Over on the IBM DeveloperWorks PHP weblog today, there's a new posting from Ken Coar concerning his presentation at PHP Quebec on security automation in PHP.

The week before last I was in Montreal, Quebec, Canada for PHP Quebec Conference 2005. One of the presentations I gave was about using PHP scripts instead of normally static files like robots.txt, and it gratifyingly raised a couple of eyebrows.

Mostly, the talk had to do with a few options for securing your site as a whole - preventing mailbots from harvesting information, using mod_rewrite to rule out "bad" URLs that might come in, trapping spiders looking to scrape all the data they can from your site. In each example, he gives a simple case where PHP can help to make the automation of the task a much simpler process.