Same vibe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOTyUfOHgas

the onion article is still up could link that

It is 100% up to the package manager's steward to control how ownership of packages and namespaces are granted.

Maven Central exists for decades the amount of incidents of people stealing namespaces is minimal.

One can't simply publish a package under the groupId "com.ycombinator" without having some way to verify that they own the domain ycombinator.com. Then, once a package is published, it is 100% immutable, even if it has malicious code in it. Certainly, that library is flagged everywhere as vulnerable.

It baffles me that NPM for so long couldn't replicate the same guardrails as Maven Central.

To be honest Rust has the exact same supply chain attack pattern - it's just newer and more maintained at the moment. Give it a decade.

Last I checked npm had 2FA for publishing, but cargo didn't. I don't think cargo is any better than npm, just not that of an attractive target.

> It seems like it might just be that Python/npm are juicier targets?

Attackers go where the victims are. Frontend is a monoculture with the vast majority using NPM; backend, less so. This isn't an excuse for NPM, but another strike against it.

You could also argue that the attacks make a deeper point about frontend vs backend devs, but I won't go there.

I suppose that go's go:generate workflow can also be abused to land a worm like the ones spreading via npm, as you can build programs that just scrape the whole hard drive for git projects and patch the go.mod dependencies there, and you could also just write this in go as a toolchain script, for example.

NPM's achilles is the pre/postinstall step which can run arbitrary commands and shell scripts without the user having any way to intervene.

Dependencies must be run in isolated chroot sandboxes or better, inside containers. That would be the only way to mitigate this problem, as the filesystem of the operating system must be separated from the filesystem of the development workflow.

On top of that most host based firewalls are per-binary instead of per-cmdline. That leads to the warnings and rules relying on that e.g. "python" or "nodejs" getting network access allowlisted, instead of say "nodejs myworm.js". So firewalls in general are pretty useless against this type of malware.

Generally, other package managers aren't great either. Notably, crates.io / cargo has some of the same people behind it as NPM and the verbiage of their excuses is oddly similar.

Something fascinating about the design and architecture of programming languages and their surrounding ecosystems is the enormous leverage that they provide to the "core team":

For every 1 core language developer[1]...

... there may be 1,000 popular package developers...

... for which there may be 1,000,000 developers writing software...

... for over 1,000,000,000 users.

This means that for every corner that is cut at the top of that pyramid, the harms are massively magnified at the lower tiers. A security vulnerability in a "top one thousand" package like log4j can cause billions of dollars in economic damage, man-centuries of remediation effort, etc.

However, bizarrely, the funding at the top two levels is essentially a pittance! Most such projects are charities, begging for spare change with hat in hand on a street corner. Some of the most used libraries are often volunteer efforts! cough-OpenSSL-cough.

The result is that the people most empowered to fix the issues are the least funded to do so.

This is why NPM, Crates.io, etc... flatly refuse to do even the most basic security checks like adding namespaces and verifying the identity of major publishers like Google, Microsoft, and the like.

That's a non-zero amount of effort, and no matter how trivial to implement technically and now cheap to police, it would likely blow their tiny budget of unreliable donations.

The exceptions to this rule are package-managers with robust financial backing, such as NuGet, which gets reliable funding from Microsoft and supports their internal (for-profit!) workflows almost as much as it does external "free" users.

"Free and open" is wonderful and all, but you get what you pay for.

[1] Most of us can name them off the top of our heads: Guido van Rossum, Larry Wall, Kerningham & Richie, etc.

The NIH mentality in the ecosystem would result in a JavaScript pgp library which itself would be an npm package and subject to supply chain attacks. lol.

Would that help? Most of these recent attacks, the attackers have gained access to the system that builds the packages. So it would have just signed the malicious build the same.

UV adoption is happening, though. NPM is still the only name in town.

Apparently it does now: https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/specifications/pylock...

https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/cli/pip_lock/

But who cares about pip, uv is here.

I don't know about snails, but everything I'm in contact with has moved over to uv, and I can't imagine I'm the only one.

I read it as a comparison of the attitude of helplessness around it, not the acts themselves. So it was a bit meta, but unremarkably inoffensive.

I don't think it's comparing them directly or arguing for equivalent seriousness. It is identifying a similarity of mindset where those who have their hands on the levers of power that could materially improve the situation act like there's nothing they can do.

But it's not comparing to school shootings, it's satirizing supposedly responsible parties who continue to deny responsibility despite repeated catastrophic failures which are their responsibility.

You’re right. Major supply chain attacks affect far more people than school shootings do, and can potentially cost more lives through downstream effects.

It’s 2026. Software is critical infrastructure for global civilization now. Lives and livelihoods depend on it working reliably. The “it’s just bits on a computer” quip has been outdated for 20 years now.