As the person who wrote the fix for this issue (and not the original code), I will just mention that I find this paragraph makes the author sound incredibly entitled:
Shamefully, the inetutils project hasn’t actually released a fixed version of their software (at least at the time of publishing).
The bug was reported on a public mailing list, which is sadly common nowadays [1]. After my workday, during which I was not able to review the report, I wrote a script to confirm the bug was real, since I was seeing way too many slop reports at the time. Then I sent a patch before going to bed [2]. A third party then graciously shared the patch on oss-security [3], which all distributions follow. There is no need to make a new release, which is harder for the distributions than simply applying a small patch.
Perhaps I am just unlucky in my interactions, but I feel like this entitlement is too common among software security people. Note that I see zero return in spending time working on Inetutils, and I find other projects I work on more interesting.
Thank you for maintaining Telnet! I still keep it around mostly for retro computing purposes to interact with very old operating systems or with machines that aren’t capable of encrypting in any reasonable amount of time.
collinfunk · · focus · HN ↗
Perhaps I am just unlucky in my interactions, but I feel like this entitlement is too common among software security people. Note that I see zero return in spending time working on Inetutils, and I find other projects I work on more interesting.
[1] <a href="https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-inetutils/2026-03/msg00031.html" rel="nofollow">https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-inetutils/2026-03/msg... [2] <a href="https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-inetutils/2026-03/msg00032.html" rel="nofollow">https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-inetutils/2026-03/msg... [3] <a href="https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/03/12/4" rel="nofollow">https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/03/12/4
trollbridge · · focus · HN ↗