alt Hacker News> On October 21st at 07:41 UTC, more than six hours before the coordinated release, Chainguard unilaterally broke the embargo and published built images containing the fix.
This is incredibly damming of Chainguard. I struggle to see justification for this, even with the chaos approaching the coordinated release.
Replies
I dunno, the post is awfully critical of Chainguard for leaking a fixed binary 6 hours early, but it was the research firm "partner" that "mistakenly" posted the dancing anime POC video over 24 hours early that created the mass panic (not to mention spawning millions of agents crawling the php codebase and trying to brute force a POC and probably using more energy than a lot of countries in the process).
I kinda get Chainguard's position here. They were part of the embargo, saw exploits hitting in the wild already and decided to release rather than hold things back.
Embargos make sense if no one is exploiting it yet, but if its out in the wild, the best path forward is releaseing as soon as possible.
This single-handedly assures that I will never, ever do business with Chainguard or any member of its C-suite executive team.
There were signs that others broke the embargo too. Public (this one video everyone is talking about), but maybe also non-public. There were some rumors going around which part of PHP was affected. That was enough for some people to figure out the vulnerability.
But it's also possible, that some attackers got non-public inside information.
If the embargo is already broken in a meaningful way, it suddenly becomes much less clear if it is still in place after all. Emphasis on >less clear<.
if their comment in true (linked in sibling comments), then it's really not damning. typically an embargo is ended when someone leaks early or it's being exploited in the wild.
so, if they saw evidence of exploits in the wild, it is not unusual at all to release the fix.
Brain rot is making us incompetent, dangerously impatient, or a mixture of both.
Not sure if this [1] comment is from them?
Because if there are already publicly available exploits seen, it makes no more sense to keep holding patches back just so that OpenAI etc. can get a nice press release
They (is it the CEO?) commented on it earlier here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50176735
In their place I would worry that this was the last time anyone shared an embargoed build with them.