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“I will slaughter you”

daniel.haxx.se

141–150 of 265 posts

Re: “I will slaughter you”

#141
post #37

I'm sorry to hear that. libCurl is great and my life is better for it. It's really best to not reply to the mentally ill people (and you can be pretty sure anyone sending something like the first is at least temporarily mentally ill). It can sometimes be extremely tempting, I know-- especially when they've managed to say something almost perfectly constructed for pithy comeback. But it will not help you and it will n…

> libCurl is great and my life is better for it. This is not directed at you specifically, but your comment got me wondering how many people contact individuals like Daniel who are behind Open Source projects like this to share positive feedback, or even just to say "Thank you." I know I've not done it anywhere near as much as I should, and I suspect that doing so would help take the edge of what can often feel like…

> how many people contact individuals who are behind Open Source projects just to say "Thank you."

Open-source developers occasionally express dislike of "thank you" messages. They may have written that software mainly to scratch their own itch, and dealing with messages that don't say anything but thanks takes precious time out of their day. Donating money, however, is usually more welcome.

Re: “I will slaughter you”

#142
post #12

This feels to me like a person with some sort of mental illness or breakdown and delusions of grandeur and persecution. Their explanation doesn't make much sense. If I were Daniel, I wouldn't respond any further.

Sounds like someone who's developed a prototype which they had grand plans of selling for billions, which then got easily hacked because they don't understand security

The $15k figure implies that's either a bill the hackers ran up on an AWS instance or what they valued their development at

Edit: The blackmail line sounds like a ransomware attack

Re: “I will slaughter you”

#143
Delusions of grandeur, scapegoating, catastrophization, odd phrases, and lack of ownership.

Sounds like a mental health crisis or a sick joke. Either way, whoever was behind it didn't accomplish anything.

There can be situations where tools get inappropriately placed as critical infrastructure that are developed as hobbies by people with hobbyist-shrug attitudes, but this wouldn't be a constructive way to address it. Blame or personal attacks don't make improvements.

Re: “I will slaughter you”

#144
post #37

I'm sorry to hear that. libCurl is great and my life is better for it. It's really best to not reply to the mentally ill people (and you can be pretty sure anyone sending something like the first is at least temporarily mentally ill). It can sometimes be extremely tempting, I know-- especially when they've managed to say something almost perfectly constructed for pithy comeback. But it will not help you and it will n…

> libCurl is great and my life is better for it. This is not directed at you specifically, but your comment got me wondering how many people contact individuals like Daniel who are behind Open Source projects like this to share positive feedback, or even just to say "Thank you." I know I've not done it anywhere near as much as I should, and I suspect that doing so would help take the edge of what can often feel like…

I can answer this a bit - I maintain Yarn, a JS package manager. While nowhere near Curl, it does have a fairly significant user base - at least a few million devs, from what I understand. For all this work, I received exactly two emails thanking me for my work during the past four years.

I also happen to maintain a little "Secret Santa" website, hosted on a GitHub page. Nothing too fancy, just a static app that lets you manage a Secret Santa without creating accounts. Well, every year, I receive 3-4 emails thanking me for creating it, which is even more surprising considering they often come from people that aren't from the tech world at all.

Perhaps for my happiness I should invest more in this side project than in a package manager used across the globe :)

Re: “I will slaughter you”

#145
post #97

This reminds me of the OK city manager threatening Centos developer - https://www.theregister.com/2006/03/24/tuttle_centos/ Although in that case the city was not actually hacked. It looks like this person actually got hacked by someone using curl and he is complaining that curl made it possible. I wonder if he knows anything about the people who wrote the actual exploit(s).

A bit like the time the scientology lawyers were desperate to find out who was running that server at 127.0.0.1 that had all their files on it, and really really wanted to find the person who was using the 'majordomo" login so that they could depose them

I read the transcript of that incident - that was some elaborate joke explaining.

Re: “I will slaughter you”

#146

I think we all owe Daniel a certain amount of thanks for somehow, incidentally, maybe, preventing nutjob exhibit A from getting a multi million dollar defense project. And anytime such unrealistic threats are made, this always makes it seem like maybe it's not so bad: https://youtu.be/Nw1643T0RD0 (One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces, by Pink Floyd)

I think any defense agency would've looked at his code if it were so easily hacked and not awarded him anything

Re: “I will slaughter you”

#147
Death threats are pretty normal for open source devs but I actually got a rape threat recently, which kind of surprised me. Cultural differences from international communities. It was not in English.

Re: “I will slaughter you”

#148
post #9

Not sure what this solves really. Some pissed off weirdo is an idiot aye. Either it's scary and get law enforcement involved or it's not and we're gawking and laughing at someone at their worst moment. In an attempt to take this post at its most charitable I agree, it fucking sucks there's not enough focus on mental health in the world.

If you're looking for ways to be charitable, I found this (and this similar Tim Ferris post[0]) to be eye-opening view into the range of noise that people with large social wakes deal with. It's a small slice of empathy that I (and possibly others) would have lacked otherwise that makes me more understanding in interactions with folks like OSS maintainers, corporate governance, etc.

I agree, there was no need to include names in the article.

[0] https://tim.blog/2020/02/02/reasons-to-not-become-famous/

Re: “I will slaughter you”

#149
post #22

I'm not a psychiatrist, but it seems that this person has some severe psychotic disorder. The whole thing reads like a cheap knockoff of "A Beautiful Mind".

It doesn't read like that to me. It reads like someone who's an arsehole who had grand plans of their prototype being sold for billions and likely getting hacked for having no security knowledge

Re: “I will slaughter you”

#150
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree; this seems like someone with so little technical ability, that I wouldn't be surprised if he did manage to talk someone into a buying a multi million dollar defense project he could not deliver... > I lost my family, my country my friends, my home and 6 years of work trying to build a better place for posterity. I get loosing your family / home / friends, but a country? Where did that go?

This sounds like the result of unscrupulous "boot camps" that are common in countries like India - people are told if they sign up and pay $life_savings they can become a programmer and be hired by "The US Government" or other companies for enormous amounts of money. A mundane class is offered with impractical advice and they're left with no money, little skills, and spamming the internet trying to get "their contrac…

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