David Friedberg says the US needs an economic reset to avoid having a social collapse like France "It depends on how far the collapse goes. You could have this sort of social collapse that you see in some countries that involve rioting and murd*r and all these sorts of things." "Or you end up having what is more of like an economic collapse, which is sort of like Argentina and Brazil, Greece more recently, where the ability to service the debt because the government got too big forces this kind of restructuring of the economy." "And yes, there are still massive protests, there is still an incredible loss of net worth, there's an incredible inflation effect that wipes out asset values for people. And you end up having kind of economic resetting without the great social resetting." "I think we have to do something. I don't think we can run a higher deficit-to-GDP than France in the United States with the same debt-to-GDP as France and only modestly higher GDP growth. I think we are fundamentally going to need to have some degree of reset in the United States." "The question is, do we want it to be a massive social reset, or do the left and the right want to put on their hard hats and say, 'Okay, we got to go in the mines and do the work and figure out how to cut this from seven and a half years to four years and do it in a way that doesn't destroy the economy.'"

What the actual fuck have I just read

Security called me at 6:12 AM today. "Patch every PHP server immediately." I asked what happened. "Two critical vulnerabilities. Remote code execution. No authentication required." Cool. How many PHP servers do we have? According to inventory: 12 According to reality: Nobody knows. We found one running WordPress. Three running old internal tools. One under someone's desk. Two inside vendor appliances. A forgotten employee directory from 2016. And a server named: PHP-OLD-DO-NOT-TOUCH Naturally, that one runs payroll exports. Then we found a PHP 5.6 box. I asked who owned it. The documentation said: BRIAN. Brian left in 2019. We called Brian. He said: "Oh wow, that's still running?" Excellent. By 8 AM, leadership joined the incident call. CEO: "Can hackers actually get in?" Security: "Potentially yes." CEO: "Without a password?" Security: "Yes." CEO: "Then why do WE need passwords?" Not the lesson. Finance asked if we could wait until the weekend to patch because downtime affects revenue. Security explained that the alternative was letting strangers execute code on our servers. Finance asked for a cost comparison. At 9:17, someone suggested temporarily taking the vulnerable websites offline. Marketing refused. "Our campaign is live." So for the next hour, the company officially decided maintaining a landing page for 20% off webinar registration was more important than preventing remote server takeover. We finally patched everything we could find. Then our scanner discovered another PHP server. Hostname: TEMP-PHP-2014 Uptime: 4,512 days. Nobody knows what it does. Nobody owns it. Nobody can shut it down. But every time we block network access, the warehouse stops printing shipping labels. Security has classified it as critical infrastructure. It is running PHP 5.4. The vulnerability has existed longer than half our employees. The emergency patch took four hours. Finding out what PHP actually runs took eleven. The internet isn't held together with code. It's held together with servers everyone is afraid to turn off.

The obvious lesson is CA certificates need to leave the Stone Age and move to threshold ECDSA signatures. The root programs need a blanket policy of only accepting certs with secret sharing between multiple independent HSMs. Crypto custodians figured this out years ago. When you have really important private keys that require resistance to nation state actors, the only solution is combining multiple independent sources of entropy

So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.

This is insane. 8 of the TLS trusted CA root certificates had private keys generated with 8 or less bits of entropy. One of them was literally; 4

UNITED CEO Scott Kirby: “.. Wealth inequality has become a danger to our society, .. We should have a national wealth tax ..” @nytimes $UAL nytimes.com/2026/10/18/busin…

One of the blackest pills you get when you start getting enterprise clients in tech is that if you are pure of heart and honest you will get zero sales and lose customers. You have to literally fake stuff to bridge the gap of understanding, which grinds your soul down.