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Comment Re:HTTPS is not flawed (Score 1) 185

by dotancohen (#48017409) Attached to: Security Collapse In the HTTPS Market

Thanks. I did untrust the obvious ones, such as the Turkish and Chinese certs, however the list is long and I'd like to tighten the security a bit. Is there any way to see which certs I've actually _used_ so that I could start making informed decisions? Take for example "Trustis Limited". On what basis would I decide to keep or leave it.

I don't mean to be a pain, but you seem to be the only person who understands this subject. Even googling the subject does not return many useful links. Thanks.

Submission + - Online communications platform for political dissent? 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Now that most of the major tech players (Apple, Google, MS) are compromised, what online communications platforms are available for those who would like to initiate change in the US political system? Consider that the current state of encrypting email is not trivial and additionally that using encryption or Tor is considered grounds for enhanced surveillance. Technical proficiency should not be a prerequisite to initiate political change. So when the common man who considers "the blue E" as the internet asks how he can communicate with me about initiating changes in the US political system, what solutions can I provide to him? Should we restrict ourselves to the post office with 2-3 days' latency in communications and face-to-face meetings? One can see that those restrictions puts us at quite the disadvantage.

Submission + - From PHP 5 to 7 (halls-of-valhalla.org)

Submitted by halls-of-valhalla
halls-of-valhalla writes: Since around 2005 we've heard talk about PHP 6 development. There have even been books sold about it. But where is PHP 6? As of July of this year it was decided that there won't be one and that PHP will skip directly to PHP 7. Why is it skipping to the next major version, and what ever happened with PHP 6?

In 2005, work began on a project headed by Andrei Zmievski to bring native Unicode support to PHP by embedding the International Components for Unicode (ICU) library and internally representing strings as UTF-16. Because this project would lead to major internal and user-affecting changes, it was planned to be the next major PHP version (i.e. PHP 6) along with a few other features.

By using UTF-16 as default encoding, developers would need to convert the code and all input (e.g. data from requests, database, etc.) from one encoding to UTF-16 and back again. This conversion takes a lot of CPU time, memory (to store the much larger strings), and creates a higher complexity in the implementation due to the increased need to detect the proper encoding for the situation. In light of all of this and the relatively small gain, many contributors became unwilling to use "trunk" as their main development branch and instead either using the stable 5.2/5.3 branches or refusing to do development at all. This shortage of developers led to delays in the project.

After a vote in July of 2014, it was officially decided that the next major release would be called PHP 7. The primary reason for even considering the name is the widely-known existence of the previous failed attempt of a new major release, and the existence of numerous books and other resources which already referred to the previous PHP 6. To address potential confusion, there was an RFC (i.e. request for comments) and a vote on whether or not to reuse this name.

In the end it was decided to release PHP 7 as the next major version, arguing that the worst case scenario is that they needlessly skipped a version as opposed to the worst case of releasing it as PHP 6 which is widespread confusion in the community.

Read the full story here: Valhalla News — From PHP 5 to 7

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