This issue was raised on the Perl Foundation steering committee list and here are couple of comments from that discussion which might prove of interest.

• The article's original title was "Danger level rises for Perl flaws". Their addition of the word "app" was a small concession to make it clear the problem is not entirely Perl's. I think petdance may have helped with that, but I'm not sure.
• Rafael has stated that the intent is to fix Perl's implementation of printf to prevent this sort of stuff.
• There's a possibility that format strings may be tainted in future versions of Perl (this was mentioned in an offhand manner and I have no other details).

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