- The developer of the ‘node-ip’ project made the GitHub repository read-only after disputing the severity of a reported vulnerability (CVE-2023-42282).
- The vulnerability involved incorrect identification of private IP addresses in non-standard formats, but the developer argued it had a dubious security impact.
- The situation highlights ongoing issues with unverified CVE reports causing unnecessary panic and frustration for open-source project maintainers.
44 points
I find this outcome delightful for all the compliance mandated organizations that are leaching with no intention to contribute back.
It could be really helpful for developers at pure leech organizations to make a case for being ready to contribute in an agile manner.
Now they’re all stuck waiting on either a good Samaritan, or their lawyers to get out of the way of progress.
I have little doubt that the fix has been committed to private forks dozens of times already, of course.
18 points
This whole debacle is a festival of stupidity:
- It’s a personal project that taxes the sole maintainer disproportionately.
- Millions of idiots use it blindly and end up building elaborate software on it. https://xkcd.com/2347/
- I’ll bet you 99.99% of those idiots use it only for
ip.isPrivate(), which you can write yourself in 5 minutes. - The CVE is a non-issue (who the fuck would call a function that takes string notation with hex numbers?)
- Appealing and reverting or downgrading CVEs is super complicated.
At this point the maintainer is fucked no matter what they do, so archiving the project and telling everybody to fuck off right back was really the only sane thing to do.
