Cape Talk, Thursday night

To intentionally take ourselves offline. And then once PHP did release the fix, it was then a scramble with us and the rest of the world to get that fix in place. What did you find caused you the biggest problems when it came to fixing this quickly? So one of the key issues that we found was these smaller, almost choke points along the chain from PHP releasing the fix all the way through to us getting it.

A good example of that is a particular maintainer called Andre. And there was a good few hours where we were waiting for Andre to package up the PHP fix and make that available. I mean, that's kind of an interesting thing, isn't it? Because, you know, it's not Andre's fault in a sense that his tech is incredibly popular and it's great for your business that it's open source, it's free, isn't it? And, you know, loads and loads of people use it. So

You saw this as a bottleneck. I mean, Andre has also been described as a hero, as somebody who got the fixes out of it. Andre is definitely a hero. Definitely a hero. I think, as a community of developers, we need to have our eyes open a bit more to the fact that the bottlenecks almost are that critical national infrastructure that needs to be there in the time of a crisis. And Andre is brilliant, and every open source developer in this world.

That's brilliant. But you wouldn't necessarily rely on an open source developer for a nuclear power plant or your water companies. In your email to me, you sort of set out that you had a concern about what might happen in the future. What concerns me is if you can imagine a rogue actor instead finding this vulnerability and perhaps not just finding this one, but building up a library of vulnerabilities that the world doesn't know about, but they

Do. If they released all of those onto the public internet at once, we would see something much more serious than what we saw with PHP. That point Louis made about getting fixes from Andre, he's referring to Andrei Suri, a programmer based in the Czech Republic, who worked to quickly make the fixes available. Shona, you've been talking to him. Yes, and he really is one of those unsung heroes of the internet because for years he's been doing something that's incredibly important, but not particularly important.