News and History of the PNG Development Group from 2005
Herein lie news items and historical stuff primarily of interest to the
Portable Network Graphics Development Group itself. Feel free to poke
around even if you're not a member, though. Note that some of the links,
particularly the older ones, are broken; in some cases this is explained by
later entries. Other links (CompuServe, tcg.arl.mil) have fallen prey to
reorganizations or upgrades; should they ever reappear, the entries below
will be updated as needed.
Keep in mind that this is history here...
- current - see here
- 18 July 2005 - zlib 1.2.3 is released. This version
fixes a pair of security
vulnerabilities when decoding
invalid compressed data. The bugs can cause denial-of-service problems
(crashes), at a minimum; the CERT page notes unconfirmed reports of
remote code execution. Also note that zlib.org is now a redirector to zlib.net.
- 14 June 2005 - Microsoft releases another critical PNG alert for Internet
Explorer (see also the 10 February entry
below) due to buffer overflow and consequent memory corruption. If a
user has Adminstrator privileges (not uncommon) while browsing an
attacker's site with MSIE, the attacker could take over the entire
machine. (The problem does not appear to affect any libpng-based
browsers, however.) This is listed as CAN-2005-1211 in the CVE list. Windows users should upgrade
as soon as possible.
- 12 June 2005 - The replacement for the swrinde ftp site,
ftp.simplesystems.org, is now online, courtesy of Bob Friesenhahn
and Simple
Systems. Previously Bob had hosted a mirror of the master site
(see the 20&nbps;October 2001 news item). A very big thanks
to Bob and Simple Systems for hosting the new master site! Thanks
also to Glenn Randers-Pehrson, who will help maintain it (along with
Greg).
- 9 May 2005 - After many years of excellent service, the ftp
archive at swrinde.nde.swri.edu--and the PNG and MNG resources
on it--has been retired. A hearty PNG/MNG thanks to Keith S. Pickens,
Alan Schaeffer, and Jay Fisher for setting up and maintaining the
archive for so long! Swrinde will be missed.
- 16 March 2005 - Microsoft apparently will (finally) support
alpha transparency in PNG images in Internet Explorer 7 (Windows
version, that is--the Mac version of IE has done so for many years).
At least, that's what "sources" told Microsoft Watch's Mary Jo
Foley for her article, Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 Details Begin to Leak.
Time will tell... Could this have anything to do with the fact that
PNG is 10 years old already?
- 7 March 2005 - Whoa, Nelly! PNG is officially ten years
old today! That's like a whole decade or something. Amazing,
eh? Happy birthday, you betcha! And many more to come, too.
- 14 February 2005 - Three of the four PNG and MNG mailing lists
are still down (and still silently so), but png-list appears
to have been resurrected successfully. (Whether anyone can still
subscribe to and unsubscribe from it remains to be seen.) In hopes
that the other three lists would soon come along, too, Greg et al.
have kept the SourceForge lists in
reserve (and, in particular, none of them has more than four or five
people subscribed) and haven't made any serious effort to notify
subscribers to the old lists. However, if nothing further happens
within the next week or two, the old lists will have to be considered
dead.
- 10 February 2005 - Microsoft releases a critical PNG alert for several Microsoft
products, including Messenger, Windows Media
Player 9, Windows 98, and Windows ME. This is
apparently the same vulnerability reported in the 4 August 2004 item; the new twist is that exploits
are known to exist in the wild. Windows users should upgrade
immediately.
- 20 January 2005 - The PNG and MNG mailing lists are currently
down (and silently so!), apparently due to a break-in and subsequent
reconfiguration of servers at wustl.edu. The problem may have begun
as early as 12 January. Greg, Matthias, Adam and Glenn
are currently working on setting up replacements for the lists.
Here are some related PNG pages at this site:
Last modified 27 January 2013.
Copyright © 1995-2013 Greg Roelofs.