

Are you a (potential) contributor?


Are you a (potential) contributor?


Super-human claims require evidence. And asking for that evidence is not an insult.


I think it’s time for this instance to consider introducing a filter where users have to choose a language they know (any language), and then have to answer easy questions about it (in a specific way), before being able to post here.
It can be limited to specific posts, to limit the false-negative filtering of genuine discourse.
This should help with bots, or worse, actual humans who accepted being shaped into acting like ones. The line separating the two has become very thin anyway, given the prevalence of LLM use, both automatic AND manual.


Can you point to relevant non-trivial public work of yours that has zero CVE’s?
The more you learn and know, the more you refrain from making such statements. This is universally applicable, and not limited to C or programming. And that’s what makes your “story” suspect.
Or maybe it’s a reading comprehension issue.
I used to write non-trivial C code myself btw.


It is guaranteed those who talk about this have ZERO clue about the licenses of the software they directly use, or have been always installed on their systems.


waypipe support input (keyboard+mouse)? because if it doesn’t, it’s kind of useless. you might as well just use ffmpeg with kmsgrab (provided that the pixel format the compositor uses is supported).I have no intention of switching to wayland, but I did try wayvnc a couple of times. The first time it was very buggy. The second time it seemed to have improved. But I see now that it isn’t actively developed anymore!


Rust has features that are not directly related to memory safety, but introduce paradigmatic and ergonomic improvements that help writing correct logic more often. Features like sum types (powerful enums) and type classes (traits, how generics are implemented) quickly come to mind. Hygienic macros and procedural macros are also very powerful features.
Sometimes the two aspects (language feature and memory safety) come together. For example, the Send and Sync traits is the part of the type system that contributes to implementing thread safety.
So it’s not all just about (im)mutability, lifetimes, and the borrow checker, the directly relevant safety features.
Also, the tooling and the ecosystem are factors the value of which can not be understated.


Nice(!) to see so many people who don’t know anything about programming get successfully propagandized into going against something they know nothing about.
Below is a list of CVE’s published against original sudo, all within the last 5 years. You may not heard of them, because CVE’s against non-Rust projects are not news 🫣
sudo CVE’s from within the last 5 years(severity scores are not available/assigned always)
Sudo before 1.9.5p2 contains an off-by-one error that can result in a heap-based buffer overflow, which allows privilege escalation to root via “sudoedit -s” and a command-line argument that ends with a single backslash character.
The sudoedit personality of Sudo before 1.9.5 may allow a local unprivileged user to perform arbitrary directory-existence tests by winning a sudo_edit.c race condition in replacing a user-controlled directory by a symlink to an arbitrary path.
selinux_edit_copy_tfiles in sudoedit in Sudo before 1.9.5 allows a local unprivileged user to gain file ownership and escalate privileges by replacing a temporary file with a symlink to an arbitrary file target. This affects SELinux RBAC support in permissive mode. Machines without SELinux are not vulnerable.
Sudo 1.8.0 through 1.9.12, with the crypt() password backend, contains a plugins/sudoers/auth/passwd.c array-out-of-bounds error that can result in a heap-based buffer over-read.
A flaw was found in sudo in the handling of ipa_hostname, where ipa_hostname from /etc/sssd/sssd.conf was not propagated in sudo. Therefore, it leads to privilege mismanagement vulnerability in applications, where client hosts retain privileges even after retracting them.
In Sudo before 1.9.12p2, the sudoedit (aka -e) feature mishandles extra arguments passed in the user-provided environment variables (SUDO_EDITOR, VISUAL, and EDITOR), allowing a local attacker to append arbitrary entries to the list of files to process. This can lead to privilege escalation.
Sudo before 1.9.13p2 has a double free in the per-command chroot feature.
Sudo before 1.9.13 does not escape control characters in log messages.
Sudo before 1.9.13 does not escape control characters in sudoreplay output.
Sudo before 1.9.15 might allow row hammer attacks (for authentication bypass or privilege escalation) because application logic sometimes is based on not equaling an error value (instead of equaling a success value), and because the values do not resist flips of a single bit.
Sudo before 1.9.17p1, when used with a sudoers file that specifies a host that is neither the current host nor ALL, allows listed users to execute commands on unintended machines.
Sudo before 1.9.17p1 allows local users to obtain root access because /etc/nsswitch.conf from a user-controlled directory is used with the --chroot option.
The special comment from @MTK@lemmy.world in this thread deserves some focus:
The Rust hype is funny because it is completely based on the fact that a leading cause of security vulnerabilities for all of these mature and secure projects is memory bugs, which is very true, but it completely fails to see that this is the leading cause because these are really mature projects that have highly skilled developers fixing so much shit.
So you get these new Rust projects that are sometimes made by people that don’t have the same experience as these C/C++ devs, and they are so confident in the memory safety that they forget about the much simpler security issues.
This has all the classics from the collectively manic discourse that has been spreading lately
mature projects
highly skilled developers
Rust projects that are sometimes made by people that don’t have the same experience as these C/C++ devs
C/C++ devs (deserves a separate entry)
they forget about the much simpler security issues.
The only classic missing is “battle tested” which is a crowd favorite these days.
But of course the internet gantry’s knowledge about CVE’s reported against non-Rust projects, is as good as their understanding of the Rust language itself.
Someone bothering to be minimally informed, even when lacking the technical knowledge to maximize their understanding of the information, would have known that the original “mature” sudo has CVE’s published against it all the time. A CRITICAL one was rather recent even. And as it just happens, the ones not (directly) related to memory safety did outnumber the ones that did recently (5 year span). Which ones had higher severity is left as homework for the internet gantry.
The discourse centered around memory safety is itself lacks the knowledge to realize that the overall value proposition of Rust is much bigger than this single aspect, although the breadth of sub-aspects that cover memory safety offered by Rust is itself also under-grasped.
The internet gantry’s susceptibility to propaganda and good old FUD done by ignorant and drama mongering “influencers” and “e-celebs” would have been almost concerning, that is if their transient feelings mattered in any way, in the grand scheme of things.
Needless to say, but this is comment is not meant to be disparaging towards Todd C. Miller or any other sudo developer/maintainer. He has a good relationship with sudo-rs developers anyway, not that the internet gantry would know.
There is no “community”. The GPL itself was explicitly created for the freedom(s) of the individual. The faux-“community” is just an attempt to create an “identity” in hopes of encouraging people to contribute, or at least advocate. And many projects don’t even like being advocated for outside of potential contributor pools (a few hate any level of advocacy outright).
Incidentally, liberally licensed software, on average, tend to value adoption at least as much as direct contribution, and thus would usually appreciate advocacy more.
Or a practical one, or …
Everything can be argued to have a political aspect to it. But what people (often non-contributors) have in mind ignores many relevant technical/practical aspects that may play a role.
Open-source license choice is practically near the bottom of an endless list of things that actually empower corporations. Most of the empowerment comes from the inherent nature of the system, which is something software licenses, GPL included, don’t even pretend to try to fix.
But that’s not why I asked.
Do you know how many liberally licensed essential packages are installed in your system right now, and can you name them? From my experience, most of the people who quibble about this don’t and can’t.
* Not that it matters, but I personally use AGPL or MPLv2 for my own stuff.