cert2rss.py retired

Posted on March 22, 2007

A long time ago, I wrote a little script called cert2rss.py that takes the URLs from the US-CERT Summary Bulletin Feed, parsed the HTML summary pages and generated a feed of containing each item individually. I needed something like this for work as I need to keep track security vulnerabilities for all things Linux. The script has been broken for some time because the HTML of summary pages has changed.

Today I finally got around to looking at the problem and found that the HTML of the summary pages is now so bad that it is very difficult to extract useful data from. The HTML looks fine when rendered but it is full of incorrectly escaped text, missing tags and bizarre formatting. Whoever is responsible for generating that HTML shouldn't have their jobs.

So, I'm retiring cert2rss.py. I've updated my Code page to reflect this.

As an alternative, there's some reasonable RSS feeds from the National Vulnerability Database that provide similar functionality.