It has been made a little more secure, with 'register globals' turned off by default. You can turn it back on with the following entry in .htaccess:
php_flag register_globals on
But if your server provides public access, I would highly recommend not doing this. The flaw in this approach is that anyone with the slightest knowledge of your application could set *any* variable, and if that variable happens not to be explicitly initialised, then before long, a hacker could be having all sorts of fun on your server.
-- JJ