- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.world
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Commit 77a294d
Update maintainer and author info. The other maintainer suddenly disappeared.
Lmao, that’s putting it lightly.
the other maintainer now has a special place:
Special author: Jia Tan was a co-maintainer in 2022-2024. He and the team behind him inserted a backdoor (CVE-2024-3094) into XZ Utils 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 releases. He suddenly disappeared when this was discovered.
RIP Jia Tan
I don’t think they would be in much peace. It was years of their work that was ruined by a person with OCD and valgrind.
Can we stop calling a good software dev autistic or stuff?
I wonder if he has a donation page. We need to get him some money.
I agree we should support him, but you know who should be more concerned with giving him and other open source maintainers money? The billion dollar corporations that rely on these critical projects and use them absolutely for free. Amazon, Microsoft, Sony, Samsung, Google, Siemens, Motorola, God knows how many more.
He probably needs a comaintainer. We could select one of us and then try pressuring him into accepting that.
Stop right there, Jio Tan! The same trick doesn’t work twice.
We need more non profits who can set aside funds for these projects. It not like these companies don’t want to help its just jot entirely clear how they can help.
They can help by donating some of their billions.
Sure. But if the project in question only has one or two donation methods and none of those are supported by the company, then the company can’t easily donate anything. Companies usually have a strict way of how they can donate and it usually entails Paypal or some other costly solution, while projects like that likely just has a patreon or LibrePay option and perhaps a crypto wallet. Most companies can’t work with that.
In my opinion it is a terrible choice for a company to rely on a dependency like XZ, especially maintained by one person as a hobby, without being able to meaningfully contribute to the maintenance themselves. I just don’t think I can be sympathetic to a company having to maybe bend a rule or two to donate.
I’m sure many companies would if it wasn’t just on individual
This is one of the problems, these companies and other groups just use a dependency maintained by one person (Lasse) without meaningfully contributing to its survival themselves.
We just need more non profits to manage projects. If a maintainer burns out they should be able to contact some organization to find help.
I bet Samsung would not even know if open source is a thing
I gotta hand it to Samsung that they outline all the open source licences they use, at least in their Galaxy smartphone products:
Samsung is the primary developer for Tizen, a Linux based OS similar to Android. Their watches, cameras, and TVs run it.
Ofc I exaggerated, samsung is not a monolithic entity. I mean most, if not all, on the managerial position would not care at all. Also, does being android-like mean they are receptive to OSS?
© 2024 Tizen Project, a Linux Foundation Project. All Rights Reserved. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
I wrote to ask him but I never heard back. To be fair he’s probably quite stressed at the moment.
Can someone provide a summary on what this means? I thought there were malicious exploits in this. Why is it back up and the perpetrator unbanned?
Lasse Collin is not the perpetrator, that would be “Jia Tan”.
Lasse is the original maintainer of XZ, they have been placed back in their position as sole maintainer.
“Jia Tan” was the person who slipped the backdoor into XZ and is now banned.
Lasse has already fixed abd removed the backdoor.
XZ itself is critical software everyone uses (its one of the main compression/decompression programs used on linux)
Yes but damage seems to be done. Distros are talking or have moved off of it to zstd.
There are some, probably. But any exodus will be slow. Xz isn’t useless because it was dangerous once.
Besides, XZ isn’t the only project in such a danger. Banning doesn’t solve that problem. They need to put in more funding and eyes.
I would argue this might make xz safer mid-term. So much eyes on it. I’m not familiar with other solutions, but who’s to say the bad actor won’t try a similar trick elsewhere
Zstd and xz fullfil different needs. Xz take more time to compress and is faster to decompress as far as I know.
XZ is a slog to compress and decompress but compresses a bit smaller than zstd.
zstd is quite quick to compress, very quick to decompress, scales to many cores (vanilla xz is single-core only) and scales a lot further in the quicker end of the compression speed <-> file size trade-off spectrum while using the same format.
Exploits were removed. Maintainer who committed them still banned. xz is a critical piece of software.
There’s a Wikipedia article regarding this incident. Have a look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor
This sounds just like something Jia Tan might say…
Don’t downvote people asking questions.
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It’s just a question. Any implications or tone you perceive here is likely your own projection.
Try and read it assuming the poster is asking in good faith.
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The second maintainer was most likely the culprit.
