> 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.
(But also, my conspiratorially-inclined mind is quite entertained by the thought of some sort of parallel construction or tip from a TLA.)
forinti•1h ago
Europe should have an equivalent scheme for programmers of important Open Source projects such as this one.
anarazel•1h ago
mc32•28m ago
Also today as I understand it much of OSS is done in-house by major companies (red hat, Ubuntu, ibm, Google, etc)