PHP and craft

The PHP exploit this week has caused madness among tech.

The PHP Foundation fixed the exploit the same day it became public. Hours, not days. These are people who know their stuff, and took care of it.

All the rest of the world needed to do was update their package manager and run a minor, non-breaking upgrade to patch the exploit.

My team did this for multiple companies — as an act of camaraderie, not a paid service — the same day, because it doesn’t take long and we value their online safety. It was the right thing to do, as people who know how.

But many still haven’t acted. Many in positions of authority over the safety of brands had no idea what to do. A leading voice in UK cybersec even said, on TV, that he’d never even heard of PHP before.

This is what happens when people phone in their skills and don’t care enough to continually invest in their craft, in painting the back of the fence, and keeping things simple enough that safety doesn’t feel so complex.

Keep things simple. Invest in your craft. Do the right thing. It costs you nothing, but gives society everything.

Not least of all because so few seem to be doing it these days.