Credit where it’s due to AI for uncovering the PHP flaw – and discredit to the leaker | Letters

David Gibson says the problem is that details of the flaw were revealed before it was fixed, while Charles MacKinnon notes that we are at the mercy of technology we don’t understand

Chris Stokel-Walker may be right (The internet has broken – again. Shouldn’t the tech firms that make billions from it pay to fix it?, 22 October), but the real issue lies elsewhere. The bugs in the PHP programming language that were recently found by an AI tool have been present for a long time without anybody noticing and without any harm being done – they are extremely obscure.

They were not found by hackers – they were found because an AI tool was used to check the PHP source code, which is a good use of AI.

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