« previous post |

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "Other numbers are largely unaffected, but anyone using '4' for their certificate key is urged to upgrade to '5'."

This obviously echoes the recent panic about vulnerabilities in PHP. The joke works because PHP was just about as much of the assumed ontological background as the number line, even for the small fraction of people who knew what it is.

Although if you were one of those (even fewer) people who knew that its TLA was recursive for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor", you might have wondered…

October 23, 2026 @ 7:37 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Linguistics in the comics

Permalink