The 2017 Pwnie winner for lamest vendor response goes to Lennart Poettering for systemd. According to CSO which has reported on it, the Pwnie winners which were announced a few days ago, the summary for Lennart and systemd reads as follows:
The most spectacular mishandling of a security vulnerability by a vendor ended up winning a Pwnie for Lennart Poettering due to SystemD bugs 5998, 6225, 6214, 5144, 6237. The nomination reads: "Where you are dereferencing null pointers, or writing out of bounds, or not supporting fully qualified domain names, or giving root privileges to any user whose name begins with a number, there's no chance that the CVE number will referenced in either the change log or the commit message. But CVEs aren't really our currency any more, and only the lamest of vendors gets a Pwnie!"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Monday July 31 2017, @04:31PM (3 children)
You're ignoring the part of the Unix philosophy where all those little tools are supposed to be easily individually replaceable. Systemd's various tools are all bolted together.
Usually somebody in these conversations claims that "modular" means "well they compile to separate executables...so what if you can't swap out any of them?"
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by chromas on Monday July 31 2017, @04:50PM (2 children)
Oh, sorry, I was being sardonic, but not enough I guess :D
I was hoping the "systemd-hostnamed" would give it away. It's a whole entire tool just for editing /etc/hostname. This is a thing that actually exists.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday July 31 2017, @07:23PM
Systemd in general is the incarnation of Poe's Law. Inverse Poe's Law? You think they must be joking then you find out no, they're actually serious.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31 2017, @08:45PM
Sweet jesus! Yeah, can't have people knowing how to fix their own computers. Must insert some 3rd party software so you can intercept the commands before the user finds ou**destroys their own computer**.