The internet has become essential to our daily life, with computers becoming portals to the internet—often not hosting much on-device, which could help drive prices down for basic computers as AI causes the price of RAM to surge. This is good news for Apple’s MacBook Neo, which, per Counterpoint Research, has helped macOS market share to increase from 8.7% to 9.8%. The MacBook Neo starts with Apple’s A18 Pro chip, 8 GB of RAM, and 256 GB of storage, and was raised to 699 dollars from its initial 599 dollar launch price. Still, with Apple’s cloud integrating with iCloud and people often using the web to get tasks done, this should be a good device to navigate the increasingly unsafe web.
The web suffered a massive new attack with PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), a programming language that is used in three-quarters of websites. PHP is the foundational engine powering massive web platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and MediaWiki (the software behind Wikipedia). The web server running PHP processes the code, interacts with databases (like MySQL) to fetch necessary data, and executes tasks. This is why the php2shell exploit (rated a 9.2 out of 10 severity) is so dangerous. Using the exploit, hackers/crackers can achieve Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution (RCE). An attacker does not need an account, a stolen session, or a valid password to break in. They only need to send a specifically corrupted web request to a server to force it to run their malicious commands. Thus, they can steal data on the server or distribute malware to your computer if you visit a compromised website.
There is a patch, but the fear is that Artificial Intelligence systems will be able to reverse-engineer the patch much faster than a human can, meaning that developers who do not update their websites fast enough could be susceptible to attack. Think of all the websites people visit for daily use that aren’t made by “big tech” companies: pharmaceutical sites, ordering specialty equipment, forums, or just blogs that people read. Now, there is a benefit to AI here as well—the flaw was actually discovered by AI systems, thus AI is being used like a tool, either for good or evil use.
This reminds me of BeEF (Browser Exploitation Framework), but on a much larger scale, as well as the time I hacked into my own phone. You can read these articles here.
In other Apple news, orders for the iPhone Duo—Apple’s 1st handset that is meant to be folded—are out, with people being limited to 2 of the phones that cost nearly three times more than a MacBook Neo. The phone is having orders not be shipped until January, and analysts are projecting it will sell over 10 million units in the 1st year, with the surge also pushing a renewed interest in other Android-based foldables like Samsung’s Z Fold 8.
God bless and Tech Talk To You Later!!
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