That said, on my Debian/Devuan installations all these accounts with "*" and "!" have /usr/sbin/nologin or /bin/false as shell, so a login should still not be possible. Does anybody know whether that is a reliable protection against this vulnerability?

The Linux kernel, ostensibly, follows the same philosophy of "you do not break userland" but in reality bugs happen all the time and this kernel philosophy actually doesn't help at all because Linux is the worst mainstream operating system for any kind of backward or forward compatibility--for some fucking reason you can't compile a static binary on most distros.

I regard the DEC saga as another example of how good guys finish last in America.

Instead we get to have holy wars over whether or not it's appropriate to have a language where if the indents get screwed up the code is completely ruined, and can't be fixed by simply running it through fmt(1).

Unless you're writing in a text editor where you have to manage the whitespace yourself, almost any IDE will take care of it for you automatically.

prevents the kind of holy war being waged to this day and wastes everyone's time when it winds up getting discussed or argued over yet again.

I dunno...it's kind of telling that this is between Hawaii and California.