this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
489 points (99.0% liked)

Linux

48655 readers
953 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 34 points 8 months ago (17 children)

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?

[–] pixxelkick 96 points 8 months ago (6 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (5 children)

Yes but damage seems to be done. Distros are talking or have moved off of it to zstd.

[–] Calyhre 10 points 8 months ago

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

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (14 replies)