5 ms·

If Google is adopting this, maybe rachelbythebay's vagueposting was ahead of the curve? I jest; the vagueposting led to uninformed speculation, panic, reddit l

If Google is adopting this, maybe rachelbythebay's vagueposting was ahead of the curve? I jest; the vagueposting led to uninformed speculation, panic, reddit levels of baseless accusation, and harassment of the developers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43477057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43477057 I hope Google's experiment doesn't turn out the same.

perching_aix 1y ago
Speaking of, whatever came out of that? I don't see any related updates on that blog.
- diggan 1y ago
  This was published the day after, with the title "Problems with the heap" but the URL makes the context clear: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2025/03/26/atop/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2025/03/26/atop/
  - perching_aix 1y ago
    Yeah, I meant since that one.
    - amiga386 1y ago
      A bug matching the details of the vaguepost was found by a third party with no help from Rachel: https://blog.bismuth.sh/blog/bismuth-found-the-atop-bug https://blog.bismuth.sh/blog/bismuth-found-the-atop-bug > Given the vagueness, we were curious if Bismuth's bug scanning capabilities could find the bug so we let it rip on the code base. 10 minutes later, we had it. Or at least we had a bug which looked and behaved exactly like Rachel described. > As soon as we figured this out and had something reproducible we moved to responsibly disclose the issue and we emailed Gerlof at 8pm on the 26th. > Seeing this bug and how it's triggered, I understand Rachel's initial reaction to write a vague "get rid of it" post without going into detail. [...] That said, the internet loves to run wild with speculation and there's a reason we have the responsible disclosure process. For something that's installed as often as Nvidia GPU drivers, it would be prudent to spend the extra few days and have a controlled disclosure. Posting something like that can start off an arms race to find the bug, and if someone malicious were to reproduce and exploit it first, they get free reign to take over affected systems until it's patched. Yes, sounding the alarm might cause people to uninstall it, but there's plenty of places where it will remain, giving malicious actors incentive to go for it. But with a coordinated disclosure, the arms race never starts, and systems are patched before anyone realizes there was an issue. The atop maintainer fixed the bug on March 29th, and also changed the behaviour of atop to _not_ connect to its helper daemons by default: https://github.com/Atoptool/atop/commit/542b7f7ac52926ca272129dba81d7db80279bb98 https://github.com/Atoptool/atop/commit/542b7f7ac52926ca2721... ... and released it as atop v2.11.1 on April 5th: https://github.com/Atoptool/atop/releases/tag/v2.11.1 https://github.com/Atoptool/atop/releases/tag/v2.11.1 There has been nothing on Rachel's blog about this topic since the vaguepost and vaguepost followup. The CVE (https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-31160 https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-31160) is still incorrect, and there's no indication who requested it. It says that versions "0 - 2.11.0" are affected, this is untrue, because the atopgpud (and support in atop for reading from it) was introduced in version 2.4.0 ("The vulnerability is present since the introduction of 'atopgpud' in atop 2.4.0." per https://www.atoptool.nl/downloadatop.php https://www.atoptool.nl/downloadatop.php)
diggan 1y ago
> uninformed speculation, panic, reddit levels of baseless accusation, and harassment of the developers To be fair, it seems like the only way of avoiding something like that is never saying anything publicly. The crowds of the internet eagerly jump into any drama, vague or not, and balloon it regardless.
- eddythompson80 1y ago
  I remember when heartbleed was the big thing. There were many people digging into the person who committed the bug. Looking for where they lived, worked, and traveled. Many people were so desperate to find something to prove he was a spy. If you google his name, 80% of the results are articles about how he denying doing that on purpose.
fn-mote 1y ago
> I jest; the vagueposting led to [...] Resurrecting a 4 month old issue that evaporated in a day or two seems like poor form to me. Also I believe most of the responsibility for the negative behavior should be assigned to those actually engaging in it, not the initial post. I understand others reasonably disagree (notably about the accusation and harrassment). Tbh, it sounds like you might have been personally affected? At any rate, I certainly don't condone a mob mentality.
- amiga386 1y ago
  I stand by what I said at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43492940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43492940 - and if you only read one thing, read the harrassment an atop contributor was subjected to by "eslerm": https://github.com/Atoptool/atop/issues/330#issuecomment-2754923903 https://github.com/Atoptool/atop/issues/330#issuecomment-275... I bring it up because of the unmissable parallels. Google are trialling a policy to see what will happen, but this incident shows already what can happen. RbtB is a trusted blog by the HN crowd, and her vaguepost unexpectedly whipped up hysteria. It was only quelled by a post with more details the next day. Google Project Zero has enormous levels of trust, intends to vaguepost as policy, and not post more details the next day to satisfy the mob. It does not look good for volunteer maintainers to suffer an entire world of talentless clowns rifling through every commit and asking "is this the bug Project Zero found?"
  - tptacek 1y ago
    The "Rachel By The Bay" blog and Google Project Zero are not reasonable comparands in matters of vulnerability disclosure.
    - amiga386 1y ago
      I think it's a fair illustration of what irresponsible disclosure looks like. I expect Project Zero will be monitoring carefully; for all their good intentions, this policy trial has the potential to go as badly wrong as the atop disclosure did, for everything they announce. You can reasonably expect massive, worldwide scrutiny in anything P0 announces has a vulnerability in it without also disclosing the vulnerability, and this extra attention has the potential to overwhelm FOSS maintainers, even if they have fixed the vulnerability and are waiting for coordinated disclosure.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

perching_aix 1y ago

Speaking of, whatever came out of that? I don't see any related updates on that blog.

