Upon the Latest PHP Calamity

“Oops, they did it again.” Scarcely have we swept away the ash of the last great conflagration - fancied ourselves secure behind newly mended ramparts - when PHP creeps forth from the underbrush with yet another malady. One is tempted to inquire whether PHP is a software architecture at all, or merely some stubborn, unkillable parasite that perennially refuses to expire, lingering on solely to test the patience of mine.

The parchment of the previous patch was barely dry before the next expedient arrived: Set session.upload_progress.enabled to off within your php.ini, twiddle your thumbs, and await further scoops of wisdom from the wizards themselves.

This latest mishap bears all the illicit hallmarks of a blood-relative to those hasty, half-baked mitigations flung together during our recent trial due to the tabloids with alluring panic to the modern scoundrels. Whilst the maintainers set about fashioning a proper remedy, the commons are straightway flooded with a fresh deluge of LLM-flavoured, vibe-coded exploits dispatched by every enthusiastic digital vagabond. Automated wretches now scour the wires, rattling every unbolted latch from here to the antipodes.

To the scribblers of the gutter press and tech journalism alike, one feels compelled to offer a modest petition: pray, for the love of all things holy, grant us five minutes of absolute silence. Do not, I implore you, blow this latest spark into a raging bonfire just to ensure every dim-witted script-kiddie learns precisely which door to kick in. That very media circus is what delivered us into our present misery in the first place.

That multitude of PHP boxes remaining exposed and unpatched upon the public thoroughfare surprises precisely no one as anyone who has practiced this trade for longer than a fortnight knows: PHP remains that immortal monster of a platform, lurking silently in the darkest, most neglected cellars of nearly every server infrastructure extant.

For my own part, I reflect with no small measure of smug satisfaction upon the choice long ago to withdraw my modest services behind the quiet, unyielding barricade of a VPN. Public access? Nay and Absolutely none.

When the automated rabble comes knocking at the gates, there remains but the ancient Gandalf decree: “Ye shall not pass!” - though to be entirely truthful, I have quite run out of virtual e-scooters with which to clutter the approach. Or perhaps it was simply my good manners that prevented me from ever touching those abominable contraptions in the first place? It does not change my sincere wishes to you, dear reader, to keep your systems safe.