alt Hacker NewsI'd argue it's actually breaking three vulnerability cultures. In addition to the two Jeff mentions, I think the culture of delaying upgrades and staying on stable versions for as long as possible is going to become increasingly untenable, if everything that's not latest can be trivially scanned and exploited. In the extreme I think there's a decent chance projects like Debian might have to radically overhaul or just shut down completely - the whole philosophy of slow and steady with old code just won't work.
There will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth around this, because a lot of tech types really resent having to update constantly, but I don't think people will have a choice. If you have a complicated stack where major or even minor version updates are a huge hassle, I'd start working now to try and clear out the cruft and grease those wheels.
Replies
> there's a decent chance projects like Debian might have to radically overhaul or just shut down completely - the whole philosophy of slow and steady with old code just won't work.
Debian continuously issues security updates for stable versions, ingestable with automatic updates. “Stable” doesn’t mean that vulnerabilities aren’t getting fixed.
The argument that could be made is that keeping up with getting vulnerabilities fixed might become such a high workload that fewer releases can be maintained in parallel, and therefore the lifetime and/or overlap of maintained releases would have to be reduced. But the argument for abandoning stable releases altogether doesn’t seem cogent.
It goes both ways: Stable code that only receives security updates becomes less vulnerable over time, as the likelihood of new vulnerabilities being introduced is comparatively low. From that point of view, stable software actually has a leg up over continuous (“eternal beta” in the worst case) functional updates.
That's not really the culture of debian to be honest. Yes they run old major and minor versions, but they do ship patch updates as fast as they can. Even on debian stable, you absolutely are supposed to update all the time. The culture of "just don't touch it" is a different one (but also exists, I've seen it).
Debian has updated kernel packages out for the stable release. https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2026-43284
I kind of get your point, but they responded pretty quickly here.
We are now paying for the sins of our fathers (well and mostly ourselves).
We've just kept building more complex things with more exposure with no recognition that the day of reckoning was coming. And now we are in an untenable situation. With governments spending billions on AI with the big providers it's likely they've found many of these already.
Yep. This is why I am using local AI to edit and build my own copies of Linux kernel, Wayland... everything a distribution would ship really.
Not so daunting for me having come of age when compiling a kernel specific to a hardware platform was essential.
Custom software that does not fit the usual patterns is not fool proof but it won't be obvious.
Monocultures with all their eggs in one basket are even less secure than truly diverse ecosystems though.
Arch Linux to become the only Linux OS left.
> In the extreme I think there's a decent chance projects like Debian might have to radically overhaul or just shut down completely - the whole philosophy of slow and steady with old code just won't work.
It may actually be the opposite.
Debians steady and professional approach on shipping security patches with very little to no functional difference actually enables us to consider and work on automated, autonomous weekly or faster patches of the entire fleet. And once that's in place and trusted, emergency rollouts are very possible and easy.
We have other projects that "move fast and break things" and ship whatever they want in whatever versions they want and those will require constant attention to ship any update for a security topic. These projects require constant human attention to work through their shenanigans to keep them up to date.