That's crazy. This is core business critical software but they just YOLO critical changes without any automated tests? this PR would be insta-rejected in the small SAAS shop I work at.
If you think you can do better you're welcome to do better. I say this without a hint of sarcasm. This is how open source works. It's a do–ocracy, not a democracy. Whoever makes a telnet server gets to decide how the telnet server works and how much testing it gets before release.
Maybe the lesson here is to stop letting the GNU folks do things, if this is what they do. This is only one example of craziness coming out of the GNU camp.
Or, flip the responsibility to what it has always been understood to be, when using open source software from random volunteers (some being bad actors) on the internet for anything remotely critical: audit the source.
GNU doesn’t provide labor, only organizational tools like mailing lists and whatnot. The projects that GNU supports are still run by individual volunteers. If you want it done better then please volunteer so that you can be the one doing it better.
Culture has changed a lot since the 20th century and older projects can have antiquated norms around things like testing. I was just listening to a recent podcast talking about how worrisome it is that OpenSSL has a casual culture about testing[1] and was reminded about how normal that used to be. I think in the case of telnetd you also have the problem that it’s been deprecated for multiple decades so I’d bet that they struggle even more than average to find maintainer time.
Even with automated tests you'd need to think of this exploit right? Perhaps fuzzing would have got it. The mailing lists says they proved it successful on
Any business that has a telnet daemon able to be reached by an unauthenticated user is negligent. Just the fact that everything is in the clear is reason enough to never use it outside of protected networks.
That link goes to a page full of random garbage. No commits there to be seen.
Apparently the owners of that website don't like my choice of user agent, and have decided to punish me accordingly.
That's crazy. This is core business critical software but they just YOLO critical changes without any automated tests? this PR would be insta-rejected in the small SAAS shop I work at.
If you think you can do better you're welcome to do better. I say this without a hint of sarcasm. This is how open source works. It's a do–ocracy, not a democracy. Whoever makes a telnet server gets to decide how the telnet server works and how much testing it gets before release.
Maybe the lesson here is to stop letting the GNU folks do things, if this is what they do. This is only one example of craziness coming out of the GNU camp.
Or, flip the responsibility to what it has always been understood to be, when using open source software from random volunteers (some being bad actors) on the internet for anything remotely critical: audit the source.
GNU doesn’t provide labor, only organizational tools like mailing lists and whatnot. The projects that GNU supports are still run by individual volunteers. If you want it done better then please volunteer so that you can be the one doing it better.
Culture has changed a lot since the 20th century and older projects can have antiquated norms around things like testing. I was just listening to a recent podcast talking about how worrisome it is that OpenSSL has a casual culture about testing[1] and was reminded about how normal that used to be. I think in the case of telnetd you also have the problem that it’s been deprecated for multiple decades so I’d bet that they struggle even more than average to find maintainer time.
1. https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2026/02/01/python-c...
Even with automated tests you'd need to think of this exploit right? Perhaps fuzzing would have got it. The mailing lists says they proved it successful on
- OpenIndiana
- FreeBSD
- Debian GNU/Linux
So not complete YOLO.
See https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-inetutils/2015-03/msg...
FWIW, a well known LLM agent, when I asked for a review of the patch, did suggest it was dodgy but didn't pick up the severity of how dodgy it was.
> a well known LLM agent
Which one?
Not GP, but my local Ministral 3 14B and GPT-OSS 20B didn't catch anything unless I gave some hints.
He says 'well known' so I assume Claude or GPT, I just don't get why he's being coy.
I thought by not naming it wouldn't shift the focus to the particular model, but it did the opposite. It was gpt-5.3-codex in medium mode.
Any business that has a telnet daemon able to be reached by an unauthenticated user is negligent. Just the fact that everything is in the clear is reason enough to never use it outside of protected networks.
unless it doesn’t matter if it’s evesdropped
Traffic could be tampered as well.
Sometimes that doesn't matter either. That is the valid use case of a plain-text protocol like telnet: doesn't matter.
Most 90’s era software had zero tests. Nobody gave it a second thought.
There's a famous XKCD about this: https://xkcd.com/2347/
In this case the hero's name is apparently Simon Josefsson (maintainer).
I feel like we should just start saying 2347. Everyone knows what you mean.
https://xkcd.com/2347/
Ah, someone beat me to it!