Interview with Ondřej Surý in the Atlanic

Last week two very critical vulnerabilities were identified in PHP. Problems There were several with this: Up tot 70% of the web runs on PHP: that's a lot. The patches were ~24 hours away: lots sites went down as a precaution But even then: only officially supported versions got patches (8.2 and up) This left one big, huge, gigantic problem: Lots and lots of webservers run older versions (8.1/8.0 and 7.x). So this would leave them vulnerable. Enter Ondřej Surý. This developer has been running the so called Sury repos for years. Free repos with patched up older PHP version. Just one guy diligently patching up older PHP versions that millions and millions of websites (still) use. And making them available in a neat and handy package format (otherwise you would have to compile the patch from source yourself). It's kind of baffling that this all depends on one guy but then again it's exactly like the famous XKCD comic. Note: some people are discussing the urgency for patching. I disagree…