Chris Stokel-Walker may be right (The internet has broken – again. Shouldn’t the tech firms that make billions from it pay to fix it?, 22 October), but the real issue lies elsewhere. The bugs in the PHP programming language that were recently found by an AI tool have been present for a long time without anybody noticing and without any harm being done – they are extremely obscure.
They were not found by hackers – they were found because an AI tool was used to check the PHP source code, which is a good use of AI.
The problem arose because someone – presumably a real human person and not an AI – leaked details about the bugs before they had a chance to be fixed. If that action is not already illegal, it should be made so, with sufficient penalty to deter others.
David Gibson
Leeds
I read with some disquiet the article by Chris Stokel-Walker. It brought to mind Carl Sagan’s observation in 1995 that “We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology”.
Today, we as citizens and customers are at the mercy of technological systems and processes that we neither understand nor requested. We have been cajoled, persuaded, manipulated and bullied into accepting ways of working and behaving using tools that we do not understand or control (except perhaps to “turn it off and turn it back on again”). All this in order for profit margins to be increased while losing good jobs and quality services.
The dizzying array of background and middleware tools that have been incrementally put together and grafted on to fit with legacy systems in order to further these commercial ambitions lacks any overall design and is sparse in methods of security and maintenance. Welcome to Y2K Mark 2, but this time it’s for real.
Charles MacKinnon
Glasgow