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Re: Security concerns (Was Re: XQuartz quextion)



*sigh*

As anyone who's been following this list knows, and I encourage you to read the archives if you're new here, "Apple" has been listening all along. I put that in quotes since, of course, there is no single "Mr Apple" that makes every decision and can be conveniently appealed to in situations like this. There is a decision matrix involving a lot of people and the set of people who get to decide what goes into software updates and when is a different set of people than the engineers who maintain X11 (and many other components in Mac OS X).

Kevin, Ben's manager, has already stated publicly in this list (and been quoted in the FAQ, AFAIK) that he and Ben are working to get these changes into an update ASAP. As Kevin's manager, I am supporting these efforts. Does that mean we can promise any of you that you'll see a specific piece of technology on a specific date? No, of course not, since that is not our promise to make.

Apple is a large company and it's tempting for customers to over- simplify the process that goes on internally where such decisions are concerned. Put too few components in an update and people complain that the right bugs are not being fixed quickly enough. Put too many in and people complain about the impossibility of downloading that 200MB update over their Grandma's 56K modem connection. This continuing set of trade-offs, coupled with the fact that line engineers are notoriously biased when it comes to assessing urgency ("my component is the most important! No! Mine is!"), means that there has to be a process here and that process is currently being followed. In the meantime, Ben is giving you early access to his work, which many folks on this list will line up for the opportunity to tell you how great and frankly exceptional that is.

A little patience would be appreciated.  Thanks.

- Jordan

On Nov 25, 2007, at 2:30 AM, Martin Costabel wrote:

Jeremy Huddleston wrote:
[]
Well... see my posting about 1.3a1 and its fixes:
CVE-2007-1003: XC-MISC Extension ProcXCMiscGetXIDList() Memory Corruption
http://nvd.nist.gov/nvd.cfm?cvename=CVE-2007-1003
Integer overflow in ALLOCATE_LOCAL in the ProcXCMiscGetXIDList function in the XC-MISC extension in the X.Org X11 server (xserver) 7.1-1.1.0, and other versions before 20070403, allows remote authenticated users to execute arbitrary code via a large expression, which results in memory corruption.

Wonderful!

Mr. Apple, are you listening?

--
Martin

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References: 
 >XQuartz quextion (From: dp <email@hidden>)
 >Re: XQuartz quextion (From: William Davis <email@hidden>)
 >Re: XQuartz quextion (From: Martin Costabel <email@hidden>)
 >Security concerns (Was Re: XQuartz quextion) (From: Jeremy Huddleston <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Security concerns (Was Re: XQuartz quextion) (From: Martin Costabel <email@hidden>)



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