recommendation for tomorrow:
no one touch ANYTHING

basically everything short of poob is broken

also it's not TODAY (it seems it started up to two days ago) but there's an active plex vulnerability out there (Plex2Shell), so unpatched plex installations are being remotely hacked to host cryptominers, ddos remotes and such. Fun!

so what has broken the internet today?
1. php
2. node.js
3. gitlab
4. 4
5. musl
6. QUIC/HTTP/3
7. Signal
8. Apache Traffic Server
9. Pillow for Python, even!
10. bind
11. LiteLLM
12. XZ Utils

(Java is reported, but supposedly it's just their version of the 4 issue)

anything else I'm missing?

and apparently Railray (a cloud provider?) got hacked and are telling all their customers to rotate their secrets. Apparently things like API keys were stolen

goto considered harmful
longjmp considered very harmful

longjmp? in the year of our gourd 2026, the php bug involves LONGJMP?

actually I have been working towards setting up a dial-in BBS (over real phone lines)

NO PRIME NUMBERS OR PHP NEEDED

solving my infosec problems by rewriting my site to not use TLS/HTTPS and just some perl scripts under cgi-bin

don't tell anyone, but we've updated the number to 5.

this is FAR more prime than the previous number

I signed out of my infosec job earlier this morning to try and sleep off a migraine, thinking "surely nothing absolutely hilarious will happy today, I won't miss anything"

only to wake up to all my socials posting a single numeric digit

She walked into my office at 9:41 and I knew she was a Plus. Trouble from the startup chime, she had a corrupted system folder and legs up to the menu bar.

I lit a cigarette. The heat was stifling and the fan had never been installed.

Somewhere a hard drive clicked three times.

It was murder.

"2026-10/19" perfectly normal way to write a date, sleepy brain

Has anyone made, like, a Kill-a-Watt with an ESP32 in it yet?

I don't want to put all my appliances on the internet quite yet, but being able to ping some of them to see if their power usage has dropped to zero yet would solve 99% of all my smart appliance needs, because all I really need is a reminder that I put something in the wash two hours ago and should move it along to the dryer now

(Amiga 500, UK)

Finally, I own a real computer

such is the state of my life that's there's a bin in on the kitchen floor that contains primarily
1. small bags of potato chips (assorted flavors)
2. ISA modems [from approximately 1984-1995]

handing a db-25 cable to an autistic friend of mine, and when they ask "why?", I say "so we can engage in parallel play!"

9pm on a wednesday is definitely the time to decide you really need to port one of your programs to Windows 3.1

spoiler alert: you'll be porting it forward

I love hearing about hardware problems where it's like "well that can't have broken that way, just from doing that" and then there's follow-up and NOPE, it's really broken that way, from doing exactly that. huh. Computers are weird.

I've been saying since the 2000s that it's important that every big software stack have at least one angry new software grad to fight back against entrenched complexity in the existing codebase.

sometimes there is a good reason why we can't "just do X, Y, or Z" but someone should be still raising the question, damn it