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One of the silliest bugs on record emerged late last week, when Debian project leader Chris Lamb took to the distro's security to post an advisory that the little [beep] utility had a local privilege escalation vulnerability.
The utility lets either a command line user control a PC's speaker, or – more usefully – a program can pipe the command out to the command line to tell the user something's happened. If, of course, their machines still have a beeper-speaker, which is increasingly rare and raises the question why the utility still exists. Since beep isn't even installed by default, it's not hard to see the issue would have gone un-noticed.
News of the bug emerged at holeybeep.ninja/, a site that combines news of the bug with attempts at satirising those who brand bugs and put up websites about them.
But the joke's on holeybeep.ninja because according to the discussion at the Debian mailing list, the fix the site provided didn't fix all of beep's problems. As Tony Hoyle wrote: “The patch vulnerability seems more severe to me, as people apply patches all the time (they shouldn't do it as root, but people are people) … It's concerning that the holeybeep.ninja site exploited an unrelated fault for 'fun' without apparently telling anyone.”
German security researcher and journalist Hanno Böck alerted the OSS-sec list to further issues on Sunday.
[...] Böck's note also linked to an integer overflow and a bug in the patch supposed to fix the original issue.
As a result, Böck wrote, beep should probably be discarded: it needs a proper code review, and there's no much point to the effort “for a tool talking to the PC speaker, which doesn't exist in most modern systems anyway.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 10 2018, @09:25AM
I actually use pidgin's integrated console beep support all the time, so I will have a noticable way to tell if someone is IMing me even if I disconnected my speakers to use on another system (You try having either 5 sets of speakers, or a chain of minijack cables strung between every system in your room/desk!) Barring that, although prone to less reliability, I can use nasd along with the snd-pcm-oss module to auplay sound notifications across the network to a central system which can notify me when messages are incoming. Compared to pulseaudio there are only a few prerequisites to nasd, and it installs on basically all my systems from modern, to 90s era.
I actually kind of wish we could get these 'gentrification techies' out of our community, so we would actually finish and debug tech before moving on to the next great thing. Given how little of the patchsets, changesets, and hardware gets thoroughly documented and debugged before getting thrown away, it feels like the entire tech community is basically a waste of time, since nothing ever really gets finished to a point where it could be considered 'mature'. Just look at Mesa for examples. The early mesa cards ALMOST got feature complete when they decided to drop DRI1. Around the time DRI2 drivers got complete we saw a push for DRI3. Now we're seeing a push to throw away OpenGL, right as feature parity is obtained and migrate everything to Vulkan. I appreciate new tech. I just don't appreciate old tech being thrown out before I can even enjoy having it feature complete, FINALLY.