I hope Lasse Collin is doing OK! Here is a older message from him [1]
"I haven't lost interest but my ability to care has been fairly limited
mostly due to longterm mental health issues but also due to some other
things. Recently I've worked off-list a bit with Jia Tan on XZ Utils and
perhaps he will have a bigger role in the future, we'll see.
It's also good to keep in mind that this is an unpaid hobby project.
"
Github (Microsoft) are in a unique position to figure out if his account is hacked or not, and find a way to reach him. I hope they reach out and offer him some proper support! Economic support (if that's needed), or just help clearing his name.
This is another tale of how we are building multi trillion dollar industries on the back of unpaid volunteers. It's not github 'job', and many other organisations have benefited even more from Lasses work, but they are in a unique position, and would be literally pocket change for them.
In a movie his mental health issues would likely have been caused intentionally by the attacker, setting the stage for the mole to offer to step in just at the right time. Seems a bit far fetched in this case though for what looks like a tangential attack.
Does it? I expect that finding someone vulnerable was the more likely approach rather than messing with the life of a stable maintainer, but it does seem very much like the attacker was acting with malicious intent from the start of his interaction with the xz project.
I would like to see more attention given to this. I'm capable of compartmentalization and not over-guilting myself, but holy hell, I really hope he's doing alright. This would kind of destroy me.
I was actually telling my dad about this. I have a project, 500+ users, not quite root access, but enough to cause serious damage. I can think of at least one covert way to backdoor the binary artifacts from it.
About two years ago, someone showed up, started making good commits. In this case, they have some other community rep that goes back a bit further but... man it's an unsettling feeling.
teach me how.
help me learn how, please.
any resources with practical utility you can share?
or any class of therapists that are good at teaching this with right frameworks offered?
thank you
"I haven't lost interest but my ability to care has been fairly limited mostly due to longterm mental health issues but also due to some other things. Recently I've worked off-list a bit with Jia Tan on XZ Utils and perhaps he will have a bigger role in the future, we'll see.
It's also good to keep in mind that this is an unpaid hobby project. "
Github (Microsoft) are in a unique position to figure out if his account is hacked or not, and find a way to reach him. I hope they reach out and offer him some proper support! Economic support (if that's needed), or just help clearing his name.
This is another tale of how we are building multi trillion dollar industries on the back of unpaid volunteers. It's not github 'job', and many other organisations have benefited even more from Lasses work, but they are in a unique position, and would be literally pocket change for them.
1:https://www.mail-archive.com/xz-devel@tukaani.org/msg00567.h...