I'm happy to announce the availability of the second beta release of the new MediaWiki 1.19 release series.

Please try it out and let us know what you think. Don't run it on any wikis that you really care about, unless you are both very brave and very confident in your MediaWiki administration skills.

MediaWiki 1.19 is a large release that contains many new features and bug fixes. This is a summary of the major changes of interest to users. You can consult the RELEASE-NOTES-1.19 file for the full list of changes in this version.

Five security issues were discovered.

It was discovered that the api had a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the block/unblock modules. It was possible for a user account with the block privileges to block or unblock another user without providing a token.

For more details, see https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34212

It was discovered that the resource loader can leak certain kinds of private data across domain origin boundaries, by providing the data as an executable JavaScript file. In MediaWiki 1.18 and later, this includes the leaking of CSRF protection tokens. This allows compromise of the wiki's user accounts, say by changing the user's email address and then requesting a password reset.

For more details, see https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34907

Jan Schejbal of Hatforce.com discovered a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in Special:Upload. Modern browsers (since at least as early as December 2010) are able to post file uploads without user interaction, violating previous security assumptions within MediaWiki.

Depending on the wiki's configuration, this vulnerability could lead to further compromise, especially on private wikis where the set of allowed file types is broader than on public wikis. Note that CSRF allows compromise of a wiki from an external website even if the wiki is behind a firewall.

For more details, see https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35317

George Argyros and Aggelos Kiayias reported that the method used to generate password reset tokens is not sufficiently secure. Instead we use various more secure random number generators, depending on what is available on the platform. Windows users are strongly advised to install either the openssl extension or the mcrypt extension for PHP so that MediaWiki can take advantage of the cryptographic random number facility provided by Windows.

Any extension developers using mt_rand() to generate random numbers in contexts where security is required are encouraged to instead make use of the MWCryptRand class introduced with this release.

For more details, see https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35078

A long-standing bug in the wikitext parser (bug 22555) was discovered to have security implications. In the presence of the popular CharInsert extension, it leads to cross-site scripting (XSS). XSS may be possible with other extensions or perhaps even the MediaWiki core alone, although this is not confirmed at this time. A denial-of-service attack (infinite loop) is also possible regardless of configuration.

For more details, see https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35315

********************************************************************* What's new? *********************************************************************

MediaWiki 1.19 brings the usual host of various bugfixes and new features.

Comprehensive list of what's new is in the release notes.

* Bumped MySQL version requirement to 5.0.2. * Disable the partial HTML and MathML rendering options for Math, and render as PNG by default. * MathML mode was so incomplete most people thought it simply didn't work. * New skins/common/*.css files usable by skins instead of having to copy piles of generic styles from MonoBook or Vector's css. * The default user signature now contains a talk link in addition to the user link. * Searching blocked usernames in block log is now clearer. * Better timezone recognition in user preferences. * Extensions can now participate in the extraction of titles from URL paths. * The command-line installer supports various RDBMSes better. * The interwiki links table can now be accessed also when the interwiki cache is used (used in the API and the Interwiki extension).

Internationalization - -------------------- * More gender support (for instance in user lists). * Add languages: Canadian English. * Language converter improved, e.g. it now works depending on the page content language. * Time and number-formatting magic words also now depend on the page content language. * Bidirectional support further improved after 1.18.

Release notes - ------------- Full release notes: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=mediawiki/core.git;a=blob_plain;f=RE LEASE-NOTES-1.19;hb=1.19.0beta2 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Release_notes/1.19

Co-inciding with these security releases, the MediaWiki source code repository has moved from SVN (at https://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/phase3) to Git (https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/gitweb/mediawiki/core.git). So the relevant commits for these releases will not be appearing in our SVN repository. If you use SVN checkouts of MediaWiki for version control, you need to migrate these to Git. If you up are using tarballs, there should be no change in the process for you.

Please note that any WMF-deployed extensions have also been migrated to Git also, along with some other non WMF-maintained ones.

Please bear with us, some of the Git related links for this release may not work instantly, but should later on.

To do a simple Git clone, the command is: git clone https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/p/mediawiki/core.git

More information is available at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Git

For more help, please visit the #mediawiki IRC channel on freenode.net irc://irc.freenode.net/mediawiki or email The MediaWiki-l mailing list at mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org.

********************************************************************** Download: http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.19/mediawiki-1.19.0beta2.tar.gz

Patch to previous version (1.19.0beta1), without interface text: http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.19/mediawiki-1.19.0beta2.patch.gz Interface text changes: http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.19/mediawiki-i18n-1.19.0beta2.patc h.gz

GPG signatures: http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.19/mediawiki-1.19.0beta2.tar.gz.si g http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.19/mediawiki-1.19.0beta2.patch.gz. sig http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.19/mediawiki-i18n-1.19.0beta2.patc h.gz.sig

Public keys: https://secure.wikimedia.org/keys.html