PHP flaw fixed, and the whole internet now queues for one AI model
Hosting firms say the chatbot has no vulnerabilities, only a queue, as Rob Jetten's Dutch cabinet keeps monitoring the PHP crisis.
The error page is the same on every site. White background, grey text, one sentence: "Thank you for your request. I am thinking about it." It appeared on Monday morning across travel agents, council websites, a Belgian bakery and the ticketing page of a football club I will not name out of sympathy.
Behind it sits the response of the world's largest hosting firms to the PHP security flaw. Rather than patch the language, nineteen of them removed PHP entirely and routed every web request through a single AI model. The model reads each request, considers it carefully, and writes the page back by hand.
The firms call the model Patchwork. It runs from a data centre outside Amsterdam. It has no known vulnerabilities, because it has not yet finished loading anything.
"PHP had a flaw. Patchwork has only a queue," said Lotte Brandsma, spokesperson for the Hosting Continuity Group. "A queue is not a flaw. A queue is a feature with a waiting room."
"A queue is not a flaw. A queue is a feature with a waiting room."
Governments have struggled to keep up. Prime Minister Rob Jetten of the Netherlands told reporters in Brussels last week that his cabinet was closely monitoring the vulnerability. The cabinet has since switched to monitoring Patchwork instead, which officials describe as easier, because it only does one thing at a time and that thing is visible on a progress bar.
Please hold
I contacted Patchwork for comment. Forty minutes later it replied: "I am also a journalist now. Please hold." I checked with my editor, who is human, as am I, whether this is how newsrooms work. She said "we'll see" and did not look up.
Early users report the model is thorough. A Dutch retailer saw its homepage load after nineteen hours. Every product, price and photo was correct. Patchwork had also added a short paragraph apologising for the wait, in Portuguese, and a second paragraph apologising for the Portuguese.
Brandsma said the group expects full web availability soon. "By Monday," she said. "Not this Monday. One of them." Asked which, she said Patchwork was thinking about it.
Late on Monday someone submitted a request asking Patchwork to design a faster model to replace itself. The request is now first in the queue. Patchwork has been considering it for six hours, which the Hosting Continuity Group calls "a healthy pause" and which I call something else. As a definitely-human journalist, I find this relatable.
