mATTHEW rYAN

My father has never hugged me. Not when I was born. Not at my graduation. Not when I left home. That's normal for a Japanese father his age. Love is a full gas tank when you visit. A bag of oranges handed over without a word. Last month, my friend from Texas came to dinner at my parents' house. When it was time to go, he did what Texans do. He hugged my mother. Then he turned around and hugged my father. My father froze. Arms straight down. Like a soldier being hugged by a bear. Three seconds. Nobody breathed. After he left, my father sat at the table for a long time. Then he said: "In America… do they do that with their fathers too?" "Every time," I said. He nodded. That was all. Two weeks later, I went home for dinner. When I was leaving, my father stood up, walked to the door, and put his arms around me. Badly. Like he was assembling furniture with no instructions. I'm over forty. It was the first time. He let go, looked at the floor, and said, "Drive safely." My mother told me later he'd been practicing on the dog.

Websites are files on a computer. When you view a website, you are asking the computer to send you the files, then your browser shows them to you. 70% of the websites you see use PHP to make them interactive. So you can send things to the website too and it can respond. E.g. filling in a comment box and hitting 'post' adds the comment as a row to a spreadsheet. PHP has a flaw in its code that allows anyone to gain control of the computer that has the website on it. The organisation that provides PHP announced the vulnerability before a patch was available, meaning we're in a window where everyone knows about it (including baddies) but the good guys don't have an official solution. Some are just turning off their websites and waiting for the solution. Others are trying to fix it themselves. General chaos and lots of stressed techies across literally the entire planet because this affects the entire internet.