"No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens

CVE-2026-8461 revealed an out-of-bounds write in FFmpeg's MagicYUV decoder due to improper bounds checking in C, allowing remote code execution. The article notes this is the latest in a long pattern of memory safety vulnerabilities that occur almost exclusively in C.

Background

- Satirical article (Onion-style) mocking how the software industry treats memory safety bugs in C/C++ as unavoidable, while refusing to adopt safer languages. - **Memory safety**: bugs like buffer overflows where code reads/writes outside allocated memory. ~70% of critical security flaws in major software (Microsoft, Google, Apple) are memory safety issues. - **C/C++** give programmers direct memory access with no automatic bounds checking, making these bugs easy to introduce and hard to eliminate. They still dominate systems programming (OS kernels, browsers, media libraries). - The article invents **CVE-2026-8461** in **FFmpeg** (a real open-source multimedia library in C, used by YouTube, VLC, etc.) — a plausible real-world scenario. - The satire targets industry fatalism: rather than switching to memory-safe languages (Rust, Java, Swift, Go) that prevent these bugs at compile time, many projects stick with C/C++ and shrug.