Archive 2. March 2006

Data greed is awesome?

One can almost see the drool dripping from the corners of the mouths of the police officials and the minister when reading the article about the Federal Constitutional Court ruling on the seizure of computers and emails. Funny, how the politicians only mention in passing that the seizure itself was absolutely not in order - instead, they immediately start screaming for legal extensions so that even more can be collected.

The restriction of the Federal Constitutional Court - that seizures must be proportional and appropriate - can certainly be forgotten, because no one will take that into account. And with the constant change in communication structures towards electronic means, one can then safely consider the secrecy of telecommunications as a done deal.

Why I Don't Like PHP Software

Wordpress is indeed one of the better systems written in PHP. And what happens? There are several sloppy programming practices found within it. Yes, I know, this happens in other languages too. The point is: the Wordpress programmers are relatively well qualified and relatively careful in their work - and yet such problems occur. Among other things, because in PHP the sources lie within the server root, meaning files that are actually only used internally are accessible via HTTP. And because PHP solutions do not inherently perform input validation and proper text quoting. No, sorry, but I simply do not like such a mess.