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Half a Second – a book about the XZ backdoor

half-second.com

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Re: Half a Second – a book about the XZ backdoor

#51
post #4

It's only going to recycle old news. The missing piece is attribution. Had it been the usuals (DPRK, Russia, China), the attribution would have been made publicly. The fact that is has not points as a friendly - especially when Microsoft (who owns Github) had all that telemetry and very likely has the means to find out. Some serious OSINT (consistency of timezone across months if not years of commits) pointed to the…

"all that telemetry" doesn't count for much if it's behind a VPN

Highly debatable.

Threat-hunting at that level can easily use VPNs to make attributions, especially if those same VPN exit points happen to be correlated to other stuff that was attributed. And when you are Microsoft or Google (Jia Tan had gmail accounts), the telemetry they have goes way beyond "oh we can't see the real IP lolz".

The group responsible for the xz attempted compromise is circulating in certain Chatham House rules conference. It's just that, as someone there said "no one has had the balls to say it publicly", which in itself gives a strong hint.

Re: Half a Second – a book about the XZ backdoor

#52

I've also been working on a free book about the XZ backdoor called 500 milliseconds. However, unlike this author it is entirely human written. A first draft is ready and I'm aiming to publish in a couple weeks

I might even need to change the name of the book

Re: Half a Second – a book about the XZ backdoor

#53
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you the only reasonable person on HN today? Others are framing this author as some official journalist who must be held to rigorous standards and has violated every rule of the trade, with wanton contempt. The author has failed to produce new data. The author is bad. This seems deranged and extraordinarily unfair. The front page explicitly states the book is for general readers and is non-technical. I do not see…

The HN crowd is generally skeptical, but "shallow dismissals", which are specifically called out in the guidelines, are still extremely common. These dismissals are not as clever as they tend to seem to those skimming the comments, but folks have developed a bunch of thought-terminating cliches to empower this: calling anything involving AI "slop" is the most common, but more catchy (but fundamentally incoherent) phr…

In posterity, your grayed comment will benchmark the integrity of the environment here. Grayed, dead, undisputed. Out of sight, out of mind, except for persisting anyway ;)

Keep the courage. That's what it was once all about.

Re: Half a Second – a book about the XZ backdoor

#54

I've also been working on a free book about the XZ backdoor called 500 milliseconds. However, unlike this author it is entirely human written. A first draft is ready and I'm aiming to publish in a couple weeks

I might even need to change the name of the book

for future reference, I've since renamed the book to "The Second Maintainer"
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