All news about PHP

coondoggie writes “Microsoft’s Sam Ramji is like a turkey knocking on Thanksgiving’s door. Ramji has the unenviable task of stretching his neck out into the open source world as Microsoft’s representative. On top of it, his employer has preheated the oven with years of hubris, sleights of hand and broken promises. Ramji’s Sisyphean task was evident last week in Portland at the Open Source Conference (OSCon) and will likely be fuel for chatter at next week’s LinuxWorld gathering in San Francisco.”

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CWmike writes “It turns out that problems with the July 8 patch that was rolled out to fix a cache poisoning flaw discovered by researcher Dan Kaminsky are causing headaches for admins. Preston Gralla suggests a 30-second quick-fix, perhaps until everyone is patched up: Use OpenDNS, which has been patched, as your personal DNS. If you run a corporate network and need help getting OpenDNS set up, your best bet is to go to the OpenDNS FAQ page, he writes.”

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Alsee writes “Welcome to our first real taste of Trusted Computing: With Vista Enterprise and Vista Ultimate, Service Pack 1 refuses to install on dual boot systems. Trusted Computing is one of the many things that got cut from Vista, but traces of it remain in BitLocker, and that is the problem. The Service Pack patch to your system will invalidate your Trust chain if you are not running the Microsoft-approved Microsoft-trusted boot loader, or if you make other similar unapproved modifications to your system. The Trust chip (the TPM) will then refuse to give you your key to unlock your own hard drive. If you are not running BitLocker then a workaround is available: Switch back to Microsoft’s Vista-only boot mode, install the Service Pack, then reapply your dual boot loader. If you are running BitLocker, or if Microsoft resumes implementing Trusted Computing, then you are S.O.L.”

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rsiles writes “Honeynet solutions were seen just as a research technology a couple of years ago. It is not the case anymore. Due to the inherent constraints and limitations of the current and widely deployed intrusion detection solutions, like IDS/IPS and antivirus, it is time to extended our detection arsenal and capabilities with new tools: virtual honeypots. Do not get confused about the book title, specially about the “virtual” term. The main reason to mention virtual honeypots, although the book covers all kind of honeynet/honeypot technologies, is because during the last few years virtualization has been a key element in the deployment of honeynets. It has offered us a significant cost reduction, more flexibility, reusability and multiple benefits. The main drawback of this solution is the detection of virtual environments by some malware specimens.” Read below for the rest of Raul’s review.

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parvenu74 writes “A story from Infoworld is suggesting that the days of Windows are numbered and that Microsoft is preparing a web-based operating system code-named Midori as a successor. Midori is reported to be an offshoot of Microsoft Research’s Singularity OS, an all-managed code microkernel OS which leverages a technology called software isolated processes (SIPs) to overcome the traditional inter-thread communications issues of microkernel OSes.”

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BobB writes “HD Moore has been owned. Moore, the creator of the popular Metasploit hacking toolkit, has become the victim of a computer attack. It happened on Tuesday morning, when Moore’s company, BreakingPoint, had some of its Internet traffic redirected to a fake Google page that was being run by a scammer. According to Moore, the hacker was able to do this by launching what’s known as a cache poisoning attack on a DNS server on AT&T’s network that was serving the Austin, Texas, area. One of BreakingPoint’s servers was forwarding DNS (Domain Name System) traffic to the AT&T server, so when it was compromised, so was HD Moore’s company.”

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the4thdimension writes “A UK man, accused of breaking into US Pentagon and NASA computers in March 2001, lost an extradition appeal that would have freed him, or at least had him tried in the UK. While the US accuses him of causing over $900,000 in computer damage, his attorney asserts that, if extradited to the US, he faces harsh penalties that are “intolerable” and “…he British government declined to prosecute him to enable the U.S. government to make an example of him.” He intends to appeal to the European courts.”

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“Improve the user interface of old client-server applications and delight your users while reducing the TCO,” says Curl Chief Strategy Officer Jnan Dash in this Exclusive Q&A with SYS-CON’s AJAX & RIA Journal in the run-up to his session on October 20 at AJAX World RIA Conference & Expo in San Jose, California (October 20-22, 2008). Dash feels the low hanging fruit for Web 2.0 deployment in the enterprise is called “RIA”.

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Last week, I got an email from Garrett Serack, M’soft Open Source Community Developer. Microsoft have been kind enough to donate a set of ADOdb drivers for the new MSSQL Native Extension for PHP. You can download the extension here and the ADOdb drivers here.

Garrett also mentions that ADOdb is the first LGPL project that Microsoft has ever contributed to. I quote from his email to me:

ADODB is actually the first LGPL Open Source project that Microsoft has ever contributed to.
We've got a dozen or so others lined up and ready to go to other open source PHP projects
(GPL, BSD and others), But ADODB was the *FIRST*. You could say that contributing to ADODB
is Microsoft going from zero to one.

We announced it at OSCON, (see the post at http://port25.technet.com/archive/2008/07/25/oscon2008.aspx )
along with Microsoft becoming a platinum sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation. Either of
these two steps is such a good move for Microsoft, and both together, is a good sign that the
Company is learning.

Thanks Garrett.

Story in The Register.

PS: ADOdb is dual licensed as LGPL and BSD. Choose which license you want.