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1125 points CrankyBear | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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woodruffw ◴[] No.45891521[source]
I’m an open source maintainer, so I empathize with the sentiment that large companies appear to produce labor for unpaid maintainers by disclosing security issues. But appearance is operative: a security issue is something that I (as the maintainer) would need to fix regardless of who reports it, or would otherwise need to accept the reputational hit that comes with not triaging security reports. That’s sometimes perfectly fine (it’s okay for projects to decide that security isn’t a priority!), but you can’t have it both ways.
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Msurrow ◴[] No.45891613[source]
My takeaway from the article was not that the report was a problem, but a change in approach from Google that they’d disclose publicly after X days, regardless of if the project had a chance to fix it.

To me its okay to “demand” from a for profit company (eg google) to fix an issue fast. Because they have ressources. But to “demand” that an oss project fix something with a certain (possibly tight) timeframe.. well I’m sure you better than me, that that’s not who volunteering works

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vadansky ◴[] No.45891699[source]
On the other hand as an ffmpeg user do you care? Are you okay not being told a tool you're using has a vulnerability in it because the devs don't have time to fix it? I mean someone could already be using the vulnerability regardless of what Google does.
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1. dylan604 ◴[] No.45893251{3}[source]
In my case, yes, but my pipeline is closed. Processes run on isolated instances that are terminated without haste as soon as workflow ends. Even if uncaught fatal errors occur, janitor scripts run to ensure instances are terminated on a fast schedule. This isn't something running on my personal device with random content that was provided by unknown someone on the interwebs.

So while this might be a high security risk because it possibly could allow RCE, the real-world risk is very low.