Weeknotes 2026.16

Posted on So 19 April 2026 in Blog

I had the second cold this winter season during the week. That was surprising. I can't remember when I had the last time twice a season. Thankfully, two coworkers figured out that I am just getting old ;-)

It was a busy week. After last week's Mythos madness, a lot of people tried to interpret the information about Mythos. Some claimed it was only brilliant marketing, others said we need to prepare for being hacked.

I guess, even when the model is not as brilliant as Anthropic suggested, some things should be done anyway. Patch your systems. Some companies are still not missing a process where they patch their systems on a regular basis. And only expose the things to the internet that are really needed. So many things shouldn't be exposed to the internet.

Content:

Story of the week
Postgres and the world of data
Security and Privacy
AI
Around the world

Story of the week

Xata announced this week that they will release Xata core as open source under the Apache 2 license. They developed a platform for branching and copy-on-write Postgres databases. Xata did this using 100% vanilla Postgres.

Postgres and the world of data

Credential rotation in Postgres

The ElyDB Team has a nice writeup about how to rotate PostgreSQL credentials.

PostgreSQL Credential Rotation in Production: A Zero-Downtime Runbook

Postgres 19 release notes

Bruce Momjian has announced the first draft of the release notes for Postgres 19.

Postgres 19 Release Notes

504 Extensions

Ruohang Feng has written about the new extensions he added to Pigsty. 32 new Postgres extensions were added, and Pigsty now has a total of 504 extensions.

504 Extensions: Expand the PostgreSQL Landscape

PGConf India

Andreas Scherbaum has written a review about his trip to PGConf India.

PGConf India 2026 - Review

Postgres Release Monitor

Security and Privacy

Supply chain troubles

30 WordPress plugins were bought by an attacker, and all of them were "enhanced" with a backdoor.

Someone Bought 30 WordPress Plugins and Planted a Backdoor in All of Them.

Digital sovereignty

There are plans of several European governments to roll out in-house messaging apps and to get their own officials off WhatsApp and Signal.

European civil servants are being forced off WhatsApp

Data breach ticker

AI

Workslop

That is probably still a problem. Many companies invested in AI, and now they want something in return for that. But it is not working that way. At least at the moment.

Bosses say AI boosts productivity – workers say they’re drowning in ‘workslop’

Sidelined

Looking at the new Anthropic Mythos model was only granted to companies headquartered in the United States. European regulators were sidelined and didn't it seem like they still have no plan how to secure access to the model.

European regulators sidelined on Anthropic superhacking model