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Alleged critical VLC flaw is nothing to worry about -- and is nothing to do with VLC
There has been a degree of confusion over the last few days after news spread of a supposed vulnerability in the media player VLC. Despite being labelled by security experts as "critical", VLC's developers, VideoLAN, denied there was a problem at all.
And they were right. While there is a vulnerability, it was in a third-party library, not VLC itself. On top of this, it is nowhere near as severe as first suggested. Oh -- and it was fixed over a year ago. An older version of Ubuntu Linux was to blame for the confusion.
The problem actually exists in a third-party library called libebml, and the issue was addressed some time ago. The upshot is that if you have updated VLC within the last year, there is no risk whatsoever. VLC's developers are understandably upset at the suggestion that their software was insecure.
Also at Tom's Hardware, Boing Boing, and The Register.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 25 2019, @07:27PM (1 child)
Java is a work of the devil!
To be any good, you have to work in straight up binary. No abstractions mean no distractions. You cut to the chase. Do it right, and the kernel will fit on a floppy again, along with VLC, a browser, an email and bittorrent client, and will find cheap tickets to Vegas.
(Score: 4, Informative) by DannyB on Thursday July 25 2019, @07:34PM
That works. As long as development cost is no object.
However businesses are optimizing for dollars, not for bytes and cpu cycles. If I need an extra 64 GB of ram, but can beat my competitor to market, my manager won't even blink.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.