On Tuesday, the world found out about two massive security vulnerabilities in PHP, a programming language that is used by roughly 70 percent of websites.

Matthew Prince, the CEO of the hosting company Cloudflare, wrote that in the 10 hours before the flaws were publicly announced, “we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it. That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.”

Surý, who lives in Czechia, does not work for the PHP Foundation. But alongside his day job as director of domain-name-system engineering at the nonprofit Internet Systems Consortium, in a volunteer capacity, he maintains and helps automate patches for the coding language. His work, with that of just a handful of others, has allowed countless websites and organizations to fix these vulnerabilities quickly. Over the past 48 hours, he’s become arguably the unsung hero of the entire internet—despite the fact that the only compensation he receives is from modest donations. “Ondřej will save the internet today,” a user in the PHP Subreddit wrote.

I spoke with Surý today from his home about the unfolding AI-cybersecurity crisis, how the internet’s infrastructure is maintained by small crews of volunteers such as himself, and how it feels to go to bed after saving the web as we know it.

(Bolding is mine to indicate who this is about.)

Is it just a matter of time until the internet goes offline?

"But the reason it was not crazy for me was that I actually don’t have any system running PHP myself." - Ondřej Surý

What a very relaxed and laid back guy Mr. Sury is! And his statements are fundamentally informative.

I'm glad he's running the internet.

Saved the Internet

Yeah... this appears to have been overblown.

Internet is dead and after this AI shit ramps up to full speed, even the dead remains will become useless.

Just seems likely with AI and terrorist groups. If it's not hacked then couldn't the internet cables in the ocean just be destroyed?