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.

Not usually into generative art, but this audiovisual project by @yamiburgenet caught both my eye and ear. Got one in my collection now. Will likely add some more later. 😍

We’re not curating Verse well enough atm - the homepage and Discord in particular are way too sloppy. The below is a step in the direction of fixing that. We want almost everything you see on the site and in our marketing to be of some kind of interest, and will be personalising things more and more as we learn what you’re interested in. Make sure to follow artists for better recommendations! The goal is to show you: - Work by strong artists - With a good chance of becoming more recognised over time - Whose markets aren’t inflated by speculators waiting for the right time to dump - That are well/fairly priced relative to recent sales and other artists at a similar stage (accounting for differences in output/age etc) - That you’re interested in We’ll do our best to send you great things at great prices on an ongoing basis. Please send them along to anyone you think might be interested in collecting if you think we’re doing a good job! 🙏