diggan 1y ago
This was published the day after, with the title "Problems with the heap" but the URL makes the context clear: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2025/03/26/atop/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2025/03/26/atop/
- perching_aix 1y ago
  Yeah, I meant since that one.
  - amiga386 1y ago
    A bug matching the details of the vaguepost was found by a third party with no help from Rachel: https://blog.bismuth.sh/blog/bismuth-found-the-atop-bug https://blog.bismuth.sh/blog/bismuth-found-the-atop-bug > Given the vagueness, we were curious if Bismuth's bug scanning capabilities could find the bug so we let it rip on the code base. 10 minutes later, we had it. Or at least we had a bug which looked and behaved exactly like Rachel described. > As soon as we figured this out and had something reproducible we moved to responsibly disclose the issue and we emailed Gerlof at 8pm on the 26th. > Seeing this bug and how it's triggered, I understand Rachel's initial reaction to write a vague "get rid of it" post without going into detail. [...] That said, the internet loves to run wild with speculation and there's a reason we have the responsible disclosure process. For something that's installed as often as Nvidia GPU drivers, it would be prudent to spend the extra few days and have a controlled disclosure. Posting something like that can start off an arms race to find the bug, and if someone malicious were to reproduce and exploit it first, they get free reign to take over affected systems until it's patched. Yes, sounding the alarm might cause people to uninstall it, but there's plenty of places where it will remain, giving malicious actors incentive to go for it. But with a coordinated disclosure, the arms race never starts, and systems are patched before anyone realizes there was an issue. The atop maintainer fixed the bug on March 29th, and also changed the behaviour of atop to _not_ connect to its helper daemons by default: https://github.com/Atoptool/atop/commit/542b7f7ac52926ca272129dba81d7db80279bb98 https://github.com/Atoptool/atop/commit/542b7f7ac52926ca2721... ... and released it as atop v2.11.1 on April 5th: https://github.com/Atoptool/atop/releases/tag/v2.11.1 https://github.com/Atoptool/atop/releases/tag/v2.11.1 There has been nothing on Rachel's blog about this topic since the vaguepost and vaguepost followup. The CVE (https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-31160 https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-31160) is still incorrect, and there's no indication who requested it. It says that versions "0 - 2.11.0" are affected, this is untrue, because the atopgpud (and support in atop for reading from it) was introduced in version 2.4.0 ("The vulnerability is present since the introduction of 'atopgpud' in atop 2.4.0." per https://www.atoptool.nl/downloadatop.php https://www.atoptool.nl/downloadatop.php)

diggan 1y ago

> uninformed speculation, panic, reddit levels of baseless accusation, and harassment of the developers To be fair, it seems like the only way of avoiding something like that is never saying anything publicly. The crowds of the internet eagerly jump into any drama, vague or not, and balloon it regardless.

eddythompson80 1y ago
I remember when heartbleed was the big thing. There were many people digging into the person who committed the bug. Looking for where they lived, worked, and traveled. Many people were so desperate to find something to prove he was a spy. If you google his name, 80% of the results are articles about how he denying doing that on purpose.

fn-mote 1y ago

> I jest; the vagueposting led to [...] Resurrecting a 4 month old issue that evaporated in a day or two seems like poor form to me. Also I believe most of the responsibility for the negative behavior should be assigned to those actually engaging in it, not the initial post. I understand others reasonably disagree (notably about the accusation and harrassment). Tbh, it sounds like you might have been personally affected? At any rate, I certainly don't condone a mob mentality.

amiga386 1y ago
I stand by what I said at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43492940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43492940 - and if you only read one thing, read the harrassment an atop contributor was subjected to by "eslerm": https://github.com/Atoptool/atop/issues/330#issuecomment-2754923903 https://github.com/Atoptool/atop/issues/330#issuecomment-275... I bring it up because of the unmissable parallels. Google are trialling a policy to see what will happen, but this incident shows already what can happen. RbtB is a trusted blog by the HN crowd, and her vaguepost unexpectedly whipped up hysteria. It was only quelled by a post with more details the next day. Google Project Zero has enormous levels of trust, intends to vaguepost as policy, and not post more details the next day to satisfy the mob. It does not look good for volunteer maintainers to suffer an entire world of talentless clowns rifling through every commit and asking "is this the bug Project Zero found?"
- tptacek 1y ago
  The "Rachel By The Bay" blog and Google Project Zero are not reasonable comparands in matters of vulnerability disclosure.
  - amiga386 1y ago
    I think it's a fair illustration of what irresponsible disclosure looks like. I expect Project Zero will be monitoring carefully; for all their good intentions, this policy trial has the potential to go as badly wrong as the atop disclosure did, for everything they announce. You can reasonably expect massive, worldwide scrutiny in anything P0 announces has a vulnerability in it without also disclosing the vulnerability, and this extra attention has the potential to overwhelm FOSS maintainers, even if they have fixed the vulnerability and are waiting for coordinated disclosure.

deleted 1y ago

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