alt Hacker NewsThat's crazy. This is core business critical software but they just YOLO critical changes without any automated tests? this PR would be insta-rejected in the small SAAS shop I work at.
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Culture has changed a lot since the 20th century and older projects can have antiquated norms around things like testing. I was just listening to a recent podcast talking about how worrisome it is that OpenSSL has a casual culture about testing[1] and was reminded about how normal that used to be. I think in the case of telnetd you also have the problem that it’s been deprecated for multiple decades so I’d bet that they struggle even more than average to find maintainer time.
1. https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2026/02/01/python-c...
Even with automated tests you'd need to think of this exploit right? Perhaps fuzzing would have got it. The mailing lists says they proved it successful on
- OpenIndiana
- FreeBSD
- Debian GNU/Linux
So not complete YOLO.
See https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-inetutils/2015-03/msg...
FWIW, a well known LLM agent, when I asked for a review of the patch, did suggest it was dodgy but didn't pick up the severity of how dodgy it was.
Any business that has a telnet daemon able to be reached by an unauthenticated user is negligent. Just the fact that everything is in the clear is reason enough to never use it outside of protected networks.
Most 90’s era software had zero tests. Nobody gave it a second thought.
There's a famous XKCD about this: https://xkcd.com/2347/
In this case the hero's name is apparently Simon Josefsson (maintainer).
Ah, someone beat me to it!
If you think you can do better you're welcome to do better. I say this without a hint of sarcasm. This is how open source works. It's a do–ocracy, not a democracy. Whoever makes a telnet server gets to decide how the telnet server works and how much testing it gets before release.