The people holding up the internet

On 29 September Paul put out version 2026e of the file. The first line of its notes says that Manitoba moves to permanent -05 on 31 October, which tells phones in Winnipeg not to set their clocks back on 1 November, and it was typed in by two volunteers a month ahead. Of the 251 changes made to the file in the last year, 218 were his and 28 were Tim Parenti's.

In 2011 an astrology software company sued Paul and Arthur Olson, who started the file in 1986 at the National Institutes of Health, claiming some of its history came from an atlas the company owned. The file's mailing list and download site were switched off until IANA, which keeps the internet's master lists, took them over later that month. The Electronic Frontier Foundation defended them for free, and the company dropped the case in February 2012.

“In case I am no longer available due to retirement or whatever.”

I also make a daily word game. Play today’s sentence. About two minutes.

People post this comic whenever something breaks. The tower is labelled "all modern digital infrastructure" and it stands on one small block, "a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003".

We wanted to know how close to true it is. We downloaded the full history of 23 pieces of software that phones, browsers and servers depend on, and counted everyone who made ten or more changes to each one between October 2025 and October 2026. Then we listed what is actually installed on an Android phone, an iPhone and a Windows PC.

projects had one or two people doing the regular work.

“It's also good to keep in mind that this is an unpaid hobby project.”

Lives in Finland and looks after xz, the compression tool on almost every Linux server and inside every iPhone.

He wrote that line in the same email where he said his ability to care had been "fairly limited mostly due to longterm mental health issues". For months, accounts calling themselves Jigar Kumar and Dennis Ens had been posting to the list about how slowly things were moving, and a contributor called Jia Tan had been sending useful fixes.

Lasse gave Jia Tan more access. In 2023 Jia Tan made 304 changes to xz and Lasse made 172, which is the red on the wall below. In February 2024 the versions Jia Tan released carried a hidden way into Linux servers. Andres Freund, an engineer at Microsoft, found it on 29 March because his logins were using more processor time than they should, before most Linux systems had shipped it. Nobody has found out who Jia Tan is.

was what Denis Pushkarev raised when he asked for donations to keep core-js going.

Wrote core-js, which lets new JavaScript work in old browsers. By his own count it runs on about half of the thousand busiest websites in the world.

In 2019 he was working on core-js full time without pay, living in Russia because it was cheaper. By his own account, three weeks after a big release he was driving home at 3 a.m. when two young women on a dark road ended up under his car, and one of them died. The families asked for about $80,000, and the prosecutor asked for seven years.

He added a message that appeared in the terminal every time anyone installed core-js, asking for help or a job. Millions of developers saw it, and many of them complained about the message. He went to prison in January 2020 and was released early, about ten months later.

changes to sudo between 2008 and 2018 were made by Todd Miller.

“I'm currently in search of a sponsor to fund continued sudo maintenance and development.”

Has maintained sudo, the command that gives you admin rights on a Mac or a Linux server, since the early 1990s.

Sudo was first written around 1980 at SUNY Buffalo, and Todd has looked after it for longer than Linux has existed. After The Register wrote about his note in February, the project's Open Collective budget reached about $61,700 a year and 30 people sponsored it on GitHub, which makes sudo the best funded one-person project in our count.

Text inside libjpeg.so, read off an Android 16 phone

Runs libjpeg-turbo, which opens every JPEG on Android phones and in Chrome and Edge, and signs his emails with his initials.

He started it in 2010 by taking the JPEG code from the 1990s and making it two to six times faster, and in 2019 it became the reference version of JPEG for the ISO and the ITU. He runs it on his own as a small business, which the project describes as "sustained solely through patronage and funded development". At one point he wrote that it had general funding "for about 8-10 hours of labor per month". This year he wrote 98 percent of the changes.

Four people changed SQLite in the last year. It is in every Android phone, every iPhone, every Mac, every copy of Windows 10 and 11 and every major browser.

“There are a lot of crazy people in the world who might misuse that information.”

D. Richard Hipp wrote SQLite in 2000 after working on software for a US Navy destroyer, where the database kept failing whenever a separate server went down, so he made one that lives in a single file. When you open WhatsApp, your chats load from one. The project's own estimate is over a trillion SQLite databases in use, and the team pays for the work by selling support through Hipp's company.

If you want two minutes away from the squares, play today’s Long Story Short, one true story cut to five of its own words.

Wrote zlib with Jean-loup Gailly in 1995. In his other job he managed NASA's Spirit rover on its way to Mars.

zlib makes files smaller. It is inside PNG images, web pages, Git, Android, iPhones and Chrome, and Debian counts it on 291,615 of the machines that report to it, effectively every one. In the last year two people did most of the work, Mark and a contributor who goes by Vollstrecker. Mark has no sponsor page, and zlib is not on any public funding list we checked.

between the line that became Shellshock going into bash and anyone reporting it.

Has maintained bash, the shell on Linux and on Macs from 2003 to 2019, since about 1990, alongside his job in the network group at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.

In September 2014 Stéphane Chazelas reported a bug in bash to Chet. Anyone could use it to run commands on a server by sending it a specially shaped piece of text, and on 24 September it went public as Shellshock, on hundreds of millions of machines. The line behind it had gone into bash on 5 August 1989. Every change in bash's public history is Chet's, including the official fixes.

Rewrote HarfBuzz, which decides how letters join and sit for Android, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, the Kindle and Figma.