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Symfony Station Communiqué - 26 July 2024

By Reuben Walker, 26 July, 2024
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Welcome to this week's Symfony Station communiqué. It's your review of the essential news in the Symfony and PHP development communities focusing on protecting democracy. That necessitates an opinionated Butlerian jihad against big tech as well as evangelizing for open-source and the Fediverse. We also cover the cybersecurity world. You can't be free without safety and privacy.

There's good content in all of our categories, so please take your time and enjoy the items most relevant and valuable to you. It includes a ton of MySQL items. 🤷🏽‍♀️ This is why we publish on Fridays. So you can savor it over your weekend.

Or jump straight to your favorite section.

Once again, thanks go out to Javier Eguiluz and Symfony for sharing our communiqué in their Week of Symfony.

My opinions will be in bold. And will often involve cursing. Because humans. Especially tech bros.

Symfony

As always, we will start with the official news from Symfony.

Highlight -> "This week, development activity was slower than usual and focused on tweaks and fixes on all supported branches. Meanwhile, we announced the first talks and workshops for the SymfonyCon Vienna 2024 conference."

A Week of Symfony #916 (15-21 July 2024)

They also have:

The Monthly Symfony email

SymfonyCon Vienna 2024 : PHPUnit 11 for Symfony Developers

SymfonyCasts has:

This week in Symfony Casts


Featured Item

MIT Technology reviews three books:

Three books reckon with technological complexity and the wicked problems it creates.

Learning from catastrophe

The second is especially relevant to programming.


This Week

Woody Gilk explains:

Interactive debugging with Symfony Console

Kerrial Newham shows us:

How And Why I Use Symfony Asset Mapper (Importmap) Over Encore

Pitangent shares their:

5 Reasons to Choose Symfony Development Services for Your Next Web App

eCommerce

TYPO3 has:

Navigating the E-Commerce CMS Maze: A Comprehensive Guide to Selecting the Ideal Platform for Your Business

CMSs

And:

Transition to PHP-Based reStructuredText Rendering for TYPO3 Documentation

Build-Your-Own Starship Enterprise — Reflections on DrupalCon Portland 2024

How to Survive Your First TYPO3 Developer Days

Toben Hansen announces:

tObserver TYPO3 monitoring service shutdown

Stitchwort explores:

CKEditor-Presets in TYPO3 setzen bzw. überschreiben

Sulu has:

Sulu Release 2.5.20 & 2.6.4 Updates

Concrete CMS has:

The Ultimate Guide to Navigation Bars and Web Menus

How to Use Mega Menus on Your Website

Joomla has:

Joomla! 5.2.0 Alpha 3 needs your help!

Wim Leers has an Experience Builder update:

XB week 8: design locomotive gathering steam

DrupalEasy examines:

Getting ready to run your first migration

Great stuff as always from Mike.

SpecBee lists the:

Top 8 Drupal modules that can improve user engagement

Golems looks at:

Best SEO Practices for Drupal Websites in 2024

Bounteous explores:

The Future of Experimentation: Acquia Convert

Four Kitchens shares:

Why time is of the essence for a Drupal 11 migration

Tag1 Consulting has:

Drupal Workspaces: A Game-changer for Site Wide Content Staging

Migrating Your Data from D7 to D10: Migrating content types

The Drop Times has:

Brad Jones on Modernizing Drupal's Data Management with JSON Integration

5 Basic Rules to Keep your Website Dependencies Secure

Joost shares a report:

CMS market share

Eirik Moreland is:

Getting rid of cronner.module

Drupalize Me announces:

New courses, guides, and tutorial navigation

Previous Weeks

Drupal 11 Preparation Checklist

The Power of Drupal 11


PHP

This Week

Allen Ash examines:

Named Arguments in PHP

HashBangCode looks at:

Validating XML Files With XML Schema Definitions In PHP

Dragan Rapić explores:

Understanding WebSockets in PHP

Auriga Aristo says:

Let’s start using PHP Traits

Nikolay Nikolov show us:

How I Wrote My First E-Book About the Strategy Pattern

DDEV examines:

DDEV and Docker Healthchecks (Tech Note)

Les Tillleuls Coop looks at:

php-redis-om : un object mapper pour Redis

Grant Horwood has:

PHP: concurrency with processes. pt. 1: using pcntl_fork for fun and performance

DataDog asks:

Why care about exception profiling in PHP?

ServBay is:

Announcing ServBay 1.3.9: More Features, Smoother Experience!

Winkel Wagen shows us:

TIL: PHPStorm Customize toolbar

Previous Weeks

And Ghulam Mujtaba shows us:

How to Install and Use Composer Packages in PHP Project?


More Programming

TechCruch reports:

‘Model collapse’: Scientists warn against letting AI eat its own tail

Let’s hope it happens.

Gabor Javorszky opines:

Anything language agnostic is just a new language

CSS-Tricks explores:

Pop(over) The Balloons

CSS Stuff I’m Excited After the Last CSSWG Meeting

Cross view document transitions will be awesome.

Ahmad Shadeed explains:

CSS Grid Areas

Fantastiqué!

Oliver Foster says:

MySQL 9.0 GA is Here!

