On Tue, Aug 6, 2019 at 7:34 AM G. P. B. <george.bany...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The voting for the "Deprecate short open tags, again" [1] RFC has begun.
> It is expected to last two (2) weeks until 2019-08-20.
>
> A counter argument to this RFC is available at
> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/counterargument/deprecate_php_short_tags
>
> Best regards
>
> George P. Banyard
>
> [1] https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecate_php_short_tags_v2


I voted "yes" for removal. <? is a security risk. If your code uses <?,
then your code is liable to leak, based entirely on a setting potentially
out of your control. As Robert Korulczyk's example illustrates, even within
the same organization, misconfigurations can have hidden and drastic
consequences.

<? is a security risk today, just as much as it was then. Remember in 2007
when Facebook's source code leaked precisely because of this [1]?

Much has been said about this being a "portability" issue. I think that's
overly specific. The core issue is "fallibility". You can globally
configure the language to stop recognizing itself as a language. That's
weird and unexpected. So much so, that no one gives due thought to this,
and we end up with security disasters.

PHP.net has opined, for years, that <? is bad[2]. It's time to act. So much
else breaks at the 8.0 boundary, let's do it all at once. If anyone needs
to justify the effort, let them say "<? is a security hole".

[1]:https://techcrunch.com/2007/08/11/facebook-source-code-leaked/
[2]:https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.basic-syntax.phptags.php

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