PHP Floating Point Bug Crashes Servers

angry tapir writes "A newly unearthed bug in certain versions of the PHP scripting language could crash servers when the software is given the task of converting a large floating point number, raising the possibility that the glitch could be exploited by hackers. The bug will cause the PHP processing software to enter an infinite loop when it tries to convert the series of digits "2.2250738585072011e-308" from the string format into the floating point format. The bug only seems to affect version 5.2 and 5.3 of the language." Adds reader alphadogg: "Computer scientist Rick Regan first reported the bug on Monday, and the PHP development team issued patches the following day."

Comments

Re:1 day turn-around

[Anonymous Coward]

In typical PHP fashion, the patch doesn't actually fix the underlying problem, it simply checks for that one specific string. Seriously, stop gloating for 30 seconds, check the source and cringe at the incompetence.

Re:*Now* can we admit PHP sucks?

[wmbetts]

PHP Warning: assert(): Assertion "strlen("£") == 1" failed in /home/ant/nou.php on line 3

Awesome Unicode support there, buddy. Performance of C combined with the user-friendliness of an interpreted high-level language! Oh wait.

Who's full of shit again?

Awesome incorrect use of a language while trying to sound smart. If you don't even know how to use a language please refrain from commenting on perceived deficiencies.

?php
mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');
if (mb_strlen("£") == 1) {
                print "lol@op being full of shit\n";
}