Roman Agabekov examines:

Managing Long-Running Queries in MySQL

Kristian Köhntopp looks at:

MySQL: Upgrading old MySQL instances

Yunus Emre Adas shares:

Improve Your DB Skills: 10 MySQLi DB Functions in PHP Development

Percona announces:

No MySQL 9.x Innovation Releases from Percona

JetBrains explores:

Using Dev Containers in JetBrains IDEs – Part 1

Truffle Security reports:

Anyone can Access Deleted and Private Repository Data on GitHub


Fighting for Democracy

Please visit our Support Ukraine page to learn how you can help kick Russia out of Ukraine (eventually).

The cyber response to Russia’s War Crimes and other douchebaggery

The Register reports:

Websites clamp down as creepy AI crawlers sneak around for snippets

Meta's mass layoff severance agreements illegal, says judge

North Korean chap charged for attacks on US hospitals, military, NASA – and even China

Uncle Sam accuses telco IT pro of decade-long spying campaign for China

Two Russians sanctioned over cyberattacks on US critical infrastructure

The Kyiv Post reports:

Fighting on the Battlefield of Ideas: Time for the Democratic World to Mobilize

BleepingComputer reports:

Spain arrests three for using DDoSia hacktivist platform

The Verge reports:

Meta cracks down on ‘Yahoo Boys’ and thousands of sextortion accounts

Meta checks off its quarterly quota of one good deed.

W3 has a finding:

Third Party Cookies Must Be Removed

Of course, Chrome just decided not to do this.

TechCrunch reports:

CIA AI director Lakshmi Raman claims the agency is taking a ‘thoughtful approach’ to AI

FTC is investigating how companies are using AI to base pricing on consumer behavior

Cory Doctorow has more details:

FTC vs surveillance pricing: a prelude to an ass-kicking

404 Media reports:

How the FBI Is Hunting North Korean Hackers Who Attacked U.S. Healthcare System

The Backlash Against AI Scraping Is Real and Measurable

Mashable reports:

Apple adopts Biden administration's AI safeguards

Wired reports:

This Machine Exposes Privacy Violations

A cool tool.

The Markup reports:

Frustrated by School Web Filters, One Teenager Created His Own

Department of Education Sued Following Markup Investigation Into FAFSA Data Shared with Facebook

The Evil Empire Strikes Back

The Counter Offensive asks:

Are we in Cold War 2.0?

No, we are in a world war of democracy vs autocracy. And the hybrid regimes in the middle are playing both ends against each other.

DarkReading reports:

Russia Adjusts Cyber Strategy for the Long Haul in War With Ukraine

Radio Free Europe reports:

'Creating Havoc And Panic': Kremlin-Friendly Fake News Takes Aim At Paris Olympics

Knowbe4 shares:

How a North Korean Fake IT Worker Tried to Infiltrate Us

Cory Doctorow reports:

Holy CRAP the UN Cybercrime Treaty is a nightmare

Speaking of shit legislation, Tech Dirt reports:

Congress Wants To Let Private Companies Own The Law

404 Media reports:

Google Is the Only Search Engine That Works on Reddit Now Thanks to AI Deal

DHS Has a DDoS Robot to Raid Smart Homes

Yet another reason to avoid anything "Smart".

The Guardian reports:

We unleashed Facebook and Instagram’s algorithms on blank accounts. They served up sexism and misogyny

Israel tried to frustrate US lawsuit over Pegasus spyware, leak suggests

North Korea-backed cyber espionage campaign targets UK military

Rewire News Group reports:

Abortion Misinformation Is All Over the Internet. You Can Blame Big Tech Censorship

Blood in the Machine reports:

Every startup in JD Vance's VC fund, ranked from least to most hillbilly elegiac

As a real hillbilly, I can tell you this motherfucker is no hillbilly. He's a “broligarch-funded shillbilly”. (BTW not an original description from me, though I would love to claim it.)

The Verge reports:

The moral bankruptcy of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz

As I've said before, VC stands for verified c^nt.

Cybersecurity/Privacy

TechCrunch reports:

Data breach exposes US spyware maker behind Windows, Mac, Android and Chromebook malware

BleepingComputer reports:

Fake CrowdStrike fixes target companies with malware, data wipers

Fake CrowdStrike repair manual pushes new infostealer malware

French police push PlugX malware self-destruct payload to clean PCs

DarkReading reports:

Chinese Forced-Labor Ring Sponsors Football Clubs, Hides Behind Stealth Tech

Computer Weekly reports:

WhatsApp and Signal messages at risk of surveillance following EncroChat ruling, court hears

The Record reports:

Ransomware ecosystem fragmenting under law enforcement pressure and distrust

Fediverse / ActivityPub

For Better has:

Influencing Influencers

Elena Rossini says:

The Future of Social is Here: a Show and Tell (part 1: Mastodon ↔️ Pixelfed)

Flipboard announces:

Flipboard Brings Local News to the Fediverse

DailyKos reports:

Mastodon users donate a quarter million dollars in 2 days for VP Harris #MastodonForHarris

Mauve Signweaver has a FEP:

FEP-1024: Peer to Peer Fediverse Identities

Stefan Bohacek examines:

Fediverse domain blocks

CTAs (aka show us some free love)

Do you own or work for an organization that would be interested in our promotion opportunities? Or supporting our journalistic efforts? If so, please get in touch with us. We’re in our infancy, so it’s extra economical. 😉

More importantly, if you are a Ukrainian company with coding-related products, we can offer free promotion on our Support Ukraine page. Or, if you know of one, get in touch.

You can find a vast array of curated evergreen content on our communiques page.

Author

Reuben Walker

Founder
Symfony Station

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