22 October - Artificial Intelligence. Friend or Foe?
Last week’s Windows 11 update included 1,414 security fixes. This wasn’t a
case of Microsoft suddenly waking up, it was because they used Artificial Intelligence to track down the operating system bugs.
I stopped using Adobe Photoshop just over a year ago because the price went up
from £8·99 a month to £15·99 so I found something different. It is not nearly as
good but it sort of does the job.
Since then the price of Adobe products has gone up more and they introduced exit fees for ditching
them. This pee’d off a programmer far more clever than me and he asked AI to make
him an alternative program which looks like Photoshop to the user but is different under the hood so he could not be accused of stealing the source code.
Within a week he had free copies available for download which get better on a
daily basis. It has Photoshop features but it isn’t Photoshop
Every Adobe application has now been copied with AI and most people heavily into
computers will not be able to think of a company they would rather wish to be brought to its knees.
And then yesterday
AI found a vulnerability in php
(PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) based websites so
serious that web hosts were instructed to close them all down and Bonkers disappeared.
“The US National Security Agency told all organisations that use PHP to take
their systems offline” and the same happened in this country
php allows web browsers to access data-bases which could be lists of names and
addresses etc. so allowing hackers in could not be more serious.
Bonkers
does not access databases as such, the nearest it gets is that if content
appears in duplicate for any reason, perhaps individual blogs and a composite copy of
them all; to ensure that there are no discrepancies that content is placed in an
external file and dragged in to individual pages as necessary.
There are absolutely no cookies within Bonkers and IP addresses are not logged;
so it is not really of interest to hackers apart perhaps from
the Go Ape gang.
But Bonkers does use php code so it went down with
a whole load of much higher
profile sites. The fixed version of php was installed on the Bonkers server
early this morning, meanwhile the hosting company put up a holding page. They
were not hackers as some readers supposed, but my business customers only ISP
based in Sydenham which provides me with services at little or even no charge.
I could not possibly afford to keep Bonkers on air if I had to pay commercial
rates for the website and the traffic thereon.
So that is it. Nothing particularly sinister but maybe the sort of thing we have to look forward to.
