Good and bad things come in doubles, it seems. We are sorry to inform you that another security issue in Serendipity has been found by the High-Tech Bridge SA Security Research Lab (Advisory HTB23092). This issue has been reported today at 11:27 and we're happy to provide a quick fix for that.
You can either download the full 1.6.2 release, or apply this simple fix to the file include/functions_trackbacks.inc.php: diff on github.
The error here is that input is not properly validated and can be used (when magic_quotes_gpc is off) to inject SQL code to a SQL query; since our DB layer does not execute multiple statements, and the involved SQL query is not used to produce output code, we regard the impact as low. Nevertheless, please upgrade your installation.
Serendipity is an open-source based product with no specific funding, so we depend on nice people like High-Tech Bridge, Stefan Schurtz, Hanno Böck and all the others of the past to report issues to us. In turn we promise to fix them as quickly and transparently as possible.
Serendipity 1.6.1 has just been released. As usual you can simply download from s9y.org, extract the archive, upload it to your webspace and accept the upgrader when visiting your blog.
This release mainly addresses two security issues found by Stefan Schurtz (thanks a lot, again!). One is a XSS issue in the media database panel, the other an SQL injection in the media database section. Both issues can only be exploited if you are logged in to your blog and you click a specially crafted link. The SQL injection cannot be used to extract sensitive information from the database or delete data.
Either way you are urged to upgrade your Blog to the latest version. Development versions of 2.0 and 1.7 on github have these bugs fixed as well.
Other bugfixes in this version include:
You might also want to check out our quite stable 1.7 development version which uses Smarty3, or even our 2.0 development version which contains major rewrites so that Smarty is used in the backend!
Das deutsche "Serendipity Handbuch" OpenSourcePress wurde vor einiger Zeit veröffentlicht, und der Verlag war so nett, die Rechte an den Buchinhalten zurückzuerhalten (auch dank des tatkräftigen Engagements von Dirk Deimeke und natürlich unserer tollen Community).
Das bedeutet, die Inhalte wurden nun unter einer CC-BY-NC-SA Lizenz veröffentlicht und können von der Community (also: EUCH!) frei gelesen, erweitert und möglicherweise auch übersetzt werden. Die meisten Dinge des Handbuchs finden auch heute noch Anwendung, aber es gibt genügend Spielraum für Verbesserungen.
Schaut euch das ganze hier an: Das Serendipity Handbuch. Die Dateien liegen im LaTeX format vor, ihr benötigt daher eine funktionierende LaTeX-Umgebung, um die Dateien kompilieren zu können. Die .tex-Dateien sind jedoch im Klartextformat, also keine fremde Scheu. :-)
Derzeit überlegen wir, in welchem Format das ganze endgültig und sinnvoll für die Benutzer und Mithelfer hinterlegt werden wird. Gerne diskutieren wir hierüber mit euch im Forum.
The german "Serendipity Manual" was published by OpenSourcePress some time ago. They were so kind to revert the publishing license back to our project (thanks to the great work of Dirk Deimeke and kind people like you), so that we can now publish it under a CC-BY-NC-SA license, and let the community (read: YOU!) be able to read the documentation for free, contribute to it, and hopefully even translate it to other languages. Many aspects of the book are still up to date, but surely many improvements can now be made.
Check it out here: The Serendipity Book. The files are written in LaTeX format, so you need a working LaTeX environment to compile it as PDF or other variants, if you like. We are currently working out the best format to use in the future; if you want, you can help us discuss this on the forums.
Grischa needs some help on updating the XML-RPC for more iOS clients. Here's the quote from his original posting of the s9y forum post:
At the moment I am enhancing the xml-rpc interface of Serendipity with WordPress functionality.
The idea: If Serendipity is able to emulate WordPress interfaces, we can use all the tools using it. WordPress is much more suported than S9Y as it is more known. I'm aiming on the mobile clients available for WordPress blogs in special at them moment.
The problem: The enhancements are nearly ready and successfully tested with the official WP for Android client, blogsy on iOS for iPad and MarsEdit and ecto for Mac. What is missing is the app for the iphone. The official WP for iOS client is able to register the blog and reads some categories but then it crashes without any message.
The developer team of WP for iOS was not very helpful on that but the client is available as Open Source.
As I am not able to debug iOS apps (I don't even have a Mac) I'm seeking an iOS developer being s9y fan, too, who is able to debug what goes wrong there, so I can finalize my changes on the s9y xml-rpc interface.
Thanks!
Since the core Serendipity project is now maintained on github.com and every developer is quite happy about that, we decided to go the jquery-plugins route and delete all Serendipity plugins.
