As mentioned in this new security advisory from Avaya, there's a risk that the PHP version included with their Messaging systems could provide a hole for a would-be attacker to gain access.

Issues have been reported in the following:

• integer overflow vulnerabilities in the PHP gd extension
• integer overflow vulnerability in the PHP chunk_split function
• a security update has introduced a bug into PHP session cookie handling
• vulnerability in the PHP money_format function
• vulnerability in the PHP wordwrap function
• vulnerability in PHP session cookie handling
• vulnerability in the PHP gc extension

The advisory contains links to more information from RedHat on these issues and includes a list of systems effected as well as recommended actions to take.

Cell phones have become ubiquitous in our society, making it possible to get information instantly through things like SMS messaging. If you've ever looked at your phone and wondered how you could send the same kinds of things from your scripts, this post on the Zend Developer Zone is a push in the right direction.

SMS messages have become ubiquitous in most of the world. As with any commodity technology, those who make their money off of it are always looking to expand it so that they can charge more. In the SMS world, there is the MMS, Multimedia Messaging Service. Developed by the Open Mobil Alliance MMS is designed to deliver rich content messages over packet data services.

That's all well and good but without the proper tools how are you going to message (spam) the cell-phones of your closest 25,000 friends with the latest release (obeying all relevant copyright laws, of course) from your favorite band? Well fear not, Stefan Hellkvist over at hellkvist.org has rushed to your rescue. The library, MMSlib, is used to encode and decode MMS messages in PHP.

There's no tutorial here, just information about the library and more pointers to the site. The MMSLib code is released under the GPL.