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.
This week, the SourceForge.Net servers have been attacked. Since the Serendipity project hosts files and our plugin's CVS on SourceForge's provided servers, this also affects our maintaineance and distribution of plugins through Spartacus.
For people having problems, you can manually download plugins through spartacus.s9y.org. You should be able to choose netmirror.org as the spartacus mirror as well.
Normal services should be restored in a few days. For the longer run, our team might move plugin repositories from CVS to SVN or even Git, but changing this will take some time (and discussion).
Onli has contributed a new plugin to spartacus, called serendipity_event_autoupdate. It is currently very much in experimental state and is meant to aid in the process of upgrading Serendipity (which already is quite easy, but automatic might even be better, right?).
If you are interested in this feature, now is the time to help develop it! Please give Feedback to online (german) or directly on the corresponding forum thread.
Serendipity bundles the powerful Xinha WYSIWYG editor to provide its functionality to our users.
Xinha ships with several plugins that utilize PHP scripting for special usage, like the ImageManager or ExtendedFileManager. A 0-day security exploit has been reported available as of today that exploits the functionality of these plugins to upload malicious files to your webspace, to execute foreign code.
Since no official patch has been made on the Xinha side, the Serendipity Team has released an updated version where those active Xinha-Plugins are no longer executable.
If you do not wish to apply the patch to the most recent Serendipity version 1.5.5 you can remove those files:
The provided functionality is usually not enabled by default, since Serendipity provides its own media file manager.
Future serendipity releases might re-enable these features, once they are safely patched.
To see if you are infected, please check the directories htmlarea/plugins/ImageManager/demo_images and htmlarea/plugins/ExtendedFileManager/demo_images to see if files have been uploaded there. If so, delete the files and check your webspace for other modified files, as well as change your passwords for FTP and SQL access. Please upgrade as soon as possible.
The release can be found on the Serendipity Download page. All serendipity versions from 1.4 to 1.6 (alpha) are affected. 1.6 alpha users should migrate to a recent SVN head checkout or tomorrow's snapshot.
Thanks a lot to Hauser & Wenz for reporting the issue. Serendipity fully acknowledges responsible full disclosure, non-reported 0-day exploits are helping nobody of true OpenSource spirit.
Serendipity 1.5.4 has been released and addresses some minor bugfixes as well as a XSS security issue discovered and reported by High-Tech Bridge. The XSS is only exploitable though, if you are using the "Remember me" feature in the Serendipity backend to login. Thanks to the quick notification by the team we were able to fix the issue within 24 hours, as with all past security issues.
The XSS-issue can easily be patched by only replace the file include/functions_config.inc.php with the new file (link), or by applying this patch.
Other bugfixes that come with the new Serendipity 1.5.4 release are:
The latest release can be found on our SourceForge repository and on the usual place on . To upgrade from any previous Serendipity version, simply extract and upload the new files to your server.