security

I run a couple of Drupal sites on 1and1 for historical reasons (3 years free). A while ago, I dutifully upgraded them to Drupal 5.7. And was surprised to find that PHP's register_globals was enabled.

All this time, I've been running with a .htaccess file which explicitly disabled that setting -- if 1and1's Apache was running mod_php only, it turns out. Apparently, such PHP settings in .htaccess files don't do anything if running PHP in CGI mode.

I recently read Robert D. Kaplan's book Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos. It got me to thinking and so I read some more books and white papers about military response, complexity, networks and collaboration. There were a number of related themes, one of which is to push power and knowledge to the edge of the network, in order to solve the complexity issues -- as well as to serve as a critical part of a transformational change required to address today's and tomorrow's terrorist threats to nations.