Their plate is already quite full and they operate a whole universe of services, so cut them some slack.
It's not an ordinary service which is exposed to internet trying to turn a profit. They run SDF, two Mastodon instances, a mail server, a Git server, trying to salvage/keep alive living computer museum (SDF Vintage Systems), etc. etc.
SDF welcomed everyone openly during the initial Mastodon waves, so it was all very Eternal September.
If you're joining to make a spare account to participate with SDF people, awesome! But if you want it as your identity for all of Fedi, I think that would be a bad experience. I ended up getting my own MastoHost account for a while and it was a vastly better experience, until I burned out on Fedi.
SDF is a super fun place to experiment with Gopher though. I absolutely recommend getting your own Gopherhole on SDF. It's like the old Geocities days but in ASCII. (And make sure you grab Lagrange as your GUI Gopher / Gemini client. I liked Phetch as my terminal Gopher client.)
We've completed our first phase of database clean up, thank you for your patience. The impact on performance was heavy, but it was a necessary step. All active users and their posts, profile, connections and media will be migrated to the new servers. Once that has been completed, any remaining data will stay online for further migration and clean up. Our instance is nearly 10 years old of constant daily operation, but we ran into a migration wall which held us back on 4.1.x. Now that it is deprecated, we will do our best to jump to the latest version rather than migrate through. Your support and patience has been greatly appreciated.You can't have it both ways: if it's not a big deal, then he can publish it.
If you say "Don't publish", then you acknowledge that it's a big deal.
I say to GP: "Congrats for finding a shell escape, it's always a big deal. But don't publish it... Yet".
Give them a chance to fix it. But it they don't even answer to the emails, even just saying: "thx we're busy we can't fix right now but will do", then at some point you just publish.
It doesn't take long to answer an email saying "thanks, we'll fix it eventually".
If they can't commit to a hard timeline of less than a few days, then publish. What happens next is not your fault - it was inevitable anyway.
Edit for clarity: This is just in general, not specifically SDF or small orgs or large orgs. The internet does not care about the difference. The internet just does not care period. Nobody is going to give anyone else any breaks, and especially not a botnet.
Perhaps just run "bash -c 'stress --cpu 64 ; echo fix your shell escape'"l " or something like that.
Some security practices sometimes feels like someone stabbing you just to prove you could be stabbed. Then they point at the wound and say: "See? You should be more careful."
Yes, the risk is real, but creating harm to demonstrate it isnt the same as protecting people.
If I ever experienced something like that, I'd be banning the person (or limiting their resources drastically) for 60 to 90 days to bring the impact of this matter to their attention.
Anything affecting users on a system is not harmless.
You can do a lot with S9 Scheme and the Unix API/syscalls it supports.