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Date: Sun, 19 Nov 2017 21:55:22 +0100
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: announce@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: [openwall-announce] blists 2.0

Hi,

We've just released blists 2.0:

http://www.openwall.com/blists/

blists is a web-based interface to mailing list archives that works off
indexed mbox files.  There are two programs: bindex and bit.  bindex
generates or updates the index file (yes, incremental updates are
supported).  bit is a CGI/SSI program that generates web pages on the
fly.  Both programs are written in C and are very fast - e.g., we're
successfully using them against an 11+ years, 2+ million messages,
15+ GB mbox of the Linux kernel mailing list on a fairly old server:

http://lists.openwall.net/linux-kernel/

Many changes and enhancements have been made since blists 1.0 released
in 2011.  Some of those have been in use on the Openwall website and on
our third-party mailing list archives website for years, whereas some
others were deployed just a few days ago - but we are in fact running
blists 2.0 ourselves now and we'd like others to be able to do the same.

Major enhancements since blists 1.0 include:

- Downloadable attachments.  Previously, any attached files were either
displayed inline (for text/* MIME types excluding text/html) or not at
all.  Now any attachment with a filename can be viewed or downloaded at
its separate URL as linked from the displayed message.  We implemented
this functionality over the last month and deployed it just a few days
ago.  Here it is in action, illustrated by Qualys' Stack Clash exploits:

http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2017/06/28/14

This also works with binary files, except that those are by default
offered for download rather than viewing.

- Re-encoding of content (message headers and bodies) from any supported
charsets to UTF-8, so that we correctly list multiple messages' subjects
and authors on the same web page, and so that common page headers and/or
footers may be used across an entire archive, despite of the messages
possibly having been in different encodings originally.  We had this
functionality deployed for years, but it wasn't properly cleaned up and
included in a blists release until now.

- Lists of recent messages on each list's main page.  We had this
functionality deployed for years, but it wasn't included in a blists
release until now.

- New calendars on the year and month pages (with extensive use of CSS,
which you can customize).  We had simpler calendars showing message
counts per month on the list and year pages in blists 1.0, but now we
also have more detailed calendars showing message counts per day on the
year and month pages.  Here they show that almost no messages get
through Bugtraq moderation on weekends:

http://lists.openwall.net/bugtraq/2017/

blists 2.0 is mostly due to work by ABC, with code reviews and cleanups
by me.

The blists 2.0 release tarball is signed with our new offline signing
key, now available at:

http://www.openwall.com/signatures/

pub   4096R/4BDC136E 2017-11-18
      Key fingerprint = 297A D21C F86C 9480 8152  0C18 05C0 27FD 4BDC 136E
uid                  Openwall offline signing key
sub   4096R/3939CC14 2017-11-18

Our old offline signing key was antiquated: 1024-bit RSA generated in
1999.  It was high time we updated it.  Incidentally, the online signing
key we were using for Owl snapshots was already 4096-bit RSA since its
introduction in 2011.  Now our offline signing key is 4096-bit RSA too.

Of course, the new key is signed with the old one, as well as with my
personal 4096-bit RSA master key (which I only use to sign other keys).

Alexander

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