tech, "AI", bad news

Quoting bsky.app/profile/baldurbjarnas :

As @davidgerard has posted elsewhere, the maintainer of the library HarfBuzz has gone all-in on vibe-coding.

(see: typo.social/@behdad/1161728385 )

A note on why this is a worry in the thread ->

Fonts are a lucrative target. They require a complex parser, usually written in a language that isn't memory safe, and often directly exposed to outside data (websites, PDFs, etc. that contain fonts). This means a flaw could lead to an attack worst case scenario: arbitrary code execution

HarfBuzz is pretty much the only full-featured library for that takes font files, parses them, and returns glyphs ready to render. It is ubiquitous. A security flaw in HarfBuzz could make a good portion of the world's user-facing software (i.e. that renders text) unsafe.

Irrespective of the vibe-coding issue (code review is not an adequate defence against "agent" bugs) this is a piece of software that, due to its position in the industry, should be MORE conservative than the rest. Core infrastructure is not where you want experimentation

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