XZ Utils backdoor
tukaani.org

They haven’t particularly made a comment on the situation so much as acknowledged it’s happening. They seem to be going with the story that they had nothing to do with it and this is news to them. Hope to hear more from them soon so we can find out more about the situation, how and why this happened, etc.

(The sceptical tone isn’t because of disbelief of Collin, it’s because we don’t know enough about the situation to be able to say Collin is or isn’t telling the truth here.)

  • Alex@lemmy.ml
    1791·
    3 months ago

    Don’t be too hard on Collin. Looking back on the threads it’s fairly clear he’s been the victim of a social engineering attack on an overworked maintainer. People were pressuring him to hand over maintainership while expressing disappointment at the slow pace of development. The off-list contact by Jia must have seemed like a helpful enthusiastic solution to a burnt out developer.

    • 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de
      101·
      3 months ago

      People were pressuring him to hand over maintainership while expressing disappointment at the slow pace of development.

      Very likely that was part of the attack as well.

    • communism@lemmy.mlOP
      48·
      3 months ago

      I agree with that assessment, I’m not accusing Collin of anything. If it is what it seems to be then I feel very bad for him. Just being cautious with wording until things are more settled/until we know more is all.

      • UckyBon@lemmy.world
        34·
        3 months ago

        I just made a similar comment in another thread here:

        I read a lot about how we should double, triple check all the code. But what we shouldn’t forget is to check up on our people too.

    • Thorned_Rose@kbin.social
      66·
      3 months ago

      ”Finding a co-maintainer or passing the projects completely to someone else has been in my mind a long time but it’s not a trivial thing to do. For example, someone would need to have the skills, time, and enough long-term interest specifically for this.” - https://www.mail-archive.com/xz-devel@tukaani.org/msg00571.html

      As someone who runs a charity almost completely solo because of a lack of volunteers, I feel this so much in my bones. It’s one thing to say, “Hey folks, I can’t run this on my own, I need help” but it’s another to find people who actually have the level of skill, committent, passion and integrity to contribute in a meaningful way. I can get people putting their hands up but I’ve lost count of the number of people who have then turned around and said, “Oh, actually I realise now I don’t have time for this” or start in great and then just ghost me. It also takes more of my own time and energy, on top of what I’m already doing’ to onboard and train people and it sucks so hard when I do that and then people disappear shortly after - I constantly have to question whether the time it takes to do that will be worth it vs just continuing the struggle by myself.

      When you get consumers being arrogant and demanding, getting angry at you for taking too long to respond to their messages or not work fast enough… it’s soul crushing. Way too many people take volunteer work for granted or assume you’re getting paid for your time and can therefore treat you like a working-class pleb or are plain just fucking rude and entitled. :( APPRECIATE YOUR VOLUNTEERS FOLKS! We need more volunteers, and appreciation. Many hands makes light work.

    • haui@lemmy.giftedmc.com
      25·
      3 months ago

      Damn. The amount of unpaid work for something so crucial to todays communication is staggering. I always make sure to pass parts if the donations I receive (not a lot) upstream.

      I have the horrible feeling that very few people who use FOSS software and could actually donate some money at least dont do this. Do we have any numbers for this?

    • TheHarpyEagle@lemmy.world
      7·
      3 months ago

      That’s a heartbreaking read, and I can’t imagine how it feels now to know that someone who finally helped lighten the load may be involved with such an egregious breach of trust and safety.

      I think this is why I can’t get behind Linus-style takedowns, even if the prospective maintainer has made bad a mistake. Entitled consumers make things hard enough already with direct access to the developers, they don’t need any help getting burned out.

  • ouch@lemmy.world
    53·
    3 months ago

    Nothing so far seems to indicate Lasse Collin knew what was going on.

    I feel sorry for him. Must suck working on an open source project for free and then get sucked into something nefarious like this. He must be under tremendous stress.

  • SteefLem@lemmy.world
    3129·
    3 months ago

    Sorry but if the maintainer says it didnt know? Sounds fishy. Or just a bad maintainer.

    • Thorned_Rose@kbin.social
      834·
      3 months ago

      You realise that this comment is exactly part of the problem of why this happened, right? 🤦🏻‍♀️

    • aksdb@lemmy.world
      37·
      3 months ago

      Do you think being maintainer makes you some kind of all knowing being? That’s not how that works. You write code and review code of others.

      If there are multiple maintainers, you may obviously not even notice what another maintainer is doing; then you wouldn’t need multiple maintainers with write access if you could handle it all by yourself.

    • RageAgainstTheRich@lemmy.world
      17·
      3 months ago

      I suggest you read a little in how the backdoor was implemented. It wasn’t as obvious as you think. I personally don’t think the owner had anything to do with it.

    • jarfil@lemmy.world
      151·
      3 months ago

      Who’s paying him? Seriously:

      • If nobody is, then we got our value’s worth.
      • If someone is, then we should look at who, how much, and why.
    • communism@lemmy.mlOP
      13·
      3 months ago

      If I were the co-maintainer of a project I wouldn’t suspect that the person who had been actively contributing for over 2 years had injected malicious code into a binary file to distribute in the tarballs. “Jia Tan” had already gained Collin’s trust by then