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Comment by khannn | Hacker News Reader

They're actively making open source projects less secure by publishing bugs that the projects don't have the volunteers to fix

I saw another poster say something about "buggy software". All software is buggy.

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The bug exists whether or not google publishes a public bug report. They are no more making the project less secure than if some retro-game enthusiast had found the same bug and made a blog post about it.

Publishing bugs that the project has so that they can be fixed is actively making the project more secure. How is someone going to do anything about it if Google didn’t do the research?

Did you see how the FFMPEG project patched a bug for a 1995 console? That's not a good use for the limited amount of volunteers on the project. It actively makes it less secure by taking away from more pertinent bugs.

Then they should mark it as low priority and put it in their backlog. I trust that the maintainers are good judges of what deserves their time.

Publicizing vulnerabilities is the problem though. Google is ensuring obscure or unknown vulnerabilities will now be very well known and very public.

This is significant when they represent one of the few entities on the planet likely able to find bugs at that scale due to their wealth.

So funding a swarm of bug reports, for software they benefit from, using a scale of resources not commonly available, while not contributing fixes and instead demanding timelines for disclosure, seems a lot more like they'd just like to drive people out of open source.

I think most people learned about this bug from FFmpeg's actions, not Google's. Also, you are underestimating adversaries: Google spends quite a bit of money on this, but not a lot given their revenue, because their primary purpose is not finding security bugs. There are entities that are smaller than Google but derive almost all their money from finding exploits. Their results are broadly comparable but they are only publicized when they mess up.

The codec can be triggered to run automatically by adversarial input. The irrelevance of the format is itself irrelevant when ffmpeg has it on by default.

If it was a rendering bug it would be a waste of time. But they also wouldn't have any pressure to fix it.

An exploit is different. It can affect anyone and is quite pertinent.

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