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Homeland Security Uncovers Critical Flaw in X11

Amy's Robot writes "An open-source security audit program funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has flagged a critical vulnerability in the X Window System (X11) which is used in Unix and Linux systems. A missing parentheses in a bit of code is to blame. The error can grant a user root access, and was discovered using an automated code-scanning tool." While serious, the flaw has already been corrected.

5 of 517 comments (clear)

  1. Re:OpenBSD fixed on Jan. 21, 2000 by WilliamSChips · · Score: 0, Troll

    Well, since with OpenBSD you can only use software from 2000, thats eems accurate.

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    Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
  2. False Alarm by dfn5 · · Score: 1, Troll
    After Homeland Security discovered "xhost -" they issued this press release "Sorry, my bad".

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  3. Re:Missing *pair* of parentheses by Edmund+Blackadder · · Score: 1, Troll

    This helps illustrate the biggest problem I have with C (and most other modern languages). And that is that is that you can close your eyes, start banging on the keyboard and type in some random sequence of characters and it is very likely that it will get parsed and compiled and result in some kind of random program.

    In other words, because there are so much abbreviations in C, any mistake usually results in syntaticaly valid but otherwise erroneous code.

    Brevity is not the end all. A more verbose language (like Pascal) can be much more helpful by catching your typos before compiling.

  4. Now I think I'm starting to understand. by Allnighterking · · Score: 0, Troll

    They are trying to find sufficient errors in Linux code to explain why they were the only group of people in the world who didn't know a major hurricane could cause the levies to break in New Orleans. (They may be on Windows, hard to tell as they use Akimai to ensure uptime)

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    I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.

  5. Re:So does this mean? by roman_mir · · Score: 0, Troll

    Yeah, because Java doesn't have function pointers. - thank you, Dr. Obvious.