/Daniel Stenberg

Why Curl Closes PRs on GitHub tl;dr: “I believe having good commit messages following a fixed style and syntax helps the project. It makes the git history better and easier to browse. It allows us to write tools and scripts around git and the git history. Like how we for example generate release notes and project stat graphs based on git log basically.” Daniel shares how GitHub’s UI doesn’t allow for this.  

featured in #523


How I Made A Heap Overflow in Curl tl;dr: Daniel discusses a significant security flaw in curl, which he describes as the "worst security problem found in curl in a long time." The vulnerability stems from a heap overflow issue related to how curl handles SOCKS5 proxy connections with overly long hostnames. Daniel explains the technical intricacies of the flaw, its origins, and the subsequent fix.

featured in #456


IDN Is Crazy tl;dr: "IDN, International Domain Names, is the concept that lets us register and use international characters in domain names, and by international we of course mean characters outside of the ASCII range. Recently I have fought some battles against IDN and IDN decoding so I felt this urge to write a lot of words about it to help me in my healing process and maybe mend my scars a little. I am not sure it worked but at least I feel a little better now."

featured in #375


Faster Base64 In Curl tl;dr: "This adventure started with an issue where a user pointed out that the libcurl function for base64 encoding actually would allocate a few bytes too many at times. That turned out to be true and we fixed it fairly quickly. As I glanced at that base64 encoder function that was still loaded and showing in my editor window, it struck me that it really was not written in an optimal way."

featured in #373


HTTP://HTTP://HTTP://@HTTP://HTTP://?HTTP://#HTTP:// tl;dr: "If you throw the above mentioned URL on any random URL parser they may reject it, like the Twitter parser didn’t seem to think it was a URL, or they might come to a different conclusion about the different parts than curl does. In fact, it is likely that they will not do exactly as curl does."

featured in #351


Uncurled tl;dr: "Everything I know and learned about running and maintaining OS projects for three decades. I have been actively involved in OS development since the early 1990s when I discovered the phenomenon of people writing source code they give away freely for others to use and modify under a certain license."

featured in #319


A Tale Of A Trailing Dot tl;dr: "Trailing dots on host names in URLs is the gift that keeps on giving. Let me take you through a dwindling story of how the dot is handled differently in different places through the stack of an Internet client. The evil trailing dot."

featured in #316


Curl Dash-Dash-Json tl;dr:  “This is a new option that basically works as an alias, or shortcut, to sending JSON to an endpoint.”

featured in #289


No Easter Eggs in Curl tl;dr: "Easter eggs are unexpected or undocumented feature in a piece of computer software, included as a joke or bonus" and, among the enthusiast community, "people seem to generally like this concept in software and devices." Dan explains why he's against adding them into Curl.

featured in #275


The Most Used Software Components In The World tl;dr: Although impossible to calculate precisely, Daniel believes zlib, sqlite & libcurl are installed in "billions of devices," and the most widely used software in the world.

featured in #264