In the past few years FUDforum has grown quite a bit in both the offered functionality and the user base. However, aside from a few tweaks the layout of the forum has remained largely unchanged. While the current layout works quite well for most people, there is a clear want to update the layout to something more interesting. Hence this contest, the goal being to devise a new better, faster and prettier default theme (layout) for the forum, which would improve the user experience. Aside from a new and improved default template some additional templates maybe included in the stock distribution to give forum deployers greater flexibility as far as appearance out of the box. So, if you have some spare time and would like to help to improve FUDforum please submit your design entries, more information can be found here: http://fudforum.org/forum/index.php?t=msg&goto=26425

A few days ago I received a bug report from a FUDforum user about his forum members having trouble staying logged in when using the AOL 9 browser, herein to be referred to as POS. According to him after logging in and browsing a few pages, the user would suddenly find themselves being logged out from the FUDforum. This happened on seemingly random pages, with no common element in between making tracking down the problem ever so enjoyable. The following is a nightmarish tale of me trying to resolve this problem, which hopefully serve as a clue to the developers who encounter the same issue. At first I thought the issue maybe related to the fact that POS, a hacked up IE that always goes through AOL proxies when it comes to fetching the content. These proxies change in between requests (load balancer?) so during the same session a user may go through any number of different IP addresses, which AOL has a fair number of. 64.12.96.0/19, 149.174.160.0/20 152.163.240.0/21,152.163.248.0/22 152.163.252.0/23,152...

In the past few days I've been testing a number of my own applications and scripts as well as various bits and pieces of applications written by others that I use, using an automated scanning tool I have written. One particular issue I came across, common to all applications is the inevitable "path disclosure vulnerability". The premise behind this so called vulnerability is that remote attackers by specifying certain value can make the script report it's own location on disk. Theoretically this combined with another vulnerability could be used to do something or rather then potentially could be bad. As you can probably tell, I don't see this as a something to be terribly concerned about in most cases. To demonstrate consider the following, most PHP function that take strings as parameters, like our favorite validation functions such as htmlspecialchars(), addslashes(), and so on will raise warnings when values they are passed are arrays rather then strings. This means that to get the path of the script,...

After nearly 2 months of development FUDforum 2.6.14 is finally out. Aside from the usual bug fixes this release includes a number of important improvements, such as full support for PHP 5.1 and introduction of a PDO database driver support, which enables FUDforum to talk with SQLite in addition to MySQL and PostgreSQL. In addition to all of the changes in found in RC1 and RC2 there is a small number of modification made since then, a list of which can be found below. The installer and the upgrade script can be found at their usual locations at: http://fudforum.org/download.php and all FUDforum users are encouraged to upgrade. Post RC2 Changes A series of fixes for the PDO SQLite driver. Fixed the phpBB2 conversion script. Added the ability to clear tracker for the NNTP import. Remove pointless JavaScript header in full-body e-mail notification, that triggered some spam filters (SpamAssassin). Fixed DB detection in the installer, when only one database driver is available. Added FUD API...

It seems web hosting companies are finally coming to grips with something most security experts have known for quite some time, phpBB is inherently insecure. According to Netcraft some are taking the steps to prevent further exploitation via this application by banning its usage on their servers. As per usual phpBB developer's response, they are denying blame and claim such moves are unwarranted, but given their security record during the past 6 months alone this is hardly surprising. Not only are new issues being found, because the developers can't seem to do an security audit, but new versions re-introduce bugs (2.0.15 re-introduced the flaw exploited by Santy worm) that have previously been solved. I hope other hosting providers will take notice and adopt the same strategy, not only for phpBB2 but for any application with a consistent history of security faults for which the developers do not wish to take responsiblity for. As well as failing to take the time to conduct an extensive security audit...