Commit 77a294d
Update maintainer and author info. The other maintainer suddenly disappeared.
Lmao, that's putting it lightly.
this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
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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.
Hmm yes.
The floor is made out of floor
I like how the first point made is that the backdoor violates the Debian Free Software Guidelines, as if that's the main problem
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.
But when open source projects go dual license to try and get paid people lose their minds.
This!!!!
This!!
People, stop celebrating "freeing" software of maintainers that want to prevent being exploited.
Seriously. If you're not a business why do you care?
Because often what the sort of folks ideologically predisposed towards Free Software actually want is for users to donate voluntarily, or for governments to give maintainers grants or stipends, or something like that.
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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.
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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 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.
The second maintainer was most likely the culprit.
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