

Ben Cartwright-Cox, director of BGP.tools, said: “My guess is that it's example code that accidentally leaked to production, but hard to know. But it’s bonkers that no one noticed.”

At this early stage, the most immediate threat appears to be for those using VPNs, especially in countries with governments likely to maliciously intercept traffic. There are likely many other cases for concern. End users largely have no recourse other than to hold off using many non-browser forms of TLS communication until they receive assurances updates are in place.

As noted, most browsers have already blocked the intermediate certificates. The exception appears to be Edge running on Windows 10, which at the time this article went live was still connecting to 12 vulnerable hosts. In response to questions asking why and if the company has plans to do so, a Microsoft representative the company will be in touch if it has anything to "share." Meanwhile, Signal, WhatsApp, Wireguard, and other apps that don’t rely on TLS for confidentiality aren’t affected. This page and the emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com site show apps known to be patched so far.

The incident is the latest to expose a fatal flaw in the TLS regimen. It's only as strong as its weakest link, which in this case was eMudhra. Fortunately, transparency logs account for much of that failure, but this measure requires parties to actively monitor massive feeds and works only after unauthorized certificates have been issued. eMudhra representatives weren't immediately available to answer questions.

One caveat: exploiting compromised certificates requires an active adversary-in-the-middle attack, meaning the attacker must act as a proxy between two TLS parties and receive encrypted traffic, decrypt it, reencrypt it, and send it to the other party. Such capabilities, in some cases, are usually limited to only the most well-resourced attackers. People with control of a local network—at a coffee shop, university, or other organization—face much less of a challenge.

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Website admins, brace yourselves. Fixes for what are believed to be uncommonly severe vulnerabilities are scheduled to drop in a little more than 12 hours for PHP, a programming language that powers websites and Web applications everywhere.

PHP maintainers said Monday that they planned to release patches for two vulnerabilities, both with severity ratings of 9.2 out of a possible 10.

Waiting for PHP2Shell

“All PHP users are encouraged to prepare now so they can upgrade as soon as the release is available,” the advisory stated. “We reserve the right to release earlier should details of either vulnerability become public, or should evidence of active exploitation appear in the wild.”

The maintainers published the advisory following the leaking of purported details, which have yet to be confirmed. The report showed a video of an exploit tool dubbed PHP2Shell executing code on webservers running WordPress 7.1.3, MediaWiki 1.46.2, phpBB 3.3.17, Magento 2.4.9, Joomla 6.2.0, Laravel 13.36.0, Laravel 8.83.29, Symphony 8.1.9, Drupal 11.4.10, and WHMCS 9.0.9, all of which use PHP. A video depicting the tool has been reposted here.

Attempts to locate the unconfirmed report were unsuccessful, but security firm watchTowr said it claimed to affect every PHP version from PHP 5, released in 2004, onward. The security firm went on to say it has confirmed that the vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, are real.

Researchers from separate security firm Sansec said they “expect mass attacks to start within 15 minutes of the release.” A third security firm, Webfence, also urged admins to prepare now. Huntress has also issued an advisory.

Preparation steps include identifying who is responsible for managing PHP inside an organization, taking an inventory of every app built on the language, planning a maintenance window starting at 14:00 UTC with contingency plans for earlier, making a backup of site and database files, and monitoring the PHP.net homepage for any late-breaking announcements, including an earlier release time. Some experts suggest unplugging any non-essential systems until they're patched.

As an open-source scripting language for building dynamic websites and web apps, PHP has come to be a de facto building block for the Web. It runs multiple CMS apps in addition to WordPress and also powers many internal tools. One security researcher said an estimated 1.3 million Internet-connected hosts are likely affected. Vulnerabilities with the severity the advisories are describing have the potential to inflict major damage across the Internet. Admins should remain aware that the patches can be released at any moment and remain vigilant until they do.

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Elon Musk is a very familiar figure to Ars readers, given his massive influence (for better and worse) on the technology sector over the last 20 years. Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney's latest biographical documentary—simply titled Musk—covers a lot of well-known ground and challenges the carefully crafted public image of Musk as a visionary tech titan.

