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:

• Current News of the PNG Development Group
• Historical PNG news:
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• History of PNG
• Current Status of PNG

• PNG Home Page
• Complete PNG Site Map

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