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Severe Flaws Found In Libarchive Open Source Library (talosintel.com)
Reader itwbennett writes: Researchers from Cisco Systems' Talos group have found three memory corruption errors in the widely used open-source library libarchive that can result in arbitrary code execution and can be exploited by passing specially crafted files to applications that contain the vulnerable code. "The library is used by file and package managers included in many Linux and BSD systems, as well as by components and tools in OS X and Chrome OS," writes Lucian Constantin. "Developers can also include the library's code in their own projects, so it's hard to know how many other applications or firmware packages contain it." (Original blog post) So, while the libarchive maintainers have released patches for the flaws, it will likely take a long time for them to trickle down through all the affected projects.
Generally it's "please use this new language that has minimal support and is single sourced and apply it to your critical systems now!" It's nice to have new languages, but if we all rushed to the latest one then we'd just be repeating the same mistakes of having a monoculture.
Remember when Java was the perfect language, designed from the ground up to make sure you can't do anything unsafe with it and it runs in a perfect sandbox that won't harm your computer.
Now Rust is a nice language. But it'll take a whole lot more than "goddammit people!" to get projects to switch.