India, Oct. 25 -- On the night of 21 October 2026, a Japanese telecommunications company suspended its earthquake and tsunami alerts. For several days, customers in one of the most seismically exposed countries on earth were advised to find some other way to learn that the ground was about to move, because their phones might not sound even for a strong quake. The cause was not an earthquake. It was a flaw in PHP, a web scripting language most people have never heard of, written in 1994 by a Danish-Canadian contractor named Rasmus Lerdorf to count the visitors to his online resume. When he first announced his little tool to a mailing list in 1995, nobody replied.

Within days, Finland took its entire public-facing internet offline. Parts o...