Dr. Christopher Kunz

After I stated my opinion about the current iteration of the Wolfenstein Series in two lenghty reviews (part 1, part 2), Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw reviewed the game in his "Zero Punctuation" review. Let's just say he has a slightly different approach, but essentially the same opinion as me. :)

Check it out.

My favorite:

your gun is of course your best friend
on which you must always depend
when you get into fights
you can look down the sights
and bullets come out of the end

The latest PHP worm (lupii) attacks systems that are vulnerable to a remote code execution hole in PEAR::XMLRPC (or phpxmlrpc). It can only propagate on systems whose administrators have neglected to update PHP (or PEAR) in the last 3 months. Those three months have seen 4 PHP version bumps alone in the PHP4 tree, and anyone who hasn’t brought his PHP up to scale is probably a moron anyway.

However, at least for PEAR, this might be easily fixable. What if the PEAR project would introduce a flag for packets, say, “-security” and modify the PEAR installer accordingly. That flag should only be used for pure security fixes, without feature or BC breakage, so that it won’t break anything at all (apart from the exploits).

A new action for the installer, say, “pear upgrade-security” could then be introduced. It would enable admins to run pear in a nightly cronjob, only fetching security fixes and installing them in a fully automated way.

Comments, everyone - is that feasible? Does a similar concept already exist?

As usual, I will be in attendance of the International PHP Conference in Frankfurt/Germany again, marking my 7th (or 8th, including the Amsterdam conferences) participation in this event. This year, however, promises to be a very special conference. Exciting things are going to happen - read more in the extended entry.

Ein netter Herr auf einer Mailingliste hat in seinen Mailformularen mit Botspam zu kämpfen und möchte das unterbinden. Da man ja allerorten diese lustigen Bildchen mit den verdrehten Buchstaben sieht, dachte er sich “mache ich sowas auch mal”.

Allerdings steht nicht unbedingt zu vermuten, daß er mit der von ihm getroffenen Maßnahme das Spamaufkommen drastisch reduzieren wird.