As the person who wrote the fix for this issue (and not the original code), I will just mention that I find this paragraph makes the author sound incredibly entitled:
Shamefully, the inetutils project hasn’t actually released a fixed version of their software (at least at the time of publishing).
The bug was reported on a public mailing list, which is sadly common nowadays [1]. After my workday, during which I was not able to review the report, I wrote a script to confirm the bug was real, since I was seeing way too many slop reports at the time. Then I sent a patch before going to bed [2]. A third party then graciously shared the patch on oss-security [3], which all distributions follow. There is no need to make a new release, which is harder for the distributions than simply applying a small patch.
Perhaps I am just unlucky in my interactions, but I feel like this entitlement is too common among software security people. Note that I see zero return in spending time working on Inetutils, and I find other projects I work on more interesting.
The bug was reported on a public mailing list, which is sadly common nowadays
In defence of the reporter, your Readme only says "Send bug reports to bug-inetutils@gnu.org.", there is no distinction for vulnerabilities. [1]
There is a 3 months old pull request to advertise a private reporting email address but it's unmerged, maybe you could use this renewed interest as a nudge to set it up and merge: https://codeberg.org/inetutils/inetutils/pulls/26
One other thing the reporter could have done to make your life easier is to write a repro script rather than just explain the steps in prose.
The not-so-silent minority hanging out on HN know that the true heroes are those who take the time and put in the effort, and then put even more effort to reply and post about it here.
> The not-so-silent minority hanging out on HN know that the true heroes are those who take the time and put in the effort, and then put even more effort to reply and post about it here.
We know that the entirety of the AI movement is built on top of open-source projects like Linux and all the terminal and command line utilities. And runs inside projects doing god's work (say to contain the agents) like QEMU etc.
AI lives inside the work of our open-source heroes and would be absolutely nowhere without the work of all those people.
> Thanks to all of our heroes, op included.
Definitely, thanks GP and thanks to all our heroes.
Thank you for maintaining Telnet! I still keep it around mostly for retro computing purposes to interact with very old operating systems or with machines that aren’t capable of encrypting in any reasonable amount of time.
you are right they are entitled brats. usually they cant write good code themselves and they purposefully look for very old or low traffic code to find things that are 'old' etc. to make stupid uninteresting AI generated blog posts.
i have not seen a decent writeup in one of these clickbait things these ppl push out.
just ignore these types of ppl. its fine to fix the bugs ofc but what i mean is, ignore their attitudes. its a kids' attitude to life they keep
It's an unfortunate statement. And it does feel like it discredits you and the heroic efforts of those like you.
But this is probably forgiven as just sensationalism in writing, which is all too common. Not to excuse the author, but these types of writeups tend to drift into name calling and finger pointing a little too soon.
"Shamefully" is definitely the wrong word here, for sure.
Maybe I'm in a generous mood, but I would credit the writer with making a joke about the content of the film they had just mentioned and subsequently show a screen cap of work the subtitles for a line about RISC being a significant future technology, rather than being that historically inaccurate in their own tech memory.
A lot of people have already made almost all of the same observations that I was going to make.
Except for: There is no bug that originates in a GNU version of an old networking program and magically makes its way into the NetBSD, FreeBSD, DragonFlyBSD, and OpenBSD (Yes; I checked.) versions of that program.
History simply didn't happen that way.
This bug goes as far back at least as far as the Jolitz-released 386BSD source for libexec/telnetd , where it can be found and which is credited in the GNU versions of the file. GNU just took the 386BSD code. But BSD had a telnetd before 386BSD. In BSD, telnetd itself goes back to 1983. Although its code to do line mode did not pre-date RFC 1116, which was published in August 1989.
The code to do line mode was written the month after that RFC, by Paul Borman, and the bug is in the very first version of that code:
> TLDR; bounds checking was missing leading to potential memory corruption.
... if you hold it just right, and let the light of the full moon shine through it on a particular day, while you send a carefully-crafted packet through the right brand of NIC over cables forged by long-forgotten smiths.
I know people seem to think nsa and other gov threat actors live in a land of zero days and advanced techniques... And to some degree, they sure do develop those and are able to leverage them.
However, from my point of view most targets are able to be compromised by poor configs, hygiene, well known and patchable vulns, or the more likely avenue: the humans operating the system.
RISC desktop computers were common-ish in UK schools by then.
Of course if you count the 6502 as a RISC chip (if you squint a bit, Page Zero RAM sure does look like 256 8-bit registers to me!) then UK schools had RISC desktops for over a decade before then!
And this is why serious enterprises use telnetd exclusively instead of your childish ssh toy. See why? Because it's got ONE CVE in 3 decades as compared to a never-ending flow of security vulnerabilities in ssh. Security!
Perhaps I am just unlucky in my interactions, but I feel like this entitlement is too common among software security people. Note that I see zero return in spending time working on Inetutils, and I find other projects I work on more interesting.
[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-inetutils/2026-03/msg... [2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-inetutils/2026-03/msg... [3] https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/03/12/4