No, just kidding. We actually imported all data from the SourceForge.net CVS servers into the github infrastructure. The short version for normal end-users: Nothing should change for you!
https://github.com/s9y/additional_plugins
https://github.com/s9y/additional_themes
All current Serendipity developers also have access to those repositories to contribute code. Developers now no longer should commit code to CVS (actually, they can't, because I took all their committing karma *eg*).
The harder task for the Spartacus infrastructure service is the actual publishing of data. The Spartacus plugin operates on a PEAR-like XML format for each plugin, which luckily is automatically generated by a small shellscript which runs once daily on one of our webservers (emerge.sh). That script iterates on a checkout of all plugins and templates, creates the XML and uploads it to all mirror servers (currently netmirror.org, s9y.org and now also github.com).
Downloading the files also either works via the files that are uploaded daily to netmirror.org and s9y.org, or you always could use the SourceForge.net server, that published the file via a nasty ViewVC oddity. The spartacus plugin of the current github core code (version 2.25) now can also retrieve those files from the Github.com servers.
For all users that currently use the Spartacus plugin with the SourceForge.Net mirror, our daily script now pushes all changes in the GitHub tree also to CVS, so that both repositories *should* be kept in sync. This is done via the gitclone.sh and gitclone.php scripts in the additional_plugins repository, for anyone that's interested.
Most likely, something in this script won't work properly, so in the next days it might be that some glitches in the matrix can occur. In that case, please report issues and remain seated. Or buy christmas presents for your beloved. Or your beloved developers.
The Serendipity Team is proud to present the final release of Serendipity 1.6. We are steadily walking towards a Serendipity 2.0 release and would be happy about any developer who may want to join our cause. The list of things is available on http://www.s9y.org/238.html and open for discussion on the Serendipity Forums.
This new version mainly covers:
The current release can be easily installed on any previous Serendipity installation. Just unpack, upload and visit your admin panel to perform possible database upgrades. Upon first login with an old password, Serendipity will store your old password in the new format - please be sure to make a backup of your Database prior to upgrading, and read the upgrade pointers on Upgrading Serendipity.
Also, this release marks our move from the closing BerliOS service (thanks for the great service during those years) on to our new GitHub repository. Contributions are welcome of course!
Have fun using Serendipity, and let us know on the Forums if you have any issues!
This is just a reference posting to indicate something important going on. Please read here on the process of the Serendipity source code repository being about to move to GitHub
Serendipity's code repository is being hosted on BerliOS for several years. Their free service is now closing down, which means that Serendipity will move its versioning control to a new provider.
The current idea is to migrate SVN over to GitHub.com. This might even motivate some new contributors to get accustomed with the Serendipity core code and make contributing patches easier.
We are planning to move the code repository at the end of October and will keep you posted here. If there are people reading this who are well familiar with Git and especially SVN migration, please step up here or in the forums to help us in the process.
Asides from the SVN service, Serendipity is currently using this infrastructure:
MustLive discovered a HTML-injection vulnerability in the tagcloud.swf Flashfile that the Freetag-Plugin bundles and makes optionally available.
The issue is fixed in version 1.23 of the flashfile, which has now been committed to the Serendipity plugin (in version 3.30).
Since the swf-File is always bundled with the update, it is recommended to update to the latest version of the plugin for all users, or to delete that specific .swf file.
Thanks to MustLive for sharing the information with us.
Christian Boltz notified us and provided a patch to fix the spartacus plugin properly being able to retrieve remote files. This became necessary when SourceForge.net changed their underlying structure.
If you are using Spartacus, you have several possibilities to fix this issue for you:
1: Manually download the updated plugin file plugins/ serendipity_event_spartacus/ serendipity_event_spartacus.php from here: serendipity_event_spartacus.php for Serendipity 1.6 / Development, serendipity_event_spartacus.php for Serendipity 1.5.
2: You can also simply configure your spartacus plugin and enable the use of Netmirror.org, or you can enter a custom mirror: http://php-blog.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/php-blog/|http://netmirror.org/mirror/serendipity/
3: You can also simply edit your serendipity_event_spartacus.php file and replace all 2 occurences of the string *checkout* with viewvc.
Thanks to Christian for notifying us!
Thanks to Stefan Schurtz, who reported a XSS issue in the serendipity_event_freetag plugin (SSCHADV2011-004). The issue was fixed in version 3.22 of the plugin, you can fetch the update through Spartacus or download via Spartacus.s9y.org.
The bug was introduced in version 3.20 of the plugin. Users of the plugin should upgrade, as it allows malicious users to trick people into visiting a specially crafted link on your blog to steal cookie login information for example, if you click on such a link.
