Eight eMudhra intermediate CA keys were cracked in milliseconds; Cloudflare ports TypeScript to Rust at 8x speed; Scott Alexander defends AI handoverism against its critics

Engineering

Jackalsyn

PHP session.upload_progress Heap Use-After-Free (CVE-2026-109618 / -109619)

The author reports a heap use-after-free bug in the PHP session.upload_progress feature. The bug is tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619. A memory-limit error can make the next request reuse freed memory. The corrected severity is CVSS 5.3 (Medium), and the author says it is not code execution. It affects only the Apache prefork SAPI. Setting session.upload_progress.enabled to Off closes the issue.

Cloudflare Blog

Introducing tsrs: A Port of TypeScript to Rust

Cloudflare and VoidZero announce tsrs, a Rust port of the TypeScript compiler. The project is not a fork, and the TypeScript team keeps control of the language. In early benchmarks, tsrs is up to 8x faster and uses about 70% less memory than TypeScript 7.0. An experimental release is available with npm install tsrs.

Josh W. Comeau

The Future of CSS: Top 10 Picks for Interop 2027

Josh W. Comeau lists his top 10 CSS picks for Interop 2027. Interop is a project that helps browser vendors improve cross-browser support. Comeau says modern CSS knowledge matters, because large language model (LLM) tools often give old code.

Martin Fowler

Fragments: October 21

Gergely Orosz ran a "No AI" essay contest, but some entrants used AI. Readers who find AI use assume the whole text is AI-written. Martin Fowler agrees, but notes that some AI use is valid, such as translation. He also writes about the cancellation of the Grace Hopper Celebration. He recommends Cindy Sridharan's guide on how to debug code that nobody understands. Her main advice is to gather evidence first, and to read the code last.

Social Sciences

Astral Codex Ten

Against Against Handover

Scott Alexander says critics wrongly group two ideas together. True successionism says AI should replace human rule. Handoverism says humans can let aligned AI hold control to serve their interests. He presents five steps of handover, from an AI president to a benevolent superintelligence. He warns that if humans reject handover, they risk tyranny, surveillance, and the harms in 1 Samuel.

Marginal Revolution

The Causal Effect of Foreign Ideas on U.S. Innovation

A National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper studies how foreign ideas affect U.S. innovation. The authors use the text of 13 million patents from 1887 to 2024. About 54% of U.S. technologies use at least one foreign input. The most productive U.S. technologies use the most foreign inputs. U.S. counties with more exposure to foreign ideas invent more technologies. These effects last for decades and affect local jobs.

Marginal Revolution

Saving for the Machines

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde wrote a paper on how automation affects economic growth. In his model, the capital that people save sets the size of the growth boom. The task structure sets how long the boom lasts. Growth reaches 11.7% a year when households save the optimal share, but only 2.2% at the 2025 U.S. rate of 23%.

Humanities

JSTOR Daily

Frankenstein, The Vampyre, and the Spirit of the Humanities

In 1816, Lord Byron challenged his friends at Villa Diodati to write ghost stories. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, and John Polidori wrote The Vampyre. The author says these works still show debate about ambition, life, death, class, and power.

Aeon

What Four Years of Ceaseless War Looks Like to Ukrainian Civilians

Anders Hammer directed this documentary film about Ukraine. The film covers four years of Russia's invasion, starting in March 2022. It follows Kseniia, a Kyiv native. She sends her children abroad. She stays in Kyiv and runs a humanitarian headquarters that gives donations to people in need. The film shows Ukrainian civilians who live with violence, fear, and solidarity.