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: 2) by DannyB on Friday July 26 2019, @01:46PM
You realize the CLang compiler generates LLVM. There are projects [v8.dev] that compile LLVM to run in the browser.
No need to rewrite VLC. Maybe. If they can get the runtime libraries to have GUI support for the browser.
There was another project that ran an entire VM, which could boot a Linux, in the browser. But alas no GUI.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.