Can someone provide a summary on what this means? I thought there were malicious exploits in this. Why is it back up and the perpetrator unbanned?
Lasse Collin is not the perpetrator, that would be “Jia Tan”.
There’s a Wikipedia article regarding this incident. Have a look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor
Lasse is the original maintainer of XZ, they have been placed back in their position as sole maintainer.
“Jia Tan” was the person who slipped the backdoor into XZ and is now banned.
Lasse has already fixed abd removed the backdoor.
XZ itself is critical software everyone uses (its one of the main compression/decompression programs used on linux)
Yes but damage seems to be done. Distros are talking or have moved off of it to zstd.
There are some, probably. But any exodus will be slow. Xz isn’t useless because it was dangerous once.
Zstd and xz fullfil different needs. Xz take more time to compress and is faster to decompress as far as I know.
It’s just a question. Any implications or tone you perceive here is likely your own projection.
Try and read it assuming the poster is asking in good faith.
