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The story
A thread on 5ch’s “Live News G” board tackled the topic of services running on outdated, no-longer-supported versions of PHP being forced to shut down because they can no longer handle emerging vulnerabilities. Patches are only released for the latest version, and posters noted that migrating comes with its own headaches — a shortage of people who understand the original specs and steep labor costs. The thread saw a clash between the optimistic take that “AI makes rewriting a breeze” and the counterargument that “AI doesn’t cut down on the cost of testing and implementation,” with the discussion heating up further once Abe Hiroshi’s famous homepage got dragged into it.
What people said
Even with AI you still can't skip the testing and implementation work — guess it's just not a service worth spending that kind of money on
Mado-Dora, I'm looking at you (nickname for a mobile game getting ribbed here)
If plugins start glitching out it'll be a pain
Just deal with it already, use AI
Unless it's a service making serious money, anyway
Patches only come out for versions past a certain point, so you'd have to update
but that calls for a pretty substantial rewrite
Labor costs pile up fast, and more often than not nobody's even around anymore who understands the original spec
That page itself is written in plain HTML so it should be fine
though apparently the server behind it runs on PHP
Just checked, it's under maintenance
Kind of wish retro games would all get the same treatment and just disappear
Security awareness way too low
The truly dangerous places just leave it alone, leak everyone's data, then leave that alone too
Condolences to anyone who didn't shut down their old service
But then you're back to the old days where a human has to manage member accounts by hand behind the scenes
If it's just a static page you don't even need WordPress, that's overkill
What kind of trouble does that cause for everyone around it?
The whole OS gets taken over and turned into a launchpad for further attacks
Overseas that's actually the bigger topic
That's actually worse than the PHP thing in practice
Long live blazing-fast hand-coded HTML
Is Puzzle & Dragons, Granblue Fantasy done too?
I wonder if KanColle, Aigis, and the castle games (Japanese mobile titles) are okay
Granblue already did their maintenance
The PHP version itself is probably too old, so a patch alone won't cut it
They're shutting down because patches CAN'T be applied
They've been running on the old version this whole time and can't just jump to the new version that's getting patches now
If it's an old service there's a chance development itself doesn't even exist anymore
Maybe for small personal or family-run operations, but any decent-sized company outsources the management entirely
Though there could be cases where they can't keep up with the fixes and basically skip town
Sorry for using you guys instead of AI
These days it's mostly Node.js that gets picked
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
Once a given PHP version’s official support period ends, security patches stop coming, and continuing to run on a vulnerable version puts a server directly at risk of being hijacked and turned into a launchpad for further attacks. The longer a service has stuck with an old version, the more a migration demands tracking down people who understood the original specs and carrying out a large-scale rewrite — and the resulting labor costs often become a real barrier to keeping the service alive. The thread saw the optimistic view that “AI makes rewriting easy,” but since AI doesn’t actually reduce the work of testing and implementation, the prevailing opinion was that small and mid-sized services not worth the expense get cut first. Abe Hiroshi’s homepage is famous for the speed of its plain static HTML, but some pointed out that the server behind it actually runs on PHP — a reminder that appearances alone don’t tell you whether something is secure.
※This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Live News G) thread “[Sad News] Unable to Keep Up With PHP Vulnerabilities, Old Services Keep Shutting Down One After Another…“.
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