Inflamation by Bryan Cantrill
marc.info
marc.info
Guessing at a bug you weren't informed about, even if (in fact, especially if) the guess is informed by the actions of people who are included in the embargo, isn't doing anything wrong. The only people to blame are the people who tried and failed to protect a secret bug for just a subset of OS's.
Also: these embargoes are stupid, and everybody involved knows just how stupid they are. Rumors spread amongst the cool kids days or sometimes even weeks before anything is published.
Maybe bcantrill can chime in.
Last I heard, Cantrill was at Joyent, and worked on IllumOS.
For at least the last few multi-platform bug embargo cycles, people have been chattering about OpenBSD's unwillingness to participate in, or possibly even honor, embargoes.
Theo recently gave a presentation (at BSDCAN, I think?) that he opened by accusing the community at large of defaming OpenBSD's behavior around embargoes, despite OpenBSD project members helping other projects with previous embargoed bugs, then carefully pointed out that OpenBSD wasn't a party to any current embargoes despite reaching out and asking Intel to participate in this current FP bug.
Then he basically "guessed", based on what he says was a very vague rumor, what the FP bug was about.
Now he says Cantrill is, on some forums, accusing Theo or OpenBSD of getting a leak about the actual FP bug, and then helping break the embargo.
I think that about covers it?
Joyent is also now part of Samsung[1], and I initially assumed this is why it was included in the embargo. However, I recall reading[2] that they were upset at being left out of an embargo in the past, so maybe being part of Samsung doesn't provide as much clout as one would assume (due to Samsung's size)?
Those comments speak for themselves; I did not accuse Theo of breaking the embargo -- and to the contrary, I was advocating that OpenBSD be included. But, as I commented on lobste.rs, that Theo has acted irresponsibly has made achieving that inclusion quite a bit more difficult.
[1] https://lobste.rs/s/zwkuza/intel_cpus_might_leak_information...
If the LazyFP team wanted to keep Theo quiet, they should have included OpenBSD in the first place. You can't retroactively include them once they figure it out; that's not an embargo, that's omerta.
Regardless, it wasn't handled responsibly -- and to those of us who were under the embargo who did advocate for the inclusion of OpenBSD, the behavior here has made that argument much more difficult.
In that post you linked, you wrote this:
> That discussion was ongoing when OpenBSD caught wind of this – presumably because someone who was embargoed felt that OpenBSD deserved to know
In the email by Theo linked above he wrote this:
> In some forums, Bryan Cantrill is crafting a fiction.
> He is saying the FPU problem (and other problems) were received as a leak.
> He is not being truthful, inventing a storyline, and has not asked me for the facts.
> This was discovered by guessing Intel made a mistake.
It's pretty clear that he is referring to your presumption that someone under the embargo told them as being the "crafting a fiction". Maybe you should simply follow up either with evidence supporting that presumption (if it exists) or just a clear statement it is only a presumption and that you simply just don't believe they found it independently. (To be clear, for your average person the latter claim wouldn't hold much weight, but your words are respected more than most so the presumption wouldn't necessarily be immediately ignored even if it had no backing evidence.)
edit: Sorry I just saw this post of yours lower in the thread:
https://lobste.rs/s/zwkuza/intel_cpus_might_leak_information...
> What I am saying is that however Theo obtained information – and indeed, even if that information didn’t originate with the leak but rather by “guessing” as he is now apparently claiming – how he handled it was not responsible. And I am also saying that Theo’s irresponsibility has made the job of including OpenBSD more difficult.
So I guess there's not much more for you to say. You've said you don't believe him, but you've also indicated you don't really have the evidence (other than your experience). Seems fine to me.
> That discussion was ongoing when OpenBSD caught wind of this – presumably because someone who was embargoed felt that OpenBSD deserved to know – and then fixed it in the worst possible way. (Namely, by snarkily indicating that it was to address a CPU vulnerability.) This was then compounded by Theo’s caustic presentation at BSDCan, which was honestly irresponsible: he clearly didn’t pull eager FPU out of thin air (“post-Spectre rumors”), and should have considered himself part of the embargo in spirit if not in letter.