A lot of web sites are going to be offline today due to critical PHP bugs being discovered

PHP is a programming language that serves up web pages for things like WordPress, Drupal, etc. - which a gobsmackingly huge number of sites on the internet use. Including government sites around the world. OpenAI was involved in discovering two vulnerabilities that allowed remote code execution on vulnerable installations, which is pretty much all of them, and Cloudflare has detected exploits taking place.

So a whole bunch of sites are going to be down entirely or producing errors while sysadmins are trying to patch things up. The maintainers of PHP have released fixes, but it takes time for things to get distributed and installed, so this could go on for a while.

Description of what's going on:
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/10/widespread-php-flaw-may-cause-many-site-outages-today/

Gov't sites being down:
https://developers.slashdot.org/story/26/10/21/1644235/government-websites-go-dark-after-severe-php-vulnerabilities-disclosed

PHP disclosing the vulnerabilities:
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/10/21/054204/php-warns-it-plans-to-release-2-emergency-patches-imminently

Researchers have made an interesting observation regarding the Voynich Manuscript

For those not familiar with this rather peculiar book, a brief recap. It is approximately 600 years old, its first confirmed owner was Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, whose rein ended in 1612. It wended through various owners through the years, ending up in the hands of Polish-American book seller Wilfrid Voynich in 1912, then ultimately into the archives of Yale Library in 1969, where it has only left once for an exhibition.

The book is written in a script that is completely unknown to academics. It is illustrated with drawings of plants unknown to botanists. It contains astrological and alchemical symbols that make little sense. No one knows what it means. But lots of people have spent a tremendous amount of time trying to decipher the book over the years.

You can view high-resolutions scans of the book from the Yale Library here.

Now we have a bit of an advancement in research of the book!

It's not about the contents. No one has successfully decoded it. We don't know what the weird plants are.

They've discovered that the pages are probably not in order. It was bound incorrectly.

A new study, the results discussed in The Digital Medievalist, put this forth. From the Gizmodo article: "the manuscript was probably intended to be read as a series of stacked bifolia, or sheets folded in half. But the version we have today was interpreted to be a quire, or folded pages sewn together to make a booklet. If true, it would partly explain why the manuscript appears so incomprehensible."

Based on writing styles and previous study of the manuscript, it's known that the book was written by five different people. The issue is that because of the way the document is bound, you'll have Writer 1 and Writer 3 on adjoining pages in the same quire, when logically Writer 1 would complete one quire, then perhaps a different writer would be the next quire. It doesn't make sense that two different writers would work within the same set of pages, that's not how they were making books back then.

This hampers decoding the writing as a lot of software used in decrypting unknown texts not only build up tables based on frequency of occurrence of individual symbols (and pairs and triplets), but they build them up cumulatively, and if the source is out of order, it massively screws up that cumulative build.

Further indication that the sequence is messed up are the illustrations, some being too close to the binding when normal method is to include a larger gutter (blank space) next to the edge that would be bound.

The good part is that now that this error is recognized, it's easy to experiment with resequencing the pages to see if it improves decryption software results. All of the pages have high-resolution scans, changing the sequence of the pages is trivial.

It will be interesting to see if this produces any meaningful information from this document.

https://gizmodo.com/no-wonder-we-cant-read-the-voynich-manuscript-its-pages-are-probably-out-of-order-2000829044

The Yale Library's index page on the Voynich Document and its provenance:
https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/beinecke/collections/beinecke-cipher-voynich-manuscript