Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: The site has been exploited (again)

2010-07-13 Thread Don Stewart
gwern0:
> 
> Ashley has made me admin; I've spent the last 1.5 hours deleting all
> the vandalism and indef blocking the accounts. I have Recent Changes
> in my RSS reader, so hopefully in the future there will be no greater
> than 24 hours delay before vandalism is dealt with. A MW upgrade will
> also help (eg. currently checkuser* seems to be unavailable).
> 
> * http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CheckUser

Thank you so much, Gwern!
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: The site has been exploited (again)

2010-07-13 Thread Mike Dillon
begin Gwern Branwen quotation:
> Ashley has made me admin; I've spent the last 1.5 hours deleting all
> the vandalism and indef blocking the accounts. I have Recent Changes
> in my RSS reader, so hopefully in the future there will be no greater
> than 24 hours delay before vandalism is dealt with. A MW upgrade will
> also help (eg. currently checkuser* seems to be unavailable).
> 
> * http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CheckUser

Excellent!

Putting aside what I said earlier about protection, which doesn't really
work well with a single active admin, it may still be worth putting some
protection in place to avoid a non-bot account maliciously sticking
something like the goatse.cx pic on the home page of Haskell.org. The
options I know of for doing this are the Patrolled Edits feature and the
FlaggedRevs extension. Unfortunately, I don't think either of these can
be applied only to a limited set of pages because of the MediaWiki
team's asinine insistence that they'll never support per-page
authorization mechanism properly.

-md
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: The site has been exploited (again)

2010-07-12 Thread Gwern Branwen
On Sun, Jul 11, 2010 at 2:28 PM, Mike Dillon  wrote:
> begin Mike Dillon quotation:
>> Being that there is only one active admin on the Haskell.org wiki
>> (User:Ashley Y), I believe the fact that this page is editable by any
>> user is a policy decision to allow the community to contribute. The
>> page could be protected, but then only two administrators could edit it
>> (assuming John Peterson decided to become active again after two years
>> of not working on the wiki):
>>
>>     http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/?title=Special%3AListusers&group=sysop
>>
>> As for whether or not moving this particular wiki to a Haskell-based
>> solution would be a good idea, I don't see it being a win. I don't know
>> of any Haskell-based wikis that support MediaWiki syntax, so the effort
>> would involve converting all the existing content to some other format.
>> Being that MediaWiki's syntax is the most widespread wiki syntax at the
>> moment, I don't see how that would do anything but make it harder for
>> people to contribute.
>
> One more thing. On a wiki with active administrators, this user would
> have been blocked. That hasn't happened. The last block was in August
> 2009:
>
>    http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/?title=Special%3ALog&type=block
>
> If there is not someone regularly watching the wiki at all times, it
> would probably be prudent to protect some of the higher profile pages
> once there are more admins able to edit them.
>
> -md

Ashley has made me admin; I've spent the last 1.5 hours deleting all
the vandalism and indef blocking the accounts. I have Recent Changes
in my RSS reader, so hopefully in the future there will be no greater
than 24 hours delay before vandalism is dealt with. A MW upgrade will
also help (eg. currently checkuser* seems to be unavailable).

* http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CheckUser

-- 
gwern
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: The site has been exploited (again)

2010-07-11 Thread Mike Dillon
begin Mike Dillon quotation:
> Being that there is only one active admin on the Haskell.org wiki
> (User:Ashley Y), I believe the fact that this page is editable by any
> user is a policy decision to allow the community to contribute. The
> page could be protected, but then only two administrators could edit it
> (assuming John Peterson decided to become active again after two years
> of not working on the wiki):
> 
> http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/?title=Special%3AListusers&group=sysop
> 
> As for whether or not moving this particular wiki to a Haskell-based
> solution would be a good idea, I don't see it being a win. I don't know
> of any Haskell-based wikis that support MediaWiki syntax, so the effort
> would involve converting all the existing content to some other format.
> Being that MediaWiki's syntax is the most widespread wiki syntax at the
> moment, I don't see how that would do anything but make it harder for
> people to contribute.

One more thing. On a wiki with active administrators, this user would
have been blocked. That hasn't happened. The last block was in August
2009:

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/?title=Special%3ALog&type=block

If there is not someone regularly watching the wiki at all times, it
would probably be prudent to protect some of the higher profile pages
once there are more admins able to edit them.

-md
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: The site has been exploited (again)

2010-07-11 Thread Mike Dillon
begin Gour quotation:
> On Sun, 11 Jul 2010 14:40:03 -0300
> >> "Felipe" == Felipe Lessa  wrote:
> 
> Felipe> As far as I know, haskell.org doesn't run on top of Haskell
> Felipe> software.
> 
> That's the point. ;)
> 
> haskell.org should work on Haskell software in order to prevent such
> things.

This change had nothing to do with Haskell versus not Haskell and was
not the result in an exploit in MediaWiki.

The haskell.org wiki is set up to only allow logged-in users to edit
pages. What appears to have happened is that someone created an account
named "Buycliamox" and used it to make the edit in question:


http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/?title=Special:Contributions&target=Buycilamox

Now, unless this was a bot-created account, there is nothing that a
newer version of Mediawiki would have helped. I believe newer versions
either have CAPTCHA/reCAPTCHA built-in or available via a plugin. That
could have helped prevent automated account creation, but you still have
the problems of hijacked accounts if haskell.org were really a target
for such things. I'd go with the most likely explanation in this case
and assume that a person created this account and decided to be cute.

Being that there is only one active admin on the Haskell.org wiki
(User:Ashley Y), I believe the fact that this page is editable by any
user is a policy decision to allow the community to contribute. The
page could be protected, but then only two administrators could edit it
(assuming John Peterson decided to become active again after two years
of not working on the wiki):

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/?title=Special%3AListusers&group=sysop

As for whether or not moving this particular wiki to a Haskell-based
solution would be a good idea, I don't see it being a win. I don't know
of any Haskell-based wikis that support MediaWiki syntax, so the effort
would involve converting all the existing content to some other format.
Being that MediaWiki's syntax is the most widespread wiki syntax at the
moment, I don't see how that would do anything but make it harder for
people to contribute.

-md
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[Haskell-cafe] Re: The site has been exploited (again)

2010-07-11 Thread Gour
On Sun, 11 Jul 2010 14:40:03 -0300
>> "Felipe" == Felipe Lessa  wrote:

Felipe> As far as I know, haskell.org doesn't run on top of Haskell
Felipe> software.

That's the point. ;)

haskell.org should work on Haskell software in order to prevent such
things.


Sincerely,
Gour

-- 

Gour  | Hlapicina, Croatia  | GPG key: F96FF5F6



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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: The site has been exploited (again)

2010-07-11 Thread Felipe Lessa
On Sun, Jul 11, 2010 at 2:37 PM, Gour  wrote:
> This is not good advertisement for Haskell and maybe it's time to
> deploy more-secure Haskell web apps/frameworks...

As far as I know, haskell.org doesn't run on top of Haskell software.

-- 
Felipe.
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[Haskell-cafe] Re: The site has been exploited (again)

2010-07-11 Thread Gour
On Sun, 11 Jul 2010 19:29:55 +0200
>> "Christopher" ==  wrote:


Christopher> http://haskell.org/
Christopher> 
Christopher> It says "TO BUY Cilamox ONLINE", etc.

This is not good advertisement for Haskell and maybe it's time to
deploy more-secure Haskell web apps/frameworks...


Sincerely,
Gour

-- 

Gour  | Hlapicina, Croatia  | GPG key: F96FF5F6



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