Even though the Disqus.com comment integration is easily integratable inside a serendipity template already, the need for a specific plugin was raised on the forums.
serendipity_event_disqus is now available on Spartacus and provides exactly this - a plug and play component to enable disqus comments on your blog, and it even allows you to only use this system for more recent blog entries, so that your old comments can be preserved.
Currently the plugin hides the Serendipity-internal comments and trackbacks through CSS. The plugin provides instructions on how to modify that, if you have a custom template.
Have fun using the plugin, and if you have issues or recommendations for it, feel free to discuss this on the Serendipity forums. :-)
The podcast plugin has recently been improved to offer a much more flexible configuration with custom player and HTML5 audio/video support. The flowplayer has been added as a new, more flexible flash-video player replacement.
You can now specify custom feed options, and the RSS podcast format should now be iTunes compatible., as well as the Flowplayer replacement for Flash-Videos. Also, custom feed options that you can add to the RSS-Feed (rss.php?podcast_format=XXX) allow you to filter the enclosures only to specific file extensions.
The update should be compatible to older versions so that you can simply use the new features. If you customized any of the player files, you can now do that much easier through the configuration; be sure to backup any files you might have changed before upgrading.
Please report any issues you might have with this updates on the forums!
It has come to our attention that the Cronjob-Plugin (serendipity_event_cronjob) has a bug that prevents it from properly detecting the next scheduled update time. This bug has been fixed in version 0.6, which should now be available through Spartacus and usual means.
If you use this plugin, this is a required update to ensure it's proper function. Thanks to Matthias2 from the forums for reporting this to us.
The Internet Explorer 9 has been released a few days ago. It's a great improvement over old versions, despite of one mayor breakage.
Usually, a web-browser requests a CSS URL with a variety of HTTP-headers. The "Accept" HTTP-Header instructs the remote server, which valid content-types it can handle. In the past, most web-browsers sent a "Accept: text/css; */*" header, which means they prefer "text/css", but would also interpret any other file types as CSS.
Now, the IE9 does no longer send */* as an accepted content-Type, thus it will now ONLY render stylesheets if they have the Content-Type "text/css". If that does not happen, IE9 complains with a "HTTP 406" error and refuses to parse/render the stylesheet.
That does not sound so bad yet, but many web-applications (including Serendipity) provide dynamic CSS stylesheets that hide behind a PHP file. Serendipity compiles this PHP through a file called "serendipity.css.php". If URL rewriting is enabled, to mask that PHP file, a RewriteRule is added that will accept "serendipity.css" and send it to the main serendipity index.php file, which in turn will include serendipity.css.php and deliver the appropriate output.
Now certain Apache setups use a module mod_negotiation that will detect "Hey- there's a file serendipity.css.php, but the browser requested serendipity.css. He surely must be mistaken, I better serve up this serendipity.css.php file instead". Sadly, it does so, BEFORE executung mod_rewrite that would "fix" this behaviour.
Finally - mod_negotiate would basically properly execute the PHP file and return valid CSS. But it does that by returning a Content-Type that matches the original negotiated request, which is "application/x-httpd-php". IE9 will receive this, and refuse to render the proper CSS, because it does not accept */*.
IMHO this is a very bad mixture of several components acting weird altogether. But the easiest place to fix this is inside IE9, to restore the "Accept" behaviour of all other major browsers, so that mod_negotiated sites will not break.
I have posted on a IE9 Team blog since it seems, Microsoft does not accept bug reports anywhere. If anybody knows of a proper place to get a hold of their team, please let us know.
FINALLY - WHAT YOU CAN DO IF THIS AFFECTS YOUR SERENDIPITY BLOG:
Edit your .htaccess file, and add the directive Options -Multiviews at the top of the file. As long as your server has the AllowOveride ability enabled for you (that's mostly the case, as soon as you are allowed to use mod_rewrite) you can remove the negotiation feature of Apache.
This change in the default .htaccess will also be part of upcoming Serendipity versions.
Clarification: This is not only IE9's fault, but rather a bad combination of multiple factors: One being that s9y has a .php file called the same way like a rewritten URL. One being that mod_negotiate does not pass a request through to mod_rewrite and fatally catches it before other means are not used up. And the last being that IE9 does not accept a fallback contenttype for CSS.
The reason why I think this should be considered a IE9 bug, is because the restrictive parsing stats against current plans to make the web as accessible as possible. XHTML actually failed in its restrictive, XML-based parsing (google mime-type application/x-html+xml) was stomped down in favor of a lax HTML5 parsing. Users should never be locked out of content, and that's why I think a fallback */* should not hurt. This allows for applications to overcome mod_negotiate and allows the browser to evaluate the final Content-Type, and not an intermediate negotiated one.