I spoke to Meredydd today...

In case anyone's wondering, the reason he has, to all intents and
purposes, disappeared from the net, is that he's on the wrong side of a
school firewall "until further notice". There were some viruses, some
leaked emails (front pages of The Times recently...) a technophobic
headmaster, and (IMNSHO and in a lot of other people's opinions too) a
not-so-great head of IT, and, basically, they decided to shut the entire
network down, hopefully while they *get a frickin' security strategy!*
(backups would help too, people have lost email, files, the list goes on
and on). Anyway, Meredydd will hopefully be back online within the next
couple of weeks once he and many others petition the school to, um,
acquire some clue. :-D

Meanwhile, he's asked me to commit a patch we've received from
"Anonymous Coward" that fixes MSN! Using GnuTLS for https requests, it
does the new Passport authentication, thus stopping (1) those annoying
"immediate security update" messages, and more importantly (2) the
impending lockout on October 15th. Thank you, Anonymous Coward. :-)

I have committed it, so far it's in trunk and bleeding. You need to run
"svn checkout http://subv.everybuddy.com:888/svn/trunk eb-lite", or the
same with bleeding where trunk is, or if you've already checked out,
just cd there and run "svn update". Recompile, make install, and log in.
You should notice there are no "security update" messages, and if you
watch the output of eb-lite there should be lines starting
"msn_passport".

Meredydd tells me this patch could have been better if it used the
existing (partial) HTTP implementation in the core already. I can't seem
to find that, perhaps he means splitting out parts of proxy.c? Anyone
know better? I think we should tidy this up at some point (I may do it
myself), because we shouldn't really have a bunch of different bits of
code doing HTTP several different ways. The only issue is sending it to
different places, like a plain socket, or SSL. Since those are really
the only two options, it might be best to just make a common HTTP
implementation that does both, and have MSN specify that it wants SSL.

Meredydd also says if he'd been online, he would probably have released
another alpha now. So, expect one to happen when he gets back. :-)

Once again, update to the latest trunk or bleeding to get the new MSN.
You need to do this by October 15th at the latest, or you'll lose the
ability to sign in. Have fun. :-)

-- 
Chris Boyle - http://cmb.is-a-geek.org/
GPG: B7D86E0F, MSN: [email protected], ICQ: 24151961,
AIM: kerneloops, Yahoo: kerneloops, IRC: cmb on freenode.net

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