In this new post to Reddit.com Timoh suggests something that could definitely help improve the overall security of the PHP ecosystem - a bug bounty system, providing libraries and projects an easy way to security-related submissions for their code.

To encourage software security research on the open-source PHP libraries we use everyday, I have been brainstorming the possibilities for us, the code authors, to start to offer security bug bounties on the projects we maintain. It is a shame such a few PHP projects encourages security research by offering bug bounties, and I think it doesn't have to be this way.

He describes his ideas for the system including the ability to offer both monetary bounties and other kinds of recognition as well. Comments on the post are largely supportive, agreeing with him that it can definitely help things. He also makes the suggestion of getting frameworks with corporate backings (like Zend Framework and Symfony) to be some of the leaders and be an example to other projects and get them on board. What do you think? Add your own thoughts and suggestions about the project to the mix!

On PHPBuilder.com today Jason Gilmore has a new tutorial showing how to create voice recognition applications with PHP and the help of open source voice interpretation tools.

Voice recognition or speech recognition technology is not easy to develop. In-house development would be very costly, and buying proprietary libraries that convert voice to text would make the developed application very expensive for end users. On the other hand, when developing in PHP, you have many open-source solutions available. The same dilemma happens with voice recognition in PHP -- there is an open-source class that can be used in voice applications. That way your application would cost less, and you also can offer it for free.

His tool of choice is Voice PHP, an open source project that uses four classes with support for SSML, SRGS, CCXML and VoiceXML. In his sample application he shows how to use the libraries to generate an application that can listen to a user's voice and translate that into certain menu options.