Yet another Hacker News

A 32-year-old bug walks into a Telnet server

76 points paimapi 1 day ago 36 comments

collinfunk 8 hours ago | parent

As the person who wrote the fix for this issue (and not the original code), I will just mention that I find this paragraph makes the author sound incredibly entitled:

    Shamefully, the inetutils project hasn’t actually released a fixed version of their software (at least at the time of publishing).

The bug was reported on a public mailing list, which is sadly common nowadays [1]. After my workday, during which I was not able to review the report, I wrote a script to confirm the bug was real, since I was seeing way too many slop reports at the time. Then I sent a patch before going to bed [2]. A third party then graciously shared the patch on oss-security [3], which all distributions follow. There is no need to make a new release, which is harder for the distributions than simply applying a small patch.

Perhaps I am just unlucky in my interactions, but I feel like this entitlement is too common among software security people. Note that I see zero return in spending time working on Inetutils, and I find other projects I work on more interesting.

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-inetutils/2026-03/msg... [2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-inetutils/2026-03/msg... [3] https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/03/12/4

taftster 8 hours ago | parent

It's an unfortunate statement. And it does feel like it discredits you and the heroic efforts of those like you.

But this is probably forgiven as just sensationalism in writing, which is all too common. Not to excuse the author, but these types of writeups tend to drift into name calling and finger pointing a little too soon.

"Shamefully" is definitely the wrong word here, for sure.

JoshTriplett 7 hours ago | parent

> But this is probably forgiven as just sensationalism in writing

Why should we forgive sensationalism in writing at all?

x______________ 8 hours ago | parent

The not-so-silent minority hanging out on HN know that the true heroes are those who take the time and put in the effort, and then put even more effort to reply and post about it here.

Thanks to all of our heroes, op included.

TacticalCoder 4 hours ago | parent

> The not-so-silent minority hanging out on HN know that the true heroes are those who take the time and put in the effort, and then put even more effort to reply and post about it here.

We know that the entirety of the AI movement is built on top of open-source projects like Linux and all the terminal and command line utilities. And runs inside projects doing god's work (say to contain the agents) like QEMU etc.

AI lives inside the work of our open-source heroes and would be absolutely nowhere without the work of all those people.

> Thanks to all of our heroes, op included.

Definitely, thanks GP and thanks to all our heroes.

saidnooneever 6 hours ago | parent

you are right they are entitled brats. usually they cant write good code themselves and they purposefully look for very old or low traffic code to find things that are 'old' etc. to make stupid uninteresting AI generated blog posts.

i have not seen a decent writeup in one of these clickbait things these ppl push out.

just ignore these types of ppl. its fine to fix the bugs ofc but what i mean is, ignore their attitudes. its a kids' attitude to life they keep

croemer 3 hours ago | parent

Thanks for maintaining telnet.

  The bug was reported on a public mailing list, which is sadly common nowadays

In defence of the reporter, your Readme only says "Send bug reports to bug-inetutils@gnu.org.", there is no distinction for vulnerabilities. [1]

There is a 3 months old pull request to advertise a private reporting email address but it's unmerged, maybe you could use this renewed interest as a nudge to set it up and merge: https://codeberg.org/inetutils/inetutils/pulls/26

One other thing the reporter could have done to make your life easier is to write a repro script rather than just explain the steps in prose.

[1]: https://codeberg.org/inetutils/inetutils/src/commit/40f19d84...

trollbridge 33 minutes ago | parent

Thank you for maintaining Telnet! I still keep it around mostly for retro computing purposes to interact with very old operating systems or with machines that aren’t capable of encrypting in any reasonable amount of time.

PunchyHamster 16 minutes ago | parent

Security culture in general seems to be very entitled and toxic, the absolute disconnect from reality some of them get needs to be studied

notimetorelax 8 hours ago | parent

I really dislike articles that blow out of proportion the technical details. TLDR; bounds checking was missing leading to potential memory corruption.

ErroneousBosh 4 hours ago | parent

> TLDR; bounds checking was missing leading to potential memory corruption.

