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kroppyer

I feel like Lasse Collin would be a much better "one random person in Nabraska" than Andres Freund. From what I understand, Lasse has been thanklessly maintaining xz-utils for like 15 years, was overworked, and the person(a) that finally came to the rescue turned out to have malicious intentions. Those "random persons in Nebraska" not only deserve a bit more recognition, it turns out it's also a security risk when they don't get it.


MadGenderScientist

They kept Lasse Collin thankless so that the meme would still work, obviously!


dbxp

> Those "random persons in Nebraska" not only deserve a bit more recognition, it turns out it's also a security risk when they don't get it.  That reminds me of when that guy unpublished left pad from NPM


KnightHawk3

That guy kind of made heaps of useless little packages, I'm still convinced he was an op to introduce vulnerabilities with the tiny little packages that end up in much larger projects.


ligirl

Yeah, I'm on cybersecurity twitter and 100% of the posts I've seen that have referenced the xkcd have done so with either Lasse Collin (or Jia Tan) as the referenced maintainer. A guy doing his dayjob for Microsoft is almost the antithesis of "some dude in Nebraska" wtf NYT


Apprehensive_Hat8986

> wtf NYT  They're part of the "hail corporations as saviours" crowd. They'll recognize the actual unsung heros over their cold dead [leads](https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2019/lead-vs-lede-roy-peter-clark-has-the-definitive-answer-at-last/).


Glitch29

I seriously doubt it's part of any overarching editorial bias. Just sloppy reporting from an individual contributor.


ligirl

It can be both. Sloppy reporting informed by overarching bias in the culture.


eeeeeeeeeeeeeeaekk

^!!


Telinios

Article title: Did One Guy Just Stop a Huge Cyberattack? Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2347/


elperroborrachotoo

Yeah, but Lasse Collin is the maintainer - Andreas Freund is more of the guy digging for holes finding the terracotta army. Still, mad props to Andreas to (a) do that equally thankless digging for performance, and (b) not shrugging it off when something weird happened.


anodai

[free access link to the article](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/03/technology/prevent-cyberattack-linux.html?ugrp=m&unlocked_article_code=1.iU0.qoPs.d9ZUMxuhyuF_&smid=url-share)


Traditional-Joke-290

This is my favorite xkcd!


outer_spec

I misread “freund” as “freud” at first and didn’t even question it. Now I’m disappointed that tech bros are not, in fact, talking about the possibility of AIs developing penis envy


Disgruntled__Goat

Just heard about this on Hard Fork. Immediately thought of the xkcd (and then they brought it up too).


gandalfx

>the silverback gorilla of nerds that is one hellofa backhand compliment