Brothers Monks, I just saw this article on C|Net: Danger level rises for Perl app flaws and my blood's boiling. Webmin is insecure (how useful it can be, we all know it's a huge pile of perl4-style insecure crap), a new webmin flaw arose, and what can we see in one of the most prominent news site? Perl is insecure. Argh!

I know journalists (or web-wannabe-journalists) to be clueless, but this one is too much for me to stand. How can we respond to such attacks against our language and community ? I'm still waiting for "Java is insecure" or "C# stinks" on C|Net!

update: according to http://www.webmin.com/security.html, the bug is already corrected anyway. Where are the headlines?

update 2: There is a nasty Perl bug. However, is there any evidence that it presents a major security flaw for some applications around ?

update 3: it seems so at last : Searching for sprintf() bug exploit opportunities in core and CPAN modules

In reply to Attack on Perl or Perl's need better PR (again) by wazoox

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.