... if you hold it just right, and let the light of the full moon shine through it on a particular day, while you send a carefully-crafted packet through the right brand of NIC over cables forged by long-forgotten smiths.

jeffbee 8 hours ago | parent

RISC was not a distant dream in 1994 LMAO.

b800h 6 hours ago | parent

That made me spit out my tea. The prose was insulting.

eqvinox 4 hours ago | parent

I stopped reading on that line. The entire text is coming off as insulting, entitled and smug.

wolfi1 5 hours ago | parent

at that time even Intel had a RISC cpu (i960)

ErroneousBosh 4 hours ago | parent

RISC desktop computers were common-ish in UK schools by then.

Of course if you count the 6502 as a RISC chip (if you squint a bit, Page Zero RAM sure does look like 256 8-bit registers to me!) then UK schools had RISC desktops for over a decade before then!

krautsauer 8 hours ago | parent

Needs a (March 19) (I know HN only does this for years, but this being about vulnerabilities…)

khrbtxyz 7 hours ago | parent

A surprisingly long article for a one-line fix the authors didn’t send.

Skywalker13 7 hours ago | parent

Since AI is redacting, a lot of articles are long and boring to read with a lot of useless details.

croemer 2 hours ago | parent

Redacting what? Did you mean write or edit?

Skywalker13 2 hours ago | parent

"rédiger" in french, then it's "write" instead of "redacting" I suppose.. sorry for my poor english

sjpb 7 hours ago | parent

If you're going to rip off xkcd pictures, I feel it'd be polite at least credit and/or link the original.

velcrovan 32 minutes ago | parent

xkcd pics are provided under a Creative Commons Attribution/Non-commercial license, so attribution is required but using them is ok.

mitxela 7 hours ago | parent

FYI all signalling is in-band signalling

ErroneousBosh 4 hours ago | parent

And all signals are analogue, if you're paying enough attention to the transients ;-)

b800h 6 hours ago | parent

> "1994" > "RISC was a distant dream"

Ahem

dspillett 6 hours ago | parent

Maybe I'm in a generous mood, but I would credit the writer with making a joke about the content of the film they had just mentioned and subsequently show a screen cap of work the subtitles for a line about RISC being a significant future technology, rather than being that historically inaccurate in their own tech memory.

b800h 3 hours ago | parent

Oh yes, "RISC is going to change everything". I remember that line.

Clunky from the author, I think.

richrichardsson 1 hour ago | parent

Was just coming to comment on that too.

"Tell that to the ARM based Acorn Archimedes I was using at 6th Form College in 1991."

icedchai 5 minutes ago | parent

Or all the Sun Sparc servers that were incredibly common at that time. Coincidentally, they almost all ran telnet!

johnnyApplePRNG 6 hours ago | parent

Something tells me the NSA is none too pleased about the advent of LLMs.

Or is there a tradeoff?

Fewer ancient holes like this for their hackers but wide open access to anyone who installs codex or claude code?

spydum 1 hour ago | parent

I know people seem to think nsa and other gov threat actors live in a land of zero days and advanced techniques... And to some degree, they sure do develop those and are able to leverage them.

However, from my point of view most targets are able to be compromised by poor configs, hygiene, well known and patchable vulns, or the more likely avenue: the humans operating the system.

ErroneousBosh 4 hours ago | parent

> In fact, this vulnerability was born so long ago (way back in 1994)

> That was so long ago that RISC was still a distant dream.

Yeah ARM would like to have a word with you. I'd been using RISC on the desktop for about five years by then and I was not an early adopter.

j16sdiz 41 minutes ago | parent

and SPARC was one of the top choice for server where telnet were run.

fl7305 30 minutes ago | parent

and the DEC Alpha RISC CPU was on fire, and ran circles around the desktop CISC CPUs

egorfine 4 hours ago | parent

And this is why serious enterprises use telnetd exclusively instead of your childish ssh toy. See why? Because it's got ONE CVE in 3 decades as compared to a never-ending flow of security vulnerabilities in ssh. Security!