PHP's vulnerabilities expose the fragility of the open web
Source: The Atlantic (paywall)
When a single programming language underpins 70% of websites, a security flaw becomes infrastructure-level damage—and this week's PHP vulnerabilities made that dependency concrete. PHP's ubiquity contrasts sharply with its governance structure: maintained largely by volunteer developers with minimal institutional backing. The gap reveals a core fragility in how the internet actually works: the most essential systems often have the thinnest safety nets. Fixing it requires either significant funding commitments from the tech companies that benefit most from PHP, or a deliberate choice about how much risk the connected world will tolerate from invisible infrastructure.