Gibney's documentary presents Musk as more of a Gilded Age confidence man, rejiggered for the 21st century: an investor cosplaying as an inventor whose real genius is pumping stocks and dazzling investors and the public alike with visions of a high-tech utopian future. The film is bound to push all the right outrage buttons, whether one is a Musk fan or a detractor—which makes it very much a product of the peculiar social media-driven era in which we live.

Gibney has been making documentaries since the 1980s, covering such varied subjects as Jimi Hendrix, Hunter S. Thompson and gonzo journalism, WikiLeaks, Scientology, Steve Jobs, Elizabeth Holmes (the subject of another forthcoming documentary, You Can See Everything, featuring comedian Nathan Fielder), Boris Becker, The Sopranos creator David Chase, alleged Russian interference in the US 2016 presidential election, the opioid epidemic, and cyclist Lance Armstrong. He snagged his first Oscar nomination for 2005’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature two years later for Taxi to the Dark Side.

Tackling the subject of Elon Musk seems like a natural progression from those earlier works. Gibney has never been one to shy away from controversy, but even before Musk's release, the film drew the ire of its subject and threats of a defamation lawsuit. There were even (as yet unfounded) rumors that Universal Pictures was getting cold feet about theatrically releasing the film in international markets.

There's certainly no shortage of material for Gibney to work with and the film covers the most well-known aspects of Musk's life: Tesla and the fatalities linked to its driver-assistance systems, SpaceX, Starlink, his purchase of Twitter, his shift from warning about the risks of AI to fully embracing it with Grok, his embrace of Trump, the creation of DOGE, his alleged drug use, and his 14 (possibly more) children. Those interviewed include ex-wife Justine Musk, Kara Swisher, Martin Eberhard, Geoffrey Hinton, former MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair (who bore a child by Musk), Cory Doctorow, Adam Becker, and Sam Harris. David Byrne co-wrote and performed an original song for the soundtrack, “Let Me Sell You a Dream,” incorporating more of Musk’s words.

Gibney is a gifted filmmaker and Musk is exceptionally well-done. But the documentary ends up feeling like two very different films. The first half focuses on the early entrepreneurial years, deftly incorporating archival footage with the usual talking heads. It reminds us of who Musk used to be—honestly, I miss that public version of Musk, even if it was carefully cultivated—and what little is known about his family background serves to humanize him a little.

Visionary or flim-flam man?

The second half focuses on Musk after his purchase of Twitter and embrace of Trump. The notoriously thin-skinned Musk has accused Gibney of making a "hit piece." It's not, but the tone in the second half is markedly different and certainly more adversarial, leaving little doubt as to where Gibney stands. (The director is a staunch critic of the so-called journalistic "view from nowhere" and his documentaries typically have a strong point of view.)

During a post-screening Q&A, Gibney revealed that he'd actually finished the documentary in 2024, but HBO asked him to keep going to document Musk's "heel turn," if you will. One assumes he recut the first half in the process, but perhaps that's why Musk feels like two different documentary films smushed together. It's also how the documentary ballooned to a nearly four-hour run time (with a 10-minute intermission). Gibney joked during the Q&A that the real question should be, how did he limit himself to just four hours when it could easily been stretched to six? In that case, perhaps it might have worked better as a six-episode documentary miniseries.

Musk declined to be interviewed for the film, so the director created an AI version of Musk uttering verbatim public quotes as a stand-in for a real interview. I get why Gibney decided to do this and it's conceptually apt: this is the AI future that Musk and his ilk are working so hard to bring about, popular opinion be damned. So sure, give him the AI avatar treatment. But the execution is lacking; it's creepy uncanny valley stuff. The AI Musk pales in comparison with the archival footage of the actual Musk, which is far more interesting precisely because it's real.

Musk is a frequently compelling portrait of a complicated man but that portrait is incomplete in some crucial ways. Gibney's portrayal is as much tragic anti-hero as con artist or flim-flam man—an idealistic dreamer ultimately corrupted by wealth and power, or what Gibney calls "noble cause corruption." The first half of the documentary made me mourn who Musk once was, and wonder what kind of man he might have become had he made different choices at crucial points on his rise to the top. But the film sheds little light on why he ended up on such a dark path.

