Seeing software companies use yesterday's events to nudge worried businesses away from PHP... as if other languages don't have lurking security flaws. If anything, the response has reassured me. I feel more confident than ever building software with PHP for my clients.

🚨 UPDATE: A public PoC demonstrates RCE on PHP 8.5.12, even after the October 21 security patches. The attack is separate from the patched php2shell CVEs and requires specific session configurations and application weaknesses. Our earlier concerns about PHP session handling remain relevant. We've updated php2shell-protection with additional hardening guidance. #php #cybercurity github.com/syhunt/php2shell-…

25 years ago, on October 22, 2001, Grand Theft Auto III was released. This is the team that made it. (I'm second from the right) Here's what I remember about making it. For most of development, GTA3 was in a sorry state. It crashed frequently, the frame rate was terrible and the map was full of holes. Only in the last six months did everything come together. For the longest time, it looked like the frame rate was going to be 20 fps. Only in the final months did we manage to hit 30. In 1999, DMA Design, based in Dundee, Scotland, was going through some changes. The company had recently been bought by Take-Two Interactive, and a satellite office had opened in Edinburgh. Space Station Silicon Valley for the N64 had been finished in 1998, but there was no new project lined up. Leslie Benzies and Aaron Garbut started working on GTA3. Unprompted. Meanwhile, the original GTA1 and GTA2 team had started work on GTA2.5, set in Miami. It was called 2.5 because it used the 2.5D (isometric) perspective. In March 2000, the Dundee office was closed and GTA2.5 was cancelled. Take-Two/Rockstar gave GTA3 the green light. Everything was written from scratch. Only two people worked on both GTA2 and GTA3, and no code or art from GTA2 was reused. The way we worked was organic. People would come up with ideas for missions and we'd just try them. If they were fun, they were in. The story was secondary. In fact, the opening plot involving Catalina trying to kill Claude was added well into development. Leslie Benzies (the producer) plastered a wall in the boardroom with Post-it notes. They were yellow, green and pink, representing missions, contacts and locations. Missions were moved around all the time, often handed from one contact to another. Only once the voice acting was recorded were these things set in stone. You sometimes come across locations on the map that are more detailed than you'd expect. Chances are there used to be a mission contact there that got moved elsewhere. Working on GTA3 was a lot of fun. Every day there was something new going in. A new mission, radio station, car, pedestrian, building or whatever. The game was growing at an incredible rate. Other than the multiplayer mode we did some work on, I can’t remember a lot of wastage. Although everybody worked hard, I don't remember many people doing crazy hours. On the rare occasions I was in over the weekend, there were usually only one or two others. Even during crunch time, most people left the office around 9 or 10 in the evening. I always thought it was better to work eight focused hours than spend your life in the office. Although we liked the game, it wasn't at all clear that it would be a hit. GTA3 had a disappointing showing at E3 in May 2001. Most people weren't interested, and those who were thought it was too violent. It had an OK launch, but sales never tapered off. Our office was in Leith, Edinburgh. It was a fairly run-down neighbourhood at the time. Just a couple of years before we arrived, J.K. Rowling had been writing the first Harry Potter in that very same neighbourhood. The thing I remember most is the camaraderie. In a small team, everybody relies on each other and everybody has a lot of input. Most of us were young and had only recently moved to Edinburgh. We went to the pub together. It felt like a group of friends who happened to be working on a project together. xitter.cf/ObbeVermeij/status/178… xitter.cf/ObbeVermeij/status/175… xitter.cf/ObbeVermeij/status/187… xitter.cf/ObbeVermeij/status/182… xitter.cf/ObbeVermeij/status/179…

Wow. Wedgewood Polls just released a bombshell. Westwood was created as a hoax to expose how bankrupt the polling industry is. Its fake election polls were cited by the New York Times, FiftyPlusOne, and MSNOW. There was no vetting. Its polls were complete fabrications.

The Cloudflare's writeup on our php2shell response is up. Rules went live at 03:02 UTC, about 9 hours before disclosure. Unfortunately the vulnerability leaked early, so we were already watching attackers mutate payloads against the rules and updating as variants appeared. New rules keep landing in the WAF changelog. Expect updates through out the day. We will have a more thorough post of what we had to build to better protect people coming shortly. PHP runs almost 70% of websites. The flaw is in the runtime, so updating plugins won't fix it. Patch PHP. blog.cloudflare.com/php-vuln…

The once-humble laundromat became a social-media supernova, with visions of the ultimate passive-income dream. Too bad it takes a lot of unglamorous hustle. 🔗: on.wsj.com/4hVIBXD

Wow. I woke up to an impressive number of upset people who apparently don’t understand how LLMs work and can’t cope well with me pointing it out. An LLM is a statistical next-token prediction model. That’s how it works. It’s an extraordinarily sophisticated calculator performing math you could theoretically do by hand (if you were sufficiently masochistic). Math doesn’t know what it’s calculating. Pi doesn’t spend its evenings contemplating the nature of circles, and c doesn’t ponder the relationship between matter and energy. That doesn’t make the results any less accurate, impressive, or useful. Between inference requests, an LLM isn’t sitting around thinking. It isn’t reconsidering its answers, wondering whether it made a mistake, contemplating its existence, or questioning whether it’s conscious. Its weights remain fixed (it doesn’t learn), and computation resumes when it receives input. We know this because we designed these systems. The architectures, mathematics, implementations, and research are extensively documented. You can study them yourself. Of course, some people immediately lean into comparisons of biological intelligence or philosophical debates over consciousness because that is what they know. But biological intelligence and artificial neural networks are fundamentally different systems. Similar outputs don’t establish equivalent internal experiences. I experience consciousness directly. I infer that other humans do too because we share biological structures and processes. We don’t have equivalent evidence for an LLM, and nothing about its known operation gives evidence of conscious experience. Which brings me back to my original point. To me, understanding is conscious comprehension. It means being aware of information, recognizing its meaning, and experiencing that comprehension. If I wasn’t conscious I could not understand. We can perform actions unconsciously. We can produce correct results without knowing why they’re correct. But I distinguish those capabilities from consciously understanding what we’re doing. An LLM can solve complex problems, explain difficult concepts, and produce remarkably accurate information. I give it full credit for those capabilities. But producing an answer that we rationalize as understanding isn’t the same as experiencing understanding. You don’t have to agree with my definitions. We can debate functional understanding versus conscious comprehension all day, but that won’t establish whether an LLM actually experiences anything. The right debate is this… Could machines exhibit something different from human consciousness, something measurable, meaningful, and worth studying? I think so, absolutely! I’m entirely open to discussing “machine consciousness” in terms of observable, testable computational properties. We built these systems, we can instrument them, examine their internal mechanisms, and investigate what they’re capable of. That seems far more productive than endlessly arguing over whether a machine experiences life the way humans do. So here’s my question: How would you define machine consciousness, and more importantly, how would you measure it?

This could never happen in a communist society, or in the regulations and tax obsessed EU. This is Total American Capitalist Victory.

BREAKING: Tesla's Roadster goes airborne, soaring over a row of Tesla vehicles in a live stunt at its unveiling event.

Absolutely mind blown. 🤯🤯🤯

Complete Tesla Roadster FLYING demo. INSANE!!!

This WSJ video about rent stabilization in NYC has gone viral in crazy-housing-activist circles, and it's been interesting to watch the insane responses. Total economic illiteracy. Naked hatred for landlords. Open calls to seize private property.