Story of XZ Backdoor [video]
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Story of XZ Backdoor [video]
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Re: Story of XZ Backdoor [video]
#2Ireland recently created a Basic Income scheme for artists.
Europe should have an equivalent scheme for programmers of important Open Source projects such as this one.
Re: Story of XZ Backdoor [video]
#3Ireland recently created a Basic Income scheme for artists. Europe should have an equivalent scheme for programmers of important Open Source projects such as this one.
Just German, not European, but still a start:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Tech_Agency
Re: Story of XZ Backdoor [video]
#4This is IMO one of the coolest tech stories to ever happen, seriously amazing spycraft & hacking skills, but I haven't been keeping up with new developments from this story since it broke. Last I heard, the best guess at what happened was some state-sponsored actor worked very hard to get this merged, and it was caught luckily at the last minute. But no one had any smoking gun as to who did it or why or who they were targeting. Any new developments since then? Are we still just totally in the dark about what was going on here?
Re: Story of XZ Backdoor [video]
#5This is IMO one of the coolest tech stories to ever happen, seriously amazing spycraft & hacking skills, but I haven't been keeping up with new developments from this story since it broke. Last I heard, the best guess at what happened was some state-sponsored actor worked very hard to get this merged, and it was caught luckily at the last minute. But no one had any smoking gun as to who did it or why or who they were…
Still no smoking gun, but possibly Russia. From the video https://youtu.be/aoag03mSuXQ?t=2883:
> A lot of the aliases, like Jia Tan, they sound like Asian names, and the published changes are all timestamped in UTC+8, Beijing time. So the signs point to China. And that's why it's probably not China. I mean, why would they make it that obvious? Every other part of the operation has been so meticulous, so cautious.
> And they also worked on Chinese New Year, but not on Christmas. And over the years, there were nine changes that fall outside of the Beijing time into UTC+2, which is a time zone that includes Israel and parts of Western Russia. That's why some experts have speculated that this could be the work of APT29, a Russian-state-backed hacker group also known as Cozy Bear. But again, do we know? No, of course we don't know who it is, and we likely will never know.
Re: Story of XZ Backdoor [video]
#6I'm still floored that Andres both found this and didn't ignore it. It's such a testament to an incredible engineer.
(But also, my conspiratorially-inclined mind is quite entertained by the thought of some sort of parallel construction or tip from a TLA.)
Re: Story of XZ Backdoor [video]
#7Ireland recently created a Basic Income scheme for artists. Europe should have an equivalent scheme for programmers of important Open Source projects such as this one.
The problem was more than remuneration. It was burnout and mental health issues. They may have been moderated by income but we don’t know.
Also today as I understand it much of OSS is done in-house by major companies (red hat, Ubuntu, ibm, Google, etc)
Re: Story of XZ Backdoor [video]
#8This is IMO one of the coolest tech stories to ever happen, seriously amazing spycraft & hacking skills, but I haven't been keeping up with new developments from this story since it broke. Last I heard, the best guess at what happened was some state-sponsored actor worked very hard to get this merged, and it was caught luckily at the last minute. But no one had any smoking gun as to who did it or why or who they were…
Still no smoking gun, but possibly Russia. From the video https://youtu.be/aoag03mSuXQ?t=2883 : > A lot of the aliases, like Jia Tan, they sound like Asian names, and the published changes are all timestamped in UTC+8, Beijing time. So the signs point to China. And that's why it's probably not China. I mean, why would they make it that obvious? Every other part of the operation has been so meticulous, so cautious. >…
Russians don't celebrate Christmas on the 25th.
Re: Story of XZ Backdoor [video]
#9This is IMO one of the coolest tech stories to ever happen, seriously amazing spycraft & hacking skills, but I haven't been keeping up with new developments from this story since it broke. Last I heard, the best guess at what happened was some state-sponsored actor worked very hard to get this merged, and it was caught luckily at the last minute. But no one had any smoking gun as to who did it or why or who they were…
Still no smoking gun, but possibly Russia. From the video https://youtu.be/aoag03mSuXQ?t=2883 : > A lot of the aliases, like Jia Tan, they sound like Asian names, and the published changes are all timestamped in UTC+8, Beijing time. So the signs point to China. And that's why it's probably not China. I mean, why would they make it that obvious? Every other part of the operation has been so meticulous, so cautious. >…
Those anecdotes don’t mean anything. If I were China and wanted plausible deniability I would work on CNY and take off on foreign holidays. Of course that leaves Beijing time as a weird oversight though it’s always Beijing time anywhere in China.
Re: Story of XZ Backdoor [video]
#10Even though the video is somewhat sensationalized at some points, it is well worth a watch for people who are interested in computers but don't have a background in it. There is a nice mixture of everything from history (e.g. the founding of the FSF) to a clear explanation of a compression algorithm (clear enough that one should be able to implement it). It also makes claims that should make some people stop and think about the industry as a whole (such as Linux being the most important contemporary operating system).
I'm not sure if it is HN-crowd type material since it is easy enough information for most of us to dig up, assuming we didn't already know it. Yet it does not simplify things to the point of, "technology is magic."