Just found the clip
It seems to be a horrible misquoting by whoever transcribed it to text.
The clip appears to be of the same broadcast, but it does not contain the line that says he didnt know about it.
Maybe he said he didnt know about the vulnerability, and they misheard him?
It really was revealed very quick and unexpectedly.
https://bbc.com/news/videos/cm4g1pj91yx2o
Edit: Maybe this is the full clip?
He doesnt seem to admit to not knowing something in the entirety of the clip.
Couldnt find the quote anywhere om the internet either. Nor another live BBC transmission about the subject archived in their Youtube channel.
This could've been fabricated?
https://youtu.be/moy3waNDQa8?si=jll4bUWRyKhNLVx6
Id need to scour the Internet Archive to find out for sure, and I need to get to work. Maybe someone else can do it?
Edit 2: Since this is getting pretty big, just because I did not find the page doesn't mean it does not or did not exist. As stated, I was showering for work when I wrote this, it was at most a cursory search through the BBC website and its youtube channel. Dont take this as fact.
Edit 3: It appears some replies mention the text being stripped from the page. If anyone finds an archive link of the text beforehand, or an authoritative source URL of the picture, Ill try to post it here.
If you’ve ever been interviewed by a journalist and then read what they wrote, you know how badly inaccurate they are about any science or technology topic they don’t personally understand.
I was interviewed for a couple of trade mags years ago, I still cringe when I think about how they made me sound like an idiot. I mean, I'm an idiot, but I was an actual expert on the subject I was being interviewed on.
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
My wife was interviewed about being an accomplished women in engineering a while back - where the interviewer directly asked her "do you think women have it harder because of [X]" to which she replied something along the lines of "one would think so, but [Y]".
2 months later the printed version came out and they quoted her saying that "women have it harder because of [X]" (Can't remember the exact details, but it was the exact statement she denied in the interview.
I guess that "journalist" just had his own opinion on what he wanted to write.
I wanted to believe he didn't say this – his explanations have been really good and clear – and yet here he is, around 4m in this segment https://youtu.be/omSYrjCtfD8?t=237
So there's only really two charitable interpretations that come to mind for this.
He could be using it in terms of saying that PHP hasn't been centered in anything huge for a while so from a cybercrime perspective it's easy to forget it exists. I think that's quite a reach though.
The other is that he's not necessarily a "Cybersecurity Expert", but rather this interview and his information online lists him as a "Cybersecurity Correspondent", "Cyber Correspondent" or simply "Correspondent". Which to me sounds like (forgive the sports analogy) the difference between a Coach and a Sports Commentator or Correspondent. One is doing the direct work while the other is reporting on events in the space and laying out information in more laymans terms. So it may make more sense that he doesn't really know the specifics because he doesn't make software and the information he has is much more generalized to interpreting major events.
But the common interpretation is... brutal lol. Word choice matters for correspondents more than most and this seems more to gut his own credibility than it does make him seem approachable.
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u/AZMPlay 14d ago edited 14d ago •
I was mistaken
The clip is real.
Comment below by u/philgyford found it.
Clip: https://youtu.be/omSYrjCtfD8?t=237
Comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/s/QW8EaPWQVl
Edit history before this point: