Scary Stories

Sweet Jesus, why does everything have to be a scare story, these days?  I mean, I know that it's coming up to Halloween and therefore the 'scary season', but it is all year round now that we are being bombarded with stories and warnings by the media and governments clearly designed to scare us out of our wits.  If it isn't the constant 'World War Three fears' nonsense every time a conflict breaks out somewhere in the world, it is warnings that AI is going to murder us all in our beds.  None of these stories are actually authenticated in any way: just how, for instance, is AI going to kill us?  Exactly how?   Those perpetrating the stories can't actually tell us that, but that doesn't stop their constant scaremongering.  It's the same with their 'World Three' cobblers and all the current ramping up of the 'Russian Threat', in the face of which we need to spend billions on defence and face being called up for military service.  Here, there is a fundamental disconnect with the reality on the ground: Russia's invasion of Ukraine has ground to a standstill, with their supposed military might and technical superiority counting for nought on the battlefield.  With the incompetence they have shown in Ukraine, let alone the vast quantities of manpower and military resources they have expended (and can't easily replace), surely denudes any threat they might pose to the rest of Europe.  In reality, the sort of operations they are running against the West at the moment - cyber terrorism and sabotage - are the sort of thing that won't be deterred by a huge conventional military build-up on Europe's part.  Not to forget that the current conflicts in Ukraine and Iran show that modern warfare is a good deal less sophisticated than the military 'experts' have lead us to believe that it might be - any defence strengthening focused simply on building more ships, planes and tanks is unlikely to be particularly effective.

But it isn't just these specific hypothetical threats they're trying to scare us with - this week we've had the government telling us how we should all be preparing for some kind of vague possible future catastrophe by stocking up on tinned foods, as part of their 'National Resiliance Conversation'.   For fuck's sake!  Have we really reached the stage where they can't even be bothered to outline the threat they are trying to scare us with?  This is just the official equivalent of the government jumping out at us and shouting 'Boo!'  Still, they did come up with one fairly specific 'threat' this week, with which the media are now trying to instil panic into the  public consciousness - the PHP vulnerability.  As the media have been so laboriously explaining, PHP is the coding language which underpins much of the web, be it servers or webpages, so any vulnerability has the potential to be exploited by hackers.  Hence we have all those breathless reports of websites being taken offline while remedial action is being taken. A couple of points, though, which seem to have been glossed over, on the issue: firstly, it seems that though it has long existed, there is no record of this vulnerability - which was apparently discovered by AI - ever having been exploited.   Could it be that it is something so obscure that it is likely that no human hacker would ever have found it, so it is actually the media trumpeting the AI 'discovery' which has created the 'threat'?  Secondly, the fact is that it apparently affects only older versions of PHP, so those rushing to secure their sites and servers are actually admitting that they haven't been bothering to keep their software up to date.  Now, the PHP for The Sleaze is actually set by the hosting company's servers and, for quite some time now, my current host has only offered the latest versions.  So - and the site will probably crash and burn now - I'm not having to rush around in a panic thanks to this latest bit of media scaremongering.