Andres Freund is a engineer at Microsoft who describes himself in a way that will sound familiar to anyone who has spent time hanging out with people who work on software: “I’m a fairly private person who just sits in front of the computer and hacks on code.” That, as it turns out, is also the self-description of the guy who may have just saved the internet. One of the thousands of times Freund privately sat in front of his computer, he noticed what looked like a backdoor hidden in the Linux operating system, one complex enough to have been deployed by “a nation with formidable hacking chops” in a multiyear effort, that if exploited by whoever planted it there, could have damaged a huge chunk of the internet—because Linux runs “a vast majority of the world’s servers — including those used by banks, hospitals, governments and Fortune 500 companies.” It all makes for an entertaining story. But it’s also pretty scary that the modern world’s operating system depended on one somewhat lucky discovery by a single individual. At this point, my whole family goes into meltdown mode if our Netflix buffers for a couple seconds. Kevin Roose in the NYT (Gift Article): Did One Guy Just Stop a Huge Cyberattack? The internet is “a messy patchwork that has been assembled over decades, and is held together with the digital equivalent of Scotch tape and bubble gum. Much of it relies on open-source software that is thanklessly maintained by a small army of volunteer programmers who fix the bugs, patch the holes and ensure the whole rickety contraption, which is responsible for trillions of dollars in global G.D.P., keeps chugging along. Last week, one of those programmers may have saved the internet from huge trouble.” (I guess that’s what Freunds are for.)

+ It’s an exaggeration to say one guy could control the internet. There are actually two guys. Here’s a story about the other one. “A little over two years have passed since the online vigilante who would call himself P4x fired the first shot in his own one-man cyberwar. Working alone in his coastal Florida home in late January of 2022, wearing slippers and pajama pants and periodically munching on Takis corn snacks, he spun up a set of custom-built programs on his laptop and a collection of cloud-based servers that intermittently tore offline every publicly visible website in North Korea and would ultimately keep them down for more than a week.” Wired: A Vigilante Hacker Took Down North Korea’s Internet. Now He’s Taking Off His Mask. “Alejandro Caceres single-handedly disrupted the internet of an entire country. Then he tried to show the US military how it can—and should—adopt his methods.”