feed on feeds - 2017/04/15 - items 0 to 15

North Korea holds a large military parade after US sends warships to the region.

An anonymous reader quotes ThreatPost: A popular version of the open source Magento ecommerce platform is vulnerable to a zero-day remote code execution vulnerability, putting as many as 200,000 online retailers at risk... According Bosko Stankovic, information security engineer at DefenseCode, despite repeated efforts to notify Magento, which began in November 2016, the vulnerability remains unpatched despite four version updates since the disclosure. Affected versions of the Magento Community Edition software include v. 2.1.6 and below. DefenseCode did not examine Magento Enterprise, the commercial version of the platform, but warns both share the same underlying vulnerable code... The remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability is tied to the default feature in Magento Community Edition that allows administrators to add Vimeo video content to product descriptions. DefenseCode says the exploit can be mitigated by enforcing Magento's "Add Secret Keys To URLS" feature, warning in a paper that the hole otherwise "could lead to remote code execution and thus the complete system compromise including the database containing sensitive customer information such as stored credit card numbers and other payment information." Magento has confirmed the exploit, says they're investigating it, and promises they'll address it in their next patch release.

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Andy Hunt is one of the 17 software developers who wrote the Agile Manifesto, and he co-authored The Pragmatic Programmer. Now Slashdot reader cerberusss writes: In an interview with Best Programming Books, Andy Hunt mentions he "hates languages that introduce accidental complexity, such as JavaScript -- what a nightmare of pitfalls for newbies and even seasoned developers... My go-to languages are still Ruby for most things, or straight C for systems programming, Pi or Arduino projects." Furthermore, he mentions that "I tend to do more experimenting and engineering than pure code writing, so there's occasionally some soldering involved ;). Code is just one tool of many." Andy writes that he also likes Elixir, talks about Agile, reveals how he survived his most challenging project, and says the biggest advancement in programming has been the open source movement. ("Imagine trying to study chemistry, but the first half of the elements were patent-protected by a major pharma company and you couldn't use them...") And he also answered an interesting follow-up question on Twitter: "Do you feel validated in an age of Node and GitHub? Some of your best chapters (scripting and source control) are SOP now!" Andy's reply? "We've made some great progress, for sure. But there's much to be done still. E.g., You can't ship process."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Andy Hunt is one of the 17 software developers who wrote the Agile Manifesto, and he co-authored The Pragmatic Programmer. Now Slashdot reader cerberusss writes: In an interview with Best Programming Books, Andy Hunt mentions he "hates languages that introduce accidental complexity, such as JavaScript -- what a nightmare of pitfalls for newbies and even seasoned developers... My go-to languages are still Ruby for most things, or straight C for systems programming, Pi or Arduino projects." Furthermore, he mentions that "I tend to do more experimenting and engineering than pure code writing, so there's occasionally some soldering involved ;). Code is just one tool of many." Andy writes that he also likes Elixir, talks about Agile, reveals how he survived his most challenging project, and says the biggest advancement in programming has been the open source movement. ("Imagine trying to study chemistry, but the first half of the elements were patent-protected by a major pharma company and you couldn't use them...") And he also answered an interesting follow-up question on Twitter: "Do you feel validated in an age of Node and GitHub? Some of your best chapters (scripting and source control) are SOP now!" Andy's reply? "We've made some great progress, for sure. But there's much to be done still. E.g., You can't ship process."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DateTime implementation of the Shire Calendar from JRR Tolkien's classic, "Lord of the Rings".

Easy Validation Handler

Add 'Content-Disposition' header for specified statics.

Violence intensifies in disputed region as police respond to rock-throwing protesters with pellet and tear gas fire.

Former PM and current opposition leader kicks off Al Jazeera's 11th annual forum addressing the 'new equation' in Syria.

"Any way you look at it, from kick-starting the Internet to launching the personal computer revolution, Bob Taylor was a key architect of our modern world," says a historian at Stanford's Silicon Valley Archives. An anonymous reader quotes the New York Times: The Internet, like many inventions, was the work of many inventors. But perhaps no one deserves more credit for that world-changing technological leap than Mr. Taylor. The seminal moment of his work came in 1966. He had just taken a new position at the Pentagon -- director of the Information Processing Techniques Office, part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Arpa -- and on his first day on the job it became immediately obvious to him what the office lacked and what it needed. At the time, Arpa was funding three separate computer research projects and using three separate computer terminals to communicate with them. Mr. Taylor said, No, we need a single computer research network, to connect each project with the others, to enable each to communicate with the others... His idea led to the Arpanet, the forerunner of the Internet. A half-decade later, at Xerox's storied Palo Alto Research Center, Mr. Taylor was instrumental in another technological breakthrough: funding the design of the Alto computer, which is widely viewed as the forerunner of the modern personal computer. Mr. Taylor even had a vital role in the invention of the computer mouse. In 1961, at the dawn of the Space Age, he was about a year into his job as a project manager at NASA in Washington when he learned about the work of a young computer scientist at Stanford Research Institute, later called SRI International... Mr. Taylor decided to pump more money into the work, and the financial infusion led directly to Engelbart's invention of the mouse, a computer control technology that would be instrumental in the design of both Macintosh and Microsoft Windows-based computers. Taylor had become fascinated with human-computer interactions in the 1950s during his graduate work at the University of Texas at Austin, and was "appalled" that performing data calculations required submitting his punch cards to a technician running the school's mainframe computers. Years later, it was Taylor's group at PARC that Steve Jobs visited in 1979, which inspired the "desktop" metaphor for the Macintosh's graphical user interface. And Charles Simonyi eventually left PARC to join Microsoft, where he developed the Office suite of applications. Taylor died Thursday at his home in Woodside, California, from complications of Parkinson's disease, at the age of 85.

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