RSS 
So Ubuntu has done it again, they're released an update to xorg-server that breaks Xorg for most people leaving them stranded in the console. If you have xorg-server sitting in your update manager but can't update because of a "403 Forbidden" error, this is why, they caught it fairly quickly and pulled it. But this should have never been released. Especially because they already did this last year. I think they at least caught it faster, but they still fail because there is no public mention of this any where. There's some chatter amongst the users on the forums, but no official news from Canonical, which I think is in pretty bad taste because this came out and started breaking people's systems this morning and it's now evening. They should be getting some public word out to the people with busted systems, and letting everyone else know whats up instead of leaving everyone guessing. There's not even any talk of it on Planet Ubuntu. You made a mistake so at least own up to it.
And then go back and try and figure out how this exact same thing can happen 2 years in a row...
January 19th, 2008 at 4:54 am
FYI the same thing happened on Debian, OpenSuSE, Gentoo and propably others, so it isn’t strictly related to Ubuntu:
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=354593
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=461465
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=206490
I agree though that it should have been caught before releasing it, but that applies to all distros.
January 19th, 2008 at 8:58 am
http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-571-2
=========================================================== Ubuntu Security Notice USN-571-2 January 19, 2008 xorg-server regression https://launchpad.net/bugs/183969 =========================================================== A security issue affects the following Ubuntu releases: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Ubuntu 6.10 Ubuntu 7.04 Ubuntu 7.10 This advisory also applies to the corresponding versions of Kubuntu, Edubuntu, and Xubuntu. The problem can be corrected by upgrading your system to the following package versions: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS: xserver-xorg-core 1:1.0.2-0ubuntu10.10 Ubuntu 6.10: xserver-xorg-core 1:1.1.1-0ubuntu12.5 Ubuntu 7.04: xserver-xorg-core 2:1.2.0-3ubuntu8.3 Ubuntu 7.10: xserver-xorg-core 2:1.3.0.0.dfsg-12ubuntu8.3 After a standard system upgrade you need to restart your session to effect the necessary changes. Details follow: USN-571-1 fixed vulnerabilities in X.org. The upstream fixes were incomplete, and under certain situations, applications using the MIT-SHM extension (e.g. Java, wxWidgets) would crash with BadAlloc X errors. This update fixes the problem.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Original advisory details: Multiple overflows were discovered in the XFree86-Misc, XInput-Misc, TOG-CUP, EVI, and MIT-SHM extensions which did not correctly validate function arguments. An authenticated attacker could send specially crafted requests and gain root privileges. (CVE-2007-5760, CVE-2007-6427, CVE-2007-6428, CVE-2007-6429) It was discovered that the X.org server did not use user privileges when attempting to open security policy files. Local attackers could exploit this to probe for files in directories they would not normally be able to access. (CVE-2007-5958) It was discovered that the PCF font handling code did not correctly validate the size of fonts. An authenticated attacker could load a specially crafted font and gain additional privileges. (CVE-2008-0006)
January 19th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Yeah, well on Gentoo at least the buggy server never made it out of unstable, really, a perfect example of the stable/unstable system. Grante it probably should never have even made it that far. :/
It’s interesting though to see this hit just about everyone (anyone know about Redhat/Fedora?).
And as for the security advisory and bugzilla entries, I’m sure there are a lot of regular desktop users who when there system breaks, there first thought isn’t “oh, I should check bugzilla”. They’d probably check the website and the google and if they are a bit more savvy, they might hit up the forums or the planet.