Chris Shiflett is an author and speaker who leads the web application security practice at OmniTI.
PHP Magazine has a free issue coming up on 15 Dec 2003 to celebrate the new monthly version of their magazine to be published in PDF format. A few weeks ago, I was asked to write the cover article, an offer I happily accepted. My article discusses sess...
I just discovered Localfeeds, a search engine for feeds where the searches are based on geographic location. This seemed interesting enough, so I typed in my ZIP (10001) and was shown the most recent blogs within 50 miles of 10001 (New York City). Sure...
PHP has one of the largest developer communities in the world, yet we have no community gathering place like those you can find for other languages (Perl has http://use.perl.org/, for example). Want to help change this? I am coordinating the devel...
I don't think I've ever been quoted before. While at ApacheCon, I went to see if there were any free Cokes left from lunch for Casey and I, and my quest was briefly interrupted by someone from Linux Today who wanted to ask me a question. I agreed, thi...
ApacheCon is over. When trying to think of all of the people that I hung out with or met for the first time (or both), I came up with the following list: Stas Bekman, Marcus Boerger, Rich Bowen, Philippe Chiasson, John Coggeshall, Rael Dornfest, Sterl...
Today was as busy as yesterday, and I've realized that it's impossible to give an accurate account of a day at ApacheCon. This is especially true when I try to remember everything that happened late at night or sometime the following day. I spent mu...
I met up with Nat and went to see Adam's talk on XML in PHP 5. I then spent much of the afternoon with Nat, Adam, John, and a few other PHP and Perl guys. I went to dinner with O'Reilly and spoke a lot with Stas about his work with mod_perl. I als...
My flight left JFK at 8:00 AM. That was not cool, but at least everything was on time. After arriving in Las Vegas, I met up with Geoff to go grab a burger and met one of his coworkers and Casey in the process. It was also the best burger I've ever e...
For all of the security-conscious PHP professionals who are starving for information, help is on the way. I'm pleased to announce my latest writing project, the PHP Security Handbook to be published by O'Reilly and Associates. There are many step...
And, mod_perl rocks. :-) Thus was the lesson taught by Geoff in his wonderful presentation given to NY.pm last night. He was specifically speaking about mod_perl 2.0, and the approach was very nice. The presentation began with a detailed step-by-step a...
Dave has a very interesting discussion on the "Virtual Machine War". Personally, I'm placing my bets and hopes on Parrot.
There is an interesting article on ONJava.com entitled The PHP Scalability Myth. The author describes scalability as follows: There are a number of different aspects of scalability. It always starts with performance, which is what we will cover in ...
My article about XSS and CSRF was published today (technically yesterday, since it is after midnight) in php|a. When reading through it, I couldn't help my perfectionist tendencies, and I found myself noticing a few minor errors. None of these exist i...
NYPHP has announced RAMP training courses. Lasting only three hours each, these courses are intended for people who are already experienced but are looking for advanced instruction on very specific topics. The hope is that you can take a class in t...
I wrote a quick PHP script that produces an RSS feed of my blog. You can find it at http://shiflett.org/rss. I'm not positive that it is valid RSS, but it satisfies a few RSS validators that I was able to find online.
Slashdot featured a review of the HTTP Developer's Handbook today. The review itself was short on details and not very flattering, but an overwhelming majority of the comments posted were very complimentary, so that was nice. Here's hoping that the ex...
You may have already read on Dave's blog that he, Adam, and I are speaking at the NYSIA Open Source SIG on Tue, 07 Oct 2003. That's the New York Software Industry Association Open Source Special Interest Group. Acronyms aren't so bad, are they? I al...
I went to the US Open yesterday to watch the Men's Semis. Andre Agassi lost his first two sets and was unable to come back. Andy Roddick had the same start, so it looked like it was going to be a bad day for US fans. Luckily, he made an amazing comeba...
It looks like I will be speaking at ApacheCon 2003. My talk will be similar to my OSCON talk, though I will be enhancing it quite a bit using some of the illustrations I drew for my article in php|architect. The talk with cover Cross-Site Scripting...
I have finally updated the HTTP Developer's Handbook companion Web site to reflect the new cover. The fun was in reorganizing the site. I decided to use the "clean URLs" approach, so I am using a combination of Apache's ForceType directive, PHP's $_...
I decided to redo my web site. I plan to add occasional updates in popular blog fashion, but I'm not using any blogging software, so no feeds, comments, etc. Things will probably be a bit sparse in the beginning. I recently finished an article for php...
404 not found :( What's with this OpenID thing, you know how long it took me to figure out I h...
I am very interested in the possibilities of this service. However, I am wondering about what is ...
Awesome code! Thanks!
Thanks for this, Shiffers. I've been working on a similar thing, using a similar method, so it's ...
Hi! May you give me an example how to use mcrypt_encrypt() in order to save passwrod in databa...
