A tidy up of locks, bolts and old doors

v0.1.81 rekeyed the site from the toolchain under the bonnet to the server itself. Nothing new to click, but rather a lot to trust.

AI-drafted. This story was written with AI from the outside reporting listed under Sources, and checked by automated tools before it went up. The originals have the full detail.

Every so often a website needs the equivalent of a locksmith's visit, not because anything is on fire, but because the locks are old and somebody left a window on the latch. That was the shape of v0.1.81, a release with no new buttons for you to click and a great deal of quiet reassurance underneath.

The bit you never see, tightened

The toolchain we build the site with had drifted a year out of date, and thirty known weaknesses in it were ones our own code could actually be reached through. We rebuilt on the current version and none of them survive the move. Alongside that, fifteen separate advisories against the packages the site is assembled from have been closed. Only two of those would ever have touched you directly: one in the text editor sitting behind every review we publish, and one in the page router that decides which page you end up looking at. Both are fixed.

Who else can read our diary

Gaming World shares a server with another small site, and until now the two ran under the same account, which meant one could, in theory, have read the other's passwords over the garden fence. We now run under our own account, with nothing else on that machine able to reach our secrets. The browser security policy that is meant to tell your browser what the site is allowed to load had been sitting in observe-only mode, watching but not stopping anything. It is switched on properly now, with an exception carved out for video embeds so reviews with trailers still play.

The server itself has also stopped accepting password logins, keys only from here on, every package on it brought up to date, and the whole machine restarted onto a fresh kernel and checked over afterwards. None of this changes what you read on Gaming World. It changes how confident we are that what you read on Gaming World is actually from us.

The full, plain language rundown lives on our changelog, as ever, minus the advisory numbers, because nobody wants those with their tea.

Image: Illustration: AI-generated for Gaming World