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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday April 25 2017, @10:24PM   Printer-friendly
from the no-consequences- dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

More than three months after being informed about remotely exploitable vulnerabilities in 25 router models, Linksys is[sic] yet to issue patches to remedy them.

Researchers at IOActive Labs wrote that they had informed Linksys of 10 flaws on 17 January, six of which could be remotely exploited by unauthenticated people.

But as of last week, all that Linksys had done was to notify users through a public post and suggest workarounds until patched firmware was ready.

Given Linksys' inactivity, the IOActive Labs researchers said they were holding off on providing the full technical details of the flaws until patched firmware was ready for download.

Shit, even we can manage a fix in six months...

Source: http://www.itwire.com/security/77772-three-months-on,-no-linksys-router-patches-for-remote-holes.html


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @10:37PM (10 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @10:37PM (#499648)

    Ok, so what's with the sic in this summary? Linksys is yet to ... is perfectly valid English. You might prefer Linksys has yet to . . ., but that is only your preference.

    If you want, we can make it a competition between the two and settle the issue. However, until we do, as old Caius Lucius would say [mit.edu]:

    Sir, the event
    Is yet to name the winner: fare you well.

  • (Score: 2, Informative) by fyngyrz on Tuesday April 25 2017, @10:48PM (9 children)

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Tuesday April 25 2017, @10:48PM (#499662) Journal

    [sic] doesn't mean "you misspelled this" or "bad grammar", it means "this is literal from the source, it's not been changed here."

    In this case, likely the editor felt that "Linksys has yet", was the preferred use just as you speculated, and simply wished to make it clear that the quote was from the source.

    sic stands for sic erat scriptum, or, more or less in English: "thus was it written"

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @11:18PM (8 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @11:18PM (#499675)

      I know what sic means, which is why I often decry its improper usage on this site. (Go back a year or so and you'll see some people who took from some definition of it up on Wiki that it is also appropriate to use it to express surprise, and they were peppering article summaries with them whenever they felt a factual error was being stated, or an exaggerated claim was being made--if the search feature here actually worked for Comments, I would dig up some examples).

      My point is that there was nothing wrong with the source, meaning that the editor shouldn't have felt the need to insert himself in where it isn't needed.

      Personally, I am of the opinion that for anything in the summary (or anywhere else here) that is presented in blockquote, it should be obvious that it is from the source and any and all misspellings and malapropisms can remain as they are. That is the whole reason for blockquote, unless, of course, I am in the minority where I cut-and-paste into blockquote and most people really type it in and are thus subject to adding mistakes in the source.

      • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday April 26 2017, @12:11AM (3 children)

        by butthurt (6141) on Wednesday April 26 2017, @12:11AM (#499708) Journal

        My point is that there was nothing wrong with the source, meaning that the editor shouldn't have felt the need to insert himself in where it isn't needed.

        The most obvious explanation is that the editor was unaware that "is yet to" is valid usage.

        https://www.englishforums.com/English/Versus/djxxm/post.htm [englishforums.com]
        https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/83430/he-has-yet-to-vs-he-is-yet-to [stackexchange.com]

        Consider volunteering as an editor.

        • (Score: 2) by isostatic on Wednesday April 26 2017, @08:28AM (2 children)

          by isostatic (365) on Wednesday April 26 2017, @08:28AM (#499903) Journal

          I suspect the editor believed it should be "Linksys are yet to", believing that linksys are a group of people rather than a single entitiy.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @02:33PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @02:33PM (#500049)

            Regardless of the editor's wrongly held beliefs, blockquote should obviate the need to add any sics.

          • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday April 26 2017, @02:49PM

            by Grishnakh (2831) on Wednesday April 26 2017, @02:49PM (#500061)

            Probably, even though that editor would be wrong, along with anyone who speaks British English. "LinkSys" is not a "group of people" at all; it's a legal corporate entity. While corporations usually have "groups of people" as employees, and sometimes even as owners, this isn't always the case. There are plenty of corporations owned by individuals, and have no employees at all. (And having employees is really irrelevant anyway, because they don't own the corporation any more than contractors that the corporation makes deals with to get work done; they're just hired hands.) A corporation is a singular entity, and the pronouns for it should reflect that.

            Similarly, a human being is a singular entity, and all English speakers use singular pronouns in referring to them, when in fact *all* human beings are actually composed of billions of cells. But being composed of many different cells, many of which are radically different species even (symbiotic bacteria), doesn't change the fact that we look at humans as individuals and use singular pronouns when referring to a single human.

      • (Score: 1) by fyngyrz on Wednesday April 26 2017, @03:10PM (3 children)

        by fyngyrz (6567) on Wednesday April 26 2017, @03:10PM (#500079) Journal

        My point is that there was nothing wrong with the source

        And my point was that [sic] doesn't mean there's something wrong with the source, so your objection on that basis is invalid.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @05:36PM (2 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @05:36PM (#500195)

          My objection is perfectly valid. The whole point of including sic is for the conveyor of information to say: "Hey, I know this is wrong, but it isn't my fault". If there is nothing to worry about in the source, there is no reason to include. Otherwise, we should just throw it around everywhere when we quote anything, as sort of a poor man's hash to authenticate quoted material.

          • (Score: 1) by fyngyrz on Wednesday April 26 2017, @05:43PM

            by fyngyrz (6567) on Wednesday April 26 2017, @05:43PM (#500203) Journal

            No, the whole point of [sic] – literally – is to say "this is literal as per the source."

            You have a mistaken conception of what it means, insisting it is an indication of error, which it is not, so you're making a mistake in interpreting what it's telling you. Your attention has been called to the fact that this is precisely what the source said. That's all.

            There are many reasons one might do this. [sic] covers them all. That is what it is for.

          • (Score: 1) by fyngyrz on Wednesday April 26 2017, @06:08PM

            by fyngyrz (6567) on Wednesday April 26 2017, @06:08PM (#500233) Journal

            Otherwise, we should just throw it around everywhere when we quote anything, as sort of a poor man's hash to authenticate quoted material.

            Sorry, should have covered this.

            Here's the thing. Suppose someone says, exactly:

            I ain't no engineer

            Then this thought, for some reason, is to be presented in a blurb that is going to be edited. There are several approaches to this, all perfectly valid.

            Direct, without indication, simply allowing the colloquialism to pass unremarked:

            I ain't no engineer

            Direct, with indication and clearly no intent to mischaracterize the quoted speaker, but rather to be clear that this was precisely how the speaker expressed the thought. This is particularly appropriate in times like ours where partial and out-of-context and intentional misquoting are not just extant, but rampant:

            I ain't no[sic] engineer

            Using indicated substitution:

            I [am not an] engineer

            Referential:

            S/he indicated that s/he was not an engineer.

            As to misspellings:

            I am a programer[sic]

            Here, there is an obvious misspelling, and your attention is being called to it (see the theme? It's about focusing your attention.) That might have been a typo. It might have been placement of a word the author did not know the spelling of. But what it wasn't, was a misspelling the editor made. The editor is telling you "yes, I/we know this is misspelled, but this is how it was written." This is appropriate, and non-condemning, because generally speaking, it is an editor's job to notice such things and make decisions about them. Specifically in quotations, if corrections of errors are not to be made, then [sic] calls your attention to the fact that the original was left intact intentionally. Not that the error exists, because that fact is obvious on its face; but that the error is not that of the editor.

            None of this is to say you can't intend to use it punitively or exclusively to point out what you consider to be errors. You can. Many do. But that is not in any way a validation of the idea that this is what it is for, and so, how it should always be taken. Therein lies your error.