News and History of the PNG Development Group from 2006

Herein lie news items and historical stuff primarily of interest to the Portable Network Graphics Development Group itself. Feel free to poke around even if you're not a member, though. Note that some of the links, particularly the older ones, are broken; in some cases this is explained by later entries. Other links (CompuServe, tcg.arl.mil) have fallen prey to reorganizations or upgrades; should they ever reappear, the entries below will be updated as needed.

Keep in mind that this is history here...

• current - see here

• 12 December 2006 - Greg's a reindeer! Or at least he sort of plays one in WebSiteOptimization.com's online poem, Don't Let the Graphics Grinch Steal Your Christmas Bonus. (Thanks to Bob Peyser for the poem and Andy King for the pointer.)

• 11 December 2006 - A lightly reformatted version of PNG: The Definitive Guide joins the eBook collection at the Virtual Institute of Applied Science, courtesy of Hans Lohninger.

• 28 November 2006 - libpng 1.2.14 is released (as is 1.0.22). It fixes a set of silly variable-declaration bugs that caused compilation failures on systems that require strict C syntax (as opposed to C++) for C code. Functionally, the code is unchanged from the previous version.

• 16 November 2006 - libpng 1.2.13 is released (as is 1.0.21, for you dinosaurs). It fixes a crash bug that can occur when decoding images containing the sPLT chunk--which is normally quite rare ("in nature") but might become more common as part of a specific kind of denial-of-service attack (i.e., visit a bad site, watch browser crash).

• 19 October 2006 - Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 7.0, the first (non-beta) version with almost-acceptable PNG support! Early reports are that it still doesn't do gamma correction correctly (or color correction at all)--i.e., no change since the July 2005 beta version--but at least alpha transparency looks to be in good shape, and that's what everyone has been awaiting...for the last decade. ;-/ Party on, dudes!

• 27 June 2006 - That didn't last long... libpng 1.2.12 and 1.0.20 are released. It (correctly) fixes one potential buffer overflow that slipped through the cracks.

• 26 June 2006 - libpng 1.2.11 is released (and 1.0.19, for those still stuck on the old branch). It addresses some potential buffer overflows (no known exploits), updates the configure scripts, and fixes some minor typos.

• 28 May 2006 - Thanks to Tobias Schwarz of AmbiWeb, we have another new PNG mirror in Germany (http://dl.ambiweb.de/mirrors/www.libpng.org/pub/png/). It is updated twice a day.

• 23 April 2006 - libpng 1.2.10 is released. This version just fixes a handful bugs in or related to the build scripts, primarily configure and friends.

• 18 April 2006 - The vote on the new sTER stereo-image indicator chunk was unanimous; the PNG extensions document will be amended accordingly. In the meantime, here is the text of the approved 20060405 sTER chunk proposal.

• 14 April 2006 - libpng 1.2.9 is released. This version fixes some small bugs and includes a configure script by default. However, an error in the latter (involving the unprotected inclusion of config.h by pngconf.h) means there will be a 1.2.10 release within a week or two...

• 29 January 2006 - Thanks to Ralf Uhlemann of RealHost, we have two new PNG mirrors: one in Dublin, Ireland (http://libpng.oss-mirror.org/pub/mng/) and one in Koeln (Cologne), Germany (http://libpng.linux-mirror.org/pub/mng/). Both have 100 Mbit connections and are updated daily.

Here are some related PNG pages at this site:

• Current News of the PNG Development Group
• Historical PNG news:
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• History of PNG
• Current Status of PNG

• PNG Home Page
• Complete PNG Site Map

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