Would Musk agreeing to be interviewed have helped? I am not so sure. This is a man, as the film makes clear, who really isn't capable of self-reflection or facing hard truths, and he has the wherewithal to keep his bubble intact. As his wealth and influence have increased, so has his detachment from reality. Somehow it still hasn't made him happy.

Musk is now playing in select theaters in New York and Los Angeles. It will open broadly across the US on October 14, 2026.

Credit: Bleecker Street

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We got our first look at Prime Video's new sci-fi series Blade Runner 2099 in July at San Diego Comic-Con. With the show's premiere roughly six weeks away, the streamer unveiled the full trailer this weekend at New York Comic-Con. Co-stars Michelle Yeoh and Hunter Schafer (Euphoria) joined showrunner Silka Luisa (Shining Girls) onstage for the big reveal.

As Luisa described the show during the NYCC panel Saturday night:

We are 50 years after [Blade Runner] 2049 and, bad news, the worst has happened. The replicant uprising that has been bubbling up in the films has taken place and the humans have lost. So the creations have surpassed their creators. And the series, the big question it asks is, ‘What happens when our time as a species ends?’ 2099 is taking place at a junction point when one species is ending and a new one is rising. The first film, something I loved about it, was that it was looking at mortality on a micro level. Roy Batty and the other replicants were fighting for more life. This show asks that same question but on a macro level. Mankind—what happens when we realize our time is running out? And are we going to accept that loss? Can we hold on to our humanity during it?

Yeoh stars as Olwen, the dying Replicant, while Schafer plays Cora. The cast also includes Hugo Hamlet as Buster Friendly, as well as Dmitri Abold, Lewis Gribben, Katelyn Rose Downey, Daniel Rigby, Johnny Harris, Amy Lennox, Sheila Atim, Matthew Needham, Tom Burke, and Maurizio Lombardi—all in as-yet-undisclosed roles.

Prime Video will drop all eight episodes of Blade Runner 2099 on November 25, 2026.

Godzilla Minus Zero

We also got a new trailer for Godzilla Minus Zero, the sequel to director Takashi Yamazaki’s gloriously grounded kaiju epic, Godzilla Minus One, which became a major international hit and snagged an Oscar for best visual effects.

Godzilla Minus One focused on kamikaze pilot Kōichi Shikishima, who struggled with survivor’s guilt after he failed to take action when Godzilla attacked the Japanese base on Odo Island in 1945. Kōichi was one of only two survivors and rebuilt a life with a woman named Noriko and the orphaned baby she rescued, Akiko. But then Godzilla re-emerged, and Kōichi resolved to die fighting the monster to atone for Odo Island.

Credit: Toho International

Spoiler alert: Kōichi survived, thanks to Tachibana’s forgiveness and mechanical ingenuity. He reunited with Noriko, who had a strange black bruise on her neck. And we saw a chunk of Godzilla’s remains start to regenerate, leaving things open for the sequel. Per the official synopsis for Godzilla Minus Zero:

War reduced Japan to zero, and Godzilla plunged it into minus. Two years have passed since then, and the country has faced agonizing struggles to achieve recovery and finally reclaim its daily life. Just as humanity managed to cling to a hard-won peace, a new threat strikes, crushing hope in an instant. There is no third time. Everything ends here.

Most of the main cast from Godzilla Minus One are returning: Ryunosuke Kamiki as Kōichi; Minami Hamabe as his wife, Noriko; Sae Nagatani as Akiko; Hidetaka Yoshioka as Kenji Noda, director of the Large-Scale Disaster Response Bureau; Kuranosuke Sasaki as Seiji Akitsu, captain of the Shinsei Maru; Miou Tanaka as Tatsuo Hotta, former captain of the destroyer Yukikaze; Sakura Ando as Sumiko Ōta, Kōichi’s neighbor; and Yuki Yamada as Shirō Mizushima, a Shinsei Maru crewman. The cast also includes Min Tanaka as biologist Kanji Murakami and Masami Nagasawa as Aoyama.

Godzilla Minus Zero hits theaters on November 3, 2026. Legendary Pictures plans to release Godzilla x Kong: Supernova—its Monsterverse sequel to 2024’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire—in 2027.

