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I don't know if it's because I skip most AI conversations, but I think you guys might have failed to discuss some things that have been happening for the last several weeks.
Reverse engineering with AI has gotten really, really good, somehow. It's so good that you can reverse engineer Microsoft Office and host it online for free. It's so good that you can submit your tokens to the Machine God and get World of Warcraft open source. You can now play the original Xbox Halo, but with 32 player coop (seemingly most of the players being Mexican). On your Nintendo 64. In fact, you can play Halo in your browser now. You can play lots of stuff in your browser now. I looked up an old game called Apeiron for old Macintosh, released in 1990 something, just a Centipede clone developed by Ambrosia Software, long since abandonware. There are two ports of it that I found in comments sections on Macintosh Garden. The classic decompilation site is shutting down due to sheer volume. And yes, there's also mods. Flying my Banshee across the Mojave almost makes me wish for a nuclear winter. My Foundry in Warcraft 3 just told me that my AWP research has completed, so I went on a tear across Lordaeron.
On the other side of this, AI can now shut down 70% of the Internet. This bug was in PHP for a long time, and only now discovered, because someone pointed a technological superweapon at it.
What the hell even happens from all this? Can Apple really continue to have a closed ecosystem? Are we going to wake up with no money in our bank accounts? Does proprietary code even exist anymore? How is Steam going to cope with having tens of thousands more games submitted to it? And why now? AI was good for several months up to now. Was it the release of tools that work with agents effectively? This seems a bit more significant than hundreds of mathematical proofs being published at once to me, especially because you can verify it works yourself, on your machine, and see the effects on the world right in front of you.
The economy and way-of-life of the first world as we know it might be ending. But at least we can play Bloodborne natively on PC.
The fears of AI superpowering the script kiddies were overblown, at least so far: https://eliastaylor.com/noexploit/
That's not to say that the exploit isn't bad, but it may have been overhyped. The actual "hack any website instantly" button remains in the hands of only a few elite hackers, if it exists at all.
This is bullshit. According to anyone who actually claims to have used these vibe coded clones, they are buggy and unusable. They are created by grifters who want attention and do not even use the tools they are cloning.
I unfortunately have to admit that there are some (not many) quite useful vibe coded apps starting to roll out, but this isn't it. As far as I know, all of the useful ones were created to solve some of the creator's needs, rather than just built to be something flashy.
I'll caveat that while that post isn't entirely wrong, it's a little overstated. PHP-FPM will generally terminate naive attempts to exploit the bug unless the rest of the infrastructure is also fucked up, but Apache's PHP module won't. While this exploit chain is difficult and fairly time-consuming per-site, it's available well before you get to 'elite' level.
I guess there's an argument that running mod_php instead of php-fpm is itself a misconfiguration (or, frankly, using Apache), but that's a level where you're arguing definitions.
It's not a Heartbleed-level incident or as bad as
4, but it's still pretty high up there.https://www.php.net/manual/en/install.unix.apache2.php
At this point they should really stop shipping it
What's wrong with apache?
That'd be nice, but there's a pretty big asterisk there. A lot of software ships with support for
mod_php, up to and including mainstay software like Nextcloud and some (paid!) web hosts, and warnings about performance never stopped people from just using it.I'll admit that this is partly an artifact of my specific use cases where there's a lot of reverse proxy or wonky configuration going on, but I've almost always found nginx a better (if slightly more annoying in syntax) option, performance, reliability, and consistency of behavior under load. The only really big selling point I've ever felt for Apache is the .htaccess concept, but unless you're running a VPS that's always seemed more a source of footguns than a benefit.
(I guess Apache and one-button LAMP stacks are easier in Windows compared to LEMP? But speaking of footguns...)
True but I feel like very little php software at this point requires mod_php and doesn't run better on fpm. Nextcloud prefers fpm.
They should yank the module so that incompetent shared hosting providers are forced to update their setups.
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