411–420 of 913 posts
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They aren't obligated to fix CVEs until they're exploited, and then, suddenly, they very much were obligated to fix the CVEs, and their image as FLOSS maintainers and as a project are very much tarnished.
I don't think anyone can force them to fix cve. Software is provided as-is. Can't be more straightforward as that.
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There are dozens if not hundreds of issues just like this one in ffmpeg, except for codecs that are infinitely more common. Google has been running all sorts of fuzzers against ffmpeg for over a decade at this point and it just never ends. It's a 20 year old C project maintained by poorly funded volunteers that mostly gives every media file ever the be-liberal-in-what-you-accept treatment, because people complain if…
I don't get why you think linking to multiple legitimate and high quality bug reports with detailed analysis and precise reproduction instructions demonstrates "slop". It is the opposite. This is software that is directly or indirectly run by millions of people on untrusted media files without sandboxing. It's not even that they don't care about security, it's that they're unaware that they should care. It should go…
Again, Google has been doing this sort of thing for over a decade and has found untold thousands of vulnerabilities like this one. It is not at all clear to me that their doing so has been all that valuable.
From TFA this was telling: Thus, as Mark Atwood, an open source policy expert, pointed out on Twitter, he had to keep telling Amazon to not do things that would mess up FFmpeg because, he had to keep explaining to his bosses that “They are not a vendor, there is no NDA, we have no leverage, your VP has refused to help fund them, and they could kill three major product lines tomorrow with an email. So, stop, and liste…
Google is not paying anyone to find bugs. They are running AIs indiscriminately.
I get the idea of publicly disclosing security issues to large well funded companies that need to be incentivized to fix them. But I think open source has a good argument that in terms of risk reward tradeoff, publicly disclosing these for small resource constrained open source project probably creates a lot more risk than reward.
In addition to your point, it seems obvious that disclosure policy for FOSS should be “when patch available” and not static X days. The security issue should certainly be disclosed - when its responsible to do so. Now, if Google or whoever really feels like fixing fast is so important, then they could very well contribute by submitting a patch along with their issue report. Then everybody wins.
So when the xz backdoor was discovered, you think it would have been better to sit on that quietly and try to both wrest control of upstream away from the upstream maintainers and wait until all the downstream projects had reverted the changes in their copies before making that public? Personally I'm glad that went public early. Yes there is a tradeoff between speed of public disclosure and publicity for a vulnerability, but ultimately a vulnerability is a vulnerability and people are better off knowing there's a problem than hoping that only the good guys know about it. If a Debian bug starts tee-ing all my network traffic to the CCP and the NSA, I'd rather know about it before a patch is available, at least that way I can decide to shut down my Debian boxes.
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Are you interpreting that as "if we violate the license, they can revoke our right to use the software" ?? And they use it in 3 products so that would be really bad. That would make sense to have a compliance person.
Possibly Twitch, Amazon Prime Video, and another one that escapes my mind (AWS-related?).
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When you already work 40+ hours a week and big companies suddenly start an AI snowblower that shoots a dozen extra hours of work every week at you without doing anything to balance that (like, for instance, also opening PRs with patches that fix the bugs), the relationship starts feeling like being an unpaid employee of their project. What's the point of just showering these things with bug reports when the same tool…
The problem with security reports in general is security people are rampant self-promoters. (Linus once called them something worse.) Imagine you're a humble volunteer OSS developer. If a security researcher finds a bug in your code they're going to make up a cute name for it, start a website with a logo, Google is going to give them a million dollar bounty, they're going to go to Defcon and get a prize and I assume…
The vulnerability in question is a Use After Free. Google used AI to find this bug, it would've taken them 3 seconds to fix it. Burning cash to generate spam bug reports to burden volunteer projects when you have the extra cash to burn to just fix the damn issue leaves a very sour taste in my mouth.
The message sounds like a human warning of someone is being fed-up with feeling taken advantage of. They see the profit being made, and they're not even getting drops of it. If this isn't addressed, it makes this repo a target for actors that don't care about the welfare of Amazon, Google etc. It seems quite predictable that someone will see this as a human weakness and try to exploit it, my question is whether we'll…
Doesn't google routinely contribute to ffmpeg? Certainly there's a lot of commits from `@google.com` email addresses here: https://git.ffmpeg.org/gitweb/ffmpeg.git?a=search&h=HEAD&st=...
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I upstreamed a 1-line fix, plus tests, at my previous company. I had to go through a multi-month process of red tape and legal reviews to make it happen. That was a discouraging experience to say the least.
In this scenario does your employer have strong controls around what whether you can write hobby code on your own time?
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As yet, Valve is the only company I know of doing this, and it's paying off in dividends both for Linux and for Valve. In just 5ish years of Valve investing people and money into Linux- specifically mesa and WINE, Linux has gone from a product that is kind of shaky with Windows, to "I can throw a windows program or game at it and it usually works". Imagine how further the OSS ecosystem would be if Open Source hadn't…
> Valve is the only company I know of [upstreaming fixes for open source software] Sorry, that's ridiculous. Basically every major free software dependency of every major platform or application is maintained by people on the payroll of one or another tech giant (edit: or an entity like LF or Linaro funded by the giants, or in a smaller handful of cases a foundation like the FSF with reasonably deep industry funding)…
Yes, I've also worked on OpenStack components at a university, and there I see Red Hat or IBM employees pushing up loads of changes. I don't know if I've ever seen a Walmart, UnitedHealth, Chase Bank, or Exxon Mobil (to pick some of the largest companies) email address push changes.