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Likely in the next few weeks, a federal judge will decide if Donald Trump can become the first president to personally profit from selling early access to government information in his social media posts.

At a hearing Wednesday, Department of Justice civil attorney Brantley Mayers argued that there was no conflict whatsoever with Trump charging up to $100,000 monthly for instant API access to Truth Social posts that often break news from his administration.

Trump is the largest stakeholder and majority owner of Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company that owns Truth Social, and the value of the API access comes largely from Trump’s role as president.

News groups suing have argued that Trump’s exorbitant API fees violate the First Amendment and the Presidential Records Act by creating tiers of access to government information in social media posts that Trump doesn’t technically own. Additionally, Trump’s exorbitant API fees undermine the Fifth Amendment. That prohibits the government from “charging unreasonable sums that cannot be justified to offset the cost of the government benefit, and granting preferential access to crucial government information for arbitrary and irrational reasons,” news groups argued.

However, Mayers likened Trump’s Truth Social posts—which have announced military strikes, ceasefires, tariffs, immigration policies, and major changes in his administration—to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s evening radio addresses known as “fireside chats,” Courthouse News reported. His personal feed acts as an unvarnished public service, not a greedy profit grab, the DOJ argued.

It’s clear, though, that Trump could potentially make $1.2 million per subscriber annually by selling government information that is not Trump’s property. Before Mayers could proceed, US District Judge Paul Oetken “cut him off,” Courthouse News reported.

“Well, President Roosevelt didn’t charge money for his fireside chats, did he?” Oetken asked.

Responding, Mayers suggested that although Roosevelt didn’t charge for his broadcasts, there were similar “barriers to entry” keeping every American from tuning in. Just as some news groups today can’t afford to pay $60,000 to $100,000 for Truth’s API, some Americans in the ’30s and ’40s couldn’t afford radios, he argued.

Nikhel Sus, chief counsel for a group representing news plaintiffs called the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), told Ars that the judge was right to push back on the DOJ’s comparison. During the hearing, the judge acknowledged that the Truth API could be discriminatory by creating “two classes of people," Courthouse News reported. Sus said that he also clearly recognized the “symbiotic relationship” between Trump and Truth Social.

Criticizing the comparison to FDR's fireside chats, Sus told Ars that the DOJ “can throw out these hypotheticals that have absolutely nothing to do with this situation until the cows come home, but they're not persuasive."

Judge asks if a second of delay is “negligible”

At the hearing, Oetken asked “tough questions” of both sides, Sus told Ars. No elected official has ever owned a media company where they can profit from presidential announcements, and the judge took time to remark that “there hasn’t really been anything like this case.”

Talking to Ars, Sus argued that the lack of precedent should trigger alarm bells, not excuse the conduct, as the DOJ has suggested. “Just because no prior president had the gall to try to do something so flagrantly corrupt and illegal doesn't mean that it is legal,” he said.

Initially, Oetken approached claims that the API scheme violated the First Amendment with skepticism, Courthouse News reported. At one point, he wondered if Trump delaying the general public’s access to information by potentially as little as a fraction of a second would meaningfully harm the free press. Although it’s easy to see how an algorithmic trader would benefit from getting information just a little bit sooner, “It’s a negligible delay to a human being,” Oetken suggested.

But the conflict isn’t only about timing, nonprofit news organizations have argued. TMTG has confirmed that large news groups are already in talks to buy API access because there is immense value in the service that goes beyond getting instant access to Truth Social posts. For example, the API “provides a machine-readable feed and a historic archive of all of President Trump's Truth Social posts,” Sus told Ars. With that access, even if Trump deletes posts—which he frequently does—any news group can maintain a more reliable log of all posts.

“It is absolutely worth something,” Sus told Ars. “And it's not just the algorithmic traders. News outlets use APIs too.”

The judge sees the case as complex and did not rule from the bench, instead promising a written ruling on whether to enjoin Trump from selling API access while he’s in office at a later date. Sus told Ars that courts typically treat requests for preliminary injunctions urgently and that he expects a decision in the next few weeks.

Until then, news groups remain optimistic that the court’s ruling will swing their way, Sus said.

