Moving planets around1 min read

A minor security problem on the Pitivi website (a script kiddie covertly filling a cache folder with pharma SEO spam) lured me into the following adventure, when MagpieRSS was suspected of having been used as the attack vector:

  1. “Oh gosh, MagpieRSS is really dead…”
  2. Why not try SimplePie instead? It’s slightly less dead and widely used
  3. “Urgh, SimplePie doesn’t parse feeds with ‘?’ in their URL
  4. “Screw this, I’ll kill two birds with one stone and replace MoonMoon by Venus, I’ve been meaning to do that for a long time anyway”

planet crash
Venus has the following advantages:

  • It is nicer for feed readers: detecting duplicate items across planets will now work in applications such as Liferea, as the correct feed item id/guid is properly passed by Venus. MoonMoon doesn’t do that and neither does Bilboplanet.
  • It potentially removes another attack vector, as it is a static page generated by cron. No PHP involved, no server-accessible executables.
  • It is what the majority of planets out there are using.

Long story short: the planet feed URL has changed to /planet/atom.xml, so update your feed readers accordingly. If you were not already subscribed to it, you can simply point your feed reader to pitivi.org and it should be able to autodetect the feed.

Jeff