“All we're asking for is that when the president chooses to make government information available to the public, he has to do so on equal terms,” Sus said. “He cannot discriminate based on who's willing to pay the president's personal company hundreds of thousands of dollars. That is obscenely corrupt and unconstitutional.”

API gives news orgs a "direct advantage"

Defending Trump’s scheme, Mayers asked the judge to look at Trump’s interests as wholly separate from the media group that bears his name. He claimed Trump had nothing to do with the decision to charge for API access to his posts, branding them as a “completely private commercial decision” made exclusively by TMTG.

Nonprofit news groups suing, however, have argued that the expensive API pricing is “corrupt,” ignoring America’s long history of providing equal access to presidential records. On Wednesday, David Schulz, an attorney representing The Intercept, argued that the scheme gives a “direct advantage” to newsrooms that can pay the high price for previously free access.

“Trump Media specifically is courting the largest news organizations in the country to get them to subscribe to Truth API,” Sus told Ars.

If Trump’s gamble pays off and the judge approves the API sales, Sus warned that the press would suffer, as more politicians could follow his lead, and access to even more government information would be delayed behind paywalls.

“If the president is allowed to do this, it sets a very dangerous precedent for enabling public officials to profit off of their office and specifically profit off of government information,” Sus told Ars.

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Soon, Reddit won’t let people use Old.Reddit.com unless they have used the site while logged in within the previous six months.

In July, Reddit started requiring that users be logged in to access Old Reddit. This new requirement is an effort to reduce Reddit’s biggest source of scraping and automated traffic, the company says.

Today, the social media platform announced additional upcoming restrictions on Old Reddit. A Reddit post from an employee, known as "judy-funnie" on the platform, says that “in the next few months, we'll further limit access for logged-in users to only those who have used Old Reddit in the last six months (which covers the vast majority of all Old Reddit users).”

There is an exception for moderators, who will still be able to view Old Reddit regardless of when they last used it, as long as they are logged in.

“This helps keep Old Reddit available for the people who rely on it while reducing automated abuse," the post says.

Today’s post claimed that forcing users to log in to use Old Reddit “helped reduce scraping and automated abuse.” But further restrictions on the site, which many longtime Reddit users prefer over regular Reddit for its look, layout, homepage feed, and familiarity, have people concerned that Reddit will shutter Old Reddit one day.

I asked Reddit if it has plans to shut down Old Reddit, and spokesperson Rosa Kim told me via email:

As [Reddit CEO Steve Huffman previously] confirmed, Reddit is continuing to work on the future of Old Reddit. This change is about limiting unauthenticated access and reducing automated abuse—not removing Old Reddit for people and moderators who rely on it. We want to preserve Old Reddit for the real people that use it, not let it be a vector for automated abuse.

Reddit’s announcement noted that the current rules permit “any logged-in account to access Old Reddit, including accounts with no prior Old Reddit use.” I asked Kim why that’s a bad thing but didn’t receive a response.

In August, Kim told Ars that Reddit “will work directly with the mods, developers, and communities that depend on our systems and make sure to keep everyone updated” about any future changes to Old Reddit.

In 2025, Huffman said Old Reddit would remain “online as long as people are using it." But in August, he changed his tune, saying in a post that “the reality is we’re getting to that time where we need to make some changes." Those changes would “probably” include limiting access, migrating “important uses,” and rebuilding Old Reddit “on a modern tech stack," per Huffman.

With the new restrictions for accessing Old Reddit, the site may see dwindling use, making it easier for the company to one day justify closing it or limiting access even further.

Reddit also limiting RSS feed support

Reddit will also stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13 “because RSS is now a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse,” judy-funnie said. RSS feeds will still be available for moderators who use it for workflows “through supported alternatives,” Reddit’s employee said. They added:

For common mod alerts, we recommend Devvit apps like Discord Relay. If your mod team relies on RSS, review your setup and migrate workflows before November 13 to ensure your needs are uninterrupted. If you use RSS for feeds outside of a community you moderate, there is no replacement. RSS has been a beloved part of the open web for a long time, and we’re grateful to everyone who used it to stay connected to Reddit.

Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